These days, the self help world says, "Think positive and everything in your life will turn out simply rosey."  Positive thought is definitely a step in the right direction. However, it's just one step, not the whole journey to creating the life you want. Until you transform what is held in the deep unconscious as well as your conscious thoughts, life will generally give you more of what it's been dishing up thus far.

So how can you shift what is held in the deeper recesses of your psyche?
The subconscious mind does not respond to logic. You can't tell your subconscious what to do. Positive actions and emotions definitely help, but if your psyche believes something like "Success is hard to achieve", "Love never comes my way," "Life is a struggle," or some other negative belief about reality, it will require more than just thinking positive to get that miraculous shift you are after. Likely, it will also mean shifting your relationship to those things that have shaped the very fundament of who you are based on what has happened to you. One of the most effective ways to reach into the depths of the psyche and transform how your beliefs are held is through the vehicle of trance.

The subconscious mind is like a remarkable library of everything that has ever happened to you and everything you've felt and thought. It doesn't choose which thoughts are "right" or "wrong"...it just accepts everything as real, no matter what the logical mind thinks about it.

We are profoundly affected by events in our lives. We can't change what happened to us, but we can change our relationship to those events and what we think and feel about them. In order for those changes to occur, the change has to be more than skin deep. We not only need to think differently, but we must feel differently as well. Einstein once said, "Knowledge is experience, everything else is just information." By creating a living experience, we connect with the deep psyche, and in so doing we can rewrite the code of our life.

The great news is, a lot of the most effective techniques look and feel suspiciously like playing, and not very much like work at all. Over the years I have developed a number of body centered transformational methods that bring about these core shifts to fruition via living experiences using hypnotherapy combined with shamanic healing practices. The results are astounding. Some of the methods involve breath, some are dance or movement oriented. Some use singing or chanting to change things up, while others involve actively engaging your imagination.

Trance states are similar to meditation. We are constantly dropping in and out of trance. For example, have you ever been driving somewhere and find you are at your destination without remember much of the drive? That is a form of trance. Some of these trance states can be restful and helpful, and some are more like psychically "checking out." What makes trance states effective for transformation is a form of trance work that directs the flow of consciousness to a specific intent. This can be done on one's own, but it is much easier to stay on track when the experience is being guided by a skilled shaman or hypnotherapist. When that trance state is directed towards a transformational goal, people can achieve physical and emotional healing, mental peace and deep spiritual awakening with almost no effort.

Trance is one of the main techniques both traditional and modern shamanic practitioners use to acquire information and produce profound healing of body, mind, and spirit. As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. What worked for our ancestors still works today. By applying both spiritual awareness and a bit of psychological know how, we can transform our consciousness, and thus change our lives for the better.

On August 29th and 30th I'll be offering an experiential workshop on Trance and Transformation in Massachusetts. In it, we'll be working with shamanic and hypnotherapeutic approaches to trance and transformation. Gonna be amazing! You can learn more about it here: http://bit.ly/ZBVG3