What if joy wasn’t just a passing mood, but something your brain could learn to access on purpose, more often?
For years, I’ve worked with hypnosis clients experiencing the full range of human emotion. Most don’t come in feeling joyful. They're hopeful that things can change, while they come in carrying fear, anger, sorrow, or guilt – heavy states that have often been with them for a long time. As hypnotists, we know these emotions aren’t “bad” at all; in fact, they’re often part of the healing process.
What clients often don’t realize is that there’s a roadmap forward – a progression beyond just neutralizing the pain. In transformative hypnosis work, resolving the negative is only the beginning. There is a whole spectrum of positive emotional states we can intentionally cultivate next. And among the most profound of these are Stillness, Connection, Awe, and Joy.
These higher states are not just “nice-to-haves” or fleeting feelings. They are trainable emotional states – meaning that with practice and the right techniques, anyone can learn to experience stillness, connection, awe, and joy more consistently in life. This matters enormously for both clients and professional hypnotists.
It means that hypnosis isn’t just about removing fear or anger; it’s also about amplifying our capacity for positive emotion and wellbeing.
In the Amplify Hypnosis Method training program, we use specific tools (like the Alpha, Theta, and Gamma sequences) to guide people through a full emotional journey: from quiet stillness, into deep connection, expanding into awe, and finally emerging in authentic joy.
Don’t worry – you don’t need any insider knowledge of those terms to understand this journey. What’s important is recognizing that each of these states builds on the previous one, forming a natural path to emotional freedom and resilience.
Let’s explore this progression step by step, and see why training these positive states matters – whether you’re coming in as a client seeking change or you’re a hypnotist guiding others on their healing path.
Stillness: The Starting Point for Professional Hypnosis
Every journey to positive emotion begins with stillness. In our context, stillness doesn’t necessarily mean total silence, and it definitely isn’t about suppression or forcing the mind to be blank. Stillness is the nervous system stabilizing. It’s a state of presence without pressure, where the constantly analyzing or defensive mind finally comes to rest.
For clients who are constantly analyzing, fixing, or performing in their daily lives, stillness is often the first profound relief they experience in hypnosis.
Hypnosis quiets the thinking mind! What a relief.
It’s that gentle pause where the inner dialogue quiets down. Stillness says: “This moment is enough.” There’s nothing you have to fight or figure out right now. In this calm fullness of presence, the client’s mind and body get a chance to recognize safety.
Establishing stillness is crucial because a mind at ease becomes fertile ground for change. In a still state, the body knows it’s safe, and that becomes the foundation for everything that comes next. As hypnotists, we often induce stillness using soothing language, pacing, breathing techniques, and focused attention (for example, the Alpha Sequence of the Amplify method is designed specifically to regulate and settle the system into calm).
When stillness is achieved, even briefly, something beautiful is already happening: the client is learning, perhaps for the first time in a long time, that it’s okay to just be. There is a palpable sense of enough-ness. From that foundation of stability, new possibilities begin to emerge.
Connection and Grounding: Inner and Outer World Harmony
Once the system feels safe and still, connection arises. First, a grounding connection to self – then, connection to others and the wider world. In hypnosis sessions, I often see this as the moment a client begins to feel again, but this time their feelings are accompanied by curiosity instead of fear.
Connection and grounding is like the soil in which all transformation grows. In this state, a person rediscovers a sense of belonging and linkage: they might reconnect with their own body and emotions, or feel a newfound empathy toward loved ones. There’s an awareness of being part of something larger, a web of relationships and meaning.
Connection is foundational.
You can think of it as the bridge between the inner world and the outer world. When a client reaches a connected state, they might say things like, “I feel like myself again,” or “I realize I’m not alone.”
This is where healing really takes root.
The fear and isolation that may have dominated their emotional landscape begin to give way to a feeling of safety and relationship. As hypnotists, we gently guide clients into connection using techniques like guided imagery and personalized suggestions that encourage openness.
Often, simple human presence and rapport in the session also foster this connection – the client feels seen and heard, and thus begins to reconnect internally. Once the person is connected (to their own heart, to supportive people or even to a sense of the greater whole), something truly transformative becomes possible.
From here, the emotional landscape starts to shift dramatically. When someone feels connected and supported, a new emotion can naturally dawn – an emotion that many of us haven’t felt in a very long time, but is incredibly powerful when it appears. That emotion is awe.
Awe: The Expansion Point for Personal Growth and Happiness
From the fertile ground of connection, awe is a natural next step.
Awe is the emotional signature of a mind that is expanding beyond its old limits. It’s what we feel when we encounter something vast or wondrous that transcends our normal frame of reference – when the brain suddenly recognizes something bigger than the problem.
In practical terms, a client might experience awe in hypnosis when they have a profound insight or a vivid, beautiful inner experience that reframes their perspective. It might be triggered by a visualization of a breathtaking natural scene, a spiritual moment of clarity, or simply the realization of their own inner strength and potential. In that moment, the ordinary can become radiant, and a sense of wonder blooms.
Awe is a powerful state for the mind, heart, and body.
