Trance Formations

Very often in NLP or hypnotherapy, approaches focus on “parts”… “parts” integration, getting one “part” of ourselves to communicate with another. It’s a metaphor I employ myself, but it is one I think we have to be very careful of and not allow it to develop potentially toxic overtones. The danger with a “parts” model is that it can suggest that one can work on a part in isolation and then integrate those changes in a two step process. But when we consider what these parts of us we are referring to are, that is patently not the case. A “part” in this sense is a nominalisation, a process made into a noun, something that is in reality experienced as dynamic and always in relationship changed by a process of language into something fixed and static. The conscious self, the part of me that feels hurt etc.

I find it far more useful to start from the principle that the mind and body are ONE system. Change *any* part of the system and you change the WHOLE system. We all ecological systems participating in a larger ecological system. As a part of us changes, we change. As we change, the world around us changes. Instantly. Without “integration” or facilitating communication.

The trick, I think, is in trusting in the integral intelligence of that system (something more than “that part of me which processes data cognitively”, a holistic quality of innate intelligence) to lead that change, to manifest its own “evolution”. And that requires getting those “parts” that seem to have become regarded as having autonomous authority (that part of me that is self-aware and identifies as “I”) to simply get out of the way and allow the process to happen.