Life Journeys: Indre talks with Clinical Hypnotherapist Gail Marra

What is Hypnotherapy?

What is the difference between Hypnotherapy and Clinical Hypnotherapy?

Welcome to Meaningful Paths webinar series Healthy Journeys. Our host Indre talks with Harley Street Clinical Hypnotherapist Gail Marra on the health benefits of clinical hypnotherapy, changing habits, mental health, addictions and hypnotherapy, the number of clinical hypnotherapy sessions required for change and much more. Please enjoy our interview.

Breath Work Audio By Clinical Hypnotherapist Gail Marra

Gail very kindly created a free breath work audio to help you become present minded and to help you create a state of calm.

Further Articles by Clinical Hypnotherapist Gail Marra

Sleep and the mind – What happens to your brain when you sleep? – Meaningful Paths

Products by Clinical Hypnotherapist Gail Marra

Breaking Bad Habits in partnership with Gail Marra and Meaningful Paths:

Breaking Bad Habits Audio Course

Gail Marra Biography

Gail Marra

https://www.gailmarrahypnotherapy.com

Gail Marra D.Hyp, MBSCH, is an accomplished Harley Street Clinical Hypnotherapist, writer, speaker and author of the best-selling book “Health Wealth & Hypnosis – The way to a beautiful life”. 
Gail is a member of the British Society of Clinical Hypnosis and the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council. A warm and personable therapist, practicing a highly effective ‘solution focused’ approach to therapy, Gail works with clients around the world, from all backgrounds and of all ages, helping them overcome a variety of physical, emotional and psychological issues, to unleash their full potential and live their best lives.

Video transcript on Clinical Hypnotherapy

Indre: I just thought I’ll quickly introduce myself while we’re waiting for Gail to join us and tell you a little bit more about who I am and why I’m here. So, first of all, welcome to our first webinar series on Healthy Journeys. We’re super excited to be kicking off today with these theories. And I can’t wait for what’s more to come.

So for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Indre. I’m not going to bore you with my last name. It’s very complicated to pronounce. Welcome, Gail. And I’m a wealth coach and a wealth expert partnering with Meaningful Pops. And I’m all about financial health and wealth health. But today we are joined by Gail, who is an absolutely incredible person, and I cannot wait for us to have this chat. So just a brief introduction and I’ll let Gail go into her story anyway. But Gail Marra is an accomplished Harley Street clinical hypnotherapist. She’s a writer. She’s also a speaker. And she’s an author of the best selling book called Health, Wealth and Hypnosis The Way to a Beautiful Life. Gail is also a member of the British Society of Clinical Hypnosis and the Complementary and Natural Health Care Council. She’s a warm and personable therapist, practicing a highly effective solution focused approach to therapy. Gail works with clients all around the world from all different backgrounds and of all ages. And her main goal is to really help them overcome a variety of physical, emotional and psychological issues and unleash their full potential and live their best lives. So welcome, Gail.

Gail: Thank you. What a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much.

Indre: It’s all you. You know what? And I am so excited. I’ve been reading a lot about your story. And I think it’s incredibly inspirational. The transformation that you’ve gone through and what you’re doing for other people is I think with that, I’m just going to open up and ask you to share a little bit more about your story and how you got into hypnotherapy to start with and what led you to start this journey.

Gail: Gosh, if I can go back to many years ago when I was a young mum, I was in a really stressful job, a really stressful career in the city, in banking and finance. I found myself really searching for something or some things that I could use to help myself get through and to be less focused on the job and the money and more focused on my children in our lives. But of course, I’m going back to the 1980s and they were Margaret Thatcher’s years. So she was gung ho and go how we can do this on our own and sisters are doing it for themselves. And so a lot of pressure probably put pressure on people around us today for sure. But then it was it was a challenging time. I decided to take a bit of a sabbatical and retrained, if you like. We trained in stress management, but again, it was corporate. So I was working with people from my industry, from banking, finance and but in a different mode now. So it is much just trying to help them do and overcome stress, anxiety, addictions, all kinds of things like that. And I’ve always kind of been really spiritual. But then again, I have a really kind of science analytical brain and the tooth didn’t always match up. So I was always awesome. And I read every book I could about spirituality, mindfulness. It wasn’t necessarily called mindfulness. I was just trying to get my life right. And eventually I was a heavy smoker because the fashion, I forced myself to smoke when I was a teenager. So anyway, I knew that I wanted to be smoking and someone had recommended that I go to see a therapist. So I’m going back 20 years now. I fast forward from 30 years of back 20 years. And I went through a couple of hypnotherapy sessions to be fair. As soon as I left, I lit up a cigarette. So I thought that that’s not for me alone to people can’t hypnotize me and I’m too in control and all I want to do is smoke, and that’s that. But I was an embarrassed smoker. I’d never smoke in the house, a bit of smoke in the car. I didn’t like to have a smoke in the street. Oh, my goodness, if my mother had every saw me I would have been terrified. So I never, never smoked in front of my children or I hung out the window to the garden door. So it was it was awful, really.