In the brain, researchers have found that experiences of awe can quiet down the habitual thought networks and support learning and neuroplasticity – essentially helping the brain form new connections more easily .
In the heart, awe often brings feelings of humility and openness; our usual defenses soften as we sense we’re part of something larger than ourselves. In the body, people describe a tingling or a feeling of lightness, and physiologically, awe can even calm the nervous system’s stress response. One study even showed that practicing small moments of awe each day (“awe micro-dosing,” as they called it) significantly reduced depression and anxiety in participants . Clearly, awe isn’t just a nice feeling – it has real mental and emotional benefits.
Perhaps most importantly, awe can be cultivated.
It’s not a random lightning bolt reserved for special occasions; we can invite and train this state. In the hypnosis context, we might use the Theta Sequence of techniques to help open up a client’s inner world of imagination and insight, setting the stage for awe to emerge. This could include deep visualization, age-regression to re-experience a positive memory, or suggesting the client to observe their life from a higher perspective.
However it’s evoked, awe is often a gift to the client – it’s that moment where they might say, “I never saw things this way before.” In practical terms, awe is the point where the client’s problem starts to feel smaller, and their world starts to feel bigger.
When awe opens the door, another beautiful shift happens almost on its own: gratitude begins to rise. It’s not forced gratitude or a platitude – it’s a natural swell of appreciation that comes when we see life’s wonder and possibility. From that genuine gratitude, the stage is set for the final and most radiant state in this progression: joy.
Awe-inspiring moments – like witnessing grand natural beauty – can quiet our fear and open us to new possibilities. In hypnosis, even an vivid inner experience can trigger a similar expansion.
Joy: The Emergence of Wholeness
And finally, from gratitude through the awe experience, joy arises. Not performative joy, not a surface “good vibes only” mask, but real, resonant joy – what I think of as a calm, inner “yes” to life. Joy in this sense is an emergence: it bubbles up when a person’s mind, heart, and body are no longer consumed by protecting themselves.
After deep healing, when fear has subsided and awe has expanded one’s perspective, joy comes forward naturally as an expression of wholeness. It’s the joy of being alive, being safe, and being connected. In a hypnosis session, I often recognize joy in a client’s serene smile, or a light in their eyes. They might describe feeling “light” or “free” or “hopeful” in a profound way.
Psychologically and neurologically, joy is a sign of harmony. In the brain, joy is associated with a kind of coherence between different networks – in other words, the emotional brain and the thinking brain are in sync, and the nervous system is in a state of regulation and balance .
Clients often describe it as a full feeling in the chest or a warmth in the body, sometimes even a gentle energized buzz.
This isn’t a hyper excitement; it’s more like a sense of “delight.” Joy feels like everything is aligned and one can fully inhabit the present moment. It’s important to note that joy is often the emotional outcome of deep healing – it emerges when the parts of us that were in pain have been heard and resolved. As one of my colleagues beautifully puts it, “Joy is not rare. It’s what emerges when the system is no longer protecting itself.”
For many clients, experiencing true joy after a long time in the dark can be life-changing. It shows them that feeling good isn’t just an abstract idea – it’s real and attainable. And crucially, it shows that their emotional growth has come full circle. Where once there was fear or grief, now there is genuine joy. This is when we know the hypnotic work has gone deeper than just symptom relief. It has become a transformation of the person’s entire emotional landscape.
From Experience to Embodiment: Training Positive States as Professional Hypnotists
It’s one thing to experience a powerful positive state once. But the real magic – and the true goal of our work – is helping clients return to these states consistently, until it becomes natural. Repetition leads to embodiment. In other words, we want connection, awe, and joy to become not just peak moments in a session, but traits woven into the fabric of daily life. This is why we talk about these emotions as trainable. With practice, a client can strengthen their ability to access these feelings, much like building a muscle or learning a new skill. In fact, this learning process follows a well-known progression that comes from NLP and psychology, often called the Four Stages of Competence:
1. Unconscious Incompetence – “I don’t know what I’m missing.” At first, a person may not even realize that a state like joy or awe is something they can intentionally feel more often. They might be so used to their baseline emotional state (even if it’s negative) that they can’t yet imagine anything different. The skill of evoking positive emotion is not on their radar yet.
2. Conscious Incompetence – “I know what I want to feel, but it’s hard to do.” Here the client becomes aware that states like calm connection or awe are possible (maybe they get a taste of it in a session), but they also realize they can’t reliably create it for themselves yet. There is an understanding of the gap that exists. This stage can be a bit frustrating, but it’s actually progress – now they know what to aim for.
3. Conscious Competence – “I can access this state with focus or support.” With practice and the aid of hypnotic techniques or self-hypnosis, the client learns how to invoke stillness, connection, awe, or even joy more or less at will. It might take some deliberate effort – maybe doing a guided visualization or a breathing exercise they learned – but they can get there. The ability is now a skill, though it requires concentration and intention.
4. Unconscious Competence – “This state is now familiar and part of who I am.” Finally, the state becomes second nature. The person’s brain and body now know the way to joy and connection as well as they once knew the way to anxiety or anger. Positive states start to arise spontaneously in daily life. For example, they may notice themselves calmly finding stillness in a tough moment or feeling a swell of awe and gratitude at small things. What was once a peak experience is now woven into their character.
