Trance in healing has a long history, from the use of what would now be termed “mesmerism” in the laying on of hands and the transfer of energy from or through the healer at a temple or sacred site. Through to the use of hypnosis in surgery and psychotherapy. The formal use of trance is only a few hundred years old, but before that it was known and used in many ways under different names. Part of the reason for this was that when people were guided or otherwise assisted into trance it was considered different from pain management via distractions such as reciting a sacred phrase or mantra. Only in the mid-20th century when research on different aspects of hypnosis were undertaken was it realised that there was state of mind which came to be called “Waking Hypnosis”

To some extent this was a crossover from stage hypnosis, where hypnosis and the phenomena it could produce were demonstrated on stage for entertainment purposes. Having so many people to work with quite a few discoveries these showmen noticed happening in their subjects made their way into formal medical and psychological research through a variety of ways despite the dislike of the latter for the former. Waking hypnosis was one of these, and named after the fact that people would exhibit all the phenomena associated with trance without undergoing a formal induction. At first it was thought to be because a percentage of the population are highly suggestible - about 20% according to psychological research – but when it was realised that suggestibility is an outcome of person + situation and not a just a fixed part of the population it was investigated further.

It was discovered that one of the main keys to the trance state was to bypass the critical censor in the mind and encourage selective thinking. Dave Elman, a stage hypnotist, developed a way to use this technique to induce waking hypnosis for rapid induction of subjects and later taught this method to medical and dental practitioners who used it to great effect in their respective areas. He taught ways of inducing a deep state of trance, even reaching the dissociative level of inner focus made famous by Dr. James Esdaile working in India in the 1800’s who induced this by mesmerism where major operations were performed using it. In Esdaile’s case his findings were overlooked because of the advent of chemical anaesthetics, and even today hypnosis is not consciously used by most medical people “because it takes too long”.

For those medical professionals using hypnosis and trance in their practice it makes things a lot easier, especially for dentists. In addition to pain management trance can be used for helping overcoming phobias, such as having dental tools in the mouth, slowing or stopping bleeding by suggestion, and time distortion where long or uncomfortable procedures are experienced as being shorter than they objectively were. Being in a state of trance actually gives a person more control over their body than usual, as in the case of treating bleeding by suggestion. In this case the mechanism for managing the blood flow is to cause the smooth muscle in the walls of the blood vessels to contract and slow or stop the flow of blood. This is particularly useful when a patient has had a tooth removed. The two most common ways are by using direct suggestion, “The bleeding will stop now” and by indirect suggestion such as suggesting that the hole from the extraction is being covered by a piece of ice which can cause both numbness, causing the blood vessels to contract just as they would from the cold.

What is gradually being recognised is the danger of waking suggestion by medical people who do not know that they are doing it. One example of this is surgical memory where the person hears the medical personnel talking around the table; even the use of Versed (Midazolam) which supposedly erases the memory does not affect this in some people. As the critical censor is part of the conscious mind any negative comments can pass directly into the subconscious mind and have a negative impact. Even comments that were not meant to be negative can be interpreted as such by the subconscious. When this was discovered as part of a hypnotic research program many hospitals throughout the world adopted a protocol of saying only positive things around an apparently comatose patient.

One of the most esoteric forms of hypnosis is its ability to help the body to heal in remarkable ways. This is not so much “The Power of Hypnosis” because hypnosis is a technique rather than a treatment, but that trance helps the person access their natural healing aptitudes. One of the most famous examples of this was the hypnosis used by Dr. Albert Mason in1951 to help a patient suffering from Ichthyosis, a type of genetic skin disease that causes hard masses to grow in lumps and layers all over the body. He assisted the patient into a trance and suggested all the hard skin, which he thought was similar to warts, were going to fall off his left arm. In five, days the hard layers fell off revealing normal skin underneath. This came as something of a shock to the other doctors as Ichthyosis is supposedly impossible to treat and even skin grafts hadn’t helped this particular patient.

Until recently the mechanism behind this was unknown, leading to all types of speculation- especially in the Pagan and magickal community. But in the last few months one of the key biological mechanisms for how the brain can affect the body has come to light due to the work of researchers from the University of Virginia. They discovered a direct link between the brain and the immune system via lymphatic vessels in the meninges, the protective membranes that cover the brain and closely follow the blood vessels. The study’s lead author said “We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role. Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component”.

This suggests that when in a trance this is one of the mechanisms that can be accessed by the subconscious to aid in self-healing. There may be others that have not been discovered yet, but work in various fields including psychology, physiology, and magick, may bring them to light. But in the meantime if you do any visualisation or self hypnosis as an adjunct to any medical treatment, you will know that in addition to the esoteric energies you are engaged with, you are also working in harmony with your own physical body.