But the time came when I was ready. I wasn’t sure that I was ready. I kind of relate that to the Caterpillar Chrysalis butterfly effect. So somewhere down the road, the caterpillar knows that it’s time to go inside and change. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what the caterpillar does, instinctively goes inside and changes and emerges as a wonderful butterfly. Whilst I didn’t emerge a wonderful butterfly, I went to see a girlfriend of mine who recently qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist. And so I thought, OK, I kind of like the sound of that. I like the sound of the clinical part. Maybe it’s more science based than crystals and candles burning, although I love that it wasn’t going to work for me at that time. I went to see her, so. And we’d gone for lunch, I’d gone to see her at the clinic and we go for lunch and back then you could smoke in restaurants if smoke everywhere in public. So I got along long enough to write a book to table. Off we go. She said, hang on, I’ve got a new script that I’ve put together for smoking session. Can I try it out on you? And I said, well, you know, if we’ve got time, I’ve got to pick up the kids and all this kind of thing. So I applied that I was doing her a favor. Yeah, that’s ego getting in the way. And we finished and we went to lunch and we have a lovely lunch in the shop. And I came home by train, pick my kids up, went home to dinner, did the homework with them, sat down evening after they gone to bed. And I thought. Oh, my goodness, I haven’t smoked so a little cross across the room for a few days. I didn’t say you could do that, but that was. And so for someone like me to have responded like that, I thought, well, no, I already knew about the power of the subconscious mind, already knew about that, because I’ve been using that all my life to get from nowhere to somewhere in my beginnings like many other people who were not the best. But there was something in me that drove me forward and now I know it’s my inner guidance.

Anyway, I then studied. I went back again and study psychology and I love psychology. I’m a forever student of psychology. And then I went to study clinical therapy. And here I am today. And I have I work in so many different areas, so many different fields. Like you say. I’ve written a book about it. I’m writing at the moment a book for young adults and teenagers, ways in which they can navigate the world around them because it’s difficult for the kids these days. I mean, I am older than you, but when we were kids, we didn’t we didn’t have the same I’m going to call it mollycoddling for want of a better word, because I can’t into that right now. But anyone else my age, you’ll know that we went out after school or we went out at weekends. We came home when we were hungry, all was well. But today the kids are under so much pressure. Social media exams. When I was at school, university was not given. It wasn’t even up to work. And if you went out to work and you went home for your parents, it’s very different. Not for everyone. You know, lots of people went to university, but it wasn’t mainstream as it is now. Yeah. Anyway, so I’ve arrived at my dream location, which was Harley Street, which has always been in the back of my mind.

To me, it’s a joy to go to the clinic and I just love it. I love the feedback. I love helping people. And every time I help someone and it helps me to anyway. You can wish you hadn’t asked me to stop talking now.

Indre: Oh, of course. This is very interesting. And, you know, I want to pick on something that you said, and I think a lot of us are, as you were, as well aware of the power that our subconscious has. And there’s a lot about mindfulness and mindset overall. And part of what I do as well, I teach about, well, mindset and money mindset. But I think. Quite often we sort of. Keep the two things apart in terms of my subconscious versus hypnotherapy, because I don’t know the half of the perception that there is that hypnotherapy is just this thing where somebody dangles a watch in front of your eyes. You go to sleep and you wake up and you quack like a chicken. But other times that, however, is actually a lot deeper than that and a lot more different. And I wonder maybe you can talk a little bit about what really is hypnotherapy? How does that work? What happens? What’s the difference between the, you know, the guy on the stage versus what you do and the clinical hypnotherapy and then how the two relate?

