Preparing for Trance — Conditions That Support the Work
Preparation for trance is not a method for producing trance. The medium can attend to physical comfort, rest, duration, foreseeable interruption, emotional condition and intention. Familiar routines may reduce unnecessary self-monitoring. Previous contemplative practices may help a person become settled. None of these creates Spirit involvement. Preparation concerns the human conditions surrounding the work. Its purpose is to make those conditions suitable without turning them into requirements that the medium believes Spirit must obey.
Book Five: Trance Mediumship
A Common Question
How should I prepare for trance mediumship?
Answer
Prepare the human conditions rather than trying to produce the trance itself.
Attend to physical comfort, sufficient rest, an appropriate length of sitting, freedom from avoidable interruption and a clear intention for the work.
Familiarity can help the person settle without repeatedly monitoring what is happening, but no routine, technique or altered sensation creates Spirit involvement.
Preparation makes the medium available for the relationship.
It does not determine what Spirit must do within it.
Introduction
Once individual variation is taken seriously, preparation for trance cannot be reduced to a universal formula.
One person may settle easily in a particular chair.
Another may need freedom to adjust their posture.
Someone may prefer a brief period of stillness before beginning.
Another may find elaborate preliminary routines distracting because they create too much expectation about what should follow.
The purpose of preparation is not to make every medium behave alike.
It is to establish human conditions that do not unnecessarily obstruct the work.
This changes the question from:
“What must I do to enter trance?”
to:
“What conditions allow me to work without having to manage myself continually?”
That difference matters.
A preparation method can become counterproductive when the medium begins treating it as a mechanism that produces the desired condition.
The correct music must be playing.
The room must feel a particular way.
The body must become heavy.
Breathing must change.
A certain amount of time must pass.
Soon, preparation becomes a sequence of conditions the person believes trance depends upon.
The medium is then no longer simply preparing.
They are checking.
Has the expected sensation appeared?
Am I altered enough?
Is Spirit close enough?
Should something be happening by now?
The preparation intended to reduce unnecessary involvement has now created another form of involvement.
The medium is monitoring whether the preparation has worked.
Trance preparation becomes more useful when it removes demands instead of creating them.
The body should not be competing with unnecessary discomfort.
The person should not be concerned that they will immediately be interrupted.
They should not be exhausted to the point that ordinary sleepiness becomes difficult to distinguish from the condition being explored.
They should not be trying to reproduce the strongest previous sitting.
And they do not need to arrive with a predetermined idea of how Spirit involvement should present on that occasion.
Preparation supports suitability.
It does not guarantee an outcome.
This also places familiar contemplative or spiritual practices in their proper role.
A medium may already have ways of becoming settled, reducing everyday preoccupation or bringing greater steadiness to attention.
Those abilities can be useful before trance without becoming trance themselves.
Meditation does not turn into trance because it is used before a sitting.
Breathing practices do not summon a communicator.
Stillness does not create mediumistic relationship.
A familiar practice may help the person stop attending to every ordinary concern that preceded the sitting.
That is enough.
It does not need to be given a greater function than it possesses.
What matters here is simpler.
The medium prepares to become available for mediumistic work.
They do not manufacture the relationship through preparation.