Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school

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From F's to Ph.D. with Self-hypnosis

by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D. Grades aren't everything, but try getting through school without them! This is a story about how you can be a really stupid kid and a nearly-as-stupid young adult and still make it through that great American obstacle course known as Hyer Ejukashun. Or, how to learn to make straight A's AND LIKE IT!

It all started when I was in the first grade. Yes, I know, lots of people started in the first grade. But not everyone had the distinction of flunking first grade. I did! People often think I'm making it up when I say I flunked first grade. It just seems unthinkable that anyone would inflict such an ego-shredding experience on an innocent little six-year-old child. "Kids just don't flunk first grade." Yes, well, I'm here to tell you it does happen because it happened to me. And I am still more than a little miffed about it, as you can probably tell. Mrs. Peek was the first grade teacher who flunked me. Mrs. Hollis (Pearl) Peek, Consolidated Grade School, Texhoma, Oklahoma. I don't know if this is significant or not, but she drove the only convertible in town. It was a Ford she had won with a $1 raffle ticket. She and her husband and son, Bobbie, who was a couple of years older than I, lived in a little house about a block from the school. When I was older (8 or 9!) several of us would stop every morning in the alley behind her house and have a smoke before going on to school. I don't know if I was really stupid enough to deserve flunking or not. For all I know, Mrs. Peek just wanted to keep me around for another year because I was so much fun to slap around. I assume it was fun because she did it so much. And she really had a free hand [ouch! sorry!]. That is, she didn't have to worry about repercussions from my parents because we were down near the bottom of the social pecking order. This was also back before corporal punishment had come into disfavor. Nevertheless, even considering the times and all, I think she overdid it. But just with me, mind you. I don't remember anyone else getting slapped. I would have noticed, believe me. Most of the time I didn't even know I had done anything wrong until she came stomping toward me, steam spewing out of every visible orifice, and slap-slap, slapslap. Twice on each cheek. Hard. Or on the ears if her aim was off a little that day. Like I said, I'm still indignant about the whole affair. But, anyway, I finally made it through the first grade. Then I was allowed to skip second grade after trying it for a couple of weeks. I don't know whether the second grade teacher felt sorry for me for having been subjected to Mrs. Peek for a full second year, or if she felt sorry for file://D:\~~junk\MLM%20PRESENTATION\SelfHelp%20Programs\HYPNOSIS\Self-hypnosis... 05/07/2004 PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory trial version http://www.fineprint.com

Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school herself and didn't want to put up with me. Either way I was allowed to go directly to the third grade thereby catching up with my "demographic cohort," as we used to say in the Panhandle. I did not pass GO. I did not collect $200. (If you've never played Parker Brothers' Monopoly you'll never figure it out.) It was in the third grade that the comments on my report cards gave me the first clue that I was not going to be a scholar. [Read "From Onions to Lamborghinis" for more on this, or if you are interested in knowing how to get rich by shining shoes, or if you are desperately in need of more information about Texhoma.] No more grades were flunked and I made it all the way through to high school graduation. Like many wise-asses, I spent most of my time and energy all the way through high school figuring out how to beat the system. If I had put as much effort into studying as I spent avoiding assignments and coming up with excuses I would have been a good student. Unfortunately I did not, so I never learned how to study. Not until later, anyway. In those days most state colleges and universities accepted just about any state resident who graduated from high school in the upper two-thirds of the graduating class. The fact that I was in the upper two-thirds--but just barely--shows how many really bad students there must have been. But I was up there, so Colorado University accepted me. Whoops! I forgot to mention that my folks moved to Denver, Colorado, the summer I was between my junior and senior years in high school. They must have at least considered sneaking off in the dead of night while my sister and I were still asleep. But they ended up graciously taking us with them. Thus my last high school year was in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. At CU I repeated my first-grade experience and flunked out. This time there was no Mrs. Peek or anyone else to blame it on; I did it all by myself. By the end of that first year I had 17 (or was it 27?) hours of F. Let me tell you, that many F's will flat mess up your GPA. The only course I can remember passing was Juggling & Unicycle 101. I got a B because I learned to juggle. Everyone who learned to do one or the other got a B. If you learned to do both I think you got an A. Now here is the funny part: You had to bring your own equipment. I mean, I can understand buying a textbook for a class, or a pair of protective glasses, say, for a lab. And certainly a jock or sweat shirt for gym. But a unicycle? I bought three tennis balls, learned to keep them in the air for one minute to get my grade, and settled happily for a B. With all the F's I was accumulating, who cared? I still had not learned the secret of studying or how to even survive in academia. In fact, at that point in my life, I didn't even know there was a secret to studying. I always thought I was going to become a scholar tomorrow! Meanwhile I was frittering away my life, learning nothing. But I did learn to juggle. I can still keep three balls in the air for a minute, and I still do not own a unicycle. Not only that but I can't remember a single situation over the years when I could have used a unicycle. For that matter I have never once been able to put juggling three balls to use. Hah!