Gail: My own personal opinion about stage hypnosis, and I think it’s great. I’ve been to studies in the past, but hypnosis, hypnotherapy or clinical hypnotherapy, hypnosis with the therapeutic end point. So it’s not entertainment. The people mainly who are part of the entertainment on stage will be willing participants. And maybe it’s the opportunity, the chance to behave outrageously and not accept responsibility. Maybe it’s people that really have kept a lot of themselves in inside. And it’s a moment to express themselves. And there are people who are very prone to hypnosis. But in the main, hypnotherapy is to induce hypnosis with a therapeutic end point. So hypnosis, you and I, everyone is in hypnosis many times every day. So it’s a natural state. It’s completely organic. So when you’re daydreaming, you’re in hypnosis, when you’re reading a good book and you’re engrossed in that book, when you focus your attention on something and nothing in the peripheral matters that you’re aware of during hypnosis, when you’re doing something you love, you’re in hypnosis. So hypnosis is a brainwaves. So we have five brainwaves, and Theta from is the brain wave of daydreaming. It’s a brain wave of hypnosis and that’s the brain wave frequency. When your subconscious mind is more susceptible to positive suggestion, you’re not asleep in hypnosis. In fact, you are in a state of heightened alertness, heightened awareness. So when your eyes are closed, you don’t have to close your eyes, by the way. And hypnosis you can you don’t have to do that. But when you’re always exposed, generally, it gives a signal to the subconscious mind that you’re resting, not necessarily sleeping. So then you can start using your other senses and become more aware and then you can kind of turn the volume down on the busy conscious thoughts. What am I here? Why am I here? What’s going to happen? What’s for dinner? What direction the of all these busy, busy things, what are you going to do to me and make that hair appointment. You’re busy conscious mind gets in the way all the time. But when you’re relaxed as in meditation, then your thoughts can become more linear and your subconscious mind can then be more receptive.

Indre: This is actually very interesting because I tried hypnotherapy. I used to have an incredible fear of heights, one of those really irrational fears where you just freak out and start crying and you’re kind of in panic mode. And yeah. And I have a friend who dabbles in hypnotherapy. And when I went to see her, I was very skeptical about it, as I think most of us are quite often. And I was really what I was expecting was this sort of complete unawareness. So I thought she was going to really put me to sleep with them. She’s going to snap her fingers. I’m going to wake up and I’m not going to have any idea of what has happened. And I I’m not going to remember any of it. But it’s interesting what you say, because it really was just sort of relaxing and letting your mind free up and getting rid of those thoughts that surround us. But at no point was I asleep and unaware of what I’m doing when it when the session was over, my thinking was I well, clearly it didn’t work on me. Clearly, you know, I’m not someone who can be hypnotized.

Gail: Exactly. Yeah.

Indre: But then the next time I was in the in the mountains up high, I suddenly felt like, oh, I’m actually OK with it and I don’t. That’s right. So that was very, very surprising because my expectation was so different. And with anything, if you want to change or improve, tweak anything, if you have to be a willing participant to be to have to respond to therapy, no one can make anyone do think so. Feel anything that’s against the moral values or against the better judgment.

Gail: Because we have something called free will. We have control in a subconscious mind, which is 95 percent of everything we’re all about. It’s job is to keep us safe and well and alive. So we’re going to let us do crazy things. We have to be a willing participant. And if somebody comes to me, I have clients who come along. And just so my wife thought I ought to come home, one mother thought I ought to come or someone else thought I ought to come. Well, I can’t really help because I can’t make them do something they’re not ready for in the same way as I had to be ready to stop smoking. People have to be ready and willing to change and then to trust that they can make those changes. And I always say to people who are skeptical, whether because I thought it was mind control and I say, I’ve raised five children. We’ve got four grandchildren and an adopted cockapoo called Teddy, who thinks he’s still a cop. If I had the power of mind control, I have to be something in place somewhere by now. So that’s not how it works. But it works.

It’s scientifically proven. There’s no doubt about how hypnosis works and how hypnosis is coming into the mainstream. More and more, I work and I give regular talks with the oncology department. So I hold talks and we do group therapy sessions to promote healing, to promote calm prior to surgery, probably to test results.

I work with people who have dental phobias, who can have dental work done without anesthetic. The recently I think was two thousand seventeen or eighteen. They did the first awake cranial up the cranial craniotomy I actually worked with at the time. And we work together to to get to get them through that. So hypnosis has been around for 100 years and more than that to go back to a swinging pocket, watches and purple coats. I only get those out for Halloween. Very special request, a special request. And it’s very interesting how you say that if not, therapy can work with people who have any physical issues and pain and all of that and is I suppose nothing is off limits when it comes to hypnotherapy as long as you’re willing. Yeah, I would say so I work not just with pain of both really well with pain management, but also for depression, for anxiety, for stress, because I teach my clients how to reduce the stress levels, their anxiety levels. I can teach them with breathing exercises. In fact, I’ve done a breathing exercise, but for power, which has a physical and chemical response in the body. So it triggers the vagus nerve and central nervous system and you can dissipate the excess adrenaline and start to release lovely endorphins just with your breath. Once you know the power of your subconscious mind, there’s no there’s no limits. I wanted to quickly touch on your fear of heights. Yeah. Because we’re actually only born where we’re born with two fears innately.

