Journey to Mental Wellness through Hypnotherapy + Resiliency with Craig Meriwether (part 1)

Can hypnotherapy be the key to unlocking your mind's healing powers? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Craig, a certified clinical hypnotherapist and founder of Arizona Integrative Hypnotherapy, as he demystifies the transformative potential of this therapeutic technique. Craig introduces listeners to the empowering concept of self-healing through the subconscious, likening hypnotherapy to a non-deceptive placebo that taps into the mind’s innate ability to overcome challenges like childhood trauma, test anxiety, pain control, and PTSD. His insights illuminate how confronting emotional barriers can lead to greater resilience and fulfillment in life.

Explore the nuances of hypnotherapy with us, as we debunk common myths and highlight its fascinating parallels with pharmaceutical painkillers in promoting healing. Craig shares eye-opening scientific research, revealing how hypnotherapy can be as effective as traditional methods in addressing both emotional and physical issues. His personal journey through depression and anxiety further underscores the power of hypnotherapy, offering listeners inspiring strategies for self-healing. Whether you're skeptical or curious about the science behind hypnotherapy, this episode promises a wealth of knowledge and potential pathways to mental well-being.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Reignite Resilience With Craig
• 10:02 Exploring the Power of Hypnotherapy
• 19:49 Unveiling the Science Behind Hypnotherapy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

All of us reach a point in time where we are depleted and need to somehow find a way to reignite the fire within. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience, where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. Resilience where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. We'll discuss the art of reigniting our passion and strategies to stoke our enthusiasm. And now here are your hosts, natalie Davis and Pamela Cass.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Welcome back to another episode of reignite resilience Resilience. I am your co-host, Natalie Davis, and I'm so excited to be back with you all today. Pam, how are you.

Speaker 3: 0:52

I am fabulous we were just talking at the beginning that next week is the last week of November. It is Thanksgiving. Yes, and I am going to confess, I watched my first holiday movie. Oh, Sunday, and yeah, and it's oh.

Speaker 2: 1:12

I was in the car quite a bit today, and I noticed that a lot of the stations have already shifted over to holiday music. I'm not there yet. I still have all stuff out, I but there is a massive snow cloud just hovering over my house right now, and so I feel like, one way or another, I'm going to get into the holiday spirit.

Speaker 3: 1:34

it's going to happen, you're just going to have to embrace it. You're going to have to embrace it. We talked on our last episode that I hired an organizer and then one of the things that I passed with doing is is getting all my Christmas stuff out, going through it, getting rid of stuff I don't use anymore so that she can start working on the storage. So then it just got me in the Christmas spirit and so I watched the show and then I was like a little guilty but whatever, oh, I am not there, that's okay. That's okay. That's okay, we'll be soon.

Speaker 2: 2:07

I can see my tote that says Christmas. It's in storage in my garage and it says Christmas big and bright and bold on the side, and I have no desire to even touch the box. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see if I touch it this year, we'll see if anything. It may not, that's okay, it may not.

Speaker 3: 2:26

Well, for anything it may not. Well, I'm excited because we have a guest and I am so excited about this guest and I am going to struggle through all of these ginormous words that are part of his bio, but I am so excited. So today we have Craig. He is a certified clinical hypnotherapist, medical hypnosis specialist, neuro-linguistic programming specialist and founder of Arizona Integrative Hypnotherapy, helping people eliminate the negative emotions and limiting beliefs that may be keeping them from reaching their full potential. For over 12 years, craig has been helping people heal from early childhood trauma, helping cancer patients with pain control, veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, students with test anxiety, children with nightmares, entrepreneurs with confidence, athletes with peak performance and anyone who may be dealing with overwhelm, fear and anxiety. I think this just summed up everyone, so I am so excited to get started. So pass it off to you, craig and, yeah, share your story with us.

Speaker 4: 3:33

Well, thank you, pam. Thank you for that introduction. Good afternoon, good morning wherever it, whatever time it is for you Natalie, whatever time it is for you Pam, and everybody listening. The reason, you know, know you said that at the end of the introduction, this is kind of for everybody is is because it is and what's interesting about this work and we can go into a deeper discussion about more of the myths and the misconceptions around hypnotherapy and hypnosis and what it is and what it isn't.