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Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school Shows you the value of higher education. So there I was, hapless, without prospect, a college flunkee facing the draft. The only sensible thing--the really smart thing--to do was run like hell and hide someplace like Canada. So I enlisted in the Army. It may seem like we are getting further and further from the point. Actually we are now getting close to the nub of this story, which is how you can learn to learn, or how you can survive academically, in almost any situation or circumstance once you are really, subconsciously ready. Like the Sufi expression has it, once you are ready, the answer will appear. I guess I was ready because it appeared to me shortly, when I was in Germany. I was in the 8th Division Band in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, when I decided to learn to speak German. Not the kind of jerk-Deutsch most GIs had learned to order a beer, but real German. I wanted to speak it well and I wanted to read and write it. My granddad was German, I was interested in German philosophy, I was intrigued by the history of Germany from Bismarck to the end of WW II, and I had always wanted to speak a foreign language. Besides I thought one of the requirements for getting a doctorate was fluency in a foreign language, and--get a load of this!--I still planned on someday earning a Ph.D. How's that for hubris, considering the showing I had made in college? But I was determined. Never try to stop a young man caught up in the throes of stubbornness born of stupidity. The University of Maryland offered correspondence and self-teaching courses to GIs so I signed up. USAFI Course MB 579, "Beginning German I." They sent me the course materials which included graded readers, a textbook and a study guide. I still have those books because they represent my first real academic success. The success did not come immediately. Those books sat around for more than a month and the deadline for my first lesson was upon me. Every day I looked at the books and became more desperate because I just did not know how to study. What time I did spend in futile efforts at studying was wasted because I lacked organization, I lacked a plan of study, I lacked everything except a whimpering desire to speak German. This would make a more dramatic story if I could say, "Then one night I had this dream, see, and . . ." Like Kekule who discovered one of the most significant discoveries in all of science, the secret of the benzene ring, in a dream. But, sorry, it was not like that. The "answer" for which I was ready did come to me at night, but it was one evening while I was trying for about the millionth time to get a decent night shot of the Bru ckhauser. This was a bridge in Bad Kreuznach with houses on it. The way it was lighted it made a great night photograph. Unfortunately I was never able to get the perfect exposure and had to settle for what you see here. (The daytime shot on the left was from the front side; the night shot was from the back side.) I was out there in the dark fiddling with my equipment. As I was setting up the

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Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school tripod and mounting my Leica M3 on it, it dawned on me: Use hypnosis to learn German! Of course! Hypnosis was almost magic the way it sometimes worked, so why not use it to make studying fast, easy and painless. I could use hypnosis to make my mind absorb and remember everything, one time through, no sweat, no hassle. There is no telling why this series of thoughts occurred to me on this particular evening while I was doing something totally unrelated (that may be part of the answer). But it did. As I have chronicled elsewhere my interest in hypnosis began when I was 14 and has continued ever since. But my use of it was still amazingly crude when I was 19, which is how old I was that night I was trying to take pictures of the Bru ckhauser in the dark. I was so excited I immediately packed my gear and went home to get started. There were, however, a couple of big weaknesses in my plan. First of all, I was incredibly na Hypnosis cannot turn someone, presto change-o, into a learning ve. machine with perfect memory. Secondly, I didn't know how to do hypnosis on myself. Oh, sure, I had played around with hypnosis a lot back in Texhoma. Lucille was a good subject until she got mad at me for trying to take her picture while she was hypnotized. (What the . . . I thought she was hypnotized! How could she wake up like that?) Then there was Eddie Sue. She wanted to quit smoking so she, a friend of hers named Pat, and I got together and I hypnotized Eddie Sue. She sat next to me and I used the finger method (Oh, stop sniggering!) wherein I bunched my fingers and moved them in front of and above her eyes, giving her commands to follow my fingers with her eyes and go to sleep, fall under my command, blah, blah, blah. It was all very corny and melodramatic. After a while Eddie Sue had slumped down and seemed to be sleeping, so I gave her suggestions about smoking. She had told me before we started that she hated the taste of oysters, which was itself amazing to me because I had never even seen an oyster, much less tasted one. We didn't get much of that sort of thing in Texhoma in those days. But I was willing to take her word for it so I gave her the suggestion that when she awoke cigarettes would taste like oysters. Suggestions that were standard in my routine then followed. Stuff about forgetting everything that had been said during the trance (!), that in future she would enter a hypnotic trance any time I told her to (heh-heh-heh), that she would follow all instructions and feel good after waking, and so on. I then awakened her and she proceeded to tell Pat and me at great length about how nothing had happened, she had not been hypnotized, it was all a farce, yakety-yak, yakety-yak (I didn't talk back). Pretty soon she reached for a cigarette and lit it. She hadn't even fully drawn the first puff before she glared at me with real fury in her eyes and yelled, "Henderson, you sonofabitch!" I guess the cigarette tasted like an oyster.

