Mark Davis on Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis

This interview with Mark Davis covers hypnosis and self- hypnosis. We've got another podcast episode with him on cognitive behavioral therapy, learning to relax, optimizing sleep and overcoming phobias. Now, Mark Davis is a therapist, trainer and meditation teacher and the director of the UK College of Hypnosis in hypnosis therapy. He trained in cognitive behavioral therapy in 2006 and has been a full-time therapist since 2007. For the practice in central London, I know that he knows his stuff because he treated me, helped me overcome my blood in hemoglobin, and only five sessions, which is amazing because I've been living with that phobia several decades. Now, he's extremely wise and curious, he traveled extensively and explored various spiritual practices before becoming a therapist and it's just awesome to sit down and talk to him. I'm saying like the word mesmerized comes from mesmer, right? Yeah, it was really the, in a way, you could say the death of mesmerism gave rise to hypnosis. Transmesmer was a very charismatic physician who was very fascinated by magnets, magnetic energy, and thought he could heal people by using magnets and then found that he could just use his own hands and could transmit waves of magnetic energy into people such that they would have a sort of a healing crisis in emotional crisis from which they would be healed. And so he had banned the magnets and would just use the gestures from his own hands and then they came very convinced in this theory of animal magnetism and that people's illnesses, particularly emotional disturbances, were caused by an imbalance in their life vital energy, which he considered to be animal magnetic energy, he called it, and that certain people had an excess of it like himself and that they could channel their healthy magnetic energy into others to heal them. And so the theory of agonism and magnetism came about and mesmerity could put that energy into glasses of water, into trees, and would even build large batteries for group mesmerism. And he charged him up with his animal magnetic energy and people would then would drink the water that was magnetized and hold on and then they'd have their crisis, etc. So it's an interesting story because it became such a popular thing in Paris and London in high society notice. And the people were going there and then having these crises and coming out feeling better. The King Louis XVI France asked scientific commission to come together from the Faculty of Science in Paris to investigate. And the lead person on that commission to investigate mesmer was Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador. So it's quite interesting. Louis XVI chemist was in there as well as well as Guieta who developed the guillotine and died from it later. So they investigated mesmer and they proved with decisive experiments, probably the first placebo controlled experiments, that by swapping the water for regular water and things like that and telling people this tree had been charged when it hadn't been and that all that was a mesmerist behind the curtain sending energy into the subject when the wasn't, etc. They showed that magnetic energy without the client knowing that it was there produced nothing. But imagination, expectations of beliefs of the subject, even without magnetic energy produced convulsions and crises. - Thank you. - Essentially they were showing that it's, and that's interesting. You see now in the investigations further into that, as mesmerist went on and still did stage shows, this guy James Braden in the United Kingdom is a Scottish physician but scientist and the skeptic of a lot of stuff thought it was all rubbish. He called it all bog and he went up on stage to challenge this mesmerist who got this woman in a sort of sleep-like state and challenged it by putting needles underneath her fingers and she didn't respond. And he was quite fascinated that she wouldn't respond to this. She was complete, had complete anesthesia for her hands. So he said about investigating it, but looked at theories of physiology and psychology that they had at the time which were actually, he did quite well really. And he came up with what's called an idiomotetherio-hypnosis, idiodynamic theory of hypnosis, that ideas create responses in the body. But he built that on the idea of hypnosis. He called it hypnosis. He named it off the Greek god of hypnosis because he thought that this response came about through a fatigue, a sleepiness of the nervous system. So he called it hypnosis of the Greek god of hypnosis unfortunately got it completely wrong and a few years later really moved away from that position, realized it hadn't really got much to do with sleep at all and would propose changing it to mono-ideasam, one idea. And that is the essence of the matter that hypnosis is the mind being dominated by one idea. So there's just one idea dominating the whole nervous system. Now it's not really that the idea that dominates us, that the way we relate to the idea, we allow the idea to dominate our mind. Does that make sense? So that's where the self-hypnosis part comes in really. It's not that the hypnotist dominates the mind of the subject with the idea or with any magnetic energy. Again, that sort of metaphor of putting things into the client is still there. We put the client into the trance, we put ideas into their unconscious mind. The modern approach isn't like that at all. And braid really had the modern approach. It's much more a self-hypnosis thing. The person actually focuses their attention on an idea in such a way that creates a physiological response in them. And people, by the way, just more susceptible to this than others? Yes, that is. And we have a different way of measuring. And there are very. I mean, the amount of research into hypnosis is extensive. There have been five research labs at major universes. Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Pennsylvania, UCL, Queensland and Australia. I mean, huge research labs there in the psychology departments with leading professors leading them that are produced incredible research into hypnosis. So, yeah, and what we see there is we have standardized tests and we can see how responsive people are to different types of suggestions. Right, they were up to the most complex or difficult to respond to suggestions, which might be suggestions for hallucination of sounds, hallucination of colors in the room, negative hallucination that you open your eyes and you don't see the computer on your desk, and post-techno-cognizia that when you come out of hypnosis, you'll forget everything I said until I say the word "rabbit" and when then you will remember it all. So, we have different. And then easier ones, which are challenge tests, your arm is so relaxed, you can't lift it, your eyelids are so heavy, you can't open them, etc. So, there are different types of suggestion tests and we can measure how responsive somebody is, and we have high responders who respond really strongly, and then we have low responders who don't respond much at all. What it's clear is that hypnosis can be a trainable skill. Low responders are lost, them can learn to become high responders because it is a self-hypnosis thing. And the second thing that's interesting within that is that normal suggestibility is underestimated, and if you do these suggestion tests without a hypnotic induction and just say to somebody, "These are tested, you're imagination, just try to respond." They respond nearly the same. In other words, the induction in hypnosis, the whole ritual of going in deeper into hypnosis, is actually fairly unnecessary. People are, when they want to be suggestible, they can become very responsive to suggestions without hypnosis. And the old movies where you've got the clock that's been used as a pendulum. I mean, you can filter and zone out, you don't need that. You don't need that. There are elements to this that make things work better. By labeling the experience hypnosis, it will lead to natural expectances to respond better for those that are positively orientated. For those that have a fearful idea of hypnosis, they'll respond less well if you label it hypnosis. So, labeling a procedure hypnosis. When I say to you, "We're going to do a guided relaxation," you're like, "Okay, I say, "Eat him, we're going to do a guided hypnotic relaxation." You'll be like, "Ooh, you see?" And the way you expect to engage with the ideas is going to be slightly different if we label it hypnosis. So, we're very interested in the research around these things and moving away from the idea that still is out there and is in this soul in the marketplace, that hypnosis is some special state of consciousness and an extraordinary state of consciousness. The particularly gives us special access to the unconscious and special access to memories. These are not just unhelpful. Sometimes they're quite dangerous concepts. The idea that hypnosis is going to give you special access to memories. Let's go back to your childhood, then, because hypnosis doesn't do that. There's no evidence that it does that. The memories don't work that way. But what it can lead you to do is hypnosis can lead to very vivid experiencing and a type of imaginary experience that feels more real than normal imagining and more real than normal memories. Because we're asking people to engage in a particular way with the content. To mention what you were saying about that unhelpful approach, I mean, memory is a tricky thing, right? You could often have false memories. That's one of the dangers of trying to use, I guess, hypnosis in the way that you were mentioning right there. To access these so-called hidden memories, right? Yeah, that we could end up creating false autobiographies of ourselves. It's a better way to think about it. A false story about ourselves. Because memories, as such, as things, don't really exist psychologically. What a memory is is an act. It's the act of remembering. And that's a creative act of drawing together on the way. all sorts of kind of content that's set in our nervous system to create this experiencing. And it can be very influenced by what somebody has just said, what somebody said yesterday, other situational contextual cues. And every time we do a remembering process, we change some of the things that we've just recalled. So every time you think about your childhood, you slightly change your memory of it, and when you record it