Smoking

The San Jose Mercury news ran an article about San Francisco Giant's Bruce Bochy using hypnosis to quit his longtime addiction to chewing tobacco, with some comments about the process and mystery of it all.

http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_18639348 -- (Aug 8, 2011)

Quotes from the article:

"I'm a believer," said Murphy, who joined the Giants as a bat boy when the franchise moved West in 1958.

"It's been the best $300 I ever spent," Hayes said. "It's weird to see how it works." (Hayes also quit chewing via hypnosis)

Bochy agrees. He already would have spent well more than $300 on dip by this point in the season, he said.

These were one-session successes, though long sessions (3.5 hrs), by medical hypnotherapist Dr. AlVera Paxson, who lives in Scottsdale, AZ. ( http://medical-hypnotherapy.com/ )

The story was on the AP News wire and carried in several other publications.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in hypnotherapy for quitting smoking, the very same methods that work for most people may not work for others. In choosing just what methods to use for a person, I offer various options and follow the person’s gut level response. This is because there is such a wide variety of personal tastes and belief systems among people seeking hypnotherapy and because a gut level response is much more indicative of subconscious agreement. The only way any method can work is with agreement by the subconscious mind.

Hypnosis offers means of communicating with the functions of mind that are below conscious awareness. Anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking cigarettes already knows that the urge to smoke comes from something gravitationally more powerful and monolithically more immune to persuasion than the conscious mind. These deep functions of mind are called the Unconscious, not because they don’t know what the conscious mind is thinking, but because the conscious mind is unconscious of what these deep functions are doing. A fleetingly remembered dream or a embarrassingly timed Freudian slip may give us glimpses into what’s really going on, but on the cruise ships of our lives, most of the action is not happening in the well-appointed first class dining room of consciousness, but in the unseen engine room whose vague pulse is the sound that consciousness has learned to ignore. Alarmingly to those whose identities are well-seated in their intellects, the powerful engines of these deep functions of mind can change and even cause our perceptions, feelings and thoughts.