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Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school It was not too long after that that my family moved to Denver and I never saw Eddie Sue again. That was probably a good thing. I don't know whether she quit smoking or not. Maybe she learned to like oysters. Anyway, back to my quandary in Bad Kreuznach. Everything in those days was still hetero-hypnosis, meaning one person hypnotizes another. I have already confessed to a weakness in scholarship so you won't be surprised to hear that I had not exactly exhausted the literature on hypnosis. But to my knowledge the term "hetero-hypnosis" had not appeared because it would have been considered redundant. As far as I know I had never encountered the concept of self-hypnosis and I still don't know where I got it. In fact I probably would have denied the possibility of self-hypnosis because to me hypnosis was something one person did to another. Remember, this was back in the dark ages when dirt was still relatively new. I needed someone to hypnotize me but I did not know anyone who could do the job. Frustration and desperation reduced me to trying some strange things. Like looking into my own eyes in a mirror and telling myself I was getting sleepy. That didn't do anything but make me feel silly. And sleepy I did get sleepy, but that was only from boredom. That fact is, it took me a while to get past the then-conventional thinking that presumed hypnosis was something that could only be done by someone to someone else. It took me a while to get past that thinking. One of the ways I had found successful in hypnotizing others was to group my fingers together and move them in an arc, back and forth, in You don't have front of the subject's face while he, or more often she, followed to go through them with his/her eyes. This is the finger method I alluded to all this earlier in my escapade with Eddie Sue. I thought about that for a yourself. My while and it eventually occurred to me that a metronome would Hypnotic do the same thing. (Was I not a musician? Did we not have Induction Tape is the easy, fast metronomes galore?) The next night I took a metronome home to my little garret at Rosengartenweg 66 and started experimenting. The instrument was one of those that work like an inverted pendulum, clicking on the beat as it swings back and forth. This kind of metronome has a sliding weight on it that changes the tempo when it is moved to a different position. Over the next few weeks I tried attaching different visual targets to the metronome with various tempos and all kinds of lighting arrangements. But no matter what I did, I could not get myself into the trance I was looking for.
way to develop and learn how to do selfhypnosis.

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Then one night I did have a dream. (Just what you were hoping to hear all along, right?) The dream itself was not dramatic. It was only my interpretation, what it meant for me, that proved to be dramatic. In the dream I was adjusting a photographic gray scale for exposure in an enlarger. It was an endless strip that gradually changed from clear to darker and darker shades of gray. But there was no pure black on the strip. It was as if the strip went on forever, getting grayer and grayer, but never becoming totally opaque. In the dream I was sorry I could not get a pure white (as you probably know, things are reversed when exposing a photographic negative), but I was also relieved to learn that shades of gray would work. And that was it. Like I said, the dream wasn't much. But the discovery was of immense magnitude for me. When I awakened I knew that I would never be able to put myself into a "trance," that I was not going to be able to get into some magical state and learn without effort. I then knew that it would not work that way, not even file://D:\~~junk\MLM%20PRESENTATION\SelfHelp%20Programs\HYPNOSIS\Self-hypnosis... 05/07/2004 PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory trial version http://www.fineprint.com

Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school if I found the world's greatest hypnotist to help me. But what I could do was utilize a "gray" state. I could go through the hypnotic routine with myself and increase my suggestibility so my own suggestions would work. It would not be as dramatic as I would have liked but it was certainly worth a try. Looking back it is obvious that the first stage of my paradigmatic shift was just a matter of logic, of conscious reasoning. That was simply the idea of using hypnosis to do this academic thing of learning German, to make learning painless and easy. The second and more creative stage, the intuitive leap, was the arrival of the concept of self-hypnosis. Like I said, as far as I know I had never seen or heard of self-hypnosis, but there is always the possibility of cryptomnesia so I lay no claim to originality. The important thing here is that I was ready for the answer, and the answer appeared, wherever it came from. I was, from that moment of insight, on a path that in years to come would lead me into many interesting terrains, as well as more than a few dead-ends and frustrations. And it would lead me to personal achievements I truly believe would have been impossible without self-hypnosis and the areas into which it led me. Thus I abandoned the silly goal of becoming a magic learning machine and focused on means rather than ends suggestions. For example, I gave myself suggestions that my mind would be receptive and that I would enjoy memorizing German vocabulary, that I would want to sit and study for certain periods every day, and that I would have increasing confidence to speak German to Germans. (It was funny to watch most of my conversations with Germans. I would doggedly persist in speaking German to them, and they would just as doggedly practice their English. I can remember many conversations in which I spoke no English and the German spoke no German.) All of this seems quite simple now, rather like something that should have been thought out in about 30 seconds. But that is not the way it works with new stuff. At least, not with this kid. Within a matter of a few weeks I was studying every evening, sometimes for as long as three or four hours. I had never been able to do that before. I learned to speak, read and write German, but more importantly I learned how to learn for the first time in my life. And I never would have done it without self-hypnosis. Eventually I got back to the US, back to Colorado, and Colorado University was gracious enough to give me another chance. Once back in school I was a different person from the one who had flunked out a few years earlier. I was still no genius, mind you, but I was able to concentrate better and I could raise my interest level in even the most boring courses (and you and I know there are plenty of those!). Best of all I had a kind of discipline I had never had before. My reading speed, however, was a problem. I was reading ordinary fiction texts at between 125 to 150 words a minute. That is abysmally slow, so Ispeed readingreading course at the University Reading Lab. When I finished the course I was no John F. Kennedy (13,000 words per minute, allegedly) but I did get up to about 1,200 words per minute. I've slowed down a little since then, but who cares, now that I know everything . . .

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Self-hypnosis and straight A's in school I was able to finish my bachelor's with a 3+ grade point averagefirst yearrst-year hours are not included in the calculation. However, the University's computer did include all those original hours of F in its calculations and that kept me on academic probation right through graduation. Those F's also made it dammed tough to get into graduate school. But I eventually did, blah, blah, blah, got a master's degree, yadda, yadda, yadda, then a doctorate, yakety-yak, was a therapist, did some teaching, and so on. As a teacher I have passed on these methods to numerous students who were having academic difficulty. Not one of them who "got it" and applied it ever failed to improve their studenting skills. Young, old ("non-traditional students"), male, female--it did not seem to make a difference. The only criteria were 1) a readiness to change their academic habits, or the absence thereof; 2) a sincere desire to get with it; and 3) sufficient information about the techniques of self-hypnosis to do it right (which is where I came in). School is just not that hard, and you don't have to be all that smart to get through it. If you doubt that, just take a close look at the kinds of people who have a doctorate, that pinnacle of academic achievement. Some of them are, of course, extremely bright and wonderful people with nary a blight (ahem!). Others, though, are not very smart at all. So you can forget about genetic concepts and whether or not you were born with the right stuff. You may have to have the right stuff to be a test pilot, but not to make it through a US degree program. To paraphrase what Mary Lou used to tell me about another part of the anatomy, it's not how big your brain is but what you do with it that counts. And you can do a lot more with it with self-hypnosis. Click here if you have a question, comment or suggestion. DID YOU FIND THIS INFORMATION HELPFUL? Your purchase at the Biocentrix Store makes it possible to create and maintain the free material offered here. Your support is greatly appreciated.
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Copyright 1998, 2001 Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. Last revised Wed, 19 Dec 2001, 11:30:16 GMT

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