Trance Postures
April 29, 2010
When my friend Dena invited me to a “Trance Postures” gathering, I was psyched. It sounded like the perfect combination of two of my favorite things to do. Yoga, and shamanic journeying. It was better than expected. In a nutshell, Trance Postures are an ancient and little-known practice where body postures are used to guide what are known as shamanic journeys: special states of trance or meditation through which we can access our inner selves or, as the shamans say, ‘journey to other worlds’. When we make this connection, there is a heightened ability to heal ourselves and others.
According to Belinda Gore, Ecstatic Body Postures “Great beings who inhabit the realm of spirit that we call the Alternate Reality have been around for thousands of years, helping humans through our journeys here on Earth; and hunter-gatherer and horticultural peoples around the world have documented their presence and preserved the means of access to them through their artwork on cave walls, in totem poles, in delicate gold or silver work, or in simple pottery. Their images have been perpetually in front of our eyes”
Sometime in the 1970′s a group of anthropologists took it on themselves to decipher these mostly clay documents, study cultures that still practiced forms of this “yoga”, and experiment with their findings. The same postures were found in sites all over the globe dating from around 700 BC- the 14th century. How odd. Anyway, the point being that this ancient information is now available to us again, thanks to these curious scientists, and I felt very privileged to be directed through these postures by a modern shaman last Wednesday night in a Brighton Michigan basement. And the best news of all is that I don’t have to wait till she comes back and I don’t have to go make an appointment with some other medicine man to experience this intense of a journey again, because according to our local shaman, it is as safe a practice as yoga, and I found a book that explains it all. See you in another dimension!
