HypnotherapyN

Hypnotherapy

I became fascinated by hypnosis and hypnotherapy as a means of harnessing the power of the mind to enhance life and living. I could see how our own mindset can lead to anxiety, fear, negativity, and doubt. And how this has a dramatic effect on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and therefore on our enjoyment of horse riding and our competition performance.

What if you could use those same processes in reverse: a positive mindset leading to confidence, courage, positivity and focus, with equally dramatic effects on feelings, thoughts, behaviours, riding skills and competition performance.

Hypnosis has transformed my own riding confidence, and I have since helped many others to overcome fears, develop a positive riding mindset, set and achieve riding goals and ride at their best in competition.

“The playful imagining of positive possibilities”.

What exactly is hypnosis?

A trained and qualified hypnotist or hypnotherapist guides you into a deep state of relaxation (sometimes described as a trance-like state) and while you’re in this state, you are more receptive to vivid imagining of positive possibilities in your life, and more able to make use of suggestions, and to overcome fears, increase confidence, improve health and wellbeing and achieve goals and flow states for peak performance in sport.

Hypnosis is a structured approach to using natural psychological processes to achieve positive therapeutic change or to achieve specific goals. Hypnosis chiefly uses fixed attention on a single idea or set of ideas, along with our natural suggestibility, and the ability to strengthen or weaken thoughts, beliefs and emotional states. These processes are active in us all day long – but we generally have little control over them! We get ideas fixed in our mind like ‘I can’t do it’, or ‘I hate oxers’. Or we experience emotions like dread, overwhelm or self consciousness, seemingly out of the blue. We accept these thoughts and feelings as if they were true reflections on us or our lives, and often act on them. Our minds run our lives and get in the way of our goals, instead of the other way around! Hypnosis puts US – the human – back in control and helps the mind to work for us and not against us.

How does hypnosis work?

While you’re in this trance-like state, your therapist will make suggestions designed to help you achieve your therapeutic or sporting goals. Hypnosis declutters the mind and that means you are in a heightened state of focus and clarity. This means you are more open to suggestions or advice, you process ideas more deeply and accept them more fully, so that the ideas can take root, and lead to real meaningful and rapid changes in how you think, feel and behave in your real life. You will remain awake and aware throughout and are always in control.

Brain imaging studies show that the brain responds in unique ways to being hypnotised. I.e. the effects of hypnosis are real and can be scientifically explained.