Many people associate aging with fading — in vitality and looks.  This is an incorrect association. It is based on correlation not causation. Beauty in 40+, 50+, 60+, and even 70+ women (and men) deteriorates from an avoidable breakdown in the mind-body connection. Not the passing of time!

Wine, properly stored, becomes more exquisite and valuable — sometimes to thousands of dollars a bottle — over time.  Improperly stored, wine sours. The same is true for people. Aging can make you more, not less, vital and beautiful. It all depends on how you do it.

Think of yourself as “vintage,” not “old.” Then learn a thrillingly simple secret how to use aging to become more exquisite. You can reverse the “age fade.” You can become more beautiful. (For men: handsome). 

There are many ways to harness the mind-body connection to turn aging into one of refinement not deterioration. Keeping, regaining, and enhancing one’s youthfulness and beauty have been a compelling quest from ancient times. Remember Ponce de Leon’s quest for the Fountain of Youth? Today Americans spend $250 billion dollars a year for rejuvenating (and youth-emulating) goods and services. 

Youthful beauty doesn’t have to be expensive. Most of that quarter-trillion dollars is spent on cosmetics and cosmetic procedures. There is a better way. It’s “all in your mind.”  So … how to enjoy it?

One well-established way to youthfulness is hypnosis. Before addressing how hypnosis works to grow younger looking and feeling, and more beautiful (or handsome), first let’s dispose of a few common myths.

Thanks to Hollywood, hypnosis has a reputation for being a little kooky and spooky. It’s not. It is just the West’s home-grown equivalent to yoga and meditation. The Scottish physician who coined the word “hypnosis,” James Braid, found, according to his Wikipedia biography, “analogies between his own practice of hypnotism and various forms of Hindu yoga meditation and other ancient spiritual practices.”

Yogis, mediators, and hypnotists were said to enter into a “trance.” Your authors (two people internationally recognized as top hypnotists), never say “trance.”  “Trance” implies a state of semi-consciousness. Instead, we say “reverie,” which our dictionary defines “being pleasantly lost in thought.”

Yoginis, meditators, and hypnotists know that the state entered is one of deep relaxation (as one experiences in massage) coupled with acute awareness (as one experiences in having your attention fascinated by a great movie). 

A hypnotized person never becomes vulnerable to “mind control.” And there is no risk of getting “stuck” any more than you can get “stuck” in a movie. 

Myths dispelled, what might hypnosis have to do with using the mind-body connection for growing younger? The mind-body connection has enormous potency for your body, vitality and, as it turns out, youthfulness (including beauty). Psychologist Robert Morgan (with whom we are not affiliated) recounts one small controlled experiment.

In his book Training the Time Sense: Hypnosis and Conditioning (2005) http://www.amazon.com/Training-Time-Sense-Conditioning-Approaches/dp/1885679106 Dr. Morgan writes:

“Three weeks after the hypnotic session the whole group retook the AGE test (designed to assess how their bodies were aging). The members of the control group showed modest changes in body age. No subject's score differed more than four points from her first score, and some of them tested 'older.' But every member of the hypnotized group enjoyed a drop in body age, from three to 18 years. The median drop was 11 years.”

Grow between 3 and 18 years younger? That’s an amazing claim. It’s also consistent with our direct experience. One of us is a grandmother. Since beginning to use hypnosis for youthfulness and beauty she has started to be mistaken for the sister, rather than mother, of her two fashion-model-beautiful 30-something daughters.

In hypnosis you sit comfortably in a chair listening to the voice of a hypnotist … in person, by phone, or by a recording. Let the hypnotist’s words guide you into the reverie and provide suggestions for a radiant complexion, a glowing smile, and a youthful gleam in your eyes. Yoga, meditation, qigong, and Ayurveda practitioners report comparable youth-creating effects. It’s the mind-body connection.

Why not use the mind-body connection to flabbergast your classmates at your 30th, 40th, or 50th High School reunion with your extraordinary youth and beauty? Why not use it to be mistaken for the sister of your daughters or brother of your sons? Hypnosis can be an easy, delicious, inexpensive and safe way to learn to radiate more youthful beauty (and handsomeness) as we age.

Don’t confuse aging with fading. Use your mind-body connection to harness the aging process to grow more youthfully vital. Use it to become like an exquisite vintage of the finest wine: a strikingly youthful vintage beauty. We can, indeed, grow younger and more beautiful!

Wendy Packer, from a New York City suburb, is an author, Registered Nurse, Reiki master, and consulting hypnotist. Ralph Benko, from suburban Washington, DC, is an author, writer, public policy advocate and trained hypnotist. Both are members of the National Guild of Hypnotists’ elite Order of Braid Council.  They are the founders and proprietors of hypnoticbeauty.com and its soon-to-be launched companion, hypnoticcharisma.com.