When Nisha was a teenager, her older sister died from choking – It was believed that she suffered an allergic reaction to something that she ate and, within moments, her throat closed up, she couldn’t breathe and was gone.
Although obviously affected by the incident, Nisha managed to pick her life back up and for many years after that, she continued to live her normally productive life without any problems or fears. However, in her 30s (almost two decades later), while going through a particularly tough and stressful time, Nisha seemed to suddenly find herself absolutely terrified of choking with every bite of food she put into her mouth.

This story or suffering a severe trauma and then, months or years later, becoming affected by it is actually a fairly common occurrence. From a mental perspective, what happens is that in the moment of the trauma, your mind (in trying to protect you from the overpowering emotions you are experiencing), actually ignores your overwhelming emotions completely and puts you in a place of “pretending” that you’re okay.

However, when we fast-forward this scenario a few months or years we see the rest of this story… At some point in time, a situation comes about which, on some level, reminds you of the original traumatic incident and your body – still not having dealt with the old emotions – remembers the original trauma and brings back all of the intense feelings all at once. For most people, this hits them like a ton of bricks - They are often doing just fine and then, out of (seemingly) nowhere, your whole world comes crashing down around you and you have no idea why. In Nisha’s case, she went from feeling just fine and competent to being severely phobic and constantly anxious in almost an instant and, to her it all seemed to make no sense what was going on or why it was happening.

Understanding that, my work with Nisha was on 3 levels. Firstly, I worked with her to properly release and integrate in the pent-up thoughts and feelings she had been storing in her body ever since she was a teenager.
Once I could see that she had managed to properly release these terrible emotions once and for all, the next step was to teach her mind how to break the current-day associations she had created in her mind of attaching a feeling of fear to eating food.
Then, finally, once we had her able to feel better and no longer afraid, we had to properly lock in the changes so there would be no way she could go back to ever feeling that fear ever again… We did this by having her feel a very strong sense of power and control in her life and to have her mind see her feeling that way all the way into her future.

It was amazing seeing Nisha once we were done with our session – She was undoubtedly a completely different person. Having helped her finally feel strong and confident and especially having helped her feel like these feelings were going to be there forevermore, she finally felt like she was back in control not only of food, but of her life!
It was an absolute pleasure working with Nisha – Not only because of knowing how wonderful a shift releasing this phobia will create in her life, but more-so because it truly warmed our hearts knowing that this woman had finally managed to move past such a terrible trauma and now, for Nisha, only the sky is the limit!

Fear, if allowed free rein, would reduce all of us to trembling shadows of men, for whom only death could bring release.

Nothing can shrink the world around you more-so than intense fear. I remember a client of mine with a bee phobia so intense that she ended up having to lock herself inside her own house just to feel protected. Or another client whose claustrophobia had reached such epic proportions that travelling by any means – whether by a plane, train, car, bus or even elevator - was such an ordeal that it required hours (if not days) of preparation and a severe over-dose of tranquilizers just to make it bearable.

The point is that phobias, if not properly treated, can make mice out of men and absolute mountains out of mole-hills. But even more importantly, given all the recent advances in psychology and human-brain research, phobia treatment has reached the point where most people’s phobias can be treated and cured in less time than it takes to even watch a scary movie.
In this article, I intend to share with you some techniques that have worked for thousands of people in helping them re-gain some form of control over their fears. Do not, in any way, let the simplicity of these techniques fool you – they are based solidly on extensive psychological research and they do work if you are willing to try them.

