Hypnotised, converted and in less pain

Seeing how they behaved in front of hundreds of strangers had me doubting my own doubt; surely no-one would be paying these people enough to behave quite that embarrassingly?

The longer I watched and noticed where and who the loudest cheers were coming from in the audience for each of the hypnotised, I identified that these people were all just regular families who’d been holidaying among us for the past week.

I was converted to believe what I was seeing was real and unembellished.

All that did, however, was increase my curiosity about what it felt like to go into a trance and have my actions controlled by a puppeteer of sorts.

But I’d missed my chance and probably still would not have been brave enough to relinquish control of my behaviour on a stage so grand.

When the opportunity presented last month to be hypnotised by celebrity hypnotist Mark Stephens, who has just released a new book and was on a publicity trail, I snapped it up quicker than I imagined he’d snap his fingers to ‘wake’ me at the end of our session.

Alas, there was no finger-snapping, no swinging pendulum to focus my eyes on, no “you-are-getting-sleepy” soundtrack.

It was all very plain and simple.

Though his voice was soothing and, yes, hypnotic, I think the key was in the arrangement of his words and my own mind’s power to visualise what he was asking me to imagine.

You see, he had me clenching my hands together with my fingers interwoven except for my two pointers.

He asked me to imagine a magnet pulling them together but to try and resist them joining.

Against my will — or was it with my will that was buried somewhere deep in a part of my mind he’d tapped into? — my fingers met with the force of the ‘magnet’.

And that was just a pre-test to see if I was hypnotisable.

Mark’s goal, while he’s charmingly amusing, is not to provide comic relief to audiences.

He’s on a mission to help relieve people’s pain and trauma, break bad habits, lose weight, sleep better and eliminate stress

His new book, Pain Free, aims to teach people the meditative and hypnotic practices to alleviate their own pain.

With limited time, he asked me to identify one area of pain in my ageing body that he could work with briefly.

My fingers are ailed with Heberden’s nodes, which are bony swellings in the joints indicating osteoarthritis.

That day, one was particularly sore.

Mark asked me to rate the pain out of 10 and then he hypnotised my mind into blocking most of the pain right out of it.

The number on the pain scale dropped from four to under one in a couple of minutes.

I felt pretty gobsmacked. How could that be?

Still a little hesitant to push on the joint too hard, my disbelief lasted for a couple of hours, at which point the pain did return.

I was not expecting something so simple could permanently fix the pain that’s plagued my hands for years, but the hope it inspired that I might be able to control arthritic pain through the power of my mind with practice and consistency and without chemical creams and medications was exciting.

Mark told stories of healing pain far more severe than my own and in turn reinstating quality of life to people who’d lost all hope.

He said one severely injured woman, who had been suffering chronic pain post-accident for years, had told him he was her last shot and that if his methods didn’t work, she was going to, sadly, head down the voluntary assisted dying path.

Understandably, that’s a lot of pressure, but Mark proudly reports he was able to bring her the relief she’d been searching for.

He believes in the power of the hypnotherapy he practises.

And now, having sunk under it personally, I do, too.