This is page 4 of a detailed tutorial. I recommend you start with page 1. Every page contains tons of practical information & no fluff. It’s thoroughly linked: You can master one tiny piece at a time—easy peasy—even though it’s almost book length. Every time you master a tiny piece, you’ll be more effective in life. I promise.
The Rehearsal Trance:
tk
Mental rehearsal works in EVERYTHING you may want to learn, and in many cases, the practice will be as valuable for you as it is for gymnasts. What do you want to master? Use this form of trance to do it.
PHSST Step 2: Analyze the problem or goal by asking these questions.
This is a separate type of trance. Rehearse really short periods of time, then review those same. Rehearse and review are parts of the same process.
If what you want to learn or improve is not as specific as a sports skill or technical skill, plan it in your journal.
Write a title for what you’d like to rehearse or practice ahead of time—or a difficult situation that you anticipate. This could be a more general skill that you’re trying to master, an attitude towards life you’d like to adopt, the way you see yourself in certain types of situations, a frightening or confusing situation that you’d like to be prepared for, a speech you plan to give, a class or party you plan to attend, an upcoming job interview, a date with an attractive man or woman, or an adventure you’re planning to go on.
(Or what about those annoying situations, in which you always intend to do something, and yet you always forget? Practice those situations in Rehearsal trances until it doesn’t happen anymore. )
Next, write a brief synopsis of how you expect this situation to go. Be as specific as possible, putting in things you would see, feel, smell, touch, hear, and taste. In other words, create at least the bare bones of actual scenes in your “movie” of this future event. Try to include somewhere between three and ten different events that you expect to occur or that you imagine might occur.
This may be difficult, especially at first, if the things you are intending to practice are things that you’re blocked about. This is a good reason to practice this specific trance on multiple occasions. And now the bad news: After all of this planning, what you’ll see in trance will not be exactly with what you planned.
Actually, it’s not bad news. It is, in fact, great news! It means you’ve learned something in the trance world. Revise your real life plans—and take advantage of what you’ve learned.
Do this immediately after your trance to keep from forgetting your insights. (Remember—Trance often produces a form of amnesia.) Then rehearse the situation in trance again to see what other insights you can gain.
An example of this type of trance is “Catapult Yourself into a Healthy Lifestyle through Visualization.”
(Go to Beginning, to Trance Recipe Overview,
to Fourteen Types of Trance to Master.)
ADVANCED LEVELS: Getting the Most from the Conversation Trance
For personal guidance in learning these skills, find my coaching profile at Cougar Brenneman Coaching. Contact me directly on the contacts page of this site. (This boring 😐 paragraph appears throughout this document to accommodate people who use our links exactly as they were intended to be used.)
(Go to Beginning, to Trance Recipe Overview,
to Fourteen Types of Trance to Master.)
The Review Trance: Want to love your life more? Research by Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside found that replaying good memories in your head is twice as effective in raising your moods as journaling about the same memories. Using trance for this review is a superpower that doubles the effect of simply reviewing the memories.
Want to learn from your mistakes? Normally, we review mistakes and feel bad. In trance, we have control over how we approach them, and in fact, we can replace the old strategies and practice new strategies within the memories when we’re in trance. So stop yelling at yourself for being stupid, and start practicing being smart in trance.
It’s really that simple. Except that it’s not. Most of the times that we’re thinking about things in the past, we’re neither yelling at ourselves or thinking of great experiences. There might be a tinge of anxiety or exuberance, but our memories are usually a mix of many different reactions and emotions.
The previous examples of curing regret and capitalizing on good feelings are merely the extreme examples. Once you understand the principle, you can use this type of trance on the complex, mixed, shades-of-gray memories that dominate our mental lives. Trance gives you power over the way you relate to your past experiences.
Mini-Disclaimer: While you may need a therapist for traumatic memories, anyone can review normal memories in trance for great positive benefits.
PHSST Step 2: Analyze the problem or goal by asking these questions.