Firstly though, before we get to the techniques, let’s take a quick look at phobias – what they are and what makes them tick.
Simply put, a phobia is our mind’s protection mechanism being put on overdrive due to us having made some form of a blanket generalization about all dogs, all dentists, all spiders, all elevators, etc.
From an internal perspective, when we are either experiencing the object of our fear, such as seeing a snake or spider, or vividly thinking about it, the first thing that happens is we begin to feel the reflex-like fear response in our bodies. Next, our minds, in trying to protect us from this perceived threat, start racing through terrible memories or possible worst case scenarios – Basically, “catastrophisizing”.
Now, with all these terrible imaginings and memories going on in our minds, our bodies begin responding to these thoughts which makes the fear levels rise even higher. The internal loop we have created looks like:
Feel scared -> Think about how to best protect yourself -> Feel more scared
Until, eventually, the situation either passes or our mind manages to get distracted away from the scared feeling for long enough for the loop to be broken … But, unfortunately, only until next time.

Considering this, ANY technique that will work MUST consist of either changing the scared feeling into a different (hopefully more empowering) feeling or changing the mind’s focus away from believing it needs to protect you.
One of my favorite techniques aimed precisely at changing BOTH of these responses at once consists of mixing together ancient knowledge from the traditional martial art of Aikido and conventional knowledge from modern- day Neural Sciences.

The idea of this technique is to shift your mind’s focus away from it having to protect you and to get you more “into your body” so to speak. This came about in Aikido due to the fact that a martial artist that is too stuck in their mind and in their fears is not in the moment and therefore substantially less capable of winning the fight.

To first start learning this technique, you will need a friend’s help.
What you do is simply stand up straight and ask your friend to gently push and put pressure against your upper body (your chest, shoulders and back). Their aim is to test whether or not you are standing solidly or if you are very easily pushed off balance.
What the Aikido masters discovered is that when you are stuck in your head, you have a very weak center of gravity and are therefore very easily pushed off balance.

Once you have done this, now imagine moving your mind’s focus down and into your stomach – To simply take all of your conscious attention and to focus it right into your gut. Your aim here is to fully feel everything in your stomach as if it was the center of your consciousness.

Now, as you keep your attention in your stomach, have your friend test your balance again. He / she should find that you are standing completely solid and are much harder to push off center – That is your way of knowing that you have successfully moved your attention out of your head and into your stomach.
Keep practicing this over and over again until your can feel for yourself what it feels like to have your consciousness shifted into your stomach.

Now, the next step of this process is to use this technique in helping you break the emotion-thought-fear-cycle mentioned above. The way we do this is by re-entering into your fear response. Your aim here is to think about whatever you have to with regards to the object or situation you fear so as to truly feel the fear in your body. Think about your object or situation, past times you did experience the phobic response, etc. Then, once you are feeling the phobic response, shift your attention back into your stomach as we just had you practice and have your friend start testing your balance again. Your aim being to have your attention shifted into your stomach well enough that your friend will not be able to push you off balance.

You should find that with your attention kept in your body (rather than in your mind) that the fear feelings will very quickly begin to disappear. The point is that as long as you keep your attention in your body and out of your head, you are not allowing the emotion-thought-fear loop to run any more and your mind never had the chance to push your fear mechanism into overdrive.

“Ok, so that’s great to do in my living room IMAGINING my fears, but what about when I’m in the REAL situation?” I imagine you asking…
The point is that if you can teach yourself this technique and truly start using it, sometimes using it even just ONCE properly in the real situation can be such a different experience for people that they fully break the fear loop for ever!
The idea is that you have to get yourself to know how to do this and you have to really do it when the real situation arises – this one technique, in and of itself, has helped thousands of people worldwide re-gain a sense of control where before they had none!

Now, trust me, I know that fears can completely overwhelm us and even more-so that a life-long phobia can seem impossible to fix so quickly, but trust me too – They ARE fixable and, even more importantly, just like it only took your mind a single moment to learn your phobia, all it usually takes is another single moment of you experiencing the exact opposite to make it be gone for ever! And that is what I wish for you!

