Tall, graceful, with a gentle smile, hypnotherapist Danijela Radonic Bhandari (38) is someone who puts you at ease instantly. The effervescent lady has a mission on her hands, to spread awareness on hypnosis and give it due recognition as a form of psychological therapy. 

Having been through some harrowing times as a teenage Serbian refugee being brought up in Croatia, she believes that war and pain were the catalysts that made her take to spiritualism and alternative medicine. The lady, who has made Bangalore her home for last one year, remembers how she picked up the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse when she was still in primary school and went deep into the world of prayer, meditation and humanitarian service. After medical school, Danijela worked in a dental clinic for eight years but always wanted to know more about alternative medicine.  Exploring better prospects she moved to Dubai and then to Nepal where she would sneak time out to study healing courses, while continuing with her regular job. She also did a course at the Indian Institute of Alternative Medicine in Kolkata.

She was managing one of Nepal’s biggest spa and holistic centres before moving to India. Fate took a harsh turn when she was diagnosed with acute arthritis. Danijela opted for homoeopathy and hypnotherapy to rescue cure herself. The therapy worked beautifully and the pain vanished miraculously. This inspired Danijela to do a course in clinical hypnotherapy in New Delhi at the Indian branch of the California Hypnosis Institute.

“Going through hypnosis and doing the intensive one year course have made me learn more about myself and now it’s my turn to spread awareness about this much misunderstood therapy. Unfortunately, magicians and so called mass hypnosis have given it a bad name and there is fear attached to it,” says Danijela.

Being a practitioner of regular meditation and visualisations, Danijela holds free meditation sessions at her home every Thursday. She combines some spiritual practices with her clinical hypnotherapy sessions. Her gentle sense of humour, compassion and sensitivity makes her session productive and joyful for her patients.

Danijela is eager to dispel some popular myths and misconceptions about hypnosis. She says it is a completely safe and harmless form of psychological therapy. It is a state of altered awareness, not sleep or unconsciousness. Your conscious mind gives a large degree of control to your sub conscious mind. You are in control of your body and mind during hypnosis. It is officially recognised and approved by the British Medical Association and American Medical Association.

Danijela says hypnosis relaxes you completely and many feel a deep inner calm. “Deep hypnosis is similar in many ways to the kind of profound trance felt by yogis or meditation experts. The best way to learn about it is to experience it,” she says. It is a branch of psychotherapy; it is not an occult or esoteric science. Registered clinical psychotherapist sometime uses hypnosis as well to achieve results and breakthroughs with patients. Danijela uses an integrated approach and combines direct verbal suggestions or visualisations and even past life regression techniques.

The most common fear is that someone will get ‘stuck’ in a hypnotic state. What if the therapist gets a heart attack during a session? “You never get permanently stuck day dreaming, do you? Everyone comes out of hypnosis in a relaxed state, no matter what. People fear that they are going to expose themselves by spilling the beans, so to speak, but that is not the case. A client has the freedom to speak aloud or remain silent during sessions. Anyone who is capable of focused attention and truly wants some help in their life can and will get hypnotised. However we hypnotise only those who want it,” asserts Danijela.

Hypnosis can even be used on older children to help alter or improve their study habits; it is commonly used by her to sort out relationship issues, all kinds of addictions and more.

She uses a voice recorder to record what has been said by the patient. Getting to the point of origin of the problem and removing deep set fears helps in healing.

The mind is a very powerful tool, make it your friend and trust in the process of life. Trusting one’s therapist is vital and one can be assured of total privacy and confidentiality. 

Wife of a jet setting hotelier, Ranvir Bhandari, Danijela manages to balance her work and inner life with parties and hectic socialising, with amazing grace and elan. She turned vegetarian a decade ago and you will find her holding a glass of chilled green tea instead of white wine at many a party! When she’s not hypnotising people, she likes to go scuba diving or dancing. Making time for social work and charity is also what Danijela does on a regular basis. Being a former refugee, she knows what it is like to have nothing literally overnight.



If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic. 

A new review of the scientific literature studying hypnosis, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, by Oakley and Halligan, discusses the potential for hypnosis to provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition and also to produce informative analogues of clinical conditions. This is a critical discussion as hypnosis is used as a psychological treatments and, recently, as an investigative tool in cognitive neuroscience.

An iconic vision of the menacing magician involves placing a hapless person from the audience into a hypnotic trance. Svengali. You are getting sleeeepy. A scam, right? Not so fast. According to to this new review, as well as our colleagues who study the brains of people who are prone to trancelike states, hypnosis is not necessarily hocus-pocus. The age-old practice profoundly alters neural circuits involved in perception and decision making, changing what people see, hear, feel, and believe to be true. Recent experiments led people who were hypnotized to “see” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought they were gibberish.

Some of the critical experiments were led by Amir Raz, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, who is an amateur magician. Raz wanted to do something really impressive that other neuroscientists could not ignore. So he hypnotized people and gave them the Stroop test. In this classic paradigm, you are shown words in block letters that are colored red, blue, green, or yellow. But here’s the rub. Sometimes the word “red” is colored green. Or the word “yellow” is shown in blue. You have to press a button stating the correct color. Reading is so deeply engrained in our brains that it will take you a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like “red” and press a button that says “green.”*

Sixteen people, half of them highly hypnotizable and half of them resistant, came into Raz’s lab. (The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance.) After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Raz gave them these instructions:

Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green, or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self.

Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion—an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, they entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when the instruction came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, Raz said. They saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But those who were resistant to hypnosis could not override the conflict, he said. The Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. In the hypnotizables, Raz found, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict. Most of the time people see what they expect to see and believe what they already believe—unless hypnosis trips up their brain circuitry. Most of the time, bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, but hypnosis creates a mismatch. You imagine something different, so it is different.

The top-down nature of human cognition goes far to explain not only hypnosis but also the extraordinary powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor can make you ill), talk therapy, meditation, and magical stagecraft. We are not saying that hypnosis can cure your cancer, but these effects all demonstrate that suggestion can physically alter brain function.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

If one of your goals this year is to quit smoking you couldn’t do anything better for your health. As you probably already know quitting is far from easy. Tobacco is the most addictive drug in the world, and nicotine is one of the strongest stimulants known.

Several of the most successful methods – acupuncture, hypnosis, nicotine gum, cold turkey, support groups – can work, but are not for everyone. It is important to note that most smokers who quit successfully do it on their own after one or more unsuccessful attempts and most find that stopping cold turkey is better than trying to cut down gradually.


According to the American Cancer Society, if you’re considering nicotine gum or the patch, you’re better off choosing the gum if you want to avoid periodic cravings (you tend to smoke at irregular intervals) and need something to occupy your hands. You may want to consider using the patch if you smoke at regular intervals and don’t want to chew gum.

Another strategy you may want to check out is http://www.stickk.com. This website helps people achieve their goals and objectives by enabling them to form Commitment Contracts.

Whatever method you choose, if you don’t succeed immediately, recognize that few people manage to stop smoking on their first try and that the best predictor for eventual success is making repeated attempts to quit.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

Hypnotic relaxation therapy can help the sex lives of postmenopausal women who are experiencing moderate to severe hot flashes, according to a new study.

The findings demonstrate yet another benefit to hypnotic relaxation therapy, shown in other studies to reduce anxiety, relieve stress and help with insomnia. With hypnosis, a person is drawn into a deeply relaxed state, with the suspension of their critical faculties.

For the study, conducted by Baylor University researchers, 187 women were randomly assigned to receive either 5 weekly sessions of hypnotic relaxation therapy or supportive counseling, said lead researcher Aimee Johnson, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, in a press release.

Those in the hypnotic relaxation therapy group were hypnotized, and heard suggestions for relaxation, coolness and mental imagery. Those who received counseling talked about their symptoms with a therapist but did not receive hypnosis.

The women were asked to complete questionnaires at the start of the study, at the end of treatment and at a 12-week follow-up. They were asked about everything from their hot flashes to their ability to experience sexual intimacy.

“The most common complaints are being too tired, anxiety, depression, hot flashes and the fear of close contact,” said Dr. Gary Elkins, director of Baylor's Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory, in a press release. Because warmth that comes from closeness can trigger a hot flash, some women begin to fear intimacy, he said.

Elkins noted that, as a result of the study, women might have an alternative to hormone replacement therapy, which has a risk of cancer and heart disease.

At the end of treatment, women who had received hypnotic relaxation therapy reported significantly greater sexual satisfaction and pleasure, as well as less discomfort. This improvement also was evident at the 12-week follow-up assessment.

“Women’s sexual health improved, whether because of sleeping better, less stress or fewer hot flashes, or perhaps other unknown mechanisms,” Elkins said.

Researchers noted that many factors besides hot flashes can impact postmenopausal sexual health including fatigue, self-esteem and a lack of interest.

For many women -- such as those who have had breast cancer -- hormone replacement therapy is not an option for menopause-related symptoms. Estrogen, for example, has been associated with more rapid growth of breast cancer.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

A previous study, also by Baylor University, found that hypnotic relaxation therapy can reduce hot flashes by 80 percent.

What do you think? Have you tried hypnotic relaxation therapy? Let us know in comments.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

A woman in Italy was successfully anaesthetised via hypnosis ahead of undergoing skin cancer surgery, in an operation hailed Thursday as a landmark by local media.

The procedure was performed in Padua by Enrico Ferro, Professor of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at the northern Italian town's university. It took 10 minutes to hypnotize the 42-year-old patient, while the surgery lasted 20 minutes.

"When the patient was de-hypnotised, she reported no pain and was discharged immediately," Ferro wrote in an article on Anaesthesia, a scientific journal.

"Our case confirms the efficacy of hypnosis and demonstrates that it may be valuable as a sole anaesthetic method in selected cases," the professor added.

Speaking on RAI radio, Ferro explained his method. "You concentrate (the patient's) attention on a single thing," so as to distract them from everything else, including pain, he said.

Hypnosis is unlikely to work on 10 to 15 per cent of the population, he indicated. A further 10 to 15 per cent is "highly" sensitive to it, while the rest of the population has "average" sensitivity.

The woman who was operated in Padua fell into the "average" category, Ferro said.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.