This book describes an entirely new way of conducting hypnotherapeutic interventions - Stephen Gilligan's generative trance. The first generation of trance work, the traditional hypnosis that still holds sway in most places, considers that both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind of the client are, to put it bluntly, idiots. So trance work involves first 'knocking out' the conscious mind and then talking to the unconscious mind like a 2-year old that needs to be told how to behave. Milton Erickson created the second generation of trance work. He approached the unconscious as having creative wisdom and each person as extraordinarily unique. Thus, rather than trying to programme the unconscious with new instructions, Erickson saw trance as an experiential learning state where a person's own creative unconscious could generate healing and transformation. At the same time Erickson, for the most part, carried the same low opinion of the conscious mind. Thus, Ericksonian hypnosis looks to bypass the conscious mind with indirect suggestions and dissociation and depotentiate it with confusion techniques.

An investigation of how the creative trance works across multiple domains in the arts, sciences, sports, and self-transformation.

Using the lives of artists as inspiration, "When Walls Become Doorways" explores the transformative power of illness and the ability of productivity and creativity to heal the soul.

Ecstatic Trance contains in-depth information on 60 ritual body postures and describes them in precise, accurate detail, with clear illustrations. The first complete manual on this subject, presented here are age-old postures (one dates back 32,000 years and was inspired by a cave painting) along with newly-researched postures, published here for the first time. Learn these postures and access, energize, and integrate your creative potential. Practicing these postures also leads to new insights into healing, inner development, and rebirth. And combined with appropriate rhythmic stimulation--music and dance, for example--the postures can engender a profound change in consciousness, leading the participant to experience altered states of reality including visions and ecstatic trance states. The postures themselves do not promote any one belief system or dogma but are elements in an overall shamanic worldview.

1974: A tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then abruptly announces that she has adopted the guerrilla name "Tania" and chosen to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Coerced? Could she be sincere? Why would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiancé, her comfortable home? Why would she suddenly adopt the SLA's cri de coeur, "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People"? Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades--the pompous and abusive General Teko and his duplicitous lieutenant, Yolanda--into hiding, where they will remain for the next sixteen months. Trance, Christopher Sorrentino's mesmerizing and brilliant second novel, traces this fugitive period, leading the reader on a breathtaking, hilarious, and heartbreaking underground tour across a beleaguered America, in the company of scam artists, visionaries, cultists, and a mismatched gang of middle-class people who typify the guiding conceit of their time, that of self-renovation. Along the way he tells the story of a nation divided against itself--parents and children, men and women, black and white; a story of hidebound tradition and radical change, of truth and propaganda, of cynicism and idealism; a story as transfixing and relevant today as it was then. Insightful, compassionate, scathingly funny, and moving, Trance is a virtuoso performance, placing Christopher Sorrentino in the first rank of American novelists. Trance is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Access heightened states of consciousness to enliven and expand your creative process. "Trance Poetics poses neurological frameworks for entering such mysterious realms as divine inspiration, epiphany, metaphor, free association and automatic writing. As Prevallet takes the reader on a wild brain-mapping adventure, she continuously traces a history of language that reifies the power of poetic intelligence." - Marissa Perel Trance Poetics is a magnificent guide to hidden sources of linguistic happiness. Kristin Prevallet gives inspiring, practical advice on how to invigorate one's creative practice, and how to rediscover the delight of unfettered play. This book-a magical toolkit-has the power to reawaken dormant verbal resources in all of us. Rapture and gratitude are logical responses to the gift that Trance Poetics bestows on its lucky readers. - Wayne Koestenbaum Drawing from the fields of clinical hypnosis, neuroscience, energy psychology, and poetics TRANCE POETICS: YOUR WRITING MIND will stimulate your creative and intellectual processes and give you new ways to access the images, memories, feelings, and language that lie beneath the surface of your conscious awareness. You will learn how to use your creative processes to communicate with your body to both generate creative material and move through emotional blocks. A guide into the world of poetry, language, and consciousness this book will bring a freshness and authenticity to your writing process. "Is there a more important -- or more necessary -- vocation for poets today than showing others a way to process for themselves the epiphanic possibilities of our beautiful, difficult existence? To experience these beautiful difficulties, as Kristin suggests in these pages, in ways that reconfigure one's most deeply-held beliefs regarding self and world? Trance Poetics: Your Writing Mind is more than just a navigational tool for poets; it is handbook of epiphanic possibilities for absolutely everyone interested in living fully alive." - Sharon Mesmer