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

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.

In those moments when focus on creative work overrides input from the outside world, we are in a creative trance. This psychologically significant altered state of consciousness is inherent in everyone. It can take the form of daydreams generating scientific or creative ideas, hyperfocus in sports, visualizations that impact entire civilizations, life-changing audience experiences, or meditations for self-transformation that may access states beyond trance, becoming gateways to transcendence. Artist and psychologist Tobi Zausner shows how creative trance not only operates in scientific inventions and works of art in all media, but is also important in creating and recreating the self. Drawing on insights from cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology and post-materialist psychology, this book investigates the diversity of the creative trance ranging from non-industrial societies to digital urban life, and its presence in people from all backgrounds and abilities. Finally, Zausner investigates the future of trance in our rapidly changing world.

Performance Coach and Certified Hypnotherapist, Holly Shaw, who has mentored hundreds of artists, from composers, to comedians, musicians, actors and directors, shares the fruits of her creative research and examples from her 30 plus years in film, television, and theatre delivers groundbreaking and original insights into your fear, your shadows, and what makes you, as an artist and performer, a brilliant agent of change. In a clear effective way, this book will uncover the systems that are running you, how they operate, and how you can dislodge yourself from the fear trance in order to start using your energy to be a powerful force on stage, in your content and online. A call to all artists, performers, speakers, limelight seekers to wake up and chart a path forward not by running from or suppressing fear. But by learning to work with fear to generate art, love and success. Because if the creators of the world can't imagine something different, then who else can?