Speaker 4: 4:02

But the basic foundation of this work is the placebo effect and in fact Dr Irving Kirsch calls hypnotherapy a non-deceptive placebo, meaning that you know, let's say, a pharmaceutical company's doing research on high blood pressure medication and half that group is going to get a placebo, they're going to get the sugar pill. The reason that happens is because they know mind will heal the body and they literally have to account for that in their research. And so half the group gets the sugar pill. And let's say, 30% get better through mind alone, they are healing themselves. Well, let's say 40% get better through mind alone, they are healing themselves. Well, let's say 40% get better on the real medication, the medication they're researching and developing. Well, they actually have to subtract 30%, because maybe 30% of those people got better. They had nothing to do with the actual medication, they healed themselves. So really only 10% got better and that's good enough. I'll put it on the market at 50 bucks a pill. Well, no one looks at, yeah, but so many more people healed themselves through their own minds, through their own subconscious healing potential. And, yeah, they were tricked into it, thinking they were getting real medication, but they literally healed themselves. Real medication, but they literally healed themselves.

Speaker 4: 5:27

And so what Dr Irving Kers was saying when he said a non-deceptive placebo is that hypnotherapy taps into the power of your healing potential. It's just you're going to do it on purpose. We're not going to trick you into do it. You're going to do it on purpose. So it's really about your intention and the reason there's in my bio that you read. There's so many different things, from children having nightmares to you know all the way to you know, people dealing with their maybe childhood trauma late into their 70s. The reason it works for everyone is because I'm not here to fix anybody, and hypnotherapy in and of itself is not going to fix anybody. You fix yourself. Now there's some techniques and some strategies and some tools that you can use and if you, you know, do a process or a modality like hypnotherapy, using a facilitator to help guide you, especially when some walls come up or some blocks come up.

Speaker 4: 6:16

But the healing in and of itself is coming from you, from your own healing potential, and that that's very empowering because you know, with all the hurt you may be carrying around, with all the pain that you've been gripping onto for years, maybe decades, maybe many decades not to say it was your fault, it certainly shouldn't have happened. And I don't mean to say this as if I'm trying to blame the victim. I'm not, it wasn't your fault. But in terms of how to keep yourself safe and holding on to that hurt and pain to protect you in the future and maybe it's not very resilient way of protecting yourself or a very resourceful way, but especially when you're a child, how do you know any better than to maybe hold on to that hurt and that pain because you don't want to experience it again, and armoring yourself with anger or fear or anxiety? Well, you're the one who put those instructions in there on how to keep you safe. And again, it's not to say it's your fault or that should happen. Certainly it happened unconsciously and through a traumatic event maybe, and as a child certainly not going to blame a child but it actually becomes very empowering because if you're the one who put those instructions in there, aren't you the one who can take them out, aren't you the one who now has the power and and, as an adult, more wisdom and knowledge and understanding about the world and life. And so that's why this work doesn't take a long time.

Speaker 4: 7:43

We don't look at healing in the terms of months and years. This isn't going to take a long time because healing happens in an instant. Change happens in an instant. Now there may be some lead up to that change or some setup, but in terms of, let's say, somebody wanted to quit smoking, you're either a smoker or you're a non-smoker. There's no like sort of kind of a smoker. You're either a smoker, you're a non-smoker. There's no like sort of kind of a smoker. You're either a smoker or you're a non-smoker. And that change, when you make that decision to become a non-smoker, can happen in an instant. The same with a lot of this other healing that can happen. It can happen in an instant. Now it may take some time for the body to maybe grow a bone back together, certainly, things like, but in terms of some of the more traumatic issues that a lot of us deal with, a lot of the hurt and the pain and the wounding to heal, that it doesn't take a long time.

