Breathing and Minimal Cues for Deep Rapport Building

I match the breathing from the start of the session and keep it matching. I won't match bad breathing patterns like coughing or an asthma attack etc, but normal breathing I match.

I will talk on the out breaths, unless I am going for an arm levitation when I give suggestions on the in breath. If someone is breathing too fast for me to be comfortable with I match every two breaths so that I do one whole in and out breath to every two of theirs.

I believe matching breathing is one of the most important things to match as it is such a fundamental process and it builds a really deep connection.

After matching breathing for some time I lead by deepening my breathing and lowering it down to my stomach as they now follow my lead.

I rarely stop matching the breathing (there are occasions I do but not often), I'll talk in time with their breathing, breathe in time with their talking, and breathe in time with their breathing.

It can be practiced in any situation where people are present. Go to public places and you can practice matching breathing of people there and also even more usefully you can practice noticing peoples breathing. With people that breathe really slowly it can be difficult to notice at first so practicing on hundreds of people every day really helps. You can then put people in different states just from matching (pacing) then leading their breathing...This can be fun to do with people in libraries, on benches, on buses or train journeys etc...

I remember an experience many years ago when a hypnotherapist said he couldn't enjoy being hypnotised by indirect hypnosis as his knowledge was such that he would notice what was going on and so his experience wasn't like the experience of trance spontaneously appearing to develop out of nowhere like his clients would have and like he used to have when he started out. He didn't believe it would be possible to experience that again.

I took this as a challenge. We sat discussing what he was saying and then carried on into 'ordinary conversation'.
As we were talking I kept asking questions I knew would make him go inside his mind, but in context with what we were discussing. I could see his pulse in the side of his neck so I matched this with the movement of one of my feet. I matched his blinking with one of my fingers whilst matching (on the surface) his general body posture and hand positions etc...so to him I would have appeared to be matching him and it was the subtle information I was cross matching (of which he was unaware). Just like when you pat your head and rub your belly, to do this I aligned myself with one thing at a time, moving on to add more once I was comfortable with what I had got.

I matched his breathing normally just matching it with my breathing, I matched his external/internal focus with my overall body posture (sitting taller when he was looking at me and talking to me, relaxing my muscles and slumping when he went inside his mind)

It didn't take long for him to be at a point where he clearly wanted to close his eyes and go into a trance but as we weren't in a context where we were doing hypnosis he would have been closing his eyes in the middle of what was appearing to be an ordinary conversation. He clearly was waiting to have permission to close his eyes. I gave him this permission, he went very deeply into a trance and when he came out of the trance he said that it was the deepest trance he thinks he has been into.