Hypnosis and trance

Often clients will ask me about trance. What is it? How will I feel? Will I lose control? They often have the idea that trance is like frenzied voodoo dervishes or zombie-like sleepwalking with arms stretched out in front, from the old Abbott & Costello movies.

Trance is a naturally occurring state of mind that we slip in and out of all the time. Our attention is always somewhere between the outside world with minimal awareness of ourselves, or being focused on our internal world. When we are driving in a car, or more obvious, when we’re at a stoplight, singing with the stereo, talking to ourselves either silently or out loud, we’re in an internal focus. After an argument or important meeting, when we replay the conversations and think of all the things we would’ve, could’ve, should’ve said, we’re in a light trance. When we’re in church or a lecture room and the speaker’s voice drones away until we’re spaced out, off on a daydream of what we plan to do later, or the solution to a totally unrelated problem pops into our mind, we’re in a trance. When we’re riveted to the screen, watching an engrossing movie, gasping at the action, crying at emotional parts, laughing at the comedy, we’re in a trance.

When we’re so focused on a computer game that we don’t hear the phone ring, don’t hear our name being called out, don’t hear the doorbell, we’re entranced.

Watch commuters on a bus, train or plane. The ones with glassy-eyed expressions have retreated to their internal focus. Watch how they wake up with a start when they arrive at their destination.

When we meditate, when we stretch out in the hammock, when we listen to our favorite music, we’re in a trance.

Daydreaming, often in the alpha state of  brainwave frequency, is a form of trance, where your attention is resting with your unconscious mind. This is where we often have the “aha!” moments. Many great discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and inventions flashed into the minds of people after they stopped pushing themselves so hard to calculate and solve the problems. Our unconscious mind isn’t critical or bound by structural rules.  Our unconscious mind can piece two or more seemingly unrelated concepts to create a new idea. The seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces were actually related on a different level than we had “tagged” them when we “filed” them away in our memory banks.

[I once drifted off into daydream land in church, at about age eight. It was hot and the priest was droning like a swarm of lazy bees. An idea popped into my head relating to the concept of perpetual motion machines that we had studied in a science class weeks before. My idea for a perpetual motion engine was based upon the power of two series of magnets, offsetting each other to keep an axle spinning indefinitely.   I quickly drew a pen from my pocket and sketched the machine on the nearest piece of paper. I got busted for writing on the hymnal, and for daydreaming during the sermon… (There was a flaw in the machine, as all the magnets had to be equal to create a constant spin, but the magnetic force was balanced and therefore stagnant. but it sure looked good on paper)]

Ask someone to remember the best Christmas of their life, and they’ll lose eye contact with you as describe with great reverie, the sights, sounds, smells and emotions.  Some people have been known to salivate while describing a feast. That’s really being entranced.

In hypnotherapy, we guide the client into a relaxed state of trance, just like a daydream, where their unconscious mind is active an able to find, link, create and solve.


 for more information
grasselhypnotherapy.com.au 
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