One is the fear of being dropped, which can move on to fear of heights. The other is a fear of loud noises. The only two fears that we’re born with every other fear is learned behavior. And you mentioned it being irrational. Phobias are irrational fears, but it doesn’t mean they’re not they don’t spark off that. The adrenaline, cortisol, the fight and flight you see today, I think more than previous decades, a lot of us are in fight and flight mode as a default. But that’s not how it should be fight and flight. It’s actually fight and flight. But we should only be in that mode when we’re in clear and present danger. If we there’s a threat or if we’re competing. If you’re in competition, if you’re going to give a presentation, if you’re going to go out on stage and work a lot with actors and actresses and musicians who have stage fright So, you need a little bit of adrenaline to give you that extra. But primarily you need to be able to flip back into what we call Western Digest, that lovely and state which is easily done. So we get stuck in fighting fight. Subconscious mind isn’t just doing how you feel as good or bad for you. Is not judging it to be positive or negative either it likes repetition of what you practice at most becomes automatic. So if you practice something and it’s really beneficial to get good at it, you don’t have to think about the steps you take to do it.

You just do it. Autopilot. You get used to feeling stressed if you’re used to high levels of adrenaline, cortisol, if you’re if you’re used to that, the subconscious mind is going to produce that. OK, that’s this is all default. So I teach people how to kind of reprogram themselves, go back to the true default. And our true default is rest and adjust most of the time and fight and fight when we need it.

Indre: I think the modern life has kind of led us to this sort of where there’s this expectation to constantly be in this growth mode, to constantly be achieving, to constantly be doing, to constantly be busy. It’s almost if you suddenly sit down and take five minutes, you feel guilty for that. Look as if you’re wasting time, as if you’re not doing something. And I think especially on the on the business and entrepreneurship side, there’s been a lot of this sort of you must hustle, you must hustle. If you want to succeed, it has to be one hundred percent of the time. It’s almost that people tend to take pride in the fact that they’re overworked, that they’re not sleeping, then they’re not sort of enjoying their everyday life because they’re building and building. And I think it can be very dangerous because when you burn out, that’s bad for you, that’s bad for everything. You’re not going to build a successful business on burnout. You’re not going to be there for your family, etc. And so I wanted to ask you, is there something that. All of us could do and incorporate in our daily life to help us manage that, it’s fair enough. We can all book an appointment with you and come see you. But is there some steps that each one of us could take on a daily basis to kind of help us reduce that sort of running towards something and that stress and anxiety that we live in?

Gail: Yeah, there’s lots of things we can do, but again, practice makes perfect, to coin a phrase. I open my mouth, my mother came out. Practice makes perfect. But to to have mindfulness practice, medicine, meditation, practice, breath work, practice, taking time to hear something, me time and people call me to time. So people say to me, oh, I have plenty.

Give me time. I had a massage. I went swimming off the gym. I ran 5K. I have my nails at it all. They went to the hairdressers or played tennis. But are you doing something now that’s not you doing nothing? And I read a book or watch a movie but yeah you’re doing something, you’re not doing nothing. And the one of the things I practice every day, it’s just 15 minutes, maybe sometimes ten, ten to 15 minutes of real me time. I’ll just sit quietly. I meditate, but it doesn’t have to be meditation. People think meditation is difficult because I say, oh, I can’t stop thinking.

Well, no, don’t do that! Don’t stop thinking. Because if you’re going to be thinking, if you’re going to stop thinking, you’re either in devil to fall asleep or unconscious. And even then, the brain is still functioning. But there’s a wonderful and I can’t pronounce his name but is a Taoist monk. And he said with to this effect, when you’re thinking of meditation, slowing the conscious thinking down, he said, allow your thoughts to come in the front door and leave by the back door. Don’t offer them tea. And I really like that, so you’re not going to stop your thoughts from coming because that’s the conscious mind, you want that to function, but you don’t have to pay attention to it. So you can just for a moment, for five minutes, just let your thoughts go. Come and go. Don’t fight them, because the more energy you put into them, the way you focus your attention, those energy flows. So the more focus you put into your thoughts, the more they’re going to come along. For instance, if you were to think about and I do this quite a lot, if you were to think now and everyone is listening about a lemon. OK, we’ve all had lemons, I guess, lines, something really acidic. If you really think about that process, if you were to even close your eyes and imagine cutting a lemon in half, maybe squeezing the lemon into your mouth and letting that juice flow down your cheeks and around your tongue and down your throat, all of your hands, it smells amazing. Good taste or really sour. And you salivate. That’s another thing it does. It doesn’t distinguish between a real event or an imagined one. So you can imagine Einstein said to me, knowledge is power of imagination to take you everywhere, anywhere.

