I’m eating lunch with my friend Marlena, sitting next to a window streaked by the chill November rain, our umbrellas dripping against the wall.

“Remember our conversation last time?” she says, “The week after my sixtieth birthday party?”

“Of course I remember,” I say – we had talked about attitudes toward getting older and self-fulfilling prophesies (see “But I Don’t FEEL Sixty …”).

“Well, it really helped, what you said.  I was starting to get bummed out, you know?  And you got me onto the right track.  Only a number, right?”  She laughs.

I smile and nod.  “Always happy to shed a little light into this dark world,” I say, hoping she’ll catch my irony and not think I’m being, like, arrogant or anything – Marlena picks right up on those things.  But no, she’s still smiling.

“I still think about that conversation,” she continues.  “And the other day it hit me.”

“Yes?” I say, my question mark hanging over the table between us.

“It just hit me – what comes next.”  She smiles, end of thought, as if somehow I should know what she intends.

“Um, what, Marlena,” I say.

“Sixty more!” she says, spreading her hands.  “Sixty more.”

“Uh, Marlena”, I say after a long pause.  “Sixty more would make you a hundred and twenty.”

She nods rapidly, smiling.

“I read in the paper, a few years ago, where a woman died at a hundred-and-twenty-two, the oldest person in the world, I think.  She was blind, deaf, toothless, couldn’t walk, could barely sit up.  Not pretty.  I don’t think I’d like that,” I say.

“Yeah, most people say something like that,” she says, sounding a little disappointed.  So much for me being a visionary.  “But I don’t think it has to be that way, if you keep yourself in shape and maintain the right attitude, and with a little help from modern medicine.”  She looks up and grins.

“But that’s not even what I’m trying to get at,” she continues, “— the possibilities do exist now, of remaining healthy and vigorous at really advanced ages.  The whole point though, for me, is how do you look at your life?”

I nod, in listening mode now.

“So the question I ask myself is, ‘How would my life be different if I expected to live another sixty years?’  How would I feel that was different?  How would my outlook change?  What would I do differently?

“Right now, most people my age are expecting to live maybe another twenty, or thirty years at most.  They want to retire; they want to stop working or not work so hard.  And travel more.  They’ve got bucket lists – places to see, things to do before they get too decrepit, before they die.  They are winding down, disengaging from life, disinclined to take on anything new.  Patch up the old as best you can, ‘cause you’re not going to need it much longer.  Right?”

“That’s right,” I agree.  What she’s saying is pretty much how it is.  “So what’s wrong with that?” I say.  “I’m tired of working forty or fifty hours a week.  I want to read more, to garden, play more tennis.  And yes, I do want to travel – never really did get to do much of that.”

“Nothing at all wrong with that, but your financial planning is going to need to be much longer term, if you’re not planning to be feeble or die at 85.  So you’re probably going to need some kind of income.  The thing is, being able to work as much or as little as you want to or need to.”  She pauses.  “So what if – what if you really think you might have another sixty?  What would that be like – for you?”

“Hmmm,” I say, thinking.  “It would sort of be like being a twenty-five-year-old, expecting to live to eighty-five, wouldn’t it.  But not exactly the same.  I don’t think I’d be going to clubs, thinking about starting a family, or starting a career.”

“You might be thinking about starting another career,” she says wryly.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I say.  “Actually, I just did that three years ago, and who knows, I might do it again someday.”

“And you have a family, but what about someone else who doesn’t?  They could start one in their sixties – why not? They could adopt or be foster parents, perhaps, if they couldn’t or didn’t want to make babies.  And with sixty more years, expect to see them grow up and then some.”

I’m starting to get into this idea.  “One really great thing about it would be that you’d have more time,” I say.  “Those things that you wanted to do when you were younger, but didn’t get to – you still could.  Maybe not play in the NBA, but you could go to med school at seventy and still expect to practice for thirty or forty years.  I could be a paleontologist someday, like I had wanted to be when I was twelve.  Learn to play the violin.  Live in South America for a while”

“You could write that novel, maybe a bunch of them.  Run for office,” she says, smiling.  “There would be plenty of time.  Space out that bucket list – there’s no hurry.”

“But hold on,” I say, my enthusiasm suddenly flagging a little.  “What if I don’t live sixty more years?  You know, they always say, ‘Live every day as if it were your last.’