Moving through these stages is a gradual process, but it’s absolutely achievable – I see it happen regularly. In the AMPLIFY hypnosis method we guide practitioners and clients through this progression using those sequences I mentioned (Alpha, Theta, Gamma) as structured practice.
The Alpha Sequence supports calm focus and stillness, the Theta Sequence opens up deep insight and imagination (practice for connection and awe), and the Gamma Sequence helps integrate and activate transformation (practice for maintaining joy and new perspectives). Each time a client moves through the emotional arc – Stillness → Connection → Awe → Joy – they are literally training their nervous system. They’re building new neural pathways that make these positive states easier to access the next time . Little by little, they are becoming a person who can live with more ease, insight, and delight in their everyday experience .
Why This Matters for Clients and Hypnotists
At this point you might be thinking: this sounds wonderful in theory, but why focus on these states in hypnosis? The answer is that guiding someone into positive emotional states completes the healing process.
In traditional hypnotherapy, a lot of emphasis is (rightly) placed on resolving negative feelings and root causes of pain. Helping a client release fear, anger, guilt, or sorrow is powerful – it liberates them from the weights of the past. But if we stop there, the journey is only half finished.
Healing feels incomplete or directionless if a client doesn’t know what they’re moving toward. By offering a pathway into connection, awe, and joy, we give the client something positive to grow into, not just something to be free from.
These are, importantly skills they learn and cultivate. So they become more empowered, more capable to know and obtain what they want, intentionally.
For clients, training these positive states provides several life-changing benefits:
- A felt sense of transformation: It’s one thing for a client to intellectually know they’ve changed; it’s another for them to feel the change in their body and emotions. Experiencing deep calm or authentic joy for the first time in years is undeniable proof that transformation is happening within them. It’s incredibly empowering and validating.
- A roadmap to emotional regulation: Instead of being at the mercy of their old emotional reactions, clients now have a kind of map. They know the steps – stillness, connection, awe, joy – and can use this map when life gets difficult. For instance, when stress hits, they remember to first find a moment of stillness, then reconnect with themselves or a loved one, and so on. It gives them a practical framework for navigating emotions in the future.
- A lifelong skill: Perhaps most importantly, once these states are learned, they become an enduring inner resource. A client can return to these positive states for the rest of their life. Long after our hypnosis sessions are done, they carry within them the ability to self-soothe, to find wonder, and to cultivate happiness. That is a profound gift of resilience. As one client told me, “I feel like I’ve discovered a superpower – no matter what happens, I can find my center and even find something good.”
For hypnotists and healers, incorporating this full emotional spectrum is equally transformative. It elevates our work from simply fixing problems to truly facilitating growth. When we help clients access and stabilize positive states, we aren’t bypassing their pain or slapping a smiley face on it – we’re completing the cycle of healing .
We resolve the hurt, and then we guide them into what’s next. This makes our work more effective and rewarding. Clients move from feeling good, and resolving their issues all the way to genuinely thriving. The changes tend to hold better, too, because positive emotions have a reinforcing effect – they motivate clients to continue healthy behaviors and keep perspectives that support their wellbeing (after all, once you’ve felt true joy, you’re more likely to do the things that maintain that joy).
In a world that’s increasingly overrun with fear and stress, helping people reclaim stillness, connection, awe, and joy is quietly revolutionary. It’s like returning to the truth of what it means to be human – to feel safe, connected, and alive. These states are not indulgent luxuries; they are part of our innate design and birthright. And with the right tools and practice, they can be trained, stabilized, and woven into daily life .
Encouragement: Coming Home to Joy
If there’s one message I hope you take away, it’s this: experiencing these positive states regularly is not only possible – it’s the natural result of deep inner work and intentional practice.
The journey from stillness to joy is one that anyone can travel. Each step builds on the last, and each can be cultivated with hypnosis, mindfulness, and self-compassion. So if you are a client, know that beyond the pain that brought you into the session, a new emotional world awaits you as you heal – one filled with connection, wonder, and genuine happiness. And if you are a practitioner, remember that our work can go beyond neutralizing negatives; we have the privilege of guiding people into the full brilliance of their being.
Every time a client experiences awe for the first time in years, or when real joy begins to bloom where only grief once lived, we witness something extraordinary. The work has moved past symptom relief and entered the realm of true transformation . The numbness turns into curiosity, the wounds give way to wisdom, and the emptiness fills with hope. This is the path of Amplifying the human spirit – taking what’s already within us and helping it flourish.
Stillness, connection, awe, and joy are much closer than they might seem. With patience and practice, they can become a stable part of who you are. Hypnosis is one powerful way to open that door, but ultimately these states live in you, and you can nurture them every day in small ways. I encourage you to allow moments of stillness in your life and to remain open to the sparks of awe and gratitude that flicker in the ordinary. Over time, you’ll find that joy no longer feels like a distant stranger – it feels like coming home.
With lots of love, Erika
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