You can lean back in your chair and relax your body while you give your attention to your hands placed on your thighs.

(The Hypnotist models to provide nonverbal cues. Both hands rest lightly on the thighs without touching each other. Forearms and elbows are able to float freely without touching anything). Your nonverbal cues modeling the desired behavior tend to bypass conscious critical analysis and are therefore a very effective form of indirect suggestion. I also carefully emphasized the pronoun “your”. I emphasize a patient’s own functioning and feelings as a unique personality. With a series of suggestions like this you can focus the patients’ attention more and more onto their own inner experiences. The series begins with the very general and easy-to-accept suggestion to “lean back” and ends with a highly specific and individualized focus of attention on feelings in the fingertips. It all sounds so casual and matter-of-fact that patients usually don’t even recognize how they are already following suggestions and beginning to build a yes set that will facilitate the acceptance of further suggestions.

Now if you sense the texture of your slacks in your fingertips, it will probably remind you of other experiences, of other feelings you have had.

“Other experiences, other feelings” is a very inclusive generalization. It includes the possibility of utilizing trance feelings from everyday life that We all commonly experience when we are “absorbed” or in deep “reverie,” concentrating very deeply on something. The patient does not recognize, however, that in accepting “other experiences, other feelings” he is actually including this possibility of trance experience from everyday life when he was similarly focused on a few inner feelings.

Now as you continue …

“Continue” is a continuing word. That word tells the patient to keep right on, and it ties the previously successful inner experience to the new suggestion you are going to introduce. You are integrating your suggestions into an associational network wherein they all mutually reinforce each other.

… to sense the feeling, the texture of the cloth with your fingers, perhaps, you will feel your hand getting lighter.

“Perhaps” means you’re not ordering, you’re not instructing. Actually it is a subtle challenge that motivates the subject to search for and experience a feeling of lightness.

Perhaps you will feel your hand getting lighter and lighter and lighter.

We are usually unaware of all the automatic responses we make on the basis of the locus of sound and the inflections of voice. Such vocal cues are indirect forms of suggestion because they tend to facilitate automatic responses that can bypass conscious intentionality. Whenever you suggest an arm levitating higher, you can subtly pitch your voice higher. The locus of your voice is a very potent suggestion because you have learned that over a long period of time: “Look at me when you answer,” says the teacher. You do not suggest in the sense of putting something into the patient’s mind; rather, your suggestions simply evoke unconscious response potentials and association patterns that are already there. The art of the hypnotist is to help the subject reassociate and synthesize these previously learned associations into therapeutic responses.

Now I don’t know, I really don’t know which finger is going to want to move first.

Here I am excluding myself so the subject must initiate his own inner exploration. At the same time, without quite realizing it the subject is receiving a very potent indirect suggestion in the form of an implication: a finger will move even though I don’t know which one. I state it in such a way that the patient has to look and see which moves first.

It may be the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth, and after your fingers start moving, you will probably begin to feel your wrist lifting.

If the subject has been slow or responding to finger movement in a marginal manner only, the new wrist suggestion may add a burst of muscle tonus to that area so that the fingers now move more easily. Actually everyone will respond in their own individual way and the therapist’s task is to recognize and reinforce whatever enhances each individual’s responsiveness. Two or more closely related suggestions (a series again) can be given in such a manner that they are mutually reinforcing.

As your wrist lifts, you will note your elbow bending.

Now it isn’t a question of wrists lifting. Resistance cannot focus on wrists because it now appears that another thing is the focus of attention: “Note your elbow bending.” Well, naturally, as his wrist lifts he will note his elbow bending; it cannot be otherwise. When a wrist lifts, an elbow has to bend.’ It is an inevitability and thus a safe hypnotic suggestion that cannot be rejected. Also notice I’m only directly suggesting a psychological awareness of the bending of the elbow. The patient has to bend his elbow in order to become psychologically aware of it, but the actual bending is his own addition to my suggestion.

As your elbow bends, your wrist will lift higher and higher (Pause) and higher.

