News Articles » – HYPNOTIST HOPES TO HELP RESIDENTS

Daily Press & Argus, August 17, 2005 (revised & reprinted)

HYPNOTIST HOPES TO HELP RESIDENTS
By Christopher Nagy

It’s really mind over matter, according to Rena Greenburg. The trick is getting your mind to think in a different way of what matters most.

Greenberg, a certified hypnotist and president of Wellness Seminars, Inc., is hosting two upcoming events for residents at St. Joseph Mercy Livingston Hospital in Howell this fall. A smoking-cessation class is set for September and a weight-loss class is set for October.

According to Greenberg, what sets her programs apart is that instead of fighting willpower with pills or patches, she seeks to help from within, using hypnosis to attack the way people think when it comes to tobacco and eating issues.

The mind, she said, is set on autopilot when it comes to these issues. Instead of that autopilot determining that someone should sit on the couch with a bag of potato chips, the autopilot can be switched to motivate someone to go out to the gym, Greenberg said.

“It’s up to us to program out own mind,” she said. “What we try to do is change the associations, so something like cigarettes are no longer thought of as pleasurable. That way, you’re not fighting against the mind and willpower.”

Since 1990, Greenberg’s seminars have been sponsored by 75 hospitals and more than 100 corporations. For the past year, she’s been working through the St. Joseph Mercy Health System in Ann Arbor. The program has been effective, she said, for people who have been smoking for 30 to 40 years and for people who have bad eating disorders since childhood.

“What is getting in the way of success is subconscious obstacles, but just as we learn to smoke, we can unlearn it just as easily. The same thing can be said about overeating,” she said.

Greenberg teaches her seminars with the knowledge of what it’s like to be someone out in the audience. In her mid-20’s, Greenberg said she had a variety of health problems.

She decided to use her second chance to help others start over, and Greenberg began studying hypnosis. She now holds two certifications in hypnosis from both the Eastern NLP In structure and the National Guild of Hypnotists, using what she has learned to help others in the same way it initially helped her.

“People who come to the seminars to lose weight or to quit smoking want to make a conscious change,” she said. “However, what keeps getting in the way of their s success are subconscious obstacles.

“People aren’t encouraged to listen to their bodies when their bodies tell them what to eat, how to eat and when to eat,” Greenberg added. “They bypass their body’s innate system. What we do is tap into this program of the deep mind and heart that can change this program of the mind.”