I’d written 22,000 words of killer material for a book. A couple publishing contacts were waiting in the wings and one of the best writers on the net was urging me along. But I just couldn’t write. Writer’s block had me bad.
Something wrong with my head, and I had to fix it. I tried everything from meditation to medication. Seriously, the smart drugs Piracatem and Provigil. They didn’t work. Well, they work, but they didn’t get me writing. Then inspiration: hypnosis. It worked. Here’s what I learned.
It doesn’t have to be expensive
I called a hypnosis school and found they were looking for volunteers to hypnotize as class demonstrations. Free. Perfect. I was so excited, I tried a home approach while I was waiting for my session. It worked so well that by the time the real session came up, my sweet tooth and various other bad habits were very much under control. Read on to see how I made that happen.
The home approach: brute force works
I’ve always thought of hypnosis and meditation as being the same thing. You’re supposed to get into a relaxed, altered state, and into the stillness of your mind you make hypnotic suggestions, achieve Nirvana, or whatever. I could never do it, the stillness of my mind would never come and my attempts at meditation would deteriorate into making grocery lists, should I take out the garbage after this, and why is that clock ticking so loud?
So. Forget the monastic subtleties, I decided to clobber my way to the same goal. I wrote out five suggestions and repeated them to myself 300 times a day. Each.
Was the computer being slow? I’d take a breath and think (five times), “I don’t have to eat junk food just because it’s around.” Am I walking down the hall to the bathroom? I’d repeat to myself, “I take pride in feeding myself good fuel.” It totally worked. I haven’t eaten any junk food since I started this approach. Okay, I had a couple cookies one day when I felt tired and bored, but, as I told myself 342 times the next day, “When I make a mistake, I get back on track.”
A few tips:
- Lies don’t work. “I don’t mind loud bass music” did not work. I minded it.
- The truth works. “Bass music doesn’t harm me” helped a lot.
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Permissive statements work. “It’s okay that there is noise” was a winner.
Working with a hypnotist rocks
Here’s how the session went. As I said, by the time I got there my writer’s block was pretty much the only really entrenched neurosis I had left. The hypnotherapist and I sat in front of the class and we talked about my writer’s block.
“What does it look like?” She asked. Huh? Well, I was playing along. Actually, as soon as she asked the questions, a visual image came to mind. She helped me pin down the details and I finally summed it up like this:
“It’s an acrylic-like clear block, about 8 feet by 8 feet, two feet thick with foggy edges.”
Then she invited me to close my eyes and imagine that I was just about to fall asleep. She emphasized that I was and would remain in complete control of everything and that I’d stay aware of my surroundings.
She started describing how relaxed I was feeling and she counted backwards from five, inviting me to reach, if I wanted, deeper and deeper levels of awareness as she counted down to one.
We quickly got to the number one and she helped me envision that big, acrylic, foggy block of Writer’s Block. Then she reminded me that writing was important to me. She had me imagine how good I’d feel when I’d finished some of the books I want to finish. She gradually guided me and we started to shrink the writer’s block smaller and smaller. She reminded me that writer’s block is totally inappropriate to the woman I am, to the writer I am. She had me shrink the block all the way to paper-weight size, and then she had me mentally imagine a stack of my manuscripts on my kitchen table, with that now-small writer’s block sitting on top of them and serving as a very nice paperweight.
The conclusion
Like a lot of people who have hypnosis, I never felt any altered state of consciousness during the session. I just felt relaxed and happy, and profoundly grateful even as it was happening. Since my session, I have written every day except Sundays. One half hour every night when I come home from my twelve-hour-a-day job. That was the plan, and I’m following it.
It feels good to write. Writing is important to me. And putting off writing is totally inappropriate to the woman, to the writer, I am. Hypnosis helped me remember what I always knew.
By contributing writer K. Zuchen
STORY HERE