Chevreul’s Pendulum in Hypnotherapy

Chevreul’s Pendulum Proves that Your Imagination Is In Charge of Your Thinking!

Michel-Eugene Chevreul was a well known French natural scientist who in 1833 investigated the ‘occult’ pendulum phenomenon and gave it a plausible scientific explanation.

His investigations showed that the strange “behaviours” exhibited by the pendulum effect are due to a perfectly natural human reaction, but a reaction with such interesting effects that it almost borders on magic.

This subsequently became known as “Coue’s Law of Reversed Effort”. (After Emile Coue)

Chevreul found that if you imagine something intensely, then the human body behaves in a way as if the imagined situation has already occurred.

Today, we use Chevreuls Pendulum to demonstrate that whenever there is a “conflict” between your conscious “desire” and your “imagination” that it is the outcomes that you imagine happening that tend to become the outcomes you experience.

This is pretty unhelpful if you always imagine things going wrong for you!

The chevreuls pendulum experiment is very simple, a child could carry it out, and it proves the following:

• The subconscious can effect physical movements not under control of the conscious.
• That the actions will be sustained by the subconscious with, without, or despite the interference of the conscious will.
• That the subconscious can be trained by repetition.

Chevreuls Pendulum – The experiment

To carry out Chevreuls Pendulum, take a piece of paper or card and draw a circle 40 cm square. Mark A at the top of the circle, C at the bottom. B to the right and D to the left of the circle. Join up each letter with a line, so that you have a cross inside a circle.

Take a piece of sewing cotton 30 – 40 cm long – don’t use string it is too thick. Attach a small weight, something like a wedding ring, to the bottom of the thread and then attach the other end of the thread to a knitting needle or twig (or similar) about 30 cm long itself – like a “fishing rod”.

The power of your imagination v your conscious will

Place the diagram on the floor at your feet and hold the little “fishing rod” so the you are looking down on the centre of the circle with the ring on the end of the thread directly over the “cross hairs”.

Keep your arm as still as possible and just concentrate on one of the “swing” lines.. The moire you think of the line and the less you think of the ring, the more the ring will swing in that direction. Try thinking of the other swing line direction (say D-B rather than A-C) and the ring should swing along that line instead.

Now change your concentration to following the circle itself so that the ring ends us swinging in a circular path – say A-B-C-D.

Finally, now try to “say” to yourself (your conscious will) that the swinging motion will NOT happen whilst still imagining the swinging action. Coue’s Law will make you repeatedly fail!

So remember, if your conscious mind wants one thing, and your imagination says the opposite, your imagination will be the outcome you get.

When you think about this phenomenon, it doesn’t take a massive leap of intellectual faith to realise that if a person can learn how to manage their imaginations more effectively, then if the imagined outcomes are what we generally experience, then by always imagining fantastic outcomes rather than disasters we should all be able to dramatically improve our life experiences.

We can help you to develop the skills to manage your thinking (including your imagination) so much more effectively that it will have a significant impact on the way you feel.