I pause because it is a continual process. When I pause at the second “higher,” you almost feel that’s as high as it’s going to go. Then he has to correct it because you throw in the third “higher.” I am using time, pauses, inflections, and inevitabilities: of course, the wrist and hand will lift higher as the elbow bends. He knows it is true, and therefore he has to verify it by the actual bending of his elbow. In other words, these suggestions are basic truths, truisms, that no one could possibly deny. Truisms are indirect hypnotic forms insofar as they initiate a yes or acceptance set for whatever other suggestions the hypnotist may choose to add to the situation.

And as it lifts higher and higher (Pause) and still higher, your eyelids may lower in direct relationship to the lifting of your hand.

There are two possibilities: the lowering of his eyelids and the lifting of his hand. Shall they take place simultaneously? That is a possibility. Shall they take place separately? “Well,” he may think to himself, “but my eyelids aren’t lowering even though my hand is lifting.” Well, he has confirmed the lifting of his hand by rejecting the lowering of his lids. You see, psychologically one needs to give the subject the opportunity both to accept and to reject anything you offer. He has the opportunity to refuse the lowering of the lids, but in doing that he has to emphasize the lifting of the hand. If he accepts the lowering of the lids, that also confirms the lifting of his hand, and so you have both processes of behavior. But it is his choice. You arrange the situation so that the patient has choices, but whatever choice is made leads to a desired hypnotic response.

And as your hand goes higher and higher, perhaps your elbow will lift up So that your hand comes nearer to your face.

When I say the “hand comes nearer to your face,” I’ve intensified what I’ve said about the elbow. The real question appears to be: Will his hand come nearer to his face or not? So attention is focused on the last part of the suggestion about the hand getting nearer to the face. The lifting of the elbow is automatically accepted, so he can deal with the hand question. If he accepts the hand question, however, he has automatically accepted the elbow suggestion. I’ve intensified it. This is a double suggestion wherein I’ve distracted attention away from an important part of the suggestion (elbow bending) to an unimportant part. They are a mutually reinforcing pair of suggestions; whichever is accepted will automatically reinforce the other.

And as the hand comes nearer to your face, it will probably move more slowly until you are ready to take a deep breath and close your eyes and go into a trance.

I am not ordering the subject because I’ve observed that his hand was, in fact, going slower. As he accepted this observation of his own experience, he also accepts taking a deep breath, closing eyes, and going into a deep trance. This is a series of suggestions that is easy to accept and follow because you hitchhike taking a deep breath, closing eyes, and a deep trance onto the already initiated behavior of the hand moving slowly nearer the face. You are again integrating your suggestions into an associational network wherein they tend to be mutually reinforcing.

Your hand is moving slowly toward your face, but you won’t go into a trance until your hand touches your face.

It’s much better for the therapist to say “you won’t go into a trance” than for the patient to say it. You thereby displace and discharge any resistance that the patient may have with your own negative “you won’t go into a trance.” The word “until” has pivotal significance. Going into a trance is thereby made contingent on an inevitability: The hand is moving toward the face, the patient now knows it eventually will touch his face and, therefore, tends to agree that he will go into a trance.

In all probability you will not be able to recognize the trance for some moments.

How long is some moments? You’re allowing the subject to define and take his own time. You evoke the question within the patient’s mind, “Will I be able to recognize the trance?” When he asks himself that question, he is assuming absolutely that there will be a trance. The only question is, will he be able to recognize it? Your question initiates an unconscious search for cues enabling him to recognize trance. It contains the implication that trance is or soon will be present. That implication probably evokes an unconscious search and processes that will evoke certain unconscious mental mechanisms that will be experienced as trance. While he is busy with that curious question about recognizing trance, you raise another goal as follows.

Probably not until after your hand has slowly lowered to your lap to signify that you will continue in a deep trance. Will you be able to recognize it?

So you give him another goal, and he wants to recognize it. His recognition is going to depend on the lowering of his hand to his lap. But you have put upon that lowering of his hand the condition that it will signify that he will “continue in a deep trance.” Remember that the word “continue” has a continuing message; the actual meaning of the word is itself a suggestion. He is going to look forward to that.

The suggestion you give the patient during hypnosis session is only a suggestion that he do something, possibly produce hand levitation. Just possible. If there is something else he prefers to do, let him do it. Do not try to restrict him to hand levitation. That is false and that is wrong to do during hypnosis.