It would be more accurate to say that all ways that lead to your own inner knowing and intuitive creative intelligence, work.
We are talking about everything: from love and fulfillment to disorder and disease.
Hypnosis is a doorway to remembering. It works because it lets you do your own thing the way you naturally do.
You are the cook.
There is something unnatural about our resistance to accepting that we ourselves make and fix our selves. This would have to based on a disbelieve in our own abilities. We rather rely on a doctor, therapist, priest, medicine or other 'expert'. Why do we believe more in their abilities than in our own? That would need to be based on the believe that we are not ourselves responsible for our own experiences, because if we would be the one creating it, we would assume to be able to fix it ourselves. It would make you the cook of your own soup.
The primary reason hypnosis works is because you remember the cook in you - the part of you that does believe you have the ability and power to make your own soup.
Intention.
Since you are cooking and making your soup, you need some idea of what soup you'd like to make. To remember what your soup should taste like, you have to have a preference to start with. Your intent is to brew a certain soup - a certain life. You are aiming to be a particular version of yourself. Since the hypnosis state is like walking into your memory library, it also helps you remember what to cook - what you love and want in life - in case you forgot.
Taste of your soup.
Continuing with your soup, sometimes something falls in your soup you don't want in there. But it's a thick soup and you can't see where it went. Soon you forget it fell in there. Yet, when you taste the soup, something doesn't taste right. The more undesired ingredients fall into your soup, the less you like the taste of it. But you don't know how to fix your soup.
Now think of the soup as being a part of you. The soup is all your memory. Events drop into it, changing you. You forget and don't realize how it affects the taste of your life. You do however experience your life not tasting as good as you know it could. You now need to remember what went into your soup and how to get it out.
Hypnosis is a state in which you do remember what went in, how you reacted to it and how it changed the taste of your soup. It's like putting on a pair of magical glasses to help you 'see' or 'smell' or just know what fell into your soup that no longer belongs in there.
Recipe.
Hypnosis also opens the door to remember and create the recipe. Once you know what you want, and have cleared your soup, your creativity can show you the steps and ideas for your soup making - to make happen in life what you love to experience.
Disease
The relationship between the cook and the soup is like your mind and your body. Perhaps think of the water in the soup as your memory, the spices as emotions and thoughts and the vegetables as your physical body. It's all in one pan mixed in one soup. The cook is in charge of what goes and stays in the soup.
Many still think it is controversial to say that the cook put the cancer in the soup. Even the depression is blamed to be caused by the soup itself, not the cook. And to try to take the depression out, we add pills to the soup. However, we know the pills don't make the soup taste how it should taste.
What you do in hypnosis is trace what went into the soup so you can get to the root of it.
You may wonder, how would for instance a skin rash develop under the eyes of the cook? And how would you heal it without medication? This is not a different question from how your hair grows. Your body clearly knows how to do that. Let's call it your body intelligence.
The question we often ask is, how did the skin rash enter the soup. But it wasn't the skin rash that entered the soup. Maybe a bacteria. The more direct question is how and why your body intelligence made the skin rash from it. It knows since it did the job. And since the cook masters the soup - and therefore the body - the cook can know it too.
Just like your body has intelligence, the cook in you does too. You know you can effect and change your thoughts and emotions. But you might not remember you can also direct your body intelligence, unless you believe your car is driving the car all by itself.
What would be requires to heal the skin rash is remembering why your body made it, receiving the message it intended to send you and then telling it there is no longer a need for it. This may seem far reached, but regulating your body functions is not unfamiliar at all. You move your eyes. You swallow. You flex your muscle. You relax or get tensed. People have demonstrated to control their heart rate and body temperature. People under a lot of stress can show signs of early again.
Whatever you may believe, in the state of hypnosis you remember what you need to remember.
Disorder
As the cook, you regulate your emotions and thoughts. It's part of the soup. Bringing and keeping order is the task of the cook. When you experience disorder, like eating disorder, burn-out and also loneliness or conflict, something entered disturbing your soup. Here too, hypnosis helps you remember what got in. When you remember what changes the taste of your life, you can lets it go and transform it into another perspective. Harmony and order is your natural state - there is nothing needed to be your natural self. It can only be disturbed until you remove the disturber.
This natural way of being is based on:
You have free will and make choices all day long. Those choices determine your life.
You are your experiences and memory.
Your memory helps you create your next experience, and thus plays a central role in your decisions, which are based on your memory.
When something enters that is in conflict with your natural self, until you resolve the conflict, you balance is off.
Hypnosis simply means that you enter your natural state of remembering, knowing and creativity at a deep level.
You could say that in every day life you bump into many events and experiences that can cause disorder and disease in you. To restore order and ease, you take a moment to remember and put things in the right 'perspective'. To do this, you remember what needs to be remembered in relation to the disorder or disease and use your creativity to change your memory. Even though the event part of your memory is a fact you can't change, you can change the mental and emotional experience you added to it - that what made it how you experienced it, how it made you feel and what you learned from it.
The cycle you naturally go through would be something like:
Intention (know what you want)
Remembering
Experiencing
Knowing
Believing
Accepting
Learning
Transforming
Becoming
Love, fulfillment, disorder and disease are all outcomes of earlier choices. Although not all events in your life are by your doing (weather, traffic jams, economic meltdown, etc), how you experience those events are completely within your control while you also do attract many of the events happening in your life because of what you expect and project.
If you don't know (remember) what a car is, it makes little sense to decide to take the car for a ride. Your experiences are build on previous experiences. Once you experience a car, you know what a car is and driving a car only then becomes a possibility. Your memory creates the possibilities. Based on hypnosis cases those memories of experiences go back very far in time.
Each memory is a mental/emotional package of the recorded event itself and the experience it gave you. The experience may have made you feel happy, sad, frustrated or peaceful. You may have learned that you like or don't like the event, not to burn your fingers again or certain ideas about yourself and the world. This cycles continues: you experience, learn, experience, learn - always building on your previous experiences and learnings.
We call this your program or experience engine. You can imagine, that only very little of you is aware of this process, just like you are not aware of the digestion process happening in your body.
All disorder and disease as well as all that we think of as positive such as love, joy, creativity, etc. are known by your mind. All of it.
When you remember your experience, you know it's true, you believe it, you accept it and from that you learn from the experience. If you truly accept what you learn, you transform and what you have learned becomes a part of you.
So nobody is asking you to believe something you have not already experienced. You can remember the experiences that matter to the question or challenge you face. Hypnosis works because it is the doorway to your inner knowing.