If you are feeling dissatisfied and unhappy, where do you start in your search for happiness? Due to the way in which the human mind works, the more you think about being unhappy the more unhappy you become. It is easy to become enmeshed in a vicious cycle of negative and unhappy effect. If one cannot think about their unhappiness then how can they seek a cure?

There are many people in the world who are incredibly unhappy; the more they have tried to find their way out of their jungle of unhappiness, the deeper they have become lost in their dreary and demoralizing landscape. Different therapies and forms of assistance are tried and then abandoned, as nothing seems to work. Ones expectation of anything succeeding diminishes and quickly disappears. Self esteem can quickly drop to sub zero, leading to a sensation of being completely out of control. And if that's how you think, then that is how you become.

"All that we are is a result of what we have thought" SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA, BUDDHA

When self confidence has been lost and the landscape of one's surrounding world seems to be getting ever smaller, it is a natural instinct to search for help from outside. But this is never going to be the right place in which to look. Help from the outside will only come in the shape of pointing you in the right direction, and in this way change may be facilitated. The right direction in which to search is within the recesses of one's own mind.

As a hypnotherapist I am all too familiar with the natural human instinct to look to someone else to "do it for you" and to hope against hope that it is possible to wake up tomorrow and find the world has magically changed. But any individual person's world will only change when they are ready to change, when they change the way in which they are thinking. Ironically, this can happen just as magically as one might wish; major change can happen in the blink of an eye, so long as one is ready, and looking in the correct place.

Preparation is required so as to set the scene for this change. As a hypnotherapist I know that I cannot make any client change and do anything different at all, UNLESS they want to and UNLESS they are ready to make that change. The task undertaken by the therapist is that of a facilitator. To be happy, one has to learn to relax and relieve built up stress and tension. You, the individual seeking happiness, need to be open to learning how to relax and find ways in which to sooth your emotional state.

In learning to use hypnosis, anyone can learn how to relax and change state easily. Hypnosis in itself is a state which facilitates change, as simply by learning to relax and access your subconscious mind you begin to access the FULL creative and adaptive power of your mind.

Happiness also requires the ability to stop worrying and to look around you with new eyes, to be in the now and therefore allow yourself the chance to enjoy the moment for what it is. Happiness is a state of mind that is felt NOW, not conditional upon something happening tomorrow or the day after. True happiness is not conditional upon "whens" and "ifs", although it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this might be the case. Simply by seeing happiness for what it really is, you can indeed find happiness. It may be experienced as a "light bulb moment" or it may come to you more gradually, but happiness is ever present, simply waiting for you to discover it, which can only ever happen in the moment.

Once one has discovered the secret that happiness is an unconditional state which is found in the now, your mind can be further opened to possibilities. Just as negative expectations lead to a negative and contracting reality, one can begin to learn to expect happiness and an infinite world of ever growing opportunities. The use of hypnosis will inevitably speed this process up, as hypnosis allows the user to access the full power of their own mind. The dual force of conscious and subconscious, logic and emotions, left and right brain functions allows you to move forwards at a pace which one would not otherwise contemplate or imagine.

With hypnosis the creative aspects of the subconscious mind can be utilized and you can begin to imagine yourself as you want to be. Confidence and self esteem can be built with a little hypnotic mental rehearsal…your own happiness train then gathers speed and momentum.

But this only happens when you become the engine driver of your own train and realize that your train is happy in each moment, whether static in the station or speeding its way along the tracks.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in hypnosis downloads for happiness.