Speaker 4: 8:34

You know, you are that powerful and what's extraordinary about this work is it's really just about your intention. There is no taking over control. I know that's a big myth that's out there that because of what you see in the movies and tv shows and las vegas shows, uh, you know, you see people up on stage and comedy clubs and things you know, singing like elvis presley and dancing like michael jackson and and quacking like a duck and barking like a dog. But really what this work is is about your intention and that's why I can't make anybody do anything they don't want to do. That's why smoking sensation that's not a hundred percent guarantee, because if you don't want to quit smoking, you're not going to quit smoking. Yeah, you know, just as I can't go into Las Vegas casinos and bars and things and just snappy, snappy, wavy, wavy, everybody quits smoking because they may not want to quit smoking or go into prisons and make everybody an upstanding, law-abiding citizen or go to the leaders of the world and create world peace. I can't hypnotize Elon Musk to write me a billion-dollar check. The reason I don't have a billion-dollar check from Elon Musk is because he doesn't want to write me one, and so I can't make people do anything they don't want to do, such as if you do, if you want to quit smoking, if somebody's a smoker, they want to quit smoking. Yeah, you're going to quit smoking, but then I can't hypnotize you to go rob a bank later that afternoon, because it gets your morals, it gets your values, and so you're not going to go rob a bank. You can't hypnotize somebody to do something you don't want to do.

Speaker 4: 10:02

So, going back to those shows, every single person who gets up on that stage volunteered to be up there. Not only did they buy a ticket and you know those Las Vegas shows. Those are expensive shows. Even the kind of no-name shows are still 70, 80 bucks, and so they got to provide some entertainment there. So everybody who gets up on the stage wants to be up there. They're not going to pull somebody up on stage that doesn't want to go up there. That's not going to be a good show. They're not going. They're going to be stressed and uptight and then maybe going to try to prove to the hypnotist that they can't go. That's not going to be a good show. They're not going to be a good candidate to have a lot of fun, and everybody who goes up there wants to have fun, and that's not how I see a fun night, and maybe Pam and Natalie, probably a lot of your listeners that's not how they see having a good time going up on stage and acting silly. But to some people they're extroverts, they're exhibitionists. They just want to have fun. They want to put a funny video up on TikTok or Instagram or something. They just want to have a good time. And at the end of the show they have a big smile on their face. Why? Because their intention was to go up there. They volunteered, they raised their hand. They probably were jumping up and down, waving their hands around pick me, pick me and they had a great time because they wanted to do that. And so they're up there singing like Elvis Presley and dance like Michael Jackson and all the other stuff. Because to them, that's having a good time and they just want to be silly and be part of the show.

Speaker 4: 11:30

And so there is no control. There is no, you know, taking over people's minds or diving into their deep, dark secrets. You can't do that to somebody else Now, that's not to say especially with, like commercials and the news and all this stuff. You can't be suggestible and influenced. But that also takes a really long time. You know, you just don't all of a sudden see a commercial for Coca-Cola and all of a sudden switch from Pepsi over to Coke. It may take a while for that influence to happen. That's why the hammering of the news or politicians or commercials is relentless. It's over and over and over again. So you can influence and certainly direct people maybe to a certain path over time. But you can't just throw a commercial in front of somebody and all of a sudden they're going to buy that jacket or go on that trip to the Caribbean or whatever. So this isn't about taking control over somebody's personality or somebody's mind or anything. That's not really possible.

Speaker 4: 12:35

You know, you may see those videos of people walking up to somebody on the street, like maybe in Vegas or something, and sleep, and then they get them to do funny things. That was all kind of set up in the beginning. It's like reality TV. Most of those shows are scripted. The ending was was planned way in advance. It's not as improvised as you think it is, and same with a lot of that stuff you see in the visual. They just walked up to him. He yelled sleep and they keeled over. It's like thinking about it. If you're walking down the street and some weirdo stranger in a sparkly jacket comes up to you and hollers in your face to go to sleep, what are you going to do? You're going to.

Speaker 2: 13:07

the last thing you're going to do is go to sleep.

