From June 11 to 13, the Dave Elman Legacy Global Zoom Conference will take place with many groundbreaking topics and illustrious speakers – including Hansruedi Wipf, OMNI Instructor, Owner & President of Hypnose.NET GmbH. As the official successor to Gerald F. Kein, probably the most renowned student of Dave Elman, Hansruedi Wipf will give an insight into the legacy of the great masters of hypnosis. In an interview, Hansruedi Wipf explains the legacy he has inherited from Gerald F. Kein and how he has developed it further.
Hansruedi, in 2012 you followed in the footsteps of Gerald F. Kein, one of the great pioneers of hypnosis. What does this mean for you?
Gerald F. Kein learned the art of hypnosis as a 13-year-old directly from Dave Elman, probably the most important hypnotist of the 20th century. Jerry Kein refined the methods developed by Dave Elman, expanded them, supplemented them and taught them from 1979 at the OMNI Hypnosis Training Center, which he and his wife founded. Dave Elman became a widely known name, and Gerald F. Kein and OMNI became the epitome of cause-oriented, uncovering hypnosis and hypnotherapy, not only in the USA, but also in Europe, Asia, South America and even Africa.
As the successor to Gerald F. Kein, I remain true to his legacy of easy-to-learn but highly effective and cause-oriented regression, while at the same time continuing to write the history of hypnosis with OMNI. So I also want to promote modernization and progress in hypnosis. Because if something works well, you should also be open to developing it further. With this in mind, we have also established HypnoWaving® (bilateral hemispheric stimulation), Parts Therapy and Ultra-Healing® as pioneering methods at OMNI. But in the end, it’s still about the same thing, namely helping a person quickly with simple, reproducible and convincing hypnosis methods. The simplicity of application and the results that speak for themselves will continue to be the key to how hypnotherapy will establish itself on the market.
How are you developing this legacy?
Simply following in the footsteps of Gerald F. Kein would not be right, of course. In order to be authentic and to bring my own personality into the company and the training, I have set my own accents. Jerry Kein has always encouraged me to develop OMNI further. The successful ISO 9001 certification, for example, was one step in this direction and the HypnoScience® project was another, along with many others, such as the digitalization of our offering.
It is very important to me to make modern hypnotherapy accessible to a broad section of the population and to show that the solution to so many everyday problems lies within people themselves. It is incredibly important that we humans take on more personal responsibility again and do not delegate it. Long-term therapies, medical or surgical interventions should only be used in the second or third instance or avoided altogether. Hypnotherapy should become the most important method in people’s repertoire to help themselves, with the support of a competent hypnotherapist.
My aim is also to establish the regression methods in such a way that they are available in the toolbox of every competent hypnotherapist and can be applied expertly, regardless of their language or culture. By further standardizing modern hypnosis methods, we can establish clear, simple and understandable processes and thus achieve reproducible and comparable results. What we do must be measurable and scientifically substantiated. We have already taken the first step towards scientificity with the HypnoScience® project by scientifically proving that there is not just one state of hypnosis, but at least two, and that these can be reproduced under comparable conditions.
What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind at some point?
My legacy should be an OMNI organization that has positioned itself on the market independently of individuals and is built on a solid foundation. After taking over OMNI from Gerald F. Kein and developing it further for many years, I retired from operational management last year in order to concentrate fully on training professional and competent hypnotherapists.
OMNI has continued to write the history of hypnosis by scientifically proving the hypnotic state and will continue to do so in the future by promoting the acceptance of hypnosis as a form of therapy among the general public and establishing the profession of hypnotherapist in Switzerland. There is still a lot to do!
At some point, I too will pass on the OMNI legacy. And I hope that the many OMNI hypnotherapists will treat this legacy responsibly and always be aware that they are not only changing lives, but also the world.
Hansruedi Wipf
Owner & President of Hypnose.NET GmbH and OMNI Hypnosis International
