Hi LindaRK thanks for the response. First you said you have been having some pretty nasty anxiety. Have you seen the studies on Claire Weekes? If not I can give you the thread to her best links right here at our community ok. I have been studying anxiety more just today so if you'd like to know some more advanced styles I'd say meditate at least three times a day until your anxiety calms down.
Here is a method from my study's today. Its how to disassociate from your anxiety while under meditation. It is also good for your concentration and remembering. This is a method you do after you relax and meditate in a relaxed and calm manner. The trance is when you do the floating as you meditate. This is not like Claire Weekes floating. This floating is where you imagine you are floating outside your body as your looking at a huge movie screen ok. The floating will help you to relax and be more at peace and calm. It takes practice but it works well.
Herbert Spiegel M.D. and his son David Spiegel M.D explain this in their book Trance and Treatment.
While you imagine yourself floating, in your mind’s eye visualize a huge screen. It can be a movie screen, a television screen, or, if you wish, a clear blue sky that acts as a screen. On that screen you project your thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories, fantasies, and plans while you float here. You establish a clear sense of your body floating here while you relate to your thoughts and ideas out there.
Once you have established the screen, you can further separate out a main screen and a split screen or, if you wish, you can insert a screen within the main screen. Allow the spontaneous flow of thoughts and feelings to continue as they proceed onto the main screen, but exert your own selectivity by focusing aspects of the main screen onto the split screen. By focusing on the split screen, you now can engage in the kind of technical virtuosity of fast-forward, fast-backward, slow-motion forward, slow-motion back ward, or you can freeze a frame and examine it carefully.
You can even use a psychological zoom lens in which you focus with great detail on an aspect of something that occurs on the split or insert screen. Using the screen visualization technique, you now have several options.
The first one is that as you learn new material, you can put yourself in a trance state and visualize this new material on the screen, especially the split screen. Then as a practice session later, you can re institute the trance state and learn the art of retrieving the memory of what previously was imprinted on the screen. By doing this in a systematic way, you accumulate and process those feelings and thoughts on the screen. At the same time, you have a practice effect of learning the art of
retrieving what was there before. While doing that, it is even possible to use a retrieval experience of whole memories that you can then focus on at will.
When your main goal is to focus on anxiety control, the emphasis in this training is to concentrate on the floating, floating, floating. Sometimes you can make it more vivid by imagining that you’re floating in water. Or if it’s more helpful, imagine that you’re like an astronaut floating above the field of gravity. The focus on floating
leads to an inevitable sense of muscle relaxation; when your muscles are more relaxed, anxiety itself is reduced. It is very difficult to instruct the muscles to relax through intellectual means, but to imagine yourself floating is a direct signal to your muscles to shift into a state of buoyant repose. An indirect consequence of
this buoyant repose is that thinking and feeling out there on the imaginary screen happen with greater ease.
When the focus is on concentration, floating is still the theme, although the main emphasis now is on imprinting new feelings, new thoughts, and new content onto the screen, especially the split or insert screen. Have practice sessions in the beginning, maybe four or five times a day, to learn the art of retrieving what was imprinted on the screen. The art form is in essence a two-way arrangement in which you learn to impose the imprint of the thought or feeling on the screen, and at the same time become equally comfortable with reestablishing the screen so that retrieval is available as the floating constantly goes on. It is especially helpful to use the slow-motion and zoom lens technique in retrieval processes, to be sure that the art of remembering on command, in response to questions, or in stress situations occurs by training and not as a surprise.
Learning how to remember on command is a very useful preparatory experience for anticipated examinations, as in the following
example.
K.U. was a 44-year-old well-trained psychiatrist with 4 years of psychoanalytic training who had failed her board examinations 2 years in a row. This was especially disturbing because she was well informed and her colleagues knew her as a competent psychiatrist. Yet something happened in the examination process that led to blocking and intellectual paralysis. For use in that setting, she inquired about learning self-hypnosis to discipline her concentration. She was taught the procedure for self-hypnosis after determining that she had an intact grade 2–3 HIP profile. She responded immediately after the first practice session with this observation:
“It’s a nice, relaxing sensation—something I have not experienced in a long while.” She practiced this exercise approximately 10 times a day. In fact, a week or so later she made a phone call to check up on the procedure and to be sure that she was doing it correctly. She conscientiously prepared for the next board examination by imprinting the review information on her private imaginary screen. After a 4-month preparation period using the exercise, she again took the examination
and passed. She successfully passed the oral examination as well. A year after the treatment session, she wrote the following letter:
It is probably unforgivable that one receive a thank you a year after the event. But one of my first thoughts on learning that I had passed Part 2 of the boards in psychiatry was to thank you. The trial session of hypnosis last October helped me considerably with both rest and study. My single “buoyant” left arm was, I think, a great asset.
Patients are taught the self-hypnosis exercise and are given instructions to practice it every 1–2 hours during the first few weeks, until they become confident of their own ability to invoke this relaxed, dissociated state whenever necessary. It is particularly important to instruct patients with anxiety to use the exercise every time they feel an anxiety attack coming.
The exercise gives them a sense of something to resort to at a time when they are prone to feel especially helpless, and it facilitates their development of a sense of mastery over the symptom. The treatment strategy is designed not merely to counter a sense of anxiety or distraction in concentration but to provide the patient
with an alternative strategy for working through psychological problems or for doing intellectual work. In particular, the patient with anxiety is encouraged to use the trance experience of thinking with the screen to work through psychological problems as he or she maintains a sense of relaxed floating in his or her body. It is also
helpful to have the patient practice visualizing situations on the screen that provoke anxiety: Have the patient freeze the action on the screen when he or she begins to sense the physical signs of anxiety and reestablish a sense of floating before proceeding with the scene on the screen. This method enables a patient to contain his or her somatic responses so that he or she can more clearly think through the psychological pressures and conflicts with which he or she is coping. At times, having the patient visualize anxiety-provoking situations provides an opportunity to further explore possible insight-oriented explanations of what is causing the anxiety.