Speaker 4: 13:09

Yeah, and so that's probably their. Their good friend is probably their girlfriend, their boyfriend or something, and so it's all a setup. It's it's just to have fun and to try to go viral on TikTok or Instagram or whatever the thing is nowadays and really what is possible is healing, and yes, there's. There's emotional healing from deep trauma. There's, you know, mindset issues, limiting beliefs you may have about yourself, about confidence in life or business or whatever. But there's also physical healing.

Speaker 4: 13:40

Harvard did a research study some years ago on broken legs and found, yeah, while using hypnotherapy didn't heal a leg in 24 hours, it actually healed faster by 40%, and so they had people with similar kind of breaks in their legs. They're all wearing casts. Half the people got hypnotherapy. The other people did not. The people who received hypnotherapy once a week for healing and healing acceleration and healing that broken leg they got the cast off in five weeks. Everybody else who didn't get hypnotherapy got off in eight weeks, and so you can accelerate healing by using the power of your own mind. There was a study that just came out in 2023 frontiers in psychology, and you can find this in national institutes of health, but it's a meta study, a 20-year meta study. A meta study is when you don't actually do the research yourself but you look at other people's research. So they looked at. Hundreds of research studies have been done over the last 20 years and found that hypnotherapy has a 99.2 efficacy rate, meaning it's that successful.

Speaker 4: 14:45

And again, it's not that hypnotherapy in of itself is healing you or the hypnotherapist is. You're healing yourself because somehow it's not that you've been deceived into thinking you can heal yourself. You can heal yourself. It's just tapping into that potential. And so the reason things like opiate drugs that's been in the news a lot over the last 10 years or so at this point, the reason those opiate drugs and the painkillers and things like that work is because it's mimicking what your brain creates already. So what hypnotherapy does is tap into that potential already. It's just you can't patent somebody's morphine, like chemistry in their brain to kill pain. You can't patent that. So you can't make billions of dollars off that you. You can mimic it in a laboratory, test it and find out that it works and then put it on the market and you can make billions of dollars that way. But in terms of showing people how to heal themselves, that's not going to buy you big yachts. So it's a very satisfying way to make a living, that's a very joyful way to make a living, but it doesn't produce the big results that those pharmaceutical companies are looking for. But everything on the market that you see in the drugstore, that you see that the doctor is going to write you a prescription for, that works because it's actually mimicking something your brain is doing already.

Speaker 4: 16:13

So what's the possibilities of tapping into that power without that kind of middleman of the medicine? And it's not to say don't go to the doctor or stop taking your medication or anything. Certainly that stuff is important, but what is possible to help reinforce the healing work that maybe the you're going to a doctor for, because this is adjunct therapy, meaning it's not alternative, it's not instead of it's as well as those people with the broken leg still had a cast on their leg, you still get an x-rays. They're still going to the doctor. You know my appendix is about to break, burst open. Don't take me to a hypnotherapist. Take me to the emergency room so I have surgery. Then take me to a hypnotherapist so I can accelerate my healing and get out of bed faster and and manage my pain in a better way. So that's, I think, uh, something like a 20 minute answer to your first question of who I am. But what I find extraordinary about about this work is, again, I'm not here to fix anybody and and I think, especially with something like talk therapy, which is extraordinarily helpful, extraordinary healing, extraordinarily useful in everybody's life.

Speaker 4: 17:18

I think it's always great to have a coach. Every champion has a coach, every Olympic athlete has a coach, anybody who wins the Super Bowl, any professional athlete, any amateur athlete has a coach. Pavarotti, one of the greatest opera singers of all time, was seen a vocal coach every year. So it's always great to have that second pair of eyes, especially when it comes to mindset issues, belief issues you have about yourself, relationships. But I think some people may get tripped up and start spinning their wheels because they're looking outside of themselves for that healing and they're stuck. They don't know what's going on. They don't know what's going on, they don't know what the problem is, and so maybe this person can tell them what their problem is and then tell them what to do to heal it.

