CHOCOLATE BUNNIES EVERYWHERE

CHOCOLATE BUNNIES EVERYWHERE

Hypnotherapy for Cravings

Spring has come, and with it, the grocery shelves are filled with chocolate bunnies, eggs, jelly beans, and all of the childhood treats.  Walking into a store is passing a gauntlet of sweets that many of us want, and wish we didn’t.  Clients are coming in and talking about cravings for sugar that are stimulated by the array of Easter candy.
What do you crave?  Sweets? Something crunchy?  Perhaps it’s not a food, but busy-ness, approval…something else?  A want becomes a craving when it feels choiceless.  We find ourselves doing something that doesn’t serve our deeper needs for peace, wholeness, and health.  We feel driven to eat yet another chocolate bunny, or keep working even though our bodies are calling for rest.
If you look up the word ‘craving’ in the dictionary, you’ll see that it’s defined as a powerful desire for something.  It’s also defined as longing, yearning, ache, ‘the need and irresistible desire’, ‘the powerful, unexplainable urge…’.  In craving, the desire feels bigger than us.
Dr. Dean Ornish the heart specialist that revolutionized our understanding of how diet can reverse heart disease, wrote that he keeps his freezer full of pints of Haagen-Daz.  When he has a craving, he eats one spoonful-slooowly- and savors it.  He commented that it’s really only that first bite that he fully enjoys, so he makes the most of it.
However, that seems impossible for most of us.  How do we get to the point where, like Dr. Ornish, we can enjoy fully the pleasure of chocolate- and then stop?  How do we cultivate both the capacity for full pleasure, and its complement- the ability to say ‘no’? so that we feel whole and integrated.
A life of saying ‘yes’ to chocolate goes beyond pleasure.  Cravings take over our lives, and we feel at the mercy of the temporary satisfaction of the moment- and then have to live with the results for the rest of the time.  Yet, the solution isn’t to deny what brings us pleasure- to only cultivate discipline and what’s ‘right’.  We rebel against that lifestyle when we try to enforce it- and end up eating more chocolate.
As a hypnotherapist, I look at craving in two ways. As with so many things, there are two sides to every issue, and I work with them both.
I address the inner longing, the ‘need and irresistible desire’ as the dictionary describes it. When we investigate, the craving is for something deeper. Then, the work is to meet the craving in a different way- to be able to be with those moments of longing without filling up with chocolate or activity or whatever the craving appears to be about, and to continue to drop in, to cultivate a relationship with our inner being that is at the base of most longing.
The second way to work with a craving, is to work with it the way it shows up in the world.  One of the things that I appreciate most about hypnotherapy, is its ability to help us to connect with the way the mind habitually travels the same well worn pathways, resulting in our repeating behaviors that no longer work- like eating too many chocolate bunnies.
Hypnotherapy allows us to access the inner resources that allow us to change patterned behaviors, and to cultivate new ways of being in the world that respond to a deeper sense of what we want.  So, even when the chocolate bunnies look good, and remind of us of those childhood moments of sitting on the porch step, gobbling up a once a year treat with glee, we have a choice.
Dr. Ornish, in the paragraph above, is a good example of the second way of working with a craving.  He brings mindfulness and presence to his craving for ice cream, and transforms it into a sensory pleasure without the choiceless experience of craving that feels that it’s bigger than us.
Like Dr. Ornish, when we end the old patterned responses to craving, we are then able to choose to enjoy fully, and also to choose when we want to stop.
So, here is a technique that I teach my students, that you can use to work with your own cravings, whether they are for chocolate, chips, or difficult relationships.
This hypnotic experience will help you to have the best of both sides of the issue- the pleasure and spontaneity of the part of you that wants simple goodness and enjoyment in the moment, and the lasting happiness and well-being from the part that can see a bigger picture, and craves what’s most beneficial over your lifetime. Both parts are precious and important, since we live moment by moment and over time.  One brings aliveness and richness, and the other creates the foundation of centeredness and groundedness.
You can listen by clicking the link below- no payment, nothing required- just something for you to use and enjoy.
In this Transforming Cravings with Hypnotherapy experience, you’ll  help your mind to address the inner conflict within the craving- the aspect of yourself that wants your long-term good, and the aspect of yourself that wants to feel good in the moment- and discover a third, more integrated and beneficial response.