With a new year underway, many are looking to make changes to their lifestyle.
The ever-popular resolutions can range from losing weight, quitting smoking or making other habit changes.
The Amethyst Wellness Group, which is located at 1206 Victoria Avenue East, offers a way to help achieve those goals through clinical hypnosis, hypnotherapy and counselling.
“When people are ready to make changes in their life, hypnosis is one of the fastest ways to do it,” Amethyst Wellness Group founder and executive director Barb Davies said.
“If your conscious mind and your subconscious mind are aligned when you start making changes, then you’re unlikely to self-sabotage and much more likely to create permanent change.”
Davies noted that there are over 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that prove that hypnosis is effective in a variety of clinical settings.
“There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnosis out there,” Davies said. “It’s a resource state in between asleep and awake where you are potentially more suggestible and your imagination, creativity and problem-solving ability are heightened. You’re able to make changes a lot more quickly when you’re in a state of hypnosis than you are in your waking state. We all go in and out of a state of hypnosis naturally, several times every day.
“When you’re in a state of hypnosis, you experience focused concentration and you’re usually physically relaxed. You access the part of your mind where your self-image and identity are rooted, and this guides your thoughts, emotions and behaviour. You are in control of any changes which are made, not the hypnotherapist.”
Davies has had a private practice – Barb Davies Hypnotherapy and Counselling – since 2017 and got certified as a hypnosis instructor shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the early part of 2020, Davies started training a few people who had lost their jobs or wanted to do something different, and some of her students asked if they could work with her.
“So I formed Amethyst Wellness Group to hire them and we were incorporated in March 2022,” Davies said. “We’ve been fairly small but we’ve started to pick up some momentum here recently as we come up on our second anniversary.”
In addition to hypnosis and hypnotherapy, Amethyst Wellness Group also offers counselling services.
“There’s a great need for that in our city,” Davies said.
“I find that counselling is a lot more effective when you understand hypnosis and how the subconscious mind works because you can help people recognize what triggers them, what motivates them and how they can make changes much more easily than by only working with their conscious mind. Our social workers, who are also certified clinical hypnotherapists, can teach clients meditation and self-hypnosis strategies too, so they can experience the power of hypnosis daily if they wish.”
More information on Amethyst Wellness Group and the services they offer can be found on their website.
