The practices of meditation and hypnosis constitute a fascinating and significant meeting area between psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, in terms of both psychotherapeutic and evolutionary aspects. Meditation and hypnosis appear to be completely different and independent subjects in terms of history, culture, definitions and use, but they are actually more intimately connected than you can imagine.
Meditation and contemplative traditions have for centuries refined practices useful to pacify the mind, relax the psycho-corporeal system and cultivate transpersonal qualities and achieve increasingly advanced levels of integration between compassion and wisdom.
Hypnosis and self-hypnosis can become powerful allies to support meditation, they can help us develop the ability to observe everything that happens while remaining at the center of ourselves, preserving our inner peace.
Self-hypnosis can be at the service of meditation and support the journey to our center everything that takes us away from ourselves, from our truth, can be defined as negative hypnosis, everything that brings us back to ourselves, to the center of our interiority, meditation.
Only when we are really in the present moment we can get out of the trance, in the present, the role of the mind is reduced to that of a simple servant and awareness can guide us.
Tart (1975) shows us how meditation can be considered as an induction technique: most meditation techniques in the first phase mean that the subject is sitting in a comfortable position, the head, neck and spine straight; to stay in this position is necessary a minimum of muscle effort: as in induction of hypnosis and sleep preparation this comfortable position allows the slowing down of kinesthetic activity, but in opposition to sleep the minimum amount of muscle effort prevents meditators from falling asleep.
Concentrative meditation teaches you to focus your attention on an external object that you are looking at intensely or on some internal sensation, such as the movement of your breathing.
As in hypnosis, the meditator is told that if his spirit is distracted, if he departs from the rule of concentration, he will have to gently restore it and put an end to distraction. the meditator then fixes his attention on one thing, this can produce unusual phenomena due to different degrees of fatigue as in hypnosis, but most meditation systems emphasize that these anomalous perceptual phenomena are not positive signs for meditation.
In Mindfulness, meditative practice is a fundamental tool for the maturation of those qualities that make the therapeutic relationship effective. The qualities of deep listening, empathy, acceptance and therefore of non-judgement, allow creating a safe basis in a dimension a climate within the therapeutic session that greatly facilitates the possibility for the patient to focus attention on himself, to relax, to open up with confidence to the experience he is experiencing.
The most known are: