Periodically question everything you know or believe
Frequently Asked Questions
Response by Hamid soltani
Stress
Stress is a natural way for the mind to react towards things that it perceives to be against its desired expectations or wishes. Such experiences register in our minds as topics of concern and will draw most of our attentions and energies toward itself. Unless the worry is addressed/ resolved in some shape or form, it will take precedence over other topics and priorities in our minds. For example, you are very close to finalise a lucrative deal, but there are obstacles that are concerning you. In such situation you will give more priorities, attention and focus on these concerns than, for example thinking of your parking fine which might be due today or buying flowers for your partner as promised.
Negative Aspects of Stress
We all experience stress. It is as natural as life itself. Every time we physically move our body gets stressed so for a period of time, we consciously allow ourselves to remain in the stressed state so we can achieve something that is important to us (Sympathetic Nervous System). Once we have pushed ourselves enough, we then put the brakes on and rest (Parasympathetic Nervous System) so we can function again normally once we have recovered. Therefore the concept of short term stress is a normal way for us to interact with life. However, when the stress persists and does not subside as a topic of concern, the natural energy of the mind and body becomes depleted and results in many potential physical side effects.
The other important negative aspect of prolonged stress is the way it stops and removes our attention from other important topics and priorities essential to our healthy daily life. This causes us to operate in disharmony with other aspects of ourselves, and life around us.
Anxiety & Panic
Anxiety is the manifestation of stress and the way in which mind and body react under stress. The mind constantly looks for solutions to address the impending problems (topics of concerns) and causes the stress to rise up within us. If the way in which it pursues the solutions is not promising or if it is encountering major obstacles, the anxiety/ panic may manifest itself as the ultimate reaction of our mind towards our situation of helplessness and our perceived feeling of being out of control. The physical symptoms of panic are the final indication of the degree that “I am out of real options”, therefore panic is the only viable option left open for the mind to use.
The mind also has its own trauma management capability that knows when to bury an unbearable unresolved issue deeply within itself. It does so in order to restore our sanity to some degree and to allow us to get on with our normal daily functions. Such annexation of traumas also provides a welcome temporary respite from a potential prolonged stress. We also subconsciously encourage this process of forgetfulness to continue in a desperate hope of having some needed relief “out of sight, out of mind”. Unfortunately, the buried issues will resurface themselves when the environment is right. Sometimes a 20 year-old unaddressed buried issue could flare up into our conscious awareness when we least expect it. Such issues may cause us a great deal of stress, sometimes with more potent venom than its initial impact years earlier. We need to sensitively and respectfully address the core and buried subconscious anxieties and relieve/ restore our healthy mental and physical state.
Depression
When we continue to fail achieving/obtaining/maintaining those items/objects that we regard as essential to our survival and happiness, we slowly begin to lose interest/ motivation for setting new goals, plan or develop our abilities to strive forward toward those perceived key objectives. We lose faith and develop a belief “Why Bother?”, especially in accordance to our traumatic past experiences, we are convinced it is a wasteful pursuit and we see no point for us trying to achieve things when we know it is not going to work. In our minds it just cannot be achieved so why bother.
Negative Aspects of Depression
Such negative beliefs create a strong sense of hopelessness, despair and withdrawal. The severity of the depression is directly dependent on the potential number of previously experienced disappointments a person may have encountered and also it is based on the individual's level of tolerance, resilience and strength for trying out things in the face of life adversities.
If depression of a mild nature is left unattended/unresolved, it has a potential, especially when accompanied by other subsequent reconfirming experiences of failure, to develop into a more serious and endogenous problem.
Lack of Motivation/Goal setting and Drive
The human mind is naturally creative. It constantly sets goals and drives us to achieve them. The depressive human state actively tries to prevent the mind from setting goals and trying to achieve them. Without goals we cannot be driven forward. In a normal state, we are interested and curious about our surroundings for what they may offer that could be of value and used to assist us on our path to achieve our goals. In a depressive state, we lose our enthusiasm in things around us as nothing matters, nothing can capture our attention or excite us in any special way. This is because we have no defined directions or goals to inspire us in our surroundings. A typical expression from a depressed person is “I can’t be bothered with this or that”.
Fear
Fear is the number one certainty in life. Every day in our lives we come across situations and experiences that can invoke fear within us. Depending on the individual circumstances, we could encounter fear on a mild, medium, severe, or very severe basis.
Fear being an emotional experience, it is always immediately accompanied by some form of physical reactions. The reaction is produced in two ways. The first reaction is our internal bodily expression such as a fast rate of breathing, muscle tension, excessive heart beat and so on. The second reaction is our behaviour and our action in response to the event that causes us to experience fear in the first place.