Five minutes, ten minutes to ten minutes. Work at finding some time in your working day in your life every day to just sit and do nothing. Sit with your thoughts. Mindfulness is not easy practice so you can go through the body in mindfulness. You can just focus on what you can see around you. Then you can focus on what you can hear around you, what you can smell, what you can sense and use your senses one at a time. That brings you to the present moment. We live so much in the past and also worrying about the future that we miss the middle bit and the middle bit. We got this if that’s the middle it. And of course, breathe work, breathing deeply won’t go into that seething but breathing manually, I call it taking the controls of your breath. You can do, but you can go from stress to calm in 60 seconds. OK, so you’re breathing in through your nose, breathing into your abdomen, and you’re breathing out through your mouth in a controlled way. Five cycles in the space of one minute, you trigger the vagus nerve and you start releasing endorphins. So there you go. There’s a few tips that everyone can find 60 seconds. Even if I can’t find five, ten, 15 minutes, everyone can find 60 seconds. And I teach that to four from children right through to adults. And it’s a wonderful practice.

Indre: Well, thank you for saying that. I agree. I think we all can find those ten to fifteen minutes in our day to really spend the time, the real me time, because I think that not just us but everyone who surrounds us, because we just become a bit calmer and nicer to be around.

Gail: Exactly right. Because we all have and that’s physics is even quantum physics, isn’t it, because of our energy, what we give off expands. So if we’re tense, then the energy around us is tense. And no one has ever told the people around us tense and the energy just swirls around and everyone gets uptight. But equally, you know, my kids will say that I can be quite annoying like that because I’m pretty Zen a lot of the time. I’ve trained myself to be that way. But what I find is when our grandchildren come along, I’ve got on my TV, I usually put some quiet music, classical music even. And they used to complain, but now they done. And it’s the ones just calm down and then they leave, they leave the room and run amok. But the energy it’s important, the energy change. You know, when you walk into a room and you can sense the vibe, what’s that energy.

Indre: And you can I have to have dinner at home. And it’s just, you know, it’s so incredible to see if I’m stressed out, if I’m a little bit tense, I can. See that he becomes stressed out and straight away, it’s all absolutely I’m noticing that how I respond to his behavior and his reactions and the energy that I give off. That’s what he absorbs. And it either increases his anger and his upset or puts him in a composition that absolutely.

Gail: And for the first seven years of a child’s life there in the programing is. So he is your son, did you say? Yeah, he’s watching your every move you ever respond to. Everyone is mirroring you because you’re the chief programmer, teach his family and friends and what have you also. But you’re the main programmer. So, yeah, he’s watching so quickly flip back to phobias. Very often phobias alert someone with seen a reaction. So if mom has seen a spider and flips out, then the programing to a child is spider equals fear equals flipping out. So that will be the response. So the brain is just some wonderful computer so you can program it and you can reprogram. Neuroscience now knows that we create new neural pathways, new brain cells all the time. I used to think we went got to it and I stuck with our brains detoxify at night the things that they didn’t know before. They know now. So it’s so important to, OK, we can’t all be Zen all the time. That’s not real life. And I wasn’t like this when I was bringing my kids up because it was a bit of a madhouse at times. But I’ve learned to be that way. I’ve learned to be mindful of my energy and other people. So if I’m in a in a space where other people’s energy is really negative or aggressive, I’ll remove myself because I know that I can absorb it because it’s an  exchange of energy. So that’s another thing. That is another good tip. I mean, we can’t move out of our hands over time. I mean, the family stress. But you can remove yourself from the situation. You can remove yourself to another room or get yourself in a good book or other. Just take yourself away. Watch Harry Potter or something wonderful like that, just to take yourself out of that zone for a while. And so, you know, given that you are in this sort of. Kind of conscious understanding

Indre: With the subconscious and concepts on mindset, what are your views on affirmations and visualizations and all of that? Because I feel it a little bit that it’s been so simplified lately, it’s just became a trend where people have to oh, all you need to do is visualize and do affirmations and everything is going to work out and you’re going to get your dream life and your dream, everything. But I suppose it kind of goes back a little bit to that. You need to want that change as well just because you wake up in the morning and say certain affirmations, is that really going to work?

