Hypnotherapy is the use of fixed-focused attention or trance as a therapeutic technique.  

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What is trance? 

As Joshua Michael Schrei beautifully describes in his podcast, How Trance States Shape the World...

“Trance – the state where we transcend the relentless babble in our heads and reach instead a zone of simply acting and doing. A zone where insights seem to pour forth. Where our attention is wrapped. Where we see things more clearly, where there’s a flow. In this state, the human being becomes permeable, porous, open to the world around them, more prone to direct revelation and less driven by the day-to-day analytical mind. And that can sound like a lot of things. It can sound good. It can sound kind of dangerous too, right? The suggestibility. The permeability. The loss of one’s discreet identity as a rational, cognitive thinker. It makes it sound like maybe we should protect ourselves from this whole trance thing, not get duped into a trance state and, of course, you look around at all of us and in our own ways we are getting duped into trance states. So, it’s not so simple as “don’t go into a state” or “trance is bad.” Because trance, it turns out, is utterly essential to the experience of being human. When I say essential, I mean the attainment of the trance state… Attainment of the trance state has been such a primary driving force for human beings that some anthropologists have even called it the main need of the ceremonial human being. Trance rituals have been found in every culture anthropologists have ever studied. And what does that mean in practice?”

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