For example, when our car is sliding on ice and fear for our safety begins to develop, our first body reaction (internal) is to increase the tension in our muscles and sharply increase the rate of our heart beat. And our second response (outward) is to grip the steering wheel tighter and try to manoeuver the car out of trouble. We need to learn from our Fears and not elevate them to create a way of life for ourselves.
Phobia
The more severe our fear is, the greater chance for our reactions and behaviours to be outside of the normal range. An extreme case of fear is usually referred to as phobia. This often causes panic and certain responses that may be viewed as irrational or labelled by some people as something outside the commonly accepted range of reactions to an event.
Fear is not necessarily bad. It is actually the mother of all development in mankind
Many schools of thinking discredit human fear as a negative force. In their views, fear should be thrown out of our lives, as it does not serve any useful purpose in our daily existence. Many people believe that by getting rid of our fears the problems will also go away. You often hear the commonly used phrase of “get rid of all your fears” so you can feel much better as a person. Such views, if not delivered in an appropriate context, can be misleading and damaging to individuals suffering from fear. In my view, fear is the mother of all growth in mankind and without it we can never rise up to be a refined and evolved human being.
You can learn the real nature of fear, and understand how it can be used effectively to make you more powerful by directly facing and experiencing it than avoiding it. You can also learn how fear can become damaging and turn into phobia if it is misunderstood and mismanaged within you.
Guilt
When we act outside of what we individually believe to be the correct code of conduct (e.g. our values, what is important to us or what is our given social conditioning) and at the same time, we also feel personally responsible for our conscious decisions and choices we have taken, then we feel guilty. In other words, we are guilty for consciously choosing the wrong path/behaviour/action. We also apply the same formula on others, we judge, find them guilty and sometimes punish them based on what we individually believe as an unacceptable code of conduct by others.
Guilt always is followed by the exercise of restoration of justice which usually referred to as delivering punishment to someone. For thousands of years, guilt has been the greatest cause for psychological pain in mankind. Our aim should be to address and realistically examine the underlying rules and beliefs that make us feel guilty. Then through exercise of wisdom, replace them with the greater sense of understanding of what we are here to learn from such experiences, how to grant forgiveness for our lack of knowing and how to holistically grow and to prosper from the experiences.
The subconscious beliefs and rules drive us most of the time and they are the real cause behind our judgmental views of ourselves and others. We need to examine the core of our judgmental views and stop punishing one another for what we internally believe.
Anger
When we believe there is an injustice taking place in a given event in life, we look for someone or something to pay for such injustices (i.e. someone is guilty). The instrument that carries the penalty is anger. Anger is the externalisation of our inner resentment of wrong doings that concerns us.
The grievances in us may build up for years and as the cup that holds them becomes fuller, the inner resentment becomes more unstable resulting in anger becoming more pronounced in its ferocity and its unleashing frequency. This is often referred to as “Short Temperedness/ Short Fuse” behaviour. As we get older, if these underlying resentments are not resolved, we become more and more angry with ourselves and the people around us.
We often do not see what triggers or brings our anger to the surface, but we owe it to ourselves to search internally for the real causes of our frustrations and learn to stop punishing those that have nothing to do with our inner dramas/ traumas.
Regret
Regret is the continuation of us feeling guilty and the need for us to be constantly punished for our past wrong decisions and doings. It also means that we cannot be kind to ourselves and forgive ourselves for having made those mistakes in the past. The truth is that in whatever decisions we ever make in life, we always have the intention for doing the best we can in a given situation. We never set out to deliberately fail. Therefore there is no point looking back and wishing for something that we had no control over to dominate us and punish us on an ongoing basis. We can learn to understand that we do not necessarily have that much free will or choices that we think we consciously have. Therefore the exercise of regret in life is a pointless and a costly pursuit.
Lack of Confidence
The topic of confidence or lack of it is something that constantly keep us busy wherever we go, it is right there starring at us and confronting our thoughts, emotions and behaviours. We are always in this never ending pattern of questioning our abilities in every task we undertake in life. We often talk about lack of confidence in relation to our daily life experiences and the way it causes us to feel inadequate to overcome such perceived shortfalls. Deep down within us there is a fear of being exposed and found out for what we think we really are. The worst part is often the humiliation and embarrassment that follows when we are unmasked and when the terrible sense of shame washes over us. In other words we become ashamed of who and what we are for failing to be as good or as capable as other people around us.
Question and Face your Perceived Shortfalls
Ask yourself what is it that makes you feel inadequate in front of others? What are the reasons that cause you to doubt your self-worth and values? Confidence is about feeling comfortable with the way you are at any given time and accepting the fact that tomorrow you may become more skilled than today, but you can feel comfortable with your current level of ability right now and not worried or waiting for the perfect self of tomorrow.
Follow Facts Not Fiction
Confidence is what you are born with. All children have confidence. Look at every newly born child. Observe how they command things and how they freely express themselves without fear of criticism. They cry for milk, they tell you what they want and when they want them and they do it without any concerns for their actions or fear of making mistakes in front of others.
In the process of growing up something happens that causes us to apparently lose some of this confidence and come to the view that we end up with less than what we have started with. What is it that makes us think, feel and believe in this way?
The truth is that our confidence does not dissipate. It is our perceptions and views of our abilities that change over time. We have what we have at any given moment. The next future phase of our life is not when our life actually begin. It is about NOW and living in the present than living in the future or worst still, the past.
What is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is an ancient art that up to recent times has been enjoyed and practiced in small circles by a privileged few. This art has always been shrouded in mystery and intrigued people with its secret powers. Today’s hypnotic science has encapsulated many of the ancient disciplines and the twentieth century knowledge of human mind into a powerful framework that can be applied to a wide range of human life issues.
For centuries, the general social belief on health has been mainly focused on the physical body and throughout our lives, we were taught to believe in correct nourishment, hygiene and physical exercises as the only means for avoiding illness and acquiring a happy existence. Mental aspects of humans were often put in the hard basket and somewhat trivialised by those healing professionals divorced from the understanding of the direct cause and effect relationship between the mind and body. Even to this day, many practitioners are still ignoring the “mind” factors in their overall diagnosis.
The most important causes of mental and physical illnesses are mind-related energies initiated from the depth of our subconscious and projected outward at our bodies and our surroundings. This energy represents our internally held view of ourselves and life. The final destination of such force is the physical manifestations and expressions in our daily lives. Nature intended these physical reactions to serve us as the warning bells and to consciously remind us of the real nature of our issues and the priorities we need to address in life.
Our mind drives our bodies and whatever we think or believe forges itself into our physical realities. We, unconsciously, create our own futures through our thoughts and beliefs. As we go through life, based on our individual perceptions, beliefs and particular convictions, we get bruised emotionally by daily events. If the size of our perceived emotional traumas is significant, we tend to fall victim to these internal feelings and subconsciously project adverse physical energies that may potentially harm ourselves and others around us.
What Can Hypnosis Achieve
Hypnotic Science allows the underlying issues within an individual mind, perceived as blockages, suppressed emotions and negative patterns of behaviour responsible for the person’s stagnation and struggle in life, to be addressed in the following stages:
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assist in identifying & diagnosing the real causes of the perceived problem;
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desensitise the originating negative emotions with a greater sense of understanding and appreciation of life’s lessons;
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replace any current destructive patterns of behaviour with those that are aligned with the individual’s particular vision for appropriate action in life;
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transfer knowledge to individuals and allow them to become aware of the mechanics and the triggers of their minds.
The complete therapy will allow the impacted part of the mind to begin operating freely and in harmony with other aspects of the self.
What is Psychosomatic?
Psychosomatic is the science of understanding the true relationship between the mind and body. Our bodies always mimic the way our minds work and our beliefs constantly manifesting themselves into our physical realities that we observe around us. The concept of psychosomatic principles that I clinically practice is based on the pioneering work by Greg Neville (ND) and medical application by Dr Roozbeh Malekzadeh (MD).
The psychosomatic disciplines directly follow the systemic and holographic nature of the reality we live in. As we embrace and hold tight to our subjective beliefs, we unconsciously and always innocently allow our thoughts to translate and manifest into our physical realities. By understanding how the mind drives our bodies we can address many of our illnesses through conscious interventions of changing our restraining beliefs and our unworkable perspectives on life.
In brief, Psychosomatic Therapies explore our internal thoughts, conclusions and beliefs that are adversely impacting our physical and mental wellbeing.
The list of health issues that can be addressed under psychosomatic therapies may range from those commonly regarded as mental or life issues such as low self-confidence with no obvious physical symptoms to those with measurable physical manifestations such as cancer.
It is about time we become more attuned with our deeper drivers and understand the hidden reasons, agendas and motives behind our existence. Once we understand our perceived subconscious pictures of life, we can resolve what actually causes our issues, miseries and holds us back in life.
We can currently provide information and therapies on over 100 common physical health conditions.