Gail: Well, far be it for me to find the face of other people’s beliefs. And indeed, the work is that for me, affirmations are empty without the emotion that goes along with it. So if you don’t feel it is subconscious mind isn’t interested in it. So you could wake up in the morning and say, I’m king of the world or I’m going to I’m going to go out and buy the Maserati today or I’m going to find the love of my life at the door today. You can say things like that constantly, but if you don’t believe it, if you don’t feel it, then there just you might as well be just rhubarb and custard. It doesn’t it has depth. You see, a subconscious mind deals in images. That’s what visualization works for. Sure. Visualization is it? I could actually if you if you have somebody pushed me to put the hypnotic process in a nutshell, I probably say creative visualization. Because the subconscious mind deals with pictures. So if I start to think of a pink elephant, I think of a pink elephant, you don’t even if you were to think of the words pink elephant, you think you are imagining the words pink elephant. If I was, I was too close to you. Don’t touch me. But you see the digits. So your subconscious mind sees things, but it also has to see to feel things. So if I said there’s a pink elephant at the door, you wouldn’t be fearful because that’s not the case. But if you believe in pink elephants and you believe it could be one door and you visualize it, your body will go through all the motions of that. It wouldn’t turn up, of course, because it’s nothing but trying to give an example of the of affirmations versus visualization. So affirmations are great so long as you have the feelings to go with them and the belief to go with them. So you could have an affirmation. But what they’re really famous for is every day in every way, I’m getting better and better. That’s a standard affirmation if you’re striving. To that end, if you’re making efforts and you’re feeling and seeing the results of that, then you will be getting better, better every day. But if you just say because it’s all a bit of flash, it’s not going to go anywhere. So affirmations of great feelings have to go with it. It takes work to be able to feel the things to what you’re saying. Yeah, we all have a lot of blockages as well. I mean, you probably find that in your work. People have a lot of financial blockages and they see it. But I never really do want to make that money. I really do want that dream job. But somewhere inside is  to deserve it. Or am I good enough? I’m smart enough and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. And those areas because you feel them, you believe them, that’s going to be a reality.

Quantum physics says if I put that in a nutshell, not and I don’t pretend to understand quantum physics. I’m reading a book for the moment actually called Quantum Physics. But from a quantum physics perspective, if you like someone out there who’s a quantum physicist might put me right. But I believe that to be anything is possible. So you can make  anything happen within reason and that becomes your reality. So after this interview here today, I could go and pour a glass of wine. I could go and get a glass of water. I could put the television on, I could go to bed, I could run down the street shouting, hallelujah, whatever I decided to do, if anything, the possibility, whichever I did, becomes my reality.

Indre: That’s very interesting!

Gail: Yeah, I kind of think that something for me that makes sense. I hope that makes sense to the people that maybe in my next life I’ll be a quantum physicist. You never know. And I’m kidding. I don’t know. I don’t know about cosmology and the future lies. I’m just throwing that out there. I’m open minded. Yeah.

Indre: With that, I’m going to just quickly see if anyone does have any questions. Now is your chance. You can either pop them in the chat box that you have just underneath or there’s a Q and A as well that you can pop your questions in. So feel free to get all your answers today. This is your chance to know everything there is to know. And while we’re waiting on that, I have another question for you. I mean, I have so many questions for you because I find it so fascinating what you do. And I just think that the mind is an absolute fascinating creation. Can hypnotherapy also help to get rid of the negative blocks and negative beliefs as we call? And overall would be interesting to understand. Is there an average that two to. Get rid of something. This is how many sessions you need, this is how long it’s going to take you, or is it completely dependent on the person and on the situation?

Gail: Oh, really, really good question. And I get asked a lot, as you can imagine. So clinical therapy is what we call a brief therapy. So unlike psychiatry, where you might be coming to see a psychiatrist for years or for most issues can be dealt with within three to six sessions and each session is 50 minutes to an hour. But you can see that I talk a lot. Sometimes a wrong way over this is that that’s the norm. But of course, it also depends on the individual. There’ll be people that they’ll come to me. For one thing, it’s like peeling layers of an onion. They might say, this is what I want to fix. So this is what I want to change. But when you peel back the layers, it’s not a tool. It’s something completely different.  But for sure, you can work on any issue, whether it’s physical or psychological, and you can work on improving everything and anything in your life. And it doesn’t take forever. But you just got to be a willing participant. You’ve got to be ready for. So am I have a client who come to me saying, oh, I can’t sleep, I have insomnia, I just can’t sleep. And sometimes all I need to do is explain to them how we sleep, the process, the various brainwave frequencies we’re in while we sleep. And it’s OK that we kind of wake up and move and they kind of get the understanding that I don’t have a problem with sleep.

Maybe I’m stressed. OK, well, let’s work on the stress. You see, it’s an organic process, but it doesn’t go on for years. Having said that, I have wonderful clients have been coming to see me for years, but very often it’ll be for a refresher, for something very different. They might bring the children or the grandchildren by now husband or that it depends. But for any one issue to answer your question, they’re three to six sessions is the norm, but everyone’s an individual differently.