Speaker 4: 18:00

But the big issue is is you're using that conscious part of mind to try to solve a problem that's hidden within the unconscious, and so not only you know. You may not really understand the core issues going on there with your conscious, logical mind, but certainly the other person is not going to know either. They can maybe guess by what you're saying or how you're saying it, or some of the issues you've gone through in your past, but the issues you're bringing up may not be the core issues. So you're just kind of talking about side effect issues and so two years later you're still there, hurting and in pain because you haven't talked about the real issue, because it's buried somewhere within the unconscious. So what's extraordinary about therapeutic hypnosis is that by quieting down that conscious level of mind, that analytical mind, that logical part of mind, you can access that unconscious.

Speaker 4: 18:54

Sometimes it's just as easy to ask when did this first start, this feeling state you have in your body, that you defined as anxiety or anger or rage or depression or sadness? When did it first start? What was the? You know that feeling state has an origin. When did you first feel that access, that part, that memory? There's a connection, there's a cord from that first time you ever felt that to the, to the memory that's buried within the unconscious.

Speaker 4: 19:24

And I tell you, sometimes it's just as easy to ask well, where does this hurt come from? And, and let's do, let me count from 10 down to one, and by one, your subconscious will open up that memory like a movie on a movie screen. So it's safe, you know, you're disassociated from it's out here on a movie screen, and we can do this work in a very safe and gentle way. And so, uh, it's, it's quite extraordinary. There's nothing magical or mystical about it. There's. There's no control here, and science and research has been showing its efficacy, how, how well it works, at least for 60, 70, 80 years.

Speaker 4: 20:03

And if you want to actually do a deep dive into the research because I love looking at science, I love looking at research uh, if you don't know, google actually has a subsection that only researches and searches out scientifically or scientific papers as published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. It's called google scholar. So if you go to regular google, googlecom, and you just type in google scholar, the first result you'll see is scholargooglecom. Just just click on that and type in whatever you want hypnosis and anxiety, hypnotherapy and pain control, hypnotherapy and trauma, uh, you know whatever, just hypnosis and you'll see thousands upon thousands of results showing how well this works because, again, mind will heal extraordinarily.

Speaker 4: 20:57

just real. One more real thing and then I'll. I'll take a breath. One of the extraordinary things that came out of prozac research and some of those ssri drugs is a research study that showed how powerful the mind is in healing. Now, when a big company, big pharmaceutical company or university, when they do research, there's no law that says they have to publish that research. That's just for them. They can do whatever they want with it. There's no law that says they have to publish it in the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature or Scientific American or whatever it is. There's no law that says you have to do that.

Speaker 4: 21:33

But some of that research into the selective serotonin reuptake and inhibitor medications like Prozac and things like that, some of that research was funded by the National Institutes of Health because they want Americans being sad and depressed. So let's see if we can fund some research and see how to, you know, make Americans happier, I guess. And so they funded some of that Prozac research back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Well, that's now owned by the government and while it doesn't have to be published, you have to send it to the National Institutes of Health, which puts it in that big.

Speaker 4: 22:14

You know Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse and Dr Irving Kirsch, when doing some research on the SSRI drugs and Prozac and things like that, did a Freedom of Information Act and what he found is one of the research studies done by pharmaceutical companies showed that that placebo group 90% got better through of chronic depression. And I'm not talking Monday morning blues where you know you have to go back to work on a Monday morning or your team lost the day before on Sunday afternoon or whatever. I'm talking about chronic depression that these people had for years. 90% of them healed themselves because they thought they were taking anti-depression medication.

Speaker 4: 22:58

They're taking the sugar pill. 90% healed themselves of years-long chronic depression. Now, that's just one study. Not every study showed that, but it shows the potential, the power that people have in terms of not just you know dealing with oh, I'm lacking confidence in giving the speech next month at the big conference or something. Yeah, I mean there's a lot that can be done with that, but in terms of things like depression and anger that maybe you've been holding on to for years or even decades, you're allowed to get rid of that.

