It’s About Time | The Hypnotizer - Connie Brannan, CHt's Hypnosis Blog

It’s Time for Hypnosis!

My car has her own personality. She’s playful. Yet reliable. Michael and I both LOVE this car. We call her “Midnight.” She’s black , which is the number two color for a car in the US, as I read today. 🙂 Anyway, Midnight has a new game she’s playing with us. It involves time. The clock. We have a digital clock readout in our car on the dashboard, and sometimes it’s brightly illuminated and sometimes it’s dim, and sometimes it’s not there at all. Midnight’s whim.

Now, you might just think this is a malfunction or defect of the clock. The time never used to vanish. But I imagine something else might be going on. Something with intentionality—Midnight has a purpose.

Let’s step back and talk about time. In NLP (that’s high-tech conversational hypnosis) we learn to experience time in different ways. There are (at least) two ways to experience time. In time. And through time. When a person is “in time,” they are living the moment, fully present in the here and now, enjoying the richness of life, immersed in experience. This is a good state for being on vacation. Or intimate moments. When a person is “through time,” they are separate from the heartbeat by heartbeat experience of time and life, and look at it from a slight distance. This is a good state for scheduling and planning. I do a lot of that! Probably too much of that!

Midnight wants me to experience time in a new way, to be more in time! “Stop worrying about the minutia of ‘what time is it?’ and enjoy life.” Because, I am a clock watcher. Always. I ALWAYS want to know what time it is. So I can know how much time I have to get to where I’m going. Midnight says: “Don’t worry about it!! You’re going to get there on time. Have I ever let you down?” No. 🙂 Midnight is teaching me flexibility. Flexibility is good!

Here’s a fun and easy process to shift your own internal perceptions of time to suit your current activities, which can be a very useful game.

How to flex your time sense: Imagine your past as a point in physical space around you. It may be to your left or right, or behind you, above, beyond, somewhere. Imagine yesterday, dinner yesterday, and point at it. There it is! 🙂 Now, think about the future, tomorrow morning, and point in that general direction. You’ve got two points sitting in space. Now, connect those two points. Remember those dot-to-dot games? This is like that, and you’ve now created a line between, through them and past them. This is your life. Your “timeline.”

So, now the question: does this line intersect your body? If yes, you are “in time.” If no, you are “through time.” Which is it? Just for fun, imagine this line differently. If it doesn’t touch you, move it so that it does cross through your body. You are now in the moment. If it does intersect your body, step back from it a step or two so that you can see your whole life separate from you. How does that feel? If the change is comfortable, try it on for awhile. You can always reset to current state of time/mind anytime you want.

Next time you have a project which demands a bigger picture of dates, interim and ultimate deadlines, cutoffs, drop dead completion, and etc, step away from your timeline and do your planning from that perspective. It helps!! You can see more. Next time you’re enjoying a day out with a loved one, step into your timeline, and relish every moment, feel and experience that richness, that joy, heartbeat by heartbeat.