Stevenson’s Hypnosis Show / In Defense of the “Lucky” Girl
Earlier this year, Stevenson’s Resident Activity Committee (RAC) organized a hypnosis show in Keck Auditorium which featured Dr. Dave Hill, a world-renowned hypnotist who has performed over 15,000 hypnosis shows around the country in the past 25 years. This random activity attracted a large crowd of spectators eager to decipher whether hypnosis was legit or not. While this show posed a fun opportunity to deduce that, it also ended up being a lesson on the power of belief-driven transformation. Much like TikTok’s "Lucky Girl" manifestation trend, Hill’s hypnosis show emphasizes the power of the subconscious mind in influencing our actions and even achieving our wildest dreams, revealing just how powerful the mind can be when we are aware of it and when we cultivate it.
There was a very mysterious air upon entering the environment, music playing as if Dr. Hill was already priming the audience into a state of relaxation. The show started off with Dr. Hill choosing about twenty people in the crowd who seemed eager and ready to be hypnotized in front of an audience. To my surprise, Hill would cue a series of commands that most students would follow, such as sleeping on command. What at first seemed like a fun opportunity to see a TV trope fall hilariously flat proved to be a true case of mind control and a complete and utterly embarrassing event.
Chanel Estrada is hypnotized to sleep (Video Credit: Henry Parker)
What intrigued me the most about the show was not quite the fact that hypnosis was real, but more so the end of the show, which reminded me of some ideas that I had previously familiarized myself with during my journey of self-improvement last year. After a series of ridiculously funny cues that involved unconsciously singing all of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, barking on all fours, smelling people’s armpits, or screaming while going on an insanely high roller coaster, Dr. Dave Hill willed these subjects into a process known as posthypnotic suggestion.
A posthypnotic suggestion is when the hypnotist gives the subject a suggestion or affirmation while they are still hypnotized with the intention that the suggestion will influence their thoughts, behaviors, and feelings after the session ends. It is designed to help the individual achieve their goals or improve aspects of their life right before they are brought out of their hypnotic state. These students were cued into vividly envisioning their biggest goals with very specific instructions.
The reason this caught my attention was because of its parallel to an idea that has been circulating the pop culture world for some time now, an idea that you have likely come across if you are active on social media: manifestation. Manifestation is the process of materializing specific desires or goals by channeling focused thoughts, beliefs, and actions into reality. In other words, you can positively think your way into getting whatever it is that you desire. The pop culture parallel becomes even more clear when considering it in relation to the methodology behind Dr. Dave Hill’s hypnosis show:
How did Dr. Hill choose his subjects from such a large crowd of people? What makes a good hypnosis candidate?
How did Dr. Hill decide who not to choose?
“Oh you have two hands up, you can definitely come up” It was about who was willing to buy into it, you’re only hypnotized because you’re allowing it to happen, you’re accepting the cues.
Why were some people clearly hypnotized and not others?
How does the concept of manifestation give us a better understanding of the reality and science behind hypnosis? And how can we use something so strange and seemingly fictionalized to our advantage?
Lucky Girl TikTok Trend
What the end of the hypnosis show reminded me of was a much newer trend that exists in the same vein, but is much more recent: The Lucky Girl Trend. The Lucky Girl Trend is a form of manifestation that involves people reciting daily affirmations, particularly the phrase “I am so lucky,” with the belief that it will attract positive outcomes into their lives.
Video Credit: Lauren Bulloch on TikTok
The Origin of the Lucky Girl Trend
"It is common to come across people who practice manifestation by furiously scribbling whatever they are trying to attract into a notebook... but it is not because they literally believe that doing these things will magically attract what they want... They do these things in order to reprogram their subconscious minds.
Manifestation and reciting positive affirmations, although having gained a lot of recent popularity, are not new concepts. They are derived directly from 1) New Thought Philosophy and 2) the 12 Laws of the Universe. The New Thought Philosophy, which emerged in the early 19th century focuses on the idea that people can use the power of their thoughts, or “right thinking” to improve their lives and heal illness. Also connected to New Thought Philosophy, and more directly related to the Lucky Girl, is The 12 Laws of the Universe which are defined as universal principles that guide spiritual growth and transformation. The Lucky Girl Trend draws directly on the following laws:
The Law of Assumption: The idea that what we assume to be true becomes our reality.