the next time you've slightly changed the story. Which is a bit worrying, I have to say, but that's memory grant like files that you can just double click and open up and there they are in their perfection. That's not the name. I mean, that's how you're able to help me overcome my phobias. You know, you're able to change and that's my memory of fit, right? That's part of the fluid nature, I guess. Yeah. And I mean, there are two aspects to memory. The one is episodic and memories and kind of autobiographical memory, the kind of the story of what we've experienced. And I remember this on this day and the details of it. And the other is what we call procedural memory. Sometimes we might call that muscle memory. An example of that is how to write a bicycle. Now, can you remember when you learned how to write a bicycle and can you write down how to write a bicycle? Well, maybe, but you know how to write a bicycle. Do you see what I mean? So you have that that that is a different type of memory and that type of procedural memory that's very much along the associative learning processes we talked about earlier is disconnected entirely from episodic memory. The dog doesn't remember where it learnt the reflex response to the bell from so to speak. That we're talking about the pavlovian. Yeah, yeah. We're sure it's for people who don't know you could explain for a second when the pavlovian experiment. Yeah, so pavlov is a physiologist, Russian physiologist, end up willing the Nobel Prize for what I'm about to describe. And he was measuring saliva response and dogs, you know, when they were presented with meat, et cetera. And then notice the dogs would respond even just to the person in the white coat before the meat would come. So he was figuring their nervous system of creating an association here. And he set about to measure that and would have a bell ring when the meat was presented and then would do those two presentations together. And then afterwards wouldn't present the meat would just ring the bell and the dog would still salivate. So what was previously an unconditioned stimulus became conditioned and we got a conditioned reflex response to essentially a neutral stimulus, which is the bell. He set about mapping that in great detail and lots of other people have done amazing about the research. And that's one of the way that nervous systems all the way through from sea slugs to dogs and cats to ourselves. We learn we associate things and neurons that fight together wire together is a way to think about that associative learning. And the other learning procedure that happens again, unconsciously, the dog couldn't tell us how it acquired the reflex. You see him, we just acquire them. The other is called operant conditioning or our behavior becoming modified by reinforcers and punishes. So we get a reward for something we'd likely to do that behavior more often. If we get a punishment, something painful or something pleasant is taken away, we're likely to do the behavior that just occurred before that less. So is what happens before or after a behavior then will either increase that behavior occurring or decrease it. And in anxiety work, for example, we're particularly interested in the behaviors that decrease anxiety temporarily because they tend to reinforce their curve more often. And for example, people with OCD, they do these compulsive behaviors because it immediately reduces anxiety. And then the behavior starts to become more stronger and stronger until the behavior occurs even before there's any anxiety occurring. They just have compulsive behavior. Could you give an example? Yeah, I mean, the way I demonstrate this in class, for example, is haven't had everything lined up on the desk, right? And you can even do that. You can all feel that sense of, I'm just going to line everything up on the desk. So everything's got nice, straight lines. I'm kind of doing it now and all the pens. And then everything's all lined up when you feel comfortable. And then if things are slightly not lined up, you could imagine becoming a little obsessed about not being able to focus on everything else until that was lined up. And when it was all lined up, now you feel comfortable and you can focus and talk. And if it's not lined up, you feel a really strong urge to line it up when it's lined up. Ha, you feel comfortable. So this can start to turn into compulsive behavior. It's something that's fairly, you know, going and checking that you can't, your door is locked, the gases off or that things are lined up. It's their little small behaviors that don't interfere too much until they start to take over and you can't do anything except line all those things up. And the reason why you keep doing it more and more is because you get the reward, the good feeling that comes from the uncomfortable feeling going away. Absolutely. So once we see that, and it is extremely effective treatment, but OCD clients do not like to do it. So it's getting them into the motivation to do it is so important is exposure response prevention. So we'll go and mess the desk up. So everything's all out of alignment. And they have to focus and talk to us and cope with the uncomfortable feeling and accept some anxiety and some discomfort and not