Debugging Trance: Pt 1
Many people struggle with meditation for a variety of reasons: overthinking, inability to surrender, attenuation, and thinking about meditating instead of meditating. Any of these scenarios can be frustrating, and keep a person mostly locked in the beta state, and generally with meditation, the goal is to go anywhere but beta. The reason for this is fairly simple — The beta state is primarily governed by cortisol, which is your stress hormone. Your other neurotransmitters are still firing, but generally cortisol is the first dose of neurochemistry that your brain gives itself each day even for the act of waking you up. People with chronic overthinking, stress, anxiety, trauma, and control/safety issues, are primarily swimming in cortisol through most of their waking life. The moment they experience what it feels like to actually enter the meditative state, the practice becomes immediately appreciated and welcomed. I will discuss each of these scenarios in the following section.
Storms In The Sky of the Mind
Overthinking is the number one issue I see in therapy and coaching. It is one of the primary reasons I started doing trancework with clients in the first place. It can be very difficult to progress when a person is completely captured by their own thinking and stress response patterns. Breaking that pattern is what kicks open the door to recovery. For people who don’t need therapy, kicking down that door is still the vital step that allows growth and exploration. Overthinking can come in a variety of unpleasant forms: rumination, obsession / compulsion, pessimism, etc. Many still believe overthinking to be some sort of misunderstood gift, but I have yet to meet a person who benefitted from what most people mean by “overthinking.” This of course is not to be confused with healthy analysis. But remember overthinking isn’t the same as being analytical. Being analytical provides some sort of net benefit in life. Some people are also just generally cerebral in nature, but learning to de-identify with thought may be more beneficial for them than any other skill. Healthy thinking isn’t a stuck process.
The Remedies: depending on the person, a variety of approaches may benefit them. I mentioned de-identification with thought, but for those who are afraid they’ll blow away under that condition, may benefit from constructively working with thought. The problem in the second scenario, is that to enjoy those deeper states meaningfully, they will still eventually need to learn to surrender. (see below) Ideally, we would move from disidentification, to then working with thought. Remember, you have 70-90,000 thoughts per day, and the sense of control overthinking brings is an illusion, as thought is the thing we are captured by most often. When we allow that capture awareness constricts.
Inability to Surrender is Another form of Capture
Inability to Surrender is the second most common thing I have seen. This can be a result of internal protective and control mechanisms, that much like overthinking, have just become automated, ubiquitous and meaningless. For some any act of surrender, even when alone and internal, is a threat to their identity, persona, or ego. This is usually a result of trauma, core wounds, or ego itself. While this is normal, it can be discouraging when a person can only absorb into meditative experience superficially. Getting into meditation doesn’t necessarily require a deep confrontation of core wounds to initiate, but it should become readily apparent that those will need to be acknowledged eventually. What I have seen most, is that most people that struggle with surrender, struggle with it even when completely alone, as if accessing their own higher processes poses some sort of danger. Meditation isn’t seeking safety, it is creating it. That may be a minor distinction, but that subtlety means everything. Much like overthinking, resistance and overcontrolling behavior are constrictions of consciousness, that unless the person is immediately in a meaningful struggle that realistically requires the faculty of safety and protection, is just another automated process that is blocking them from their stated intention.
The Remedies: Attempting to engage in any kind of deep trance or healing is going to be counterproductive for this issue as those states REQUIRE surrender by nature. Assuming that the person doesn’t want to resort to drugs or plant medicine to induce a trance state, then we have to approach by using mechanisms of the brain that feel safe, until the person can trust themselves to go deeper. This may involve working simply with visualizing colors, and shapes, engaging in creative art or music, or any other act that lights up the right side of the brain. (We use the metaphor of right and left, because it is an easy way to distinguish between analytical and creative faculties in a format that is well known., and easy to understand.)
Tuning into the subtle, or… the profound.