In Ewy’s case, her phobia began with a traumatic experience in her youth. As a very young girl, Ewy very much liked birds and even thought them to be beautiful and fun to play with, but when she was 5 years old, Ewy’s pleasant feelings towards birds changed very dramatically to ones of fear and panic – all because of one very small and seemingly insignificant event…

Throughout Ewy’s whole childhood, her grandmother had a very large collection of cockatiels which Ewy would often help her take care of. Feeling she knew what she was doing and wanting to surprise her grandmother, one day Ewy decided to feed all the birds herself. She went into the bird-room, closed the door behind her and began feeding them. Unfortunately, she forgot to re-lock the cage doors and within a matter of moments, all the cockatiels escaped their cages and were flying all around her head in this small enclosed room.

The sheer shock and surprise of the moment already had Ewy highly traumatized, but at the same time, the young girl knew she wasn’t meant to be doing this alone. This compounded the feelings of terror with feelings of shame and guilt. This paralyzing mixture of emotions is often so devastating to our psyches that we, in that moment, make an unconscious decision NEVER to let such a thing happen again… Our unconscious minds, in trying to protect us from such a devastating event, exaggerates the feelings of fear and we end up with a feeling of terror… In Ewy’s case, this event marked the start of her intense bird phobia.

From that day onwards, whenever she would see a bird (especially one in flight) she would, on a deep unconscious level, be reminded of the 5-year-old’s terrible experience and would feel the intense terror she had now associated with it.
Now, in Ewy’s case, regardless how much therapy or relaxation she would do, there was a part inside of her that was unwilling to release her fear due to the child’s intense fear of re-creating such a situation again.

Understanding that, during the session I guided Ewy through a series of processes to help her re-categorize the 5-year-old’s experience and to get her to now see it with an adult perspective. She was then able to release the shame and guilt she had been carrying around for all these years. Within just over an hour, Ewy had managed to fully change her perspectives - As you will see on the video, the same woman who said she would be happy if she could somehow just manage to be in the same environment as birds, suddenly found herself enjoying playing with a bird and having it perched on her finger.

It truly was a wonderful treat working with Ewy, not only just because we got to see her finally getting over her phobia, but even more-so because we watched her, before our very eyes, re-connecting with the young girl inside of her – The little girl who always loved birds and considered them to be beautiful and wonderful… A little girl that had been suppressed by fear for WAY too long!

“Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go, It is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.”

In Esther’s case, her fear is what we call a “Learned Phobia”. That meaning that she never truly had any traumatic experiences concerning spiders herself, but rather she grew up in a house surrounded by people afraid of them. Because of this, she (as a child) simply learned that spiders are dangerous and fear-inspiring.

In many ways, such a phobia is harder to treat due to the fact that most of her fear was created only in her imagination based upon stories she heard and information she was fed by other phobics. As a matter of fact, her concept of spiders had made them into such fear-inspiring creatures that she imagined them having dozens of legs and other out-of-worldly (and terribly frightening) creature attributes and characteristics.
The point here is that she, having learned that spiders are scary at such a young age, became a victim to her childhood imaginings and was SO intensely afraid of spiders that she never got a chance to consider or study them to banish the misconceptions her mind had created.

Once I had become aware of how she manifested this phobia, I took her through a set of processes – Firstly, teaching her how to control her emotions and to get out of her mind’s terrible imaginings, then, under hypnosis had her begin to use her imagination to re-teach the young girl within her that spiders are simply animals and are not in and of themselves scary. Once her mind managed to conceive that, we then slowly re-taught her mind how to handle the shock of ever seeing a spider and, finally, I created within her a strong sense of comfort and had her attach that feeling to the thought of seeing a spider – In essence, re-programming the mind to have a different emotional response from that point forth.

Finally, once the session was complete, we had Esther meet up with “Daisy” a roughly 5-inch diameter pink-haired tarantula. We did a few finishing-touches on the work, eliminating her fears in the presence of such a large spider. All within 2 hours, Esther had moved from a person severely affected by a paralyzing phobia all the way to a strong, confident woman - fully and completely in her power and comfortable in the presence of a spider large enough to make for a house-pet.