act on it. As soon as they try and act on it to fix those little things, then we're back it to the beginning again. So with OCD clients, they have to learn to accept anxiety actually and tolerate it. And if you teach them any techniques like relaxation or hypnosis, if you teach it at the wrong time, they will use it as one more way to avoid being anxious, which actually is their problem. No, that makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. This is the operative conditioning principle. This is people getting their nervous system getting rewarded by a reduction in anxiety. And of course, you know, this is the addictive behavior. It is, you know, this is very similar. Yeah. So people have an, you know, I always want to sit with the smoker and go, well, what's the feeling you have before you have a cigarette? They're feeling slightly uncomfortable, slightly unsettled. Just a little bit, but they feel unsettled in a certain way. And then the cigarette settles them down. And what thereafter is that change of state? And it's not the cigarette they want. It's that change in feeling. But the cigarette becomes a thing and they don't feel they can get that settled feeling without the cigarette. Right. And one of the amazing things about smoking is that apparently your blood pressure actually rises when you smoke, rather than going down. Yeah. And it is a stimulant that your heart rate goes up. You start to sweat, your muscle tension increases, your blood pressure goes up when you have a cigarette. Yet most people in research will tell you that they smoke to relax, but smoking does not relax you. It does the opposite. And smokers as a group, are more nervous, tense, anxious. They have more mental health problems and more sleeping problems than non smokers. They have more mood variation during the day up and down the non smokers, more irritability. And this isn't their personality. And they to get rid of those feelings, they smoke cigarettes, but it's the smoking that makes them have those feelings when they stop smoking, they're returned to normal. And it's very interesting. There's a study actually, and it's published in the British medical journal. You can look it up. It's a metronautical analysis done by I think the behavioral group of Oxford University on anxiety and depression scores before and after stopping smoking. They looked at 13 different studies. And what they noticed was that when people stop smoking, their mood improved, they became less depressed. And their anxiety reduced, they became less anxious. And the effect size of that in social science, we use effect sizes was the same kind of statistical impact as taking antidepressants. I mean, that's pretty astonishing. In other words, instead of taking antidepressants, just stop smoking. There is nothing you can do better for your physical health, a mental health, and particularly now with COVID-19, the stopping smoking. I mean, it is, it is. So basically smoking makes you anxious and depressed. And when you stop smoking, you'll take an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety pill. But the antidepressant anti-anxiety pill is you stopping smoking. But it's challenging because people don't think they can. And this leads to a very interesting thing here. And we can come back and talk about your fear and phobia here. It's you see, which is the balance between motivation and self belief. And we don't allow ourselves to become really motivated about what we want. Unless we believe we can do it. And I'll give you a really good example of this. Somebody came back to me, he done smoking cessation with me about eight years ago and came back. He needed effects. He started smoking again. This happens. So I asked him to give me a score from zero to 10. How motivated are you to stop smoking? He put five out of 10. And in fact, this was beforehand. And I said to my secretary, who's my wife, why am I going to see this person? If his motivation is that high, I can't work with people whose motivations five out of 10 that needs to be high. So anyway, it was too late. She'd book the appointment. So I went to see him. I said, why is your motivation five out of 10? That's the first thing I want to know, David. I said, look, let me just check. If you could stop smoking as easily a switching off the light up there, switch one across the room and switching that light switch off. And it works. I showed him if you could stop smoking as easily as that, who he said, oh, then it would be 11. I said, so you're just not allowing your motivation to come in because you don't think you can do it. And I said, it's just that you don't know how to do it. Once you know how to do it, now you can allow your motivation to saw. Let me show you how to do it. So it's self-believe in motivation and very, and this is about everything in life, you see. We don't allow ourselves to go for the jobs you want, the life of our dreams because we don't let our motivation get to feed the pitch because we don't believe we can do it. Where's the other to come back for a third time? No, he didn't. No, he didn't. Well, you haven't. I haven't seen him for nine months now. I think we really, you know, sell the deal, but you know, people have lots of different things going on their