Mark Cunningham - The Power of Pleasure Webinar Notes

Why pleasure?

When they refer to pleasure, its not only sexual pleasure. Mark Cunningham often leads with  sexual pleasure, but pleasure can be anything that is highly desirous. 

·  The gratification you get off selflessly serving others is pleasure. 

·  The drive to be successful is a type of pleasure.

·  The drive to be seen as successful is another type of pleasure.

You can plug in any pleasurable state with meaning to your subject and it will work just as well. What are the things that when you work with your clients that they want more of?

Why pleasure as opposed to something like intellectual curiosity?

Intellectual curiosity can be satisfied. Pleasure can not. The more you get, the more you want. You can't run out of it because its internally generated.

We are hard wired for pleasure. In the absence of a harsh environment pleasure is what we almost always default to. As long as your basic animal sustenance needs are met, you go for pleasure.

Habits are based in pleasure. You get pleasure out of performing the routine.

But aren't negative habits bad?

Good and bad does not exist to your subconscious. What we interpret as bad habits are our subconscious efforts to drive you towards some goal (which leads to pleasure, or will result in pleasure), regardless of whether you consciously agree or not.

Mark Cunningham's Own style

Mark Cunningham has moved away from most traditional hypnotic methods and has made conditioning with pleasure his main method. He disagrees with older methods of hypnosis where hypnotists would take their clients deeply into the same problem they want to escape. He believes its unethical to take clients into a resource poor state, as some hypnotists do this to keep their customers.

Cunningham now leads with pleasure conditioning techniques and uses only specific regression techniques and blind therapy to harvest what he wants out of the past or simply let it go.

His greatest challenge isn't getting people over their past, its opening them up to pleasure in the first place. His experience is that people in the western world are conditioned to not feel pleasure, or screen it out. If he can get them feeling good about one thing, he can get them to branch out. Then he attaches pleasure to different objects and different behaviors. Then they become disinterested in their past.

Instead of acting like what took place in the past is so important, he's found that leading with pleasure, enhancing the imagination, amping up their physical responsiveness and then leading them into new scenarios where he can use their imagination, responsiveness and overwhelming pleasure is much more effective.

Mark tells the story of how he used pleasure conditioning on a waitress at his favorite restaurant. He noticed that the waitress was chronically tense, so he inquired about her past and found out that she had been in lots of abusive relationships. [Note: I thought this was ridiculously powerful, although there was no How-To] He told her to imagine those same guys and that force that was drawing her to them so powerfully, then he took that emotion and applied it to her taking care of herself, her 3 kids, being happy at work etc.

Average people love feeling pleasure. They remember how you made them feel and they do things for you.

What is conditiong with pleasure?

Conditioning with pleasure is the process of replacing value systems with something that is forward moving and removes positive feedback from external factors in people's lives to internal factors. Instead of having happiness being attached to what other people think of them, how their last conversation went, etc, its attached to am I making progress, am I achieving my goals, am I reinforcing my goals with pleasure?

One of the criticisms of Mark's hypnosis style is that pleasure removes the element of choice, which isn't true. Early conditioning is very powerful and may inhibit pleasure conditioning. But the day to day stuff is taken care of by pleasure conditioning.

Question about Mark Cunningham's Product Renegade Hypnotist Project

You don't sit women down and do complete sessions. Renegade Hypnotism is just a form of communication that is tremendously persuasive. You can convince women to do anything that is beneficial to them.

Conditioning with pleasure in the context of The Renegade Hypnotist Project is not just for orgasms. Orgasms are the party trick, the cool thing that brings about something much better: it opens women up to deep personality and identity change.

In the Renegade Hypnotist project, Mark usually shoots 7 videos with each girl. He spends videos 1-4 hypnotizing them to achieve multiple, awesome orgasms. Videos 5-7 are spent creating identity changes that will improve the woman's life. The women are more open to the identity change because they've orgasmed. 

Mark never turns off his hypnotism skills. Even in casual settings he will practice pacing and leading, and varying his voice tonality to create even small level changes. It can be as small as getting a woman to hug you and feel pleasure when doing so.

Notes on state control:
Stop taking yourself so seriously. Stop paying attention to the thoughts in your head. Continue looking for opportunities to practice. Instead of thinking “target”, must approach, think “opportunity”. Are they thinking something that can be redirected towards me?

Mark slows down immensely because his natural state moves way too fast. He slows down to begin noticing opportunities.

Question: Is conditioning with pleasure useful for things like weight loss, depression, quitting smoking?

Short answer: yes. Mark says not to rely on only sexual pleasure. For things of this nature you want to focus on the pleasure of success and other forms of pleasure.

Question about Skype sessions:
Mark only does Skype sessions with people he's already worked with because they've already been conditioned to his voice, his eyes and his face. Skype sessions are difficult because of the lack of touch and it requires a change in technique. He's not able to take people into the depth of trance that he would be able to in person with first sessions. It requires more work to do things over Skype.

Question: How long does the pleasure last after being hypnotized?

It depends on the quality of your work. If you've really made a client FEEL that pleasure deeply, its very powerful. If you give them ways to reinforce their pleasure by themselves it lasts longer as well. You want to build in reinforcing methods into your work like “every time you pass by a mirror you will see the person you are becoming and feel pleasure”

Question: Can these techniques be done in conversation without need for a formal induction?

Mark says absolutely. He tells this story of when he went to go buy a car.

Before buying the car Mark spent a lot of time looking over specifications like the weight of the motor, handling, horse power, etc. After going through several cars, he sat down in one car in particular was like “oh yeah!” and the salesman immediately picked up on it and said “Feels good, huh?”

During the entire test drive the salesman did not try to sell Mark the car. He just talked to him about how enjoyable the driving was and how enjoyable driving is in general. He was conditioning Mark to feel pleasure while driving the car! Mark sold himself the car. When they got back to the dealer Mark wanted the exact car he was sitting in, not the same model, or the same year, but that particular car his ass was in.

The salesman used some very basic hypnotic principles. He noticed what Mark was paying attention to, what he was responding to, and simply fed that back to him or offered him more scope and opportunities to talk about what he liked about the car and the experience. He was a genius salesman because he got out of his own way.

Mark tells another story of a hypnotist who wanted to learn to sell cars. He drives up to a country club with his Mercedes, parks it right outside the window, walks into the bar and loudly and cheerfully announces “Who wants to feel good!” By allowing people to sit in the car and drive it he got quite a few people to buy Mercedes and he wasn't even a car dealer.

Question: What is the limit of conditioning with pleasure when working with clients?

In a practical sense, if your client passes out, stop! While pleasure is internally generated, things like orgasms do have a physical cost. Mark says that he can make a woman orgasm for a whole hour, but that is something that needs to be worked up to, as trying that immediately can cause a comatose state, or make someone pass out.

Another limit is after installing an orgasm trigger such as “you will orgasm whenever I say so” if you keep using it eventually the woman will come to resent the trigger and actively fight against it.

Question: how do you use pleasure in your own Self Development work?

Remember to invest a lot of pleasure into your goals by using your imagination. Reward yourself by allowing yourself time to play after completing goals.

Notes:
Emotions are just the physiological responses to our thoughts and nothing more.

Pleasure hypnosis makes you a lot less neurotic. Once people start getting their needs met through pleasure hypnosis their neuroses start dropping away.

When working with a dominant person, the best way to go is to use indirect suggestions