Attuenation in fields like radiology, means reducing the signal, force, or value of their apparatus to catch fine detail or features that require more refined frequency. In the PITCH method, attenuation is a requirement, as most individuals, in one way or another, have generally lost track of the subtleties of mind amidst all of the sensory demands and stress of modern life. Through attenuation, we reintroduce the person to the subtle aspects of their mind. The reasoning for this, is that the subconscious mind (we use that instead of unconscious, which we deem to be the inactivity of the brain when it is, well, unconscious) is a very subtle and fine mechanism that is difficult to detect, communicate with, and develop. This represents another automated process that we want some access to in our work, whether you are getting coaching from us, or using the self-guided experience. THe use of attenuation sessions may be different depending on multiple factors such as hyper/hypo receptivity, former or current substance use, etc., as these all affect the sensory thresholds, processing, and cognitive faculties of the brain.
The Remedies: Working from a place of honesty, and spending some time in meditation doing “cloud-bursting” of the mind, until some quietude is reached. Withdrawing from overstimulating environmental factors temporarily may help as well. In coaching we would be engaging in very specific exercises to allow the mind to become reacquainted with those finer, less obvious aspects of the internal ecosystem., without becoming a hermit, preferably. If a person’s experiences all things with the force of being run over by a mac truck, they are going to have some difficulty noticing the sound of crickets. It can be even more difficult when someone conflates the intensity of experience with the profundity of it. Attenuation may be necessary for individuals who have overused plant medicines and hallucinogenics as well, depending on how their thresholds for sensation and perception have changed. Every action has a reaction, and that is true, no matter how sacred a medicine is. Anything can be abused.
A paradox of thought.
Thinking about meditating instead of meditating is also a common struggle with meditation. This isn’t the same thing as overthinking as mentioned above, or in refusing to surrender. In this scenario, the person doesn’t need to be in any of the abovementioned circumstances, but instead are just experiencing a simple cognitive error, by relegating the task to thought. There are forms of meditation such as contemplation, inquiry, prayer, that are all exercises of thinking, but those forms of meditation have little difficulty. What we’re specifically referring to here, is that a person who wants to utilize theta state meditation and trance, are thinking instead of doing.
The Remedies: This is going to be the simplest problem to solve, by just moving the person into the visual part of the brain with simple exercises to decouple thought from the concept of meditation. Going into trance itself is an action of the brain moving into a different state, not an act of mental gymnastics. If that were the case, intelligent people would be constantly hypnotized, and people with cognitive difficulties would be unable to meditate. Fortunately, neither of those things are true. Exercises of the visual imagination make a fine remedy to this problem.
Meet “The Secretary”
Employee of a lifetime….
.The lateralization model of the brain, that generally holds that functions like handedness, logic, intuition, etc., are predominantly enacted by the left (logical / patterning) or right (creative / intuitive) is not settled science (not fully debunked, either, but the brain is a bit more complex), we use the language of lateralization because it is a familiar and easy to understand way of describing seemingly dichotomous processes of the brain. For the purposes of our work, we generally want to move more into the right, creative side of the brain, because the subconscious can only communicate with symbols (just like in dreams) or with fine motor movements (some hypnotists prefer assigning a yes finger and no finger when their patient is in the “Esdaile State.” With PITCH coaching, we’re not solely focused on trancework, but it is a hallmark of our model, so you’ll see me addressing the issue frequently. But to reach deep and effective healing, whether I am delivering PITCH in psychotherapy, coaching, or spiritual healing, we want that subconscious mind involved. We store our wounds there. That is the theta state. That is where the mystical experience is evoked.
In PITCH, we deal alot with what we call “The Secretary,” which represents all the functions of the “left brain.” Usually we think of mathematical skill, logic, process orientation, etc., but that set of functions can be relegated to SAFETY & PROTECTION with it’s spatial reasoning and pattern recognition, especally in today’s world where everything has become a source of fear. You don’t even need trauma to have an overworked secretary, you just have to have an amygdala and a smart phone.
The secretary is the gatekeeping function of the mind. She has done an excellent job. Dedicated. Loyal. Never clocks out. Probably holds all of the skills that make you good at your job. She is also the engine of your “overthinking, she is also the first thing standing in the way of your hidden and lost parts. She was meant to be your intelligence, but she was repurposed as your ultimate protector. The gatekeeper.
She also keeps most people miserable and locks them out of their own creativity and spirituality. To get good movement, we want her to clock out for the first time in….years? Decades? Just long enough for us to do our work. All of your stresses, concerns, problems, agendas, symptoms, and identity will still be on her desk when she clocks back in. But she needs a break, and so do you!