lives and they forget useful information. They forget the coaching skills they've been taught, et cetera. And then we remind them and then they get back on track. But does that relate for you? For example, for overcoming your phobia, you know, once you knew that it was possible to that allow your motivation to increase. - Yeah, absolutely. It's true, like, you know, having not done it before, apart of me was skeptical as to whether or not I could overcome my needle and blood phobia quickly. Wow, yeah, relatively quickly. So, yeah, I did believe that I'd be able to do it eventually. I just didn't know how difficult it would be. So I did have the belief that I had the motivation. But yeah, you obviously, you totally rocked my world there. I have to say it was amazing to see how quickly we progressed on handling that. By the way, you also mentioned vocal muscles. If you want to talk about that for a second, in terms of tension, and how to relax, and how apparently our muscles tense when we think as well, our vocal muscles. - Yeah, well, you know, how do we think? How does a child learn to think? We can approach this from the point of view of child psychology and child development psychology. Or we can look at it also from the kind of the physiology and science of the neuromuscular system. When I studied hypnosis, when I first took the course that I now teach at the college that I now own, the chap there introduced me, Donald Robertson, to the whole work of muscle relaxation, progressive muscle relaxation, as developed by the great Edmund Jacobson. And he was a researcher and clinician in the 1910, 1920s, 1930s. And he did an enormous amount of detailed research in his own lab, basically, on muscle tension and reflexes as well. I just point out whether the listeners who don't know a lot of the skills I learned from work were muscle relaxation techniques, which were pivotal in allowing me to relax and overcome my failure. - They can become pivotal in everything, because our bodies are mostly comprised of what? Skin, blood, fluid, organs, some jelly-like organs, and muscles and nerves. So it's the muscles and nerves that allow us to stand up straight to breathe, to move through the environment, to eat, take the environment into us and move it through and out of us, and to speak. Without muscles, we couldn't do any of these things. We just be a lump of, we couldn't do anything. So muscles are our life, yeah. And thinking, obviously speaking, involves muscles and looking around involves muscles, tiny muscles that are working all the time in incredibly coordinated ways. And what Jacobson showed was that when we're thinking, we're still using our muscles, but in a more private way. So the movements are tiny, private, minuscule, but as we're thinking and let's say reciting a poem to ourselves, the vocal muscles are moving. It's called sub-vocalization. And if we relax the vocal muscles and learn how to do that, and a very easy way to do that is just to relax and slur the voice and make it quieter. Like as you say, the days of the week. So something like going, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday. And then just let the jaw relax at the end. If you practice that, you're thinking just stops. And you're just in this sort of empty, spacious state. And your eyes will often feel quite tired, because then the eyes defocus at the same time, focusing and thinking go together. And the eye muscles relax. And we're off, I can fall asleep. It's a lovely way to fall asleep, but I use it as a way to get into meditation, because meditation for me essentially is being instillness, not being in thoughts, just resting in stillness. So that was incredible. Finding that out was incredible, because I spent 15 years involved full time with yoga, five turn, five years in India, in an ashram, another 10 years in the United States in Ashram, meditating, many hours a day, chanting, many, many hours a day, service, many, many, many hours a day, and all of the week. And studied a lot of philosophy. Now, the essence of yoga is really stillness, the essential practices stillness. The Patanjali's yoga sutra say, yoga chitti vritti niroda, yoga is the stilling, the calming down of the vrittis, the turnings of the mind, the mind field. And then Patanjali says, the seer or the soul can rest in its true nature, the experiencer can rest in his or her true nature, else the experiencer or the soul gets caught up with the content of the mind and identifies with the thoughts in the mind, you see. So stillness practices the essence of yoga, being in and creating sort of that pond-like stillness of the mind without a ripple in it. And of course, as soon as you try and do that, you've got ripples, how do you do that? Well, relaxing the vocal muscles in this way, boom, 30 seconds, and your mind is still. And then you've got this sort of gazing spacial state that you're in and hanging out in that non-thought, non-thinking. It goes both ways by relaxing the vocal muscles you actually can't speak to yourself in a sense. Your self-talk stops, you see, because our life is, when we become really honest with ourselves, we notice that we're chattering to ourselves all the time. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. I've got to remember to, when Mark starts, finish, stop talking about that bit, I've got to remember to ask him about that. That's what Eaton's probably doing right now. We're chattering in our head. We're self-instructing, planning, criticizing, do, do, do, do, what's in next. Now while we're doing that, we're stressing ourselves, we're not being present. We're not even listening to the other person, actually, because we've got a conversation going, so to be present with somebody else, we want to relax the jaw and really listen without the chatter in our own head going on. So we can really let the sounds of that person's voice and the sight of them, the presence of them, feel us completely. And so actually also, you get a sense here, when we do a hypnosis, one of the things I do is teach some vocal relaxation or use some techniques at the beginning to reduce the self-talk of the client, the mental chatter the client has, so that they can focus on the words that I'm giving them. And there, my words and ideas become their ideas, become their experiences. - Absolutely. By the way, on that note, there was a lovely quote, you mentioned in the past to me, which was, this is as God is a Getz. So not this is as good as a Getz, this is as God is yet. So I love that quote, which I think is kind of relevant. Could you explain what that means in terms of the moment? - Well, that would go off on a big topic. First, I'm going to give credit to that quote to the right person, which I would love that I come up with that, but it was actually Christopher Wallace, or he's sometimes called her "Riche Wallace", who is a fantastic scholar, indelogical scholar and practitioner of non-Julesche by Tantra, and has written some great books on it. And yes, so he has this phrase, "This is as God as it gets." And what that means is that, well, in this approach of non-Jules philosophy, that there isn't, this is it. This is the actual, you know, we're not into some transcendentalism that we're going to go off an experience, God, in this case, Shiva, is the, and going to have this incredible experience in heaven or something like that. This is it. This experience is the summation point of the whole universe that you're having right now. This is as God as it gets. So to be fully present, in a way, imagining the whole universe listening through your ears and looking through your eyes, into this focused experience. Because you see the universe can't experience itself. It can experience itself on a sort of global level, where maybe it's a supervised review, to experience itself, it has to climb down into the trenches of life, if we will. And so we are the way the universe can look out and experience itself from the trenches. And by say, from the trenches, I mean, if you're being, you know, you've got all your toy soldiers down there and you're looking from above, that's one way of looking at what's going on. But the other thing is to get there and pretend you're a soldier in the trenches of life. And that's what the universe is doing through us. It, how can it experience itself, unless it climbs down and becomes all these individual experiencing points? So by becoming these experiencing points that you, you know, now your five senses are the way the universe is experiencing where you are right now. Otherwise, how can it experience itself? We are, you know, we are that experience. And right now is the most important moment. Right now, you and me talking, and you guys listening to this, this is, as God as it gets. And what that does is it brings us into, it moves us also away from all this doing and striving. You know, we talked about that before into being. And just being with what is and opening to all of the opportunities and wonder of the present moment and the feeling of time and space, being the air that we breathe right now, we deeply in the present moment. And of course, there are so many great teachings on this from Eckhart Hall and everything like that. Eckhart, I'll tell you all the power of now, but the power of being in that sort of tremendous book and he's a tremendous teacher Eckhart Hall. Yeah, so the power of being present and the power of valuing the present moment. And that phrase, this is as God as it gets, don't be seeking for anything else, but the experience that you're having right now and open to it right now. And I think that's a very interesting thing to consider at these times as well, because we're having very different experiences, you know, instead of you and I meeting in your office or in your shop, we're doing it this way. and this is it too. This is God took And I mean the other side from that particular philosophy that I do love very much, which is kind of a a shiver, shakti philosophy, shiver as being kind of awareness and shakti as being all the forms and colors of sensory experience. So that this is the Godess presenting herself right now as all of this experience right now for her Lord, Shiva, which is our awareness. So there's this kind of union between the Godess and Shiva, the shakti, Shiva and shakti as the meeting of the senses with the sense experience. And that's a kind of, I don't know, I love that. That just gets me very, as a there's this lovely poem from a 12th century and it says, you know, if