Hypnosis is an altered conscious state of awareness which can be profoundly relaxing and causes a person to be more suggestible. Clinical hypnosis relies on suggestions, imagery, and relaxation to produce its therapeutic effects. Hypnotic suggestions are things that the hypnotist verbally suggests may happen while the person is under hypnosis. Due to the focused and receptive state of the hypnotized person, these suggestions happen almost automatically and without conscious decision or effort. If you, for example, receive the suggestion under hypnosis that your arm may be getting heavy, you will very likely feel it becoming heavy, without trying to do anything to make it happen. This "automaticity", the feeling of things happening by themselves, is by some considered the hallmark of hypnosis, and is often surprising to people experiencing hypnosis for the first time.
            Hypnotic imagery consists of picturing mentally events or situation or place in a way that has a desired positive physical or mental effect. For example, patients undergoing surgical or dental procedures are sometimes taught to enter a hypnotic state and go to a pleasant place in their mind. When successfully applied, the person gets completely engrossed in the vivid enjoyable imagery and is therefore happily unaware of the unpleasantness of the procedure.
            The hypnotic state is naturally accompanied by relaxation, and the physical relaxing effects are often deliberately strengthened further by clinicians through suggestions and relaxing imagery. Some of the benefits that come from hypnosis treatment are likely to result partly or entirely from the fact that hypnosis is a powerful relaxation method.
            Indeed, hypnosis is a relaxing, naturally occurring state of mind which happens to us every day. Each time we read a captivating novel, float off in a daydream or see an engrossing movie we are in a natural state of hypnosis.  For thousands of years people have recognized the power of hypnosis to enhance learning, heal emotional scars, improve performance, change habits and speed the healing process.