The most amazing part of my trance teacher Corine Sombun experience is that she managed to transform trance from a folkloric experience to a scientific experiment. And since 2018 she is training people to have a cohort of trance practitioners to check that measurements performed on herself are consistent for people trained to induce trance.
Pushed by curiosity Corine Sombrun, once she was a trained Mongolian shaman, tried to connect to scientific brain research institutes to better characterize this strange trance state she was practicing.
At the start no-one was interested and it was quite unclear for professors whether she was healthy or pathological: during trance she demonstrated clearly the combination of several pathological states, but at the same time she was able to come back to a perfectly healthy condition. This was surprising, so unconventional that it took a decade (!) for the first scientific paper on her capabilities to be published.
In the meantime she managed to get her brainwaves measured and studied. To achieve the best results one has to be perfectly immobile, which is not quite consistent with trance practice. However Corinne progressively managed to learn how to induce trance at will and be perfectly immobile during that state, so that electro-encephalograms could be measured (see picture), which showed a significant alteration of brain activity during the trance state. Those alterations were not very different from those measured in very experienced meditation practitioners; generally there is a change of the balance between brain hemispheres and a different activity in the cortex.
The current state of this evolution is the creation of a scientific institute on trance, the training of cohorts of trance practitioners, and an increasing number of projects about the capabilities of trance in a number of situations: for astronauts, people suffering from cancer, people close to die, artists that want their creativity to be boosted, people treated by psychologists or psychiatrists etc…; and also what trance brings to common people in their daily life.
And that’s how I was privileged to join this cohort training to be part of the experiment.
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
- How My Teacher Corine Sombrun Discovered Trance Practice
- How Shamanistic Trance Inducers Are Quite Ineffective