a melody could become ears and listen to itself, if honey could become a tongue and taste itself, if a young woman could become a young man and so enjoy herself, so the one becomes the many to experience itself. I just think this is gorgeous, you know, the melody grows ears to listen to itself. The universe grows you and me, Eaton to experience itself. Lovely, that is beautiful. By the way, as we're trying to run out of time, I wanted just to mention briefly a book that you had brought my attention that had been basically for about like two decades now, I guess, it had been out of print. And you persuaded me to contact the estate of the author and and and republished this book. And that book is conditioned reflex therapy by Andrew Salter. Could you maybe just talk for a couple of minutes about how I guess influential that book has been for you as a therapist in your practice? I mean, I know I should mention when you treated me, you actually gave me some handouts at the time which, you know, quoted parts of the book and that was very useful. Yeah, I mean, that not just therapist's practice, but I think for me also personally and even spiritually, so to speak, one of the most important books I've read, which focuses entirely on the issue of inhibition and that are natural childlike animallike responses to things become inhibited. And so we don't say what we think. We don't express our emotions naturally, at least not until we've had a few drinks. So once we have some alcohol, we become less inhibited. And so, but he wants us to act as if we're constantly drunk, half drunk and really let go of that control and let our emotions speak forward more spontaneously like they do with children. And it's a really fascinating journey. People get very upset reading the book thinking it's not right. I want to be clear, this is the book that started behavior therapy and therefore became common to behavior therapy. It was written in 1949 and it is a brilliantly written with so many quotable phrases in it. One of his great ones is play your own game. Never play anyone else's game. Play your own game. And Salter's work became the four-owner of assertiveness training which has had such a huge influence on people in terms of empowering them, giving them permission to speak up and negotiate for themselves, negotiate against people in power and take a stand for themselves. Particularly on feminist movement, had a massive influence on it. So reprinting this historic book is fantastic and it's just as relevant today. There's lots of work to do in this area in terms of empowering people who are, have become inhibited because of life experience, to stand up and speak and regain their natural confidence and reflexes. And the testimonials we had in getting this book reprinted were from some of the leading psychologists around the world, including Professor Stephen Hayes who developed acceptance and commitment therapy and Elizabeth Shapiro who developed EMDR. So I mean it is an incredibly relevant book for today. One of the guys said every therapist and most of their clients should read this book, that Professor David Barlow, who is a top researcher in CBT. So I mean, yeah, it is a fantastic book and I continue to reread it and find inspiration from it. And I want to thank you for bringing it to my attention. It's been obviously a privilege to get to publish. So thank you for publishing it. I mean really, really good and we just started the journey of how great it is having this book back out and I want to get the word out more and more. It's a very empowering book. Listeners highly recommend it. Thanks. And also, so before we, I guess we sign off for now, definitely we should do this again at some point because we could go on for hours. I have to say one of the things that really impressed me about you is your curiosity and the way that you really have combined wisdom from both the East and the West. It sounds like you've got everything from Zen, Buddhism, to Greek philosophy, all converging together with contemporary evidence-based psychology. That's not really a question. That's more of a compliment. But yeah, how do you view your evolution in terms of how that's all come together? And I guess maybe I'll, we'll rephrase it as a question because you do seem to differentiate yourself. This, this you can, you can answer to from other codes of therapy that often are more, I guess, I don't know, perhaps continental and perhaps psychoanalytical that take much longer and I guess you like Andrew Salter in his book. He's, he's often quite critical of how inefficient they can be, I guess. Yes, there you go. Right. We want the therapy that is effective and efficient and as deep as it needs to be, and what we all could look at the concept of depth is effective and brings about change and the change that we want in ourselves. And I think ultimately that is going, it is some sort of philosophical change as well in terms of how we view ourselves and the world and our future. What is a human being? What is life about? Having a purpose for living, Victor Frankl's stuff. These are already important. Yeah. Victor Frankl, you mentioned that's the amazing book. I highly recommend having a purpose. And so, you know, if you don't get persuaded by