I am honored to have another returning guest for this podcast, my good friend Jack Elias. My first podcast interview with him was about his book entitled “Finding True Magic” in 2010 and in this podcast, we are going to be speaking about this new book that he co-authored with his wife Ceci Miller entitled “The Outrageous Guide to Being Fully Alive: Defeat Your Inner Trolls and Reclaim Your Sense of Humor”
Jack Elias, CHT is the founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning, a Washington State licensed vocational school offering Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP Certification trainings, seminars and mentorship programs.
If you want to know more about Jack Elias and his books, his coaching and training sessions, please click here to be directed to his website.
I hope you enjoy this engaging and informative interview with author Jack Elias. You may also refer to the transcripts below for the highlights of the interview. Please leave a reply in the comment box if you want to request for the transcripts of the full interview.
Happly listening!
Greg Voisen:
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And I have a returning guest, Jackie Elias, and his wife, Ceci Miller actually wrote this new book. He is up in the Seattle area called The Outrageous Guide to Being Fully Alive: Defeat Your Inner Trolls and Reclaim Your Sense of Humor. Love the title, Jack . good day to you. How are you doing?
Jack Elias:
I'm great. Thanks for having me back.
Greg Voisen:
Well, it's good to have you back. Jack. I've known you quite some time and you've got a long history with your wife Ceci in doing workshops and seminars and counseling and transpersonal hypnosis and hypnotherapy. What is it that you've learned from your clients and that you can share with us that have created really rapid results for your clients? And then in inspired you really to write this book, The Outrageous Guide to Being Fully Alive.
Jack Elias:
So as I consider my work, the evolution of my work, based on the experience with clients and how people tend to think complexity is important. And to be able to think in complex ways is important. A lot of what contributes to that as a lot of the way the way that psychological theory and ideas about psychotherapy are transmitted. People like to talk in very complex ways and have lots of complex labels. People come to me all the time with labels, for their afflictions, and they feel like they're a victim of these things and that's how it's presented to them. So, what became quickly apparent to me that the most important thing to help people is to recognize that language is hypnotic. That, our subconscious self-talk is hypnotic. That language, if not from outside or inside, and that if you get a label we're taught that nouns are things.
So you get a label that was a subtle hypnotic suggestion there that you're dealing with a thing. When in reality, there are no things there's just activity, but if you're given a label, now you think there's something outside of you, something outside of you that you have to struggle with. Whereas the, the truth is you are creating what you're experiencing. So I turn people's attention towards connecting with the awareness that they're the creator and what are they doing to create the profits. Like initially people would come to me and many people say, well, I don't know about hypnosis, or I don't think you can hit and ties me. I've been to other hypnotists and they haven't been able to hypnotize me. And I just say too late, too late, your problem is a freestanding hypnotic state. And they quickly get that and it energizes them and it gives them hope because now it's not something outside of them. That's afflicting them. They can, they can quickly that they're creating this, which means they can change it.
Greg Voisen:
I love what you say because literally they've created their own hypnotic state, which they were denying. They would alter as a result of working with you. And that phrase, you said, can you repeat it again? Cause I think it's really important.
Jack Elias:
Which one?
Greg Voisen:
What you tell them.
Jack Elias:
Language is inherently hypnotic. You're creating your experience of your issue. It's not a thing that's afflicting you. It’s like you're slapping your own self in the face. But you're being told that the pain is coming from this label syndrome.
Greg Voisen:
You speak about expectations and the correlation to having anxiety and stress in our lives. That is a big factor for anybody listening to the show. Because nobody's immune from it. We're not immune from anxiety. But taking this Zen Buddhist approach, which you do, and I would as well, not every listener would, what advice can you give our listeners about falling into the expectation trap and what are the three insights in gaining clarity about expectations? Because look, you know this, and I know it. And I think a lot of our listeners know it, but if they set themselves up by saying, I want a particular outcome, and it doesn't happen that way, that actually creates anxiety. And that creates stress. But people are doing that all day long every day, Jack that's like, Hey, I expect that someone's going to behave in a certain way, or I expect my business is going to go this way. And it doesn't. What are those three insights that you can impart on our listeners?
Jack Elias
I'll tell you the insights, but it's more important to get the background from which they arise so the insights are there in the book, our confusion about ownership, confusion about adulthood and confusion about performance. And these are all just different aspects of a dysfunctional hypnotic suggestions. All of our thinking any self-conscious thinking is a hypnotic suggestion, as opposed to being reality. So what you said is, is at the root, when you said people and immediately take it personally, like when I said slapping yourself in the face that they're going to think, oh, I'm the problem. This is the route. This book is based on a paradigm I've created from the 18 types of confusion that create all of our suffering and we use the word confusion all the time, but because we don't appreciate really the power of language, we don't examine words that we should examine. And this is a crucial one, confusion con means with, fusion means poor together. So you get a state of confusion and suffering, anytime you pour things together that don't go together. So the root confusion of these 18 types is pouring worth of being together with judged performance. Everything you just said was in the context of believing that the worth of your being is at stake in terms of how your performance turns out, how it's judged. That's a delusion.
Greg Voisen:
Now, Jack, if the listeners would like to end their day free of stress and anxiety what recommendations do you have that hypnosis can help them with? In other words, they want to wake up, hopefully stress-free and they want to go to sleep stressfully stress-free and anxious. What do you, what recommendations do you have?
Jack Elias:
Would I would phrase it as practicing de hypnosis. You don't want to have moralistic gratitude, which means you're trying to be a good boy or a good girl. And moralistic gratitude is in the framework of beliefs, religious beliefs, whatever social beliefs, family beliefs, actual gratitude is based on what we said before is recognizing that you are literally being birthed moment by moment. We're not deciding to be able to see right now, we're not deciding to have conscious intelligence. We're not deciding to digest their food like a good one. Every moment we are being fully manifest all these millions of coordinated processes that we just experienced at a superficial level of I'm here. I'm me. And I have, I can see and feel my body that's based on millions of coordinated experiences that are being gifted to us moment by moment. So you want to de hypnotize yourself to who you think you are and what you think your life is and practice your friend is right. It's all about practicing, developing habitual sanity. So habitual sanity is practicing, remembering and developing a felt sense, not just an intellectual idea, but a felt sense that you're being birthed, that you're being given the gift of life, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, and make the effort to deconstruct all the speedy thinking of your hypnotic self so that you come back to your natural, effortless flowing self.
Greg Voisen:
Jack, thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth.
Jack Elias:
Can I add one more thing quickly?
Greg Voisen:
Jack Elias:
Create a, create a file on your phone that says you deserve your love and respect as much as anyone in the universe. And so that you see that every time you open up your phone, that's a, that's a teaching of the Buddha. You deserve your own love and respect as much as anyone in the universe. And that includes the Buddhists you deserve love and your love and respect as much as anyone in the universe, we learn through habituation. So if you every day, just see that takes five seconds, but you do it like say a hundred times a day, day by day, it will change you
Greg Voisen:
And Jack. Namaste to you. Thank you for being on the show again and bringing some of your wisdom and insights. And I think my listeners definitely appreciate that.
Jack Elias:
Thank you. Thanks for having me
-End-
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