Trance ordinarie/en

Page title: Ordinary Trances

The ordinary trances are, in the terminology of the Paret Method School, the altered states of consciousness not recognized as such in which the majority of people live most of their waking time. The term translates and expands the concept of «everyday trance» introduced by American psychologist Stephen Wolinsky in the 1980s, and describes a phenomenological constellation that the hesychast patristic tradition had already described as logismoi in the 4th century, which Reich described as character armor in the 1930s, and which contemporary psychology describes as subclinical dissociation and reduced activity of the ventral vagal network.

The ethical and clinical hallmark of the School — as explicitly recalled on the page I sei tipi caratteriali nella mappa polivagale — is that character is a set of habitual trances and that typological diagnosis does not serve to classify the person but to recognize one's own trance in order to move through it towards the state of Presenza Integrale.

I. What is an ordinary trance

An ordinary trance is a habitual alteration of the state of consciousness that presents the technical characteristics of a hypnotic trance — restriction of the attentional field, altered time perception, increased suggestibility, reduced critical thinking, partial dissociation from the body or emotions — but not recognized as a trance by the person themselves, who considers it their normal state of functioning.

Stephen Wolinsky in the 1980s was among the first to systematically describe these states in contemporary psychology. He identified a wide range of ordinary trances, including:

Habitual negative self-hypnosis (Daniel Araoz) — the inner rumination that continuously repeats dysfunctional messages to the person.
Dissociation from the body — the person lives "in their head," with the body as a distant and barely perceived object.
Trance of the past — the person continuously relives past events as if they were present.
Trance of the future — the person lives projected into future scenarios that distract them from the present.
Trance of identity — the person stably identifies with a character, a role, a story of themselves that is not all that they are.
Trance of relationship — the person repeats habitual relational patterns without recognizing them as choices.
Trance of work — the person operates on autopilot in their professional activities, losing the encounter with what they do.
Trance of the aching body — the person identifies with a pain or physical limitation that becomes the lens through which they interpret everything.

The common characteristic of all these trances is the reduction of Presence — the fact that the person is not truly here, and yet lives this absence as if it were the normal way of existing.

II. The non-verbal diagnosis of ordinary trances

The Paret Method™ trains the practitioner to recognize the state of ordinary trance through specific non-verbal signs:

Unfocused gaze or defensively hyper-focused gaze;
Monotonous voice without authentic prosodic modulations;
High and restricted breathing, not coordinated with thoracic-abdominal movement;
Rigid muscle tone or, conversely, flaccid (absence of medium tone);
Misaligned posture relative to natural verticality (see corresponding section in Presenza Integrale);
Gestures incongruent with verbal content (automatic hand movements, micro-movements of discomfort);
Low conversational synchrony: the person does not notice the other's reaction;
Gaze that drifts off mid-sentence, re-emerging after a few seconds.

The Paret Method practitioner recognizes these signs as state indicators — not as moral judgments about the person. The ordinary trance is not a fault: it is the baseline condition of the majority of contemporary human beings and has identifiable social, traumatic, and physiological causes.

III. Ordinary trances in the patristic tradition

The recognition of ordinary trances is not recent. The Christian tradition of the Desert Fathers, synthesized by Evagrius Ponticus in the 4th century in the doctrine of the eight logismoi, described eight patterns of habitual fixation of behavior that phenomenologically correspond to contemporary ordinary trances:

Gastrimargia — the trance of food, consumption, compulsive craving;
Philarguria — the trance of money, accumulation, material security;
Porneia — the trance of sex and genital drive as compensation;
Orgè — the trance of chronic anger, habitual hostility;
Lupé — the trance of sadness, unprocessed grief;
Akèdia — the trance of discouragement, powerlessness, "it's not worth it";
Kenodoxìa — the trance of success, appearance, social recognition;
Uperéphanìa — the trance of pride, superiority, identity rigidity.