“If you don’t, well – you don’t.  None of us really knows when we’re going to go, right?  I think that saying means, ‘Don’t put off the really important things.’  That applies no matter what age you are.  Have your affairs in order.  That old friend you’ve lost contact with – look her up.  Never know how long she’s going to last.  The important thing is not the fact of sixty more years, it’s the attitude – it’s a whole nother way to look at your life. Don’t assume limits if you don’t have to.”

“I’m starting to see what you mean,” I say.  “How would it be different?”

How would your attitude toward life be different if you expected to live another sixty healthy years past your sixtieth birthday?  How would that feel?  What would you do differently?  Think about it!

—————————————-

Donald is a hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner in Silver Spring, MD, where he helps his clients resolve troublesome issues in their lives. He has been happily married since 1977 and has three wonderful grown sons. His website is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/ and his blog is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/blog/.

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“I can’t believe I’m sixty.”  My friend Marlena sits across from me over lunch, my treat, a few days after her somewhat raucous sixtieth birthday party, held in a local art gallery and featuring a DJ and enthusiastic dancing along with the usual delicious food and cake.  “I’m not ready to be sixty,” she says in a plaintive voice, shaking her head.  “I don’t feel sixty.”

This is not the first time I have heard this phrase, “I don’t feel sixty (sixty-five, seventy, etc.).”  I hear it a lot these days, as my friends and contemporaries begin to reach the ages their grandparents were at the dawn of my friends’ childhood memories.  I may even have uttered it myself, in a lapse of under-awareness.

My first, off-the-cuff, somewhat flippant response is, “But of course you feel sixty – exactly.  You are sixty.  And how do you know what sixty feels like, anyway?  You’ve never been sixty before.”  Duh.   I am biting my tongue, which is so in my cheek – this is disingenuous.

Marlena rolls her eyes at me.  “You know that’s not what I mean,” she says.

I nod sheepishly.  “I know,” I say.  “What you mean is, you don’t feel like you think your grandparents felt like, when they were sixty, or what you imagine those other people feel like at sixty: beginning to lose your vigor and acuity, body starting to ache, losing interest in sex, memory not what it used to be – right?”

She nods.  “Yes, that’s what I mean.  I don’t feel decrepit.  I have plenty of energy; my thinking is flexible and creative.  I feel pretty much like I did when I was fifty, or forty.  Even twenty, sometimes.  I don’t feel old.”

We all have these notions.  We assume, and are assumed into, roles and attitudes based on our chronological age.  We know what it is “supposed” to feel like to be sixty, seventy, eighty, and so on.  Most of this is negative, but there are some positives too: younger people should defer to us; we are wise with experience and enhanced understanding.  “I don’t feel sixty” is a sort of protest, but over time, many of us will succumb to these stereotypes as self-fulfilling prophesies, so that people, when they reach a certain age, begin to feel and act according to their and others’ programmed preconceptions, in part, at least, because of these preconceptions, not any actual physical changes.

I am not denying that there are physical and metabolic changes that occur with increasing age.  But when in a person’s life these manifest and how severe they are is highly individual, depending not only on genetics but also lifestyle and, above all, attitude.  And I believe that these stereotypic ideas about aging that we unnecessarily carry around in our heads, age us well ahead of any physical aging.

It is a matter of attitude.  I do feel 65, and my 65 feels a lot like my 45 was, and in some ways like my 25.  I don’t want to be young (good thing, because I never will be); I don’t mind getting older and even older than that.  It’s those associations with being old that I want to dump.  I intend to preserve my strength, flexibility, energy, and mental acuity as much as I can and for as long as I can, chronological age be damned!

“Maybe this is what old feels like – to you,” I say to Marlena, with a wink.  She gives me a funny look.  Enough said, I tell myself – too much maybe.  Maybe I’ll write an article about this.

*****

One year later.  Now Marlena says she doesn’t feel sixty-one.

Last night anoter friend of mine said, “My memory gets worse every day.”  How much of that, I wondered, is observation and how much his expectation?  When a thirty-year-old can’t think of a name, she attributes it to a temporary lapse; it will come to her in a minute or two.  But someone sixty will often think, “I’m getting old, my memory is failing me.”  If that’s really true, of my friend, that his memory is getting worse every day, he should see a doctor or a nutritionist (or a hypnotist!), start doing memory-improvement exercises, or something – not just assume this is some inevitable consequence of how long he’s been alive.

There is so much negative thinking around, especially in regard to getting older.  “You can hypnotize yourself in the negative as well as for the positive,” I tell my clients, and it’s true.  Keep thinking that way and you will feel sixty – you will feel a hundred before you’re even seventy!

