Take Control of Your Trances

This work is all too serious. My Point of Contact needs to stop taking everything so seriously and I need to help my clients do the same. I am exploring new ways to create laughter in sessions. Laughter is the best medicine and a great trance breaker. I teach Robert’s concept that we are Trance Monkeys and all those memories and feelings we tap away are just trances, not real, not happing now. Most of us live in whatever story or trance we are making up and telling ourselves in the moment. I instructed a client on how to use the Fake Laugh Technique and I used the monkey laugh from an iPad app. Laughter creates great shifts and fun for both of us.

Lately, I ask clients, “What do you do to have fun, play or be silly?” Many of us have forgotten how to play silly like children. That is one of Jesus’ teachings, to be like a little child. There are so many ways to practice that. One is to be present in the moment, fully absorbed and consciously aware of this moment. I have observed my grandchildren when my son says, “Tell GG what you did last weekend.” They can hardly remember it because they are busy doing something different in this present moment. This is how we become conditioned to recreate the past and make stories from it. The story may become like a trance, not real now. The more we repeat the story, the deeper the trance may become.

In the 1990s I heard a story about a bush native from an isolated tribe that had never had contact with the outside world. He was captured and put in prison for a small crime. He was told he would be set free in a certain number of days. In his culture he had no concept of the future because they lived totally in the present moment. He had lived freely and could not comprehend confinement or the hope of getting out of prison on a future day. He died within a few days. That is the power of the mind.

A motivational speaker gave another powerful example. A man jumped a freight train and landed in an empty refrigeration car. His mind went into fear of freezing to death. As he rode through the night, he wrote with his finger in the dust on the floor that he was getting colder and colder as his heart and breathing were getting slower and slower. The last thing he wrote was, “It’s over.” When the train stopped they found him dead but the temperature in the car was above 50° because the refrigeration wasn’t even on. He died simply because of his belief that he was freezing to death.

There was the Soccer Team in South America whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains and the rescue teams didn’t find them. Many days later the survivors realized no one was coming to save them. They agreed as a group to eat the meat from the bodies of those who had died in the crash that were preserved in the frigid temperatures. The power of the mind saved them when three men set out alone to walk to civilization. They spent many nights sleeping in the freezing cold snow with no specific gear to protect them. After days of walking they made it to a small village, they directed the rescue teams to the crash site and the other survivors were saved. Because they practiced a trance of survival, persistence and action, their belief saved them. Alive is a movie about their story that was released in the 1990s. A documentary was released around 2010 and the actual survivors were interviewed.

We are all Trance Monkeys and we need to be very careful to take control of our thoughts, beliefs and responses to our world. Choose your trances wisely and only practice the ones that feel good and create what you really want in your life. — © Copyright B. Grace Jones 2014 All Rights Reserved.