Indre: We have a couple of questions. So why instead of answered already. But I still want to put it out there so you know what I’m saying. What confuses me about approaching work like this, although I really admire it and I’m fascinated by it, is that it seems you would approach it with a particular fear or here. But what if you’re feeling the fear or the blocker, but you don’t know it, you haven’t identified it yet.

Gail: OK, so there’s a blockage, but you’re not quite sure what the blockages. Yeah, yeah, exactly. OK, something is stopping someone getting to where they want to get to and they don’t understand doing I’m making all the moves that I’m doing everything I should, but there’s got to be a blockages somewhere. So in hypnotherapy to look to ununified. So when you can in hypnosis, when you turn down the volume on your conscious thoughts, that conscious still the same. What I don’t know what it is. It could be because it could be, but I don’t know what it is. We just turn the volume down. We say, OK, let’s look at what’s coming up. Stuff comes up. All we can remember this happened or I thought that or this was my experience with someone keeps telling me. So then we’ll work on that belief system and reprogram it if they want to so we can go out into what’s called regression therapy personally, although I guess it comes in a little bit to what I do. But we can go back and unearth traumas, traumatic events, negative memories, and we can even we don’t erase memories. That’s impossible. But we can reframe how we feel about them. And I use what real people we can, referring we can detach emotion from negative memories or blockages or barriers and things that are stopping us from moving forward. But we honor them. And I hope that answers the question of going off on a tangent. But we are peeling the layers of an onion. We can get to the bottom line therapy of what the blockage is, what’s caused, caused and what’s causing the blockage. And then we work towards overcoming it, simply overcoming it. Yeah.

Indre: We have another question that sort of continues on that conversations, how long on average can it take to change a bad habit or bad pattern in the subconscious mind?

Gail: Again, if you want to if you want to stop that bad habit, it can happen in one session. So we use, for instance, smoking cessation. If you’re ready to give up, you’ll give up in one session. Some people don’t trust themselves and might come back for a little top up, which is great. Nail biting, lip biting, hair pulling, that kind of thing can take a few more sessions, but again, three to six sessions, because if you’re if you want the change to occur, you make the change happen. I don’t make changes happen. I’m a facilitator to somewhat facilitate the change. So someone comes to me and I say, I’m pulling my hair, I’ve got patches I can’t stop. First thing we do is get rid of the word. I can’t because you’re giving your subconscious mind a clear instruction. It’s the same as. Oh, I can’t remember. I can’t remember that. I can’t remember. Well, the subconscious mind said we will stop looking and stop looking for the answer. So, yeah, bad habits. We develop them. All of us develop them. Continually throughout life, but because were a learned behavior or learned response, then we can unlearn it and learn something more beneficial every time.

Indre: It’s incredible. You have one more question. This is interesting. Can regulate use of breathing exercises, reduce high blood pressure.

Gail: Yes. There you go. Yes, it certainly can. Because when you do when you’re doing what you do in breath work, particularly the breath that I mentioned briefly, you are  triggering the vagus nerve in your releasing endorphins and in that relaxed state, in hypnosis, in meditation, in relaxation. When you’re sitting on a beach somewhere and kids are back at home, when you’re really chilled out, you are in you’re in that type of brain wave and you really see endorphins. And so your blood pressure lowers your heart rate slows down, your digestive system, starts to get rid of excess acidity and you can digest the food that has so many beneficial components to it. Physically, physiological changes take place of birth. Absolutely. What the opposite to that. A talking about blood pressure there. If you were to hyperventilate and you see the spring up here by default, again, that’s not what your lungs are up there. And that’s going to raise the adrenaline because the conscious mind is going to think you’re in trouble. Yeah, you’re in trouble. You’re going to run. You’re going to you can’t get your breath, panic, adrenaline and fear of fight and flight. So, yes, yes, yes. Breath work is fabulous to reduce blood pressure. I’m not suggesting that if anyone’s on medication, they should come off medication to stop breath because the two go hand in hand. And I’m not a medical doctor. So the other always recommended medical advice if there’s a blood pressure concern.

Indre: Yeah, this is very interesting, I guess, how we kind of behave with our body and what we do physically can have such a huge impact on how we react to things. And I remember I’m quite into surfing and I remember when I was in Costa Rica, we had quite the big waves. And basically the instruction from the guy was, you know, if you  fall off and if you get into that tumble of the wave, what you have to do, it goes against your brain is you have to just relax, because the kind you try and fight it, the deeper you go down and as soon as you relax, you just come back up. And it was quite interesting because I did get into one of those tumbles and it was incredible how the different physical reactions have such different effects on your mind as well, because if you relax, you stop panicking and you know that everything is going to be OK and you just.

Gail: Yeah, I love that. I love that analogy. I would imagine everyone who’s listening visualized you on a surfboard having a tumble in the waves because we were with you on that brief journey. So, yeah, I love that. Absolutely relaxation. You know, when an adult falls over, we’re likely to hurt ourselves. I should know I’m a klutz. So if there’s something to trip over, I’m going to trip over the matter, whatever it is. But a child, when they fall, they relax, they tumble. Yeah, we lose that ability to go and we both bruise and cut the children relax, OK? They often themselves as well, but they’ll relax and they’ll tumble. So relaxation is our default mode. When we come into this world, we might look stressed because we’re crying because we were, but we were using fluid in our breathing air and we need to do that to clear the lungs. But we were all born in a default mode that is resting, not just relaxation when anything’s possible and nothing’s a problem and everything’s wonderful. And the only thing I need to do, my subconscious mind innately, is going to make sure that I know how to get fed and changed and how I have to keep going because I cry for those things. Yeah, yeah. And then life happens and we take all kinds of other stuff.

Indre: Yeah. It’s actually really interesting that you say that because. Exactly. You know, before giving birth I went on to a number of different courses and read some books. And about exactly how newborns just know subconsciously to look for milk, if you’re putting them on your chest, that they will just naturally crawl to where the milk comes out and will just get on it. It’s like as if they’re born knowing what to do. And then three days later, suddenly they’re like all confused, like, oh, what do I do now? But that that kind of that moment when they’re born, it’s just incredible how they just programed to do that, programed to do that.

Gail: So we come in. We don’t come into this world, in my opinion, as an empty vessel. I think we come into this world as a complete vessel and we just add to it as time goes on. But you can today, you can pick and choose. You can really pick and choose. I mean, we can’t control what goes on around this. And we look at the last year, we as a planet, we’ve never been so controlled as in the free world anyway. You never so controlled. And now we’ve had to we can’t leave until we can’t see our loved ones or friends or family can’t go to the shops. We can’t try on clothes without all liberties taken away. And we can’t control that. But we can control how we respond So we can go to the list, if you remember, same as everyone will, that first lockdown where people are scrapping over. And I’ve got to tell you, my husband went to the local shops and they also wanted to get the kids to get the we all got on the back of the gravy train. But my goodness, how you respond is always good to see you go to work and have to have your boss screeching down your neck and giving you all the stress of you kids are stressing you out or money is the problem. But you can change how you respond to that stress.

You can say, OK, I’m going to I’m going to take five minutes, I’m going to reboot re-energized, start again. Maybe I’m going to go to bed and start again in the morning.  Maybe I’m going to tell my subconscious mind as I start to go to sleep at night that things are going to be clear for me in the morning. But something else I want to mention is when as we go to sleep at night, our thoughts act as a marinade measurement So we marinate in that stuff all night long. So it’s important if you can change your mindset as you go to sleep and just be aware of your thought process, because if you’re going to bed worrying about the next day or worrying about what’s just happened, you can’t change. You’re going to wake up in the morning.

So just to try, you can even do your breathing exercises and just be aware of your thoughts as you drift off to sleep and know that you’re going to marinate in them.

Indre: If I have to say in the last month I started practicing a bit of relaxation before sleep. So what I do is I switch off my phone and put it away as I enter the bedroom. So I know just that I don’t want to look at anything. Even if I haven’t finished. It’s OK. I’ll finish whatever needs finished tomorrow. I just want to switch that off. And I bought myself. I think it’s called a shock. That’s one of those mats with the spikes in them. Just like this is  a little mat that you lie down on and it has like sort of little spikes, little needles. It’s sort of like a little massage, I guess. It helps put me in a place of Zen where you just, wow, relax, because it relaxes all your muscles with the wonderful little needles. And it’s just yeah, this is how I go to sleep every night. I do that for good. Twenty minutes, half an hour. Then I put it away and I’m going to sleep with my mind. Clear. And it’s true. Every morning I wake up feeling great and ready for whatever is to come and happy.

Indre: So much I don’t know about everyone else, but for me this was one of the best talks I had in a long. Q Fascinating what you do and thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and sharing your knowledge and giving us all those tips.

Gail:] And it’s just been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. It’s been a joy and I love to share and I hope it can help some people. And yeah, so wonderful people can go into my website and have a look a bit more about what I do and what it’s all about.

So, yeah, it’s been a joy. And you’ve been a great host.

Indre: thank you. And thank you everyone who attended. And we look forward to seeing you soon and one of our next webinars. And have a wonderful evening, everyone.

Gail: Take care. Bye.