some of the sort of the metaphors of depth in psychology and keep looking just at what is effective and bringing things simple and the science and the yoga all time because you see the whole area in the east, I mean, it is about techniques and practice to bring about transformation. I mean, it's, it, andra is incredibly practical and we're not talking the sexual thing. That's just a very tiny part of it. The Vinyana Bhairava tantra, for example, is a ninth century scripture that has 112 different techniques for centering and expanding your awareness into the state of Shiva of Bhairava. So, I mean, these guys are very technique focused, practice focused. They're not interested in going into the past, you know. There's the very famous story of the Buddha, you know, a man's dying, you know, being shot by a poison d'arro. And the doctor comes to remove the poison d'arro and the man says, "Oh, before you, this is the story of the Buddha would tell. Before you remove the arrow, please tell me the man who shot it, did he come from a noble family or not? And what would was the bow made of? And which direction was the woodwind blowing when he shot it? And wasn't it a lot of a specialist time when he shot it? And the doctor is like, do you want me to remove the arrow or not?" You know, you see, once we make the change, the story, the historical stories of no relevance. And people have a sort of more bit fascination with the historical roots of their problems. And that will be fascination. Sometimes it's helpful in terms of realizing it's not you to blame, very important it isn't you to blame. It's what people have done to you, but get on with making the change then, you see. And the change is going to happen now. It's about now. The only thing that's going on is now. So, it is realizing the power of now, as Eckhartton, the power of choice, giving people more choices to make better choices now is what my therapy is about. And that means even showing people that their feeling of self-consciousness and awkwardness is when they become aware of it, a choice they're making and they can change that and not feel awkward or self-conscious or feel that there is sexual object for other people. They don't have to feel that. They can change it. They can take control of their experience. I'm just going to share another sort of story that's in a similar vein to the one that you told. It's obviously thought about more big fascination with every fine detail. It is about clinging to the past. Have you heard this story about the two monks or their pro-ver? And there's, I don't remember exactly how it goes, but I guess there's some sort of, there's a young, young woman who I guess, I don't know, obviously I'm not sure what religious connotations were, but she wasn't dressed, I guess, yeah, wasn't wearing that much. And basically she asked for help on crossing the river because she couldn't swim. So one of the monks put her on his back and helped her cross the river. And then, obviously afterwards the monks kept walking on their own, but about half an hour later is friendly. The other monk he asks him, he says, you know, how are you able to carry over? It seems kind of sacrilegious. You're a monk, you're a holy man, how could you do that? And she was hardly dressed, you know, and so the monk says to him, he says, I stopped carrying her several miles ago. I say, you're still carrying her with you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, you see. Being presence, of course, is all those thoughts about the past, what was happening at the riverbank or whatever were in our childhood are happening now anyway. So it's becoming aware that all the thoughts we have about the past or future are happening in the present moment and seeing that we get sucked in by language and symbols and numbers and things like that. And we lose consciousness and contact with present moment experience. This moment right now is as God as it gets. So being fully present, Wherever we are is what we want to achieve and then being able to not be under the control of our habits Automatic reactions, but be able to choose more consciously That's kind of the essence Love it love it. I think we need to sign off at some point so we'll leave it at that But thank you so much for for your time today It's been a real pleasure and thank you for all of it You know the great work that you're doing both educating therapists for the future and and all The wonderful work that you do in your practice as well That's fantastic. Thank you so much for for arranging this and for your listeners for listening in and all of your team there at Watkins It's great and also for getting that book published which is fantastic and for being such a great client You're a great client, you know great great therapist have great clients. Let me tell you Well, you did you know you did transform my life in it in a very substantial way. I am eternally grateful Absolutely my pleasure my pleasure. Yeah, let's do this again sometime before he good I've got another podcast episode with Mark Davis It's all about cognitive behavioral therapy Learning to relax how to optimize your sleep also how to overcome phobias and There's a whole lot of wisdom there. So I really recommend checking out [Music]