The best part, though, is not Esther having found relief from her spider phobia.
More so, it is her now having a wonderful new perspective of being able to change a life-long fear in a matter of minutes and re-connecting with her inner confidence – THAT is the true gift she gave herself that day that will guarantee to change her future forever-more!

August 26th, 2008… I remember that day well. That was the day I ALMOST developed a bridge phobia.
My whole family woke up at 4:30 in the morning and there was a terrible rushing around the house to make sure everything was in order.
Laptops – Check ; Snacks – Check ; Warm Clothes – Check. We had to make sure we had everything we would need for the 6-hour wait in that terrible hospital family waiting area while my sister underwent her surgery. Of course she was as calm as could be – What did she have to do besides go to sleep for 6-hours?… I couldn’t say the same for my mom, though. She was trying to hide her nerves, but she was definitely more on-edge and excitable than your average mother hen. And, of course, trying to be strong for my family, I was trying to make the whole situation light-hearted and trying to distract everyone from any possible negative thoughts that may arise.
We get down to the car, pack it up and my father hands me the car keys – as he always does because he hates driving while its dark… No problem! – After all, I love driving and it’ll give me something to keep my mind on for the hour-long drive down to the hospital in Miami Beach.
So, we begin our drive down the I-95 freeway and all’s going great. No traffic this early in the morning. We’re all talking and trying to hide our inner-anxieties from each other.
THEN the darndest thing happens… As I drive over a bridge on the highway – The same bridge I must drive over at least 3 times in any given week… Yup!, that one! - my mind starts imagining that I might just drive the car over the side and kill my entire family.
I try and push the thought out of my mind… Think happy thoughts… Think Happy thoughts… Easter bunnies, jungle gyms, rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens… DARN IT, I’m so nervous I’m stealing lines from the movie “The Sound of Music” – But it doesn’t help… I start getting stuck in the thought that the bridge is too narrow and what if a tire were to burst and I were to lose control of the car… This REALLY sucks!!

I want to scream, but given the current mood in the car, I just wipe my INTENSELY sweaty palms on my jeans and keep trying to banter with my family – hoping they think the anxious break in my voice is nothing more than morning grogginess.
Thank god the entire bridge episode lasted no more than those eternal 60-seconds, but I was already dreading the thought of what would happen when I drove over the next bridge – After all, I’m a darn good hypnotist and I know how easily phobias can lock themselves in a person’s mind… Did I mention that THIS SUCKS?

So, we get to the hospital with no further complications from my side. Hand my sister over to the nurses, kiss her good luck and begin our tedious 6-hour wait.
While sitting there waiting, I turn to my girlfriend (who is an extremely gifted practitioner herself) and begin to tell her that it absolutely sucks that I think I might have just developed a bridge phobia and have to call Pavel as soon as I can to have him do one of our phobia-cure procedures on me. I truly must admit that I forget how wonderfully talented and insightful she is, though (to learn more about her, check out www.inthemomentcoach.com). She simply asks me one question – “Do you think this has to do with driving over the bridge, or do you think it might be about your sister dying in surgery?”
I mean, in telling you this story, I’m sure you have already very easily made that connection yourself, but when it’s all happening at once, your mind truly doesn’t notice the obvious. I quickly shrugged off the idea and said I didn’t think that was the case, but she simply asked me again if I was sure.
Was I sure? … NO!.. Not really… But my ego was already stuck in the thought that I was afraid of the bridge, not nervous about my sister going under the scalpel… What a silly question for her to ask TWICE now??

But I have to admit it - Thanks to her loving, very non-confrontational way of asking me, I considered the possibility and POOF! Just like magic, I got in touch with my REAL fears about my sister’s operation, her possible death, my needs to keep a strong face for my family’s sake, etc – All the things I had to bottle up to make it through that anxiety-filled morning without cracking… But my mind, being nervous and overwhelmed HAD to find an outlet – It began imagining driving off a bridge. Was I in ANY way afraid of that… NO! But, I was filled with anxiety and that was the easiest path for the fears to manifest themselves in my body.