The Law of Attraction: Arguably the most well-known Law of the Universe, the idea that like attracts like; by focusing on positive thoughts, you attract positive outcomes while focusing on negative thoughts attracts negative outcomes.
The Law of Correspondence: The Law of Correspondence is the idea that what you think and feel in your conscious and subconscious mind is what you create on the outside.
These laws all focus on the common understanding that whatever is happening on the inside is what manifests on the outside, the basis for posthypnotic suggestion as well as the Lucky Girl mindset. It is common to come across people who practice manifestation by furiously scribbling whatever they are trying to attract into a notebook or saying affirmations of what they desire out loud, but it is not because they literally believe that doing these things will magically attract what they want, as if they are conjuring up some magical spell. They do these things in order to reprogram their subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is the part of your mind that makes decisions and influences, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors without conscious effort. This is the aspect of your mind that is influenced by hypnosis and positive affirmations.
One example of what our subconscious minds are responsible for are the beliefs that form our perception of ourselves. If you are constantly seeing a particular body type being positively represented in the media and put on a pedestal, that may form the belief in your head that having that body type is better. Continuously getting bombarded with media that affirms that belief may subconsciously influence you into thinking that you are of less value if you do not have that body type.
The Power of the Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind is important because it dictates your actions, meaning that you will only seek out realities that affirm whatever you think. For example, if you think that you don’t deserve good things, you might have trouble accepting compliments and developing happy relationships. This is where the idea of reprogramming your subconscious mind comes into play. If you want to achieve something, it usually starts with internalizing a particular set of beliefs, because you can only achieve something as long as you have thoughts or beliefs pointed toward achieving that thing. Thus, by repeating affirmations like “I am so lucky” daily, these TikTok users are filtering ideas into their subconscious mind with the belief that they will naturally align themselves with these positive ideas.
This is what Dr. Hill was emphasizing during his posthypnotic suggestion sector: the idea that you can create your own positive reality through positive thinking. Since hypnosis at its core is an intense state of relaxation that provides a window into the subconscious mind, Dr. Hill was capitalizing off of this wide window by implementing an abundance of positive beliefs into the subconscious without the interference of limiting thoughts from the outside world. He asks people to imagine themselves actually achieving their goals so that once they are out of the trance, they will ideally align themselves with the behaviors that they think are synonymous with attaining their desired outcomes.
In Defense of the Lucky Girl
While inherently positive, The Lucky Girl trend tends to receive a lot of backlash for being unrealistic or just straight-up fictitious. Most people tend to point out the idea that while positive thinking is powerful, it can also be misguided or even exploited if not practiced properly. However, despite all these criticisms, I think the overarching idea that the Lucky Girl, manifestation, and posthypnotic suggestion emphasize can be transformative for our current age.
Hypnosis and manifestation are not mind control or magic tricks, they rely on a basic idea of positive thinking that everyone can benefit from. However, it not only relies on positive thought but something way more transformative: radical belief. Radical belief is the idea that anyone can manifest positive things for themselves as long as they believe they can. People argue that hypnotic suggestion is mind control because of the assumption that you lose control to the
hypnotist, however, we don’t actually accept suggestions we don’t want; hypnosis itself does not work if you do not believe in it. Dr. Hill chose people based on how eager and open he perceived them to be towards hypnosis, and anyone who actively resisted was asked to leave because hypnosis– especially posthypnotic suggestion– is fundamentally based in belief.
The belief that you deserve good things is the natural precursor to actually accepting good things into your life. This belief is critical in boosting our perception of ourselves and combating the attitude of negativity and self-deprecation that is laden in our current culture. It is so often that we limit ourselves according to ideas of what we think we can do or think we deserve, however this is not synonymous with our actual capabilities. It’s easier to limit ourselves only because we have been conditioned to. While the Lucky Girl may seem silly, she packages the power of reprogramming your subconscious mind in a way that is empowering and accessible to anyone who dares to chase their dreams.
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