In your journal, write a title that summarizes the specific thing you’re going to review in trance. In other words, choose a specific, narrowly defined time period or event. This could be a long period, such as, “What I Accomplished Last Year,” but most often, keep it specific, such as “My Job Interview with Professor Dufus.”
Write the specific details that you remember experiencing: the things you saw, felt, smelled, touched, heard, and tasted. Create at least the bare bones of the scenes in your “movie” of this past event. Try to include somewhere between three and ten different aspects, and put them in order.
Then enter trance, and review the events as if they were a movie, but improve your performance. Then do it again… and again… and again. Each time you review it, practice the improvements you made to the movie previously, and at the same time, make new improvements.
If you experience something really great, slow the movie down, increase the sensations or beauty, focus on positive feelings in your body or heart. Expand on the good things in a progressive manner, just as you practiced an improved past in a progressively better way each time.
If you’re using the Review Trance as a daily review, you’ll never need to repeat the same trance twice. But if you’re using it to review last year or a specific skill that you’re learning, you’ll need to update your plans for this trance regularly.
For personal guidance in learning these skills, find my coaching profile at Cougar Brenneman Coaching. Contact me directly on the contacts page of this site. (This boring 😐 paragraph appears throughout this document to accommodate people who use our links exactly as they were intended to be used.)
(Go to Beginning, to Trance Recipe Overview,
to Fourteen Types of Trance to Master.)
The Empathy Trance
The problem with empathy is that it’s hard to access in moments of stress, conflict, anger, fear, exuberance, hurry, and worry—in other words, it’s mostly out of reach in much of normal life. We all want to be more empathic, don’t we?
But that’s often just an aspiration because of normal stresses that everyone feels. So how do you build empathy when you are a normal person living a normal life with a normal level of stress? And when you’re surrounded by so frickin’ many jerks?
Disclaimer: They’ll still be jerks when you’re done with this trance.
tk tuning in on question. What comes, focus until it fades, focus again until it fades, focus again until it fades
PHSST Step 2: Analyze the problem or goal by asking these questions.
In your journal, write the name of a person who you want to understand better. This could be a loved one or an enemy. It could be an ancestor or a future descendant that hasn’t yet even been born. It could be a boss, an employee, a sales prospect, a guru, or a neighbor. It could be a different species, such as a vanishing species of whales. It could even be an inanimate object, such as your car’s engine or the earth. (Well, some people think they’re inanimate!)
For this type of trance, you may want to acquire a picture or other icon of the person or entity. You may want to look them up on Wikipedia, read about them in some other way, or search online for images. But in the end, you’ll be using trance to look at a deeper level of reality, and all of those preparations may appear to be irrelevant.
Begin by going into trance, and once there, imagine seeing the person you chose. Then move your consciousness into their body, and begin looking at the world from behind their eyes. When you’re in trance, it’s fairly easy to do this with no extra techniques.
There are some additional techniques in the example “Tune In to an Important Person in Trance by Shape-Shifting.” These are techniques that involve generating more chi in your body and moving your consciousness as a ball of light into the other person. These methods can improve your results in your trance, but practicing them also gives you an approach to increased empathy when you’re not in trance. You can use the ball of light technique without going into trance at all.
Another example of an empathy trance is the long induction “Shape Shifting 4 Stability Agility Intuition16_16.mp3.” I also used this induction as the introduction to “Tune In to an Important Person in Trance by Shape-Shifting.”
(Go to Beginning, to Trance Recipe Overview,
to Fourteen Types of Trance to Master.)
ADVANCED LEVELS: Getting the Most from the Conversation Trance
For personal guidance in learning these skills, find my coaching profile at Cougar Brenneman Coaching. Contact me directly on the contacts page of this site. (This boring 😐 paragraph appears throughout this document to accommodate people who use our links exactly as they were intended to be used.)
(Go to Beginning, to Trance Recipe Overview,
to Fourteen Types of Trance to Master,
to Self-Exploration Trance (next page).)
Cougar
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