Thankfully for my girlfriend’s keen insight and more-so her persistence at making me really consider that fact, I’ve never had a fear driving over bridges again because I truly dealt with the core issue that created the phobia in the first place.

And now, THAT is a point worth mentioning and considering… Imagine, for a moment that I did not overcome this phobia and did not have gifted healers such as Pavel or Diana (my girlfriend) around me. I would slowly, but surely have allowed my fears of driving over bridges make me more and more nervous of driving over one to the point that – at an extreme - I may have even developed an entire fear of driving at all – I’ve seen it happen to hundreds of people over the span of my career and the mental path one goes down to make that kind of phobia expand that way is, unfortunately, extremely easy to go down, but seemingly impossible to move back up.
But, THE absolute biggest point to consider FOR ANY PHOBIA is this… Regardless how much I would have rationalized about how safe bridges are, how unlikely it would be for me to have a tire blow-out right while I was on the bridge… I would never have been able to overcome this phobia.
Why? Because my underlying anxiety had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the bridge, it had to do with worry for my sister’s operation. So, I could tell myself how safe the bridge is, etc, BUT I would still be feeling anxious… However, I have my girlfriend completely ignore the bridge issue and say to me “you’re nervous over your sister’s operation – It’s okay, it’s scary… But she’ll be Ok” and my entire phobia crumbles like a sand-castle during high-tide.

The main point here is that most people try and rationalize their phobias away – “You shouldn’t be scared of spiders or doctors or bridges because…” and they try and find statistics to prove to themselves that the object of their fear is substantially safer than they feel it to be in their moment of panic… But the very definition of a phobia is “An exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation” … Consider that… ILLOGICAL… It’s not that it truly is illogical, rather that it defies rational reason why you are still afraid of that object or situation.

I am writing you this for one specific reason – Phobias can VERY EASILY BE HEALED… But, trying to rationalize with an irrational fear is about as smart as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble-gum! The only real way to heal a phobia is either by:
(a) Dealing with the REAL core fear that drives the phobia in the first place.
This way works fantastically well, the only problem with it is that it can sometimes be very hard to really get to the core anxiety that created the phobia and to heal it properly. That is one of the AMAZING powers of either a very gifted, insightful healer and, as Pavel and I like to sometimes use – Hypno-analysis – The process of using hypnosis to take you back to the original time and have you re-examine the original incident to see other factors that you may have missed back then.
Or, the other, oftentimes, almost instant cure:
(b) Dealing with the EMOTIONS driving the phobia rather than the thoughts.
The point here is that regardless what the core underlying issue was that created my phobia (in this story’s case – my anxiety over my sister having an operation), the emotions are very real!
So, if you simply move beyond trying to rationalize away the logic of the phobia and, rather, manage to release or “move away” from the EMOTIONS… you are cured! - No need for analyzing how or where it started. Simply no longer under the power of the fear in the first place.

This is why I wish to tell you and tell you clearly… PHOBIAS CAN BE HEALED!
Not only can they be healed, but oftentimes in less than an hour and most other times in less than a couple of hours for the stubborn ones.
If you are in the South Florida area and have a phobia you would like to heal (or know someone else that does), please contact us and if we have space in our 44phobic roster, you might even get you phobia cured absolutely for free.
If you are not in our area, have a look in your area for a phobia specialist. Now that you understand how a phobia should be treated, you can interview them to see if they are truly capable of helping you or contact us and we’ll do our very best to try and help you find a good practitioner and end this suffering once and for all… You deserve that, don’t you think?

If you (or someone you know) are suffering from a phobia and are in the South Florida region, please fill in your information in the “Become One Of The 44″ section above and we will personally contact you to discuss your eligibility.

Thank you.
Ori & Pavel