*****

Here is an exercise you can do, to begin to get used to the idea of remaining healthy, vigorous, and mentally acute as you continue to age.

1. 1. On paper (or in an electronic document) write, on the left “70”, “80”, “90”, “100”, “110”, and “120”, leaving space between them to write sentences each (if you want to stop at “110”, fine.  I like to push the envelope.)

Starting with the highest number, write a few sentences about what you imagine your life is like at that age, assuming that you are healthy, vigorous, and mentally active and acute.  For example:

110: I walk a mile every day, when the weather is decent.  I read a lot these days, and I occasionally give short talks and interviews.  I have resumed playing guitar.  I travel occasionally, especially to beaches in warm places.  I still see some clients, which keeps me on my toes, and I have several students who hang on my every word.

1. 2. Now take yourself into a self-hypnotic or meditative state (see “Finding the Zone” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PC-E4BZE54, a, for an example of how to do this).  For each of the ages you have listed, open your eyes and read what you wrote (maintaining that same altered state), then close them and visualize (with all your senses) yourself at that age, having that life.

—————————————-

Donald is a hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner in Silver Spring, MD, where he helps his clients resolve troublesome issues in their lives. He has been happily married since 1977 and has three wonderful grown sons. His website is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/ and his blog is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/blog/.

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My mother-in-law was with us in October. My wife drove her here from North Carolina and we drove her back a month later. She turned 85 in mid-month.

Maureen sings in church and enjoys many types of music. I got us all tickets to a concert on a Sunday, and she was looking forward to it. But the day before, her right foot swelled up, with the pain going up her ankle and shin. She wasn’t able to get a shoe on, so she had to stay home, disappointed, while my wife and I went to the concert.

The next couple of days she put cold packs on the foot and elevated it, and the swelling started to go down. There was a community sing on Thursday that she wanted to go to, and it looked like she would be able to make it. But Wednesday evening the foot started to hurt and swell up again and it seemed like another disappointment was in the works. And then I remembered something.

We were sitting in the dining room, waiting for dinner to cook. “Ma,” I said, “could you do this – take a deep breath in through your nose.”

“Ok,” she said, indulging me, and she did. Maureen is a skeptic when it comes to anything related to hypnosis, but this wasn’t that.

“Now,” I continued, “the next time I want you to imagine that the skin of your foot is permeable, filled with thousands of tiny holes, and I want you to imagine that the air is coming in through that foot, and feel that air moving up through your ankle and shin.”

She took in another breath.

“Can you feel that?” I asked her, and she nodded yes. “Can you feel how cool and soothing that air is, as it travels up your ankle and shin?”

“Yes,” she said, sounding a little surprised at herself.

She kept breathing that way for a bit; then started to smile. “I think it feels better,” she said.

Then, after a few more minutes, “I think the swelling’s going down,” the smile turning into a grin

And it did! She kept up her foot-breathing, on and off, and by Thursday afternoon, she was able to get her shoe on with no trouble, and the two of us went to the Sing. She kept doing it the rest of the month, and that foot didn’t give her any more trouble.

*****

Win Wenger, Ph.D. has been studying and writing about breathing patterns for over 40 years. He began with observing his own children. His book, Beyond O.K. – Psychegenic Tools Relating to Health of Body and Mind (1979, Psychegenics Press) has a chapter, On “Breathing As A Way Of Life”, in which he describes a number of breathing patterns and their uses.

Of course breathing techniques and practices have been central to traditions around the world for thousands of years, in particular the various Yoga traditions (especially Pranayama and Hatha Yoga). Win’s observations and techniques surely parallel some of those, but he makes them and their uses very accessible without one having to become immersed in these traditions.

Each physical state, every emotional, intellectual, aesthetic experience has its own breathing pattern. Not only that, but we pick up, usually subconsciously, on the breathing patterns of others, sometimes even spontaneously synchronizing with them, below the level of awareness. And not only that – by consciously altering our breathing patterns we can affect and change our physical states and states of mind, just as I helped my mother-in-law to do. Win states, “You are how you breathe” – breathing serves as a two-way link between your conscious mind and your autonomic systems that control your physical and mental states.

Here are a few of the breathing patterns Win mentions. For much more, check out his website, http://www.winwenger.com/part28.htm.

