In this article I’d love to follow up on the previous piece devoted to healing vision. I want to share a fascinating case that clearly shows the power of our subconscious mind and suggestion—and how useful they can be when addressing health challenges.
We won’t be talking about ordinary placebo effects, even if it may sound a little like that. Instead, here’s a story told by Dr. Richard Bandler (co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programming).
During one experiment, Dr. Bandler suffered an unfortunate accident: a highly dangerous chemical splashed into his eyes and seriously damaged his vision.
Doctors gave him no hope of recovery. The tissue in his eyes was so scarred by the burns that he could see only through glasses with lenses thicker than the bottom of a Coke bottle.
With those glasses he actually saw fairly well—until he misplaced them. Then he’d search and search… followed by the familiar crunch underfoot. Goodbye, glasses.
Since Bandler is famously absent-minded, this scene repeated itself far too often.
What many NLP enthusiasts don’t know is that beyond co-creating Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Bandler is a passionate experimenter who’s had the chance to test technologies most of us don’t even know exist.
One of his observations was striking: if a person wears inverting lenses (that flip the world upside down) for two or three days, after removing them the brain continues to invert the image for hours, as if that were the new normal.
Knowing this, Bandler pushed further. If you’re familiar with NLP, you know that alongside hundreds of techniques it also leverages hypnosis and hypnotic trance.
Imagine being able to use your eyes like a magnifying glass. With hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion, this is possible: people simply imagine holding a real magnifier—and the brain does the rest.
Frustrated by constantly losing and breaking his glasses, Bandler wondered: why not create virtual glasses?
Through self-hypnosis he crafted virtual lenses, “placed” them in his eyes, then calibrated their “power” against his physical glasses until the result matched what he needed.
The outcome? He no longer needed real glasses and could see just as well without them.
Even more surprising: after a later checkup with an eye specialist and a battery of tests, he was told that the scarred tissue—supposedly permanent—had disappeared, and his eyes had healed.
You might be thinking, “Interesting story—but what does this mean for me? I don’t practice self-hypnosis.”
Notice that a crucial ingredient of hypnosis is suggestion.
In FasterEFT we view hypnosis as an everyday state that lets the mind imagine and feel as if something were already real. Our problems themselves function like hypnotic trance states, and the way we think about them becomes suggestion.
So when we complain that something is getting worse, we’re sending our subconscious a clear instruction about what to create.
And we build a more difficult future accordingly.
But what if our suggestions were entirely different? What if we continually affirmed robust health and the good things we want to experience?
It works both ways. Whatever we truly want must receive our attention—not what we don’t want.
And remember: doctors originally told Bandler that his eyes would never heal and that he’d wear “jam-jars” for life…
How do we address such negative suggestions in FasterEFT? All FasterEFT processes move in that direction. For shaping the outcomes we want, the most direct tool is the A.R.T. of Change (Art of Change), described in the second book—and it applies not only to health, but to every area of life.
Because it isn’t what we want, but more of what we already hold inside, that we attract into our lives.
Want to learn how to resolve health issues and pain with FasterEFT? Get the new e-book: Heal Your Mind, Heal Your Body.