Speaker 3: 24:24

Can I ask you what led you down this path? I don't know many people that are like I think I'm going to be a hypnotherapist, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 24:33

That's usually not when you're on the playground in sixth grade, you're not. Nobody's talking about being a hypnotherapist. But it was really my own depression and anxiety that led me down this path. I struggled a lot with depression, anxiety in my teenage years. So that's the 1980s and you know, of course there's no internet back then, so there's not a whole lot of research. You're doing the SSRI drugs, prozac and things. Those then come out until the late 1990s or so. You know, really back in the 1980s all you had was talk, therapy or whatever book you could find in the bookstore or the library. And of course, you course, you know, teenager, you're not going to probably do any of that stuff. No, and so it was really just something that I, I got used to. You know, because really, how do you know any any different sort of like describing color to a blind person? I mean, how do you, how do you know what life can be like? Just get used to wearing that big, heavy, uncomfortable coat and so just managed and just kind of struggled with it through the 90s.

Speaker 4: 25:36

But it was really the birth of my son in the year 2001 that I really thought I need to get my life together, I need to get this under control, because my mother struggled with depression. I struggled with depression and anxiety, so there's a really good chance my son's going to struggle with it as well, and so sometimes you'll step up for another person, even though maybe you don't know how or don't can't figure out a way to step up for yourself. And so I thought, okay, well, whether it's nature or nurture, whether this is a genetic thing that keeps getting triggered, you know in my family or you know it's just what you grow up and what you mirror in the house. I didn't want my son to have to go through that, or if it was struggling with that, here are some tools or techniques that you can use. And or 2001, the internet's out there, had been out there for some years, and so there there's ways of researching this stuff now, and so I just started doing a deep dive when I could. You know, at that point we'd actually moved, moved uh states actually moved, moved uh into a different state, and you know new jobs and uh and a baby and all this stuff.

Speaker 4: 26:45

It's not like I was working on this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but when I could, I'd dive in, and there's a lot of experimentation and research and, you know, on again, off again, kind of working on myself, but after a while, after, you know, using different tools and techniques and researching and reading books and articles, I woke up one morning it was a Saturday morning and you know I had to go to work and just kind of lying in bed watching the kind of sun come through the windows and I thought, you know, I hadn't felt depressed or anxious in a really long time, kind of like the reverse frog in the pot of water. Yeah, it was just like, oh, I feel better and I didn't notice it, you know, because you know life was going on around you and all that. That. You know because you know life was going on around you and all that. And just like I had kind of done the work, rewired my brain literally with new thoughts, new which create new behaviors and actions which create new feelings, change the body, kind of reset my nervous system, sort of like. I uploaded a new operating system. You know I'm still me, I'm still the, the computer or whatever you know what I, but it's just a new operating system that now just works better. And around that point I was meeting some people where I was living and actually started a mastermind group. Use our whatever talents or skills we might have to kind of make the world a better place.

Speaker 4: 28:14

And I ran across a writing contest that Hay House was putting on. This is 2010. At this point, a writing contest. It was actually done by their one of their imprints called Hierophant, and I pointed to decide, hey, they're doing this writing contest, why don't you should write a book? And they're like, well, why don't you write a book? I'm like, okay, I don't know what I'd write about, why don't you write about depression? And so I ended up joining this contest, which was kind of months long. So you submit a chapter and it started off I don't know 250 people, and then they just kind of, as they read everybody's chapters, they narrowed it down down to, like you know, the top five or whatever.

Speaker 4: 28:48

And so after some months that I was just writing every month doing the research, and because it was a non-fiction book and I think most people's were non-fiction, though I've turned. A lot of people had their book written already and I got into top five. I got into the the top five, and one person even said I came in a close second, which was very satisfying, though I didn't get the publishing deal, but I did get to be in that world a little bit and got a chapter into a book called 30 pearls of wisdom. That was like jack canfield and some of the other hay house people that they put out there and as part of that you promote and you go on podcasts and radio shows and all these kind of things and that was really fun. So I was doing my own reviews, I did a telesummit because back in the day and whenever that was 2011, 2012, that was the thing you did with telesummons back then. So I did my own on depression and and talked to all these amazing people and that was really fun to my own podcast and blah blah.

