Trance and Sensing by Patrick Marsolek Trance isnt an on-or-off experience where youre in it or not.

Rather, it has subtle gradations. While youre remembering falling to sleep or into another state, you are shifting a little. When you sense an object, you may also have shifted more. If your mind wanders to something you need to do, or to the sound of someone else moving in your house, your trance may shift again. You are continually shifting your focus, and consequently your trance, anytime your attention is drawn into a different way of perceiving or processing information. Trance is a natural process that allows flexibility of mind and a connection between the conscious and unconscious. Even a brief dip into an inner memory, perhaps triggered by a phrase you read here, allows you to connect to a thought or a feeling in a different and meaningful way. If youre focused on reading and you feel a wave of sleepiness, you could stop and nap briefly. Afterwards, your mind and body will feel different. You may find yourself energized. While youre asleep, you may dream about intuitive processes. There is often an intelligence in the way your subconscious moves you away from the focus of your conscious mind. En-trances can occur in an infinite number of ways. If you are visually dominant, your awareness of trance may begin with an alteration in your visual field. If you stare at an object and stay focused there, you may start to notice changes in your vision. You might experience blurred or extra-sharp focus, darker or lighter colors, loss of peripheral vision, pulsations in light, intensity and color, multiple vision, or even a general fading of your entire visual field. At some point your eyes will get tired. Then when you close them and let go of your holding focus, you might relax your whole mind and body and go into a deeper trance. This is the beginning of a common induction into self-hypnosis and intuitive visioning. When these kinds of alterations occur in our vision or in our other senses during normal daytime activities, we often ignore them. Since were on task with our conscious focus, we reestablish our normal vision as quickly as possible. Yet, these subtle shifts may indicate unconscious information wanting to come to consciousness. When you allow small changes in your sensing or experiencing, these changes may open a flow of intuitive information. Similar visual distortions to those I have described are utilized by psychics who work with crystal balls. When focused on the ball, the psychic allows her consciousness to shift. Then internal, intuitive images start to arise and are allowed into consciousness. There is nothing special about the ball. It is the changes in the psychics awareness that opens up her intuition. The ball serves as a visual focus, an entryway into the trance. As one goes deeper into trance and more into an altered state of awareness, more internal imagery begins to form. David Lewis-Williams, an archaeologist who specializes in prehistoric art, describes how this next step is experienced in trance:

People see geometric forms, such as dots, zigzags, grids, sets of parallel lines, nested curves, and meandering lines. The forms are brightly colored and flicker, pulsate, enlarge, contract, and blend one with another. With the eyes open, they are projected luminously onto surfaces such as walls and ceilings. These visual forms have been discovered in rock art dating back at least thirty thousand years. They are thought to be the record of shamanic altered states. They also occur in drug-induced states of consciousness. These entoptic images, or images from within the mind, are transitional phenomena that develop into more complex visual imagery in even deeper trance states. They can evolve into symbolic images and dream-like imagery that can relate specifically to conscious intentions. If your awareness is centered around another sense, you may experience the same relaxation of perception and alteration. If you focus on the auditory channel, you may experience subtle changes in the background sounds in the space youre in. You may start to hear new sounds, low tones, buzzing or clicking, or words and phrases. Hearing ones name spoken is a common auditory hallucinatory phenomenon. Others report hearing music. As with a visual technique, the auditory stimulus can lead into a flow of increasingly complex hallucinations. This can occur with any sense. If your kinesthetic channel is dominant, you might experience the same progression as a range of sensations in the body. Spontaneous muscle twitches may progress into complete physical sensations of movement or other activity. Becoming adept at utilizing deeper trance states relies on allowing the manifestations of trance as they occur. These manifestations can be difficult in the beginning as any abnormal phenomena may be disconcerting or even overly exciting. Many people focus on phenomena that arise with conscious awareness. For example, have you ever thought you saw something out of the corner of your eye? What happened when you looked at it? Directing your conscious, focused mind on these unconscious signals chases them away. We activate a different state of mind which causes a shift to objective awareness. We terminate the trance state. As you learn to be more receptive and more comfortable allowing unknown senses and feelings, you can allow subconscious perceptions coming into the periphery of your awareness. You can recognize when something unusual is happening and relax into it, before you try to look directly at it and figure out what it is. Any alteration you sense can be the beginning of information coming from your unconscious, whether you call it intuition, insight, or hallucination. Excerpted from A Joyful Intuition, copyright 2010 by Patrick Marsolek. Patrick Marsolek works with businesses, individuals and families on how to communicate effectively and how to access untapped inner resources for growth and effectiveness. He is a Clinical Hypnotherapist in Montana and the author of A Joyful Intuition and Transform Yourself: A Self-Hypnosis Manual. You can contact Patrick at info@PatrickMarsolek.com or read more at www.InnerWorkingsResources.