Relief Breathing: Imagine that you are carrying a pair of heavy sacks of groceries in from the car. You pull out your keys and with difficulty balance the bags while you unlock the door, hoping you don’t drop them. You carry them in the house. One is slipping and the other is about to break. At last! – you get to the kitchen table and finally set them down. You take a deep breath in and heave a sigh of relief! That is relief-breathing. Right now, breathe that way several times, and notice the change in the way you feel.

Exhilaration Breathing: Breathe in a number of times, each time imagining a different wonderful scent (salt sea air, oven-baking bread, etc) and all its associations. This is a technique which prevents or abolishes depression, grief, or other “down” feelings and deconditions the stimuli which gave rise to them. Practice frequently.

Mirror Breathing: for self-esteem. You imagine yourself standing in front of a full-length mirror, breathing in delicious breaths, each one more delicious than the last. As you do you, you review your formative events and developments that have helped shape who you are. You examine your goals, and what things you have to do in order to achieve them.

Noise-Removal Breathing: a way to get comfortable with any pain, discomfort, or distress, past or present. You breathe calmly and slowly, taking six seconds or more with each inhale and each exhale. Imagine (feel, imagine, hear) the air coming in through the bottoms of your feet. As it comes it, imagine it swirling piles of dried leaves or other debris out of the tissues and cells, as the air passes through them. And with each calm, slow, deep exhale, see this “noise” blown clean out of your system, flaming into bright sparks as it hits the open air, as you fill the open air around you with what has now become clean, life-enhancing energy.

Yawn Breathing: Continue with noise-removal-breathing, but let the yawns come up as they will. Enjoy!

Heart Breathing: Breath in through your heart. Notice how wonderful that feels!

Circular Breathing: Breathe slowly and calmly, inhaling and exhaling in one continuous motion, like the turning of a wheel.

—————————————-

Donald is a hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner in Silver Spring, MD, where he helps his clients resolve troublesome issues in their lives. He has been happily married since 1977 and has three wonderful grown sons. His website is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/ and his blog is http://www.hypnosissilverspring.com/blog/.

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Today I’d like to talk about hypnosis. Hypnosis is a relaxed state of consciousness where the participant is better able to facilitate programming of the self. There are hundreds of applications for hypnosis, but today we’re going to focus primarily on how to put yourself into a hypnotic state and the first steps of what you can do from there.

Let’s take a look at induction techniques. It’s important to keep a few key things in mind when you’re setting out to put yourself in a hypnotic state.

First, find a place where you won’t be disturbed for a while. The place doesn’t have to be in complete isolation, but it is important for the success of your session that you not be interrupted by people wanting your attention. Outside noises of people talking or vehicles, while distracting, are not necessarily going to end your hypnotic state. You’ll be surprised how quickly those sounds fade into the background once hypnotized.

Second, sit or lay in a comfortable position with minimal annoyance to your back or shoulders. Be in a position where you will be able to relax all your muscles without falling over or leaning to one side very suddenly. While in a hypnotic state you will be drifting away from your body in a sense.

Third, you’ll need a method of hypnotic induction. There are many scripts to induce hypnosis but usually we don’t have the luxury of a trained hypnotherapist to administer the session. Often we must depend on an alternate method. Hypnosis sessions can often be distracting as the hypnotist breathes into the microphone or makes distracting sounds or improvises the script as they go along.

Unfortunately, even “professional” sessions often have these problems as well. A hypnotist who doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing can inspire a lack of confidence and create anxiety in the person undergoing the therapy. Fortunately, there are other methods including the hypnosis entrainment program we offer at the unexplainable store. Be sure to check it out at Hypnosis

It’s easy with the entrainment therapy. First put yourself in a comfortable place, then press play and begin focusing on your breathing. Breath in slowly and evenly through your nose, then breath out the same speed through your mouth. If your nose is unreliable due to seasonal conditions such as allergies, breathing through your mouth is fine too. After a couple minutes of this your mind will begin to detach from your surroundings bit by bit.

Don’t wait for it to happen, but rather immerse yourself in the experience with a mind free from a desire for results. Of course you can want results prior to and afterward, but during the session focus only on the experience itself and your positive intentions. In that mindset you will find it easy to slip in and out of hypnosis at will.

Once you’ve induced hypnosis, what then? The sky is the limit. Hypnosis has been used by therapists to do everything from recovering lost memories to putting the hypnosis subject on a path toward self discovery. Next time we’ll look at hypnosis “scripts” you can visualize as well as tips on writing your own hypnosis script to create specially created hypnosis sessions made just for you!

Thank you for taking the time to read our presentation on Hypnosis.

Jim McElwee

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