Speaker 4: 29:45

But then I got the opportunity to go to an amazing training academy called the hypnotherapy Academy of America and because one of the things that helped me during that time of you know, renewal, restoring myself and healing myself was hypnotherapy. Because in all the books and articles and the different things I was researching, most of the time they'd have the bullet points at the end that would say here's what you can do to change your life. You know, top five things, or five bullet points to change your life. Four of them would be different, but every single time they'd mention hypnotherapy usually and I was always.

Speaker 4: 30:23

You know, after a while you keep seeing hypnotherapy, hypnotherapy. And it's like there's all these people that I admire, that I'm following, that. I'm following that I'm learning from and I'm reading all their books, and they keep mentioning hypnotherapy over and over again as a way to not only heal old wounds but change, you know, beliefs, not only about yourself, but about the world around you that you live in, which, then again, you change your beliefs, you change your behaviors. Change your behaviors, you change your actions. Change your actions. You change how your emotional state. Then, therefore, you change how you feel in your body. And so I thought well, you know everybody's talking about hypnotherapy and I did some sessions and it really helped me. You put everything else on the shelf because this is going to take your entire focus.

Speaker 4: 31:14

Went to an extraordinary school 500 hours of training, just a hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming and medical hypnosis. A hypnotherapy academy, america's extraordinary school. It's 9 am to 6 pm, monday through Friday. This isn't some university class at university where it's 1 pm to 2 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is every day, 9 am to 6 pm, and then you're doing work on the weekends, doing small group work and all that. So it was extraordinary training two and a half months of just straight immersion into this world, and I've just been working with it ever since. That's beautiful.

Speaker 2: 31:55

That is beautiful, and I'm assuming, then, along the same lines, like you never had the intention of becoming a healer, because that's the space that you're working in now is in that healing space.

Speaker 4: 32:05

No, it was never. Probably there's other people who have the same experience. It's not that you went out to become, you know, a psychotherapist or, uh like, a yoga instructor or anything like that chiropractor or anything. It's just like you received healing in that manner that really made an impression upon you and you say maybe I can help others with this because it really it really connects with you in a way, and and the same with hypnotherapy, because again it's really the placebo effect.

Speaker 4: 32:38

Right, and again it's not you. You go to a massage therapist, or maybe you know, of course, a surgeon or a dentist or something like that. You're, you're looking for healing from them. You know, I want that massage therapist because I got a problem with my back. Or you know, god forbid, you have to go to a surgeon or something like that. Or I'm going to the dentist just to take care of my teeth and I want them to help me and to help heal me.

Speaker 4: 33:03

But in terms of hypnotherapy and even I guess you know even things like yoga you're doing it yourself. Yeah, there's a facilitator there, maybe, but you're doing the healing work and I really like that idea. I really like the idea of showing people how powerful they are. Yeah, and you may not think it at the moment, especially with what's going on, the hurt and pain you've been holding on to for a long time, but I guarantee you, not only do you know what the problem is, you know what to do to resolve it, you know what the solution is and again, not with your conscious mind and for people who have maybe spun their wheels way too long in talk therapy again an extraordinarily helpful and useful modality.

Speaker 4: 33:47

Talk therapy I think everybody should do it. Talk therapy, I think everybody should do it. But sometimes you just find yourself spinning your wheels and you're not going anywhere. You know what the problem is, but it just happens to be in that unconscious part of mind, maybe you're. You know it hurts so bad that your unconscious mind put a curtain around it because it didn't want you to just reliving it over and over and over again. Well, you're allowed to heal it, you're allowed.

Speaker 2: 34:11

We hope that you've enjoyed part one of our two-part conversation with hypnotherapist Craig Merriweather. He has posed the question for us what else is possible? How great would it be to really unlock all of the possibilities that we have in life? Well, make sure that you come back and join us for part two, because Craig is going to continue to dive into the work around hypnotherapy and how we can use that as an adjunct therapy method and modality as we're continuing to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that we have in our life. We hope you come back soon.

Speaker 1: 34:48

Thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast soon. Thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast. We hope you had some aha moments and learned a few new real life ideas. To fuel the flames of passion, please subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like or download your favorite episodes and, of course, share with your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you again next time on Reignite Resilience.