“Can you give me a different pack?”
I slid the pack of Marlboro Lights back at the bloke at the newsagent counter…
picture on the back, illustrating the man with throat cancer, face down.
“I can’t look at that!” I confessed, pouring the strength of will I should have been using to stop smoking into my voice instead, as though by choosing a different picture was somehow taking control of the situation.
“Can you give me one of the others…have you got the one where the guy has an amputated limb? I don’t mind that one.” (yes, I was trying to be a bit funny whilst laughing at my own demise) “Actually, have you got one where the baby is lying in a cot covered in breathing apparatus?”
Perhaps this conversation strikes you are ridiculous…possibly even unlikely…but it’s exactly the kind of conversation I’d have in newsagents during the last few years of my smoking life…that is before I made the decision to stop smoking easily with hypnosis. I knew I was being ridiculous but it didn’t stop me from being so.
If the pictures of the throat cancer bothered me so much why didn’t I just stop smoking rather than ask an indifferent newsagent vendor for a less loathsome way to die?
It defies logic
but so does smoking, doesn’t it? it defies logic on every level. We all know that smoking kills us slowly, one cigarette at a time, one puff at a time and yet we…
(actually not I any more)
Continue to pay a premium for the privilege.
Before every single ‘stop smoking hypnosis session near me’ or ‘quit smoking hypnotherapy group session’, I ask smokers:
“Why now? Why today”?
And the answers are varied but usually related to health concerns. Sometimes, it takes the traumatic death of someone close to the person, to get to the point of threshold, sometimes it’s the realisation that for the last however many years, they’ve not been enjoying smoking at all. Sometimes it’s a recent diagnoses from a doctor.
Sometimes, the smoker has just become aware of the fact that whilst they know they have been killing themselves…they’ve stopped enjoying doing it:
Maybe the person attending the hypnotherapy to stop smoking session still enjoyed the first one in the morning….maybe even the first puff of a cigarette but mostly out of the twenty or thirty cigarettes being smoked during the course of a day, like most smokers I see, realise or say during that first hypnosis to stop smoking session that they don’t really enjoy most of the fags they put in their mouth.
Some even say the smell is disgusting and makes them feel sick.
And yet they don’t stop.
“It’s just a habit and I can’t seem to stop.”
A pretty tragic state of affairs is it not?
What other situation could you possibly imagine where you pay thousands of pounds every year to make yourself feel trapped and dependent on something that is systematically destroying your health?
So if understanding that smoking is a vile, loathsome, death-production monster, doesn’t provide a smoker with the strength and fortitude to stop smoking themselves, what is it about hypnosis or hypnotherapy that makes it easier?
It all comes down to this: your imagination.
I firmly believe that this is the magic wand that a hypnotist and the person in the quit smoking with hypnosis session uses to make stopping smoking as easy and painless as it is.
As ridiculous as it was…there is a wisdom in my thinking when I refused certain images from the shop vendor. There was a reason why I never wanted to take the picture of the throat cancer because I knew that once I saw this image…I’d be puffing my fag thinking about that picture. I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my mind. It wouldn’t stop me smoking the fag but it would make me think of that death as I smoked.
Horrible? Yes.
Dangerous. Yes. Because as I would be smoking I would be imagining myself dying from that horrible disease and this is a catastrophic thing to do to ourselves
because as a hypnotist I truly comprehend the power that our imagination has over us.
Of course I would have been way better to stop smoking altogether…
but if I did intend to continue smoking…
I mean if you intend to continue smoking…I urge you at least, do it without imagining bad outcomes. At least imagine that the cigarette you are smoking is good for you, that it’s doing wonderful things for you because smoking is already terrible enough for your health without the constant accompanying meditation on the harm its doing your body.
As I continue to see more and more smokers and help them through hypnosis to quit smoking easily, I have become convinced that the key to successful hypnosis in helping the client to stop smoking and stay stopped is getting them to understand their own power.
Yes, I’m the hypnotist who will appear to wave the wand in your direction. But just think about Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The good witch is forever waving that wand in her face with that irritating good witch voice that she has…
But it turns out that Dorothy always knew how to get home: She just had bend down and touch her shoes and say to herself three times: “there’s no place like home.”
Similarly a smoker who wants to stop smoking only has to remember and reconnect to that part of them that was born free. Whoever you are, that part of you is still there, that part of you who is free. No baby was born with a fag in their mouth.
So, if you come to me to stop smoking with hypnosis, I’d like you to understand and be prepared to believe that hypnosis is going to present you with a gateway into your own powerful imagination. It is your imagination and your own powerful mind that is going to make hypnosis to stop smoking an exciting and enlightening transformation.
During the hypnotic trance you will experience a freedom from the constraints of your conscious mind to the extent it’s like being a child again wondering through strangely familiar yet unexplored hallways in large house.
Just remember to tap your shoes three times.
“There’s no place like home”.