Playing Sacred Pretend
As a board-certified clinical hypnotherapist, I have to be familiar with all of the little tips and tricks for helping a client achieve a trance state quickly and easily. One of the most useful is having the client “pretend” to be in trance. I tell the client to act the way he think a person in trance would act. Slump their shoulders, tilt their head, close their eyes or stare blankly. However they picture a person in trance, that’s what they should pretend to be.
Why does this work? Well, for one reason, as famed hypnotherapist, Clark Hull explained, “Anything that assumes trance, causes trance.” Our subconscious mind has trouble differentiating between what happens in reality and what happens in our imagination. So, to that end, imagining yourself in a trance, is often all your subconscious mind needs to operate as if you were in trance.
In my work as a hypnotherapist and a spiritual teacher, I often advise my clients to create rituals around their desired outcomes. A ritual is kind of like a religious game of pretend. Think about the Christian Eucharist. A believer takes communion in the form of bread and wine and is told to imagine those elements as the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Catholics believe that through the miraculous act of transubstantiation the bread and wine actually become flesh and blood. Scientific tests have shown that not to be true, but does that make the sacrament any less meaningful for adherents? Rituals are meant to be an outward expression of inward activities. Which is why I find them so useful.
Part of my instructions to my clients is to gather all the needed “toys” for their ritual game of pretend; incense, candles, an altar. Once the items are collected, a ritual is prescribed or created as an outward sign by the conscious mind to signal the subconscious mind (as with hypnosis) and the superconscious mind or the soul (as with ritual) that the work begins in earnest. My methods involve creating rapport between these three parts of the mind and, to that end, a sacred game of pretend ends up being a useful way to start.
