Corine Sombrun (link in French), my trance teacher, has quite an incredible destiny. The amazing part is how she managed to transfer a millenia-old shamanic practice into a scientific experiment of an alternate state of consciousness.
She is a musician and composer, as well as sound engineer. During a BBC-commissioned trip to Mongolia at the start of the 2000s, which followed a difficult personal emotional period of mourning her partner, she entered a trance state unexpectedly during a shamanic ceremony. The shaman struggled a bit to bring her back and then announced to her she was a great innate shaman and she had to learn to become a full shaman.
Under the shamanic threat of not being able to regain her inner balance, she travelled several years in succession to Mongolia for her shaman-training, ultimately becoming a shaman herself (and participating to shaman competitions!). The picture shows her with her shaman-teacher.
The tale of this learning experience was so dramatic that her book rights has been acquired by the movie industry and a movie was produced in 2019 with a well-known French actress (who also was trained in trance!): “un monde plus grand” (a wider world)”.
Beyond the traditions of shamanic trance, she was able to train and develop her trance state, increasingly being able to induce it easily. However she was still very much requiring all the shamanic associated contraptions like the drum and other folkloric impedimenta. Soon however, pushed by curiosity, she was able to work on better characterizing this state, and induce the trance-state differently – to be followed in a subsequent post.
In a series of post I will describe a personal journey into an altered state of consciousness – cognitive trance – that I was privileged to undertake this year. Previous posts in this series:
- A Journey Into Altered States of Consciousness: Introduction
- How Trance Is a Common Altered State of Consciousness
- How Trance Is Common Around Us But We Don’t Realize It
- How Trance Is Associated with Pain Decrease and Strength Increase
- How ‘Flow’ May Assimilated to a Trance State
- How I Was Taught to Self-Induce Trance At Will After Only a Few Hours
