"A Chat about Hypnotherapy"
An interview with Mark Bancroft, by Jan Fishler
As pubished in The Union Newspaper on March 3, 2015.
Mark Bancroft didn’t know anything about the power of the subconscious mind until his first semester of college when he had to make a presentation in front of 150 people. That’s when he discovered he had a common phobia—the paralyzing fear of public speaking. Despite having the willpower to make the presentation, he found it impossible to speak and humbly excused himself from class. Desperate for a solution, Mark turned to hypnotherapy. In just two hypnosis sessions, Mark’s subconscious fear of public speaking was released. Mark returned to class the following week and successfully gave his presentation. The following semester Mark took a speech class to make sure the block was truly gone. It was. From there Mark joined Toastmasters and participated in speech competitions, where he took first place in 8 out of 10 speeches. In an effort to understand his experience, Mark began studying psychology, altered states of consciousness, hypnosis and how the subconscious mind works. The more he discovered how to work with the subconscious mind, the more he noticed life becoming easier and far less stressful. For the past 20 years, Mark has focused his professional life on helping others reach the deeper potentials of their mind in order to strengthen and support their health, healing and empowerment process.
In this week’s Healthy Options, we share a short interview with Mark Bancroft MA, a local Holistic Health Practitioner specializing in clinical hypnotherapy. Mark offers health coaching and relief to individuals dealing with chronic diseases and conditions. He provides powerful and effective techniques designed to establish and maintain the optimum emotional, mental, and spiritual states that support physical healing and a return to health.
Q:What is your primary focus as a hypnotherapist?
A: My focus is to help my clients get into a natural balanced state so they can respond pro-actively within themselves to the health condition they are dealing with. When most people get sick, they tend to unknowingly turn responsibility of their body’s healing process over to their physician. From there a patient often ends up taking a backseat to their treatment, which causes them to lose connection to their source of inner empowerment that can directly enhance and accelerate their body’s capacity to heal. Many times patients are at the mercy of their diagnosis and subsequent test results. If the results are unfavorable and the subjective impact of the results is ignored, negative test results can undermine the patient’s emotional and mental states that affect health and healing. What I bring to the equation is a recognition and acknowledgment of how important and powerful the emotional, mental, and spiritual factors are at supporting physical healing.
Q: What does supporting a person’s healing process mean?
A: First and foremost it means looking at the whole person, including the individual’s interior world of thoughts, feelings and emotions that arise in response to encountering a serious health condition. It also means looking at the structures in their outer life to determine if the person’s exterior life is supportive of their health and healing process. There is nothing like a serious disease or illness to force a person to evaluate their life and reexamine their priorities. One common aspect of the healing process is coming to ask yourself some fundamental questions that challenge old assumptions around self-identity and role identification. Supporting a person’s healing process means serving as a guide and facilitator who is there to help someone enter into and move through their own individual healing journey. This involves helping a person create supportive exterior conditions to support healing, as well as guiding someone into and through the all-important interior space of perception, belief, thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Q: What do people gain from a session with you?
A: In every session I spend about 30-45 minutes sharing ideas, tools, and techniques people can use to strengthen and empower their healing process. The tools I offer depend on the person I am seeing and what best suits them. The first part of the session provides you with health coaching, in addition to personal support and motivation. After this, I spend 35 -45 minutes on the hypnotherapy portion of the session. The client leans back comfortably in a recliner and hypnosis is used to bring the body, mind and emotions into a balanced state of being. From there, stress, worries, doubts, and fears are gently released and cleared from the mind, body, and emotions. Following that the person is given the experience of accessing their inner potential to heal and empower themselves physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The session ends with freeing the body of stress and energetically aligning the mind-body system to the essence of health.
Q: Why is being present so important?
A: By being present you move into a place that frees you of fear, worry, stress, anger, and doubt. When dealing with a health concern, it’s easy to become non-present, to chronically live for the future. What's the next test going to say? Is there going to be improvement? Am I getting worse? Then, you wait. What do you do with that time in between? In most cases you default to fear and negative thinking. Stress hormones are released into the body system and you’ve moved away from a balanced internal state supportive of healing. Fear-based thinking also programs your subconscious mind with negative expectation, which can undermine your body’s capacity to heal. Hypnosis allows you to avoid this by helping you enjoy a deeper connection to the present.
Q: Why does hypnosis work to help the body heal?
A: The body will typically seek to return to a state of health because that is its natural state. Your physician is concerned with curing your body, in bringing your body back to health. However if the thought processes and emotional states you hold are producing continual stress signals, there is greater resistance and less energy for your body to get stronger and healthier. Hypnosis can help your body by focusing and directing your emotional, mental, and spiritual energies on health and healing.
For more information about Mark Bancroft, go to www.markbancroft.com or call (530) 274-2020