Evagrius wrote these observations fifteen centuries before psychoanalysis. The specific didactics of patristic work was to recognize the dominant logismos at the moment it arises — exactly as the Paret Method practitioner trains the client to recognize their own ordinary trance when it sets in. The common remedy is Presence — called hesychía (stillness) by the hesychasts, Presenza Integrale by the contemporary School — as the state from which trances have no hold.

IV. Ordinary trances in the Reichian vocabulary

Wilhelm Reich described the same fixations in the 1930s in the vocabulary of character armor: stable patterns of chronic muscle tension that become the structure of personality. The difference from the patristic tradition is the bodily focus: Reich adds to Evagrius the observation that every ordinary trance has a precise somatic counterpart — specific muscle groups chronically stiffened, breathing altered in specific ways, typical postural configurations.

This Reichian observation has been developed by Gerda Boyesen in Norwegian biodynamics, by Alexander Lowen in American bioenergetics, by John Pierrakos in Core Energetics, and — more recently — by David Berceli in the TRE simplification.

The Paret Method School integrates this bodily reading into its non-verbal diagnosis: recognizing the ordinary trance means recognizing both the mental signs (rumination, dissociation, fixed identification) and the bodily signs (tensions, breathing, posture). The two levels are always coordinated, because — as demonstrated today by Polyvagal Theory of Porges — there is no "mental" level separate from the "bodily" one: there is an integrated neural state that manifests in both registers simultaneously.

V. Ordinary trances in the polyvagal vocabulary

The contemporary translation of ordinary trances into the language of Polyvagal Theory is precise: ordinary trances correspond to stabilized autonomic configurations in non-integrated modes. Specifically:

the trances of chronic activation (habitual anger, anxiety, hypervigilance, perfectionism) correspond to the fixed sympathetic configuration (Pure Sulfur);
the trances of dissociation (depression, avoidance, anhedonia, withdrawal) correspond to the fixed dorsal-vagal configuration (Pure Salt);
the blocked conflictual trances (held-back anger, activating exhaustion, clenched jaw) correspond to the Sulfur+Salt without Mercury configuration (the blocked hyperenergy of the School's Springer papers).

The way out — according to patristics, Reich and Boyesen, polyvagal theory, and the Paret Method alike — is the same: reactivate the ventral vagal network (the Mercury principle of the Paracelsian Tria Prima, the Indian sattva) as the organizer of the other two configurations. The School's operational tool for this work is Presenza Integrale through its four practical elements (Charges, Reference Point, Stop, Hara and Verticality).

VI. The School and Wolinsky's deconceptualization

Stephen Wolinsky, in his mature work, develops what he calls «deconceptualization» — a practice of recognizing ordinary trances at the moment they arise, through a series of direct questions to the client that make the dissociative structure of the trance explicit. The Paret Method School recognizes in this work a notable parallel to its own practice, while proceeding predominantly non-verbally (magnetic fascination, presence, field) rather than verbally-cognitively (Wolinsky's deconceptualizing questions).

The two methods are not in competition: they work on the same ground with complementary tools. The advanced student of the School can integrate Wolinskyan deconceptualization as a verbal tool to complement the non-verbal magnetic work, particularly useful in the follow-up of mesmeric crisis or fascination induction sessions to cognitively consolidate what the system has already shifted somatically.

VII. Ordinary trances as an ethical field of work

The Paret Method School considers the recognition of ordinary trances the ethical basis of its clinical, didactic, and initiatic work. Three practical consequences:

The practitioner must be the first to recognize their own ordinary trances. Without continuous personal work of Presenza Integrale, the practitioner operates from their own trance and — as demonstrated by the experiment of three identical sessions described on the Presenza Integrale page — their work loses effectiveness proportionally.
Typological diagnosis is not judgment. When the practitioner recognizes a blocked Sulfur+Salt type in a client, they are not saying "the client is like this," they are saying "the client is predominantly in this trance, and the work consists of accompanying them out of it." The trance is not the person.
Magnetic practice is an instrument of liberation, not substitution. The mesