Re: Hypnosis and meditation

Your confusion is understandable, since one's subjective experience while meditating could be similar to what one could experience during hypnosis.

SAME?

Even as a practitioner, some observable characteristics of a client in trance (such as motor inhibition, muscle tone) may also be observed in someone who is meditating.

Michael Yapko, Ph.D, in Trancework: An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis writes: "Meditation is self-hypnosis with a meaningless mantra as a focal point, instead of a meaningful suggestion."

Milton Erickson, while discussing psychotherapy and state-dependent learning and memory, wrote "These workers [Peake, Van Noord, Abbot 1979] have found an equivalence between the concepts of state-dependent learning, Tart's state-dependent knowledge, meditation, biofeedback, and hypnosis." (Mind-Body Communication in Hypnosis, Erickson, edited by Rossi and Ryan )

DIFFERENT?

I have never studied meditation, but you may want to compare it to some other possible trance indicators: literalness, time distortion, reduction in reality testing to see if they differ there.

As a practitioner of hypnosis, my intuition and bias suggests that the language of hypnosis is more specific (or specifically vague) than the language of meditation. Also, in a therapeutic session with a client, the work done before and after what one might call a "formal trance" (which may seem like and include a period of meditation) is not present in what I would normally think of as existing in meditation.

Hypnosis as a therapeutic tool and communication framework has much to offer.

BUT IS THAT ALL?

Rather than lump hypnosis together with meditation, you may find it more useful to continue to use your confusion to guide well-defined questions. You will not only discover how they are the same and different, but something even more. And in the process develop at least two skills (meditation and hypnosis) so you can use each when most appropriate.

Replies:

Re: Hypnosis and meditation, by C.E. Wilkinson, 5/7/00 Great answer, by Stephen Lankton, 5/10/00 Re: Hypnosis and meditation, by Lindsay Smith, 04/03/01

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