Ecstatic Trance Postures

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I highly recommend incorporating ecstatic trance postures into your shamanic practice. Some of my most profound journey experiences have taken place while holding shamanic postures. Anthropologist Felicitas Goodman discovered that specific yoga-like poses recur in the art and artifacts of world cultures, even societies widely separated by time and space. Goodman’s hypothesis, therefore, was that these postures represented coded instructions on how to produce consistent trance-like effects. Goodman researched and explored ritual body postures as a means to achieve a bodily induced trance experience. Her studies led her to many countries, and to trying out these body positions practically with hundreds of participants worldwide. She discovered that people who assume these body postures report strikingly similar trance experiences irrespective of their worldview or belief systems.

These postures produce a common effect, according to Goodman, because they all share one thing in common: the human body, the basic structure and functioning of which has remained unchanged since the time of our most ancient ancestors. The nervous and endocrine systems are, in fact, all much the same as they were 30,000 years ago, a fact which enables contemporary urban dwellers to enter non-ordinary reality as effectively, and through the same neural doorways, as shamans throughout history. You can access, energize, and integrate your creative and intuitive potential. Combined with shamanic drumming, the postures engender a profound change in consciousness, leading to new insights into healing, inner development and soul purpose. In her book, Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences, Goodman describes different postures that facilitate divination, healing, spirit journeys and more. In my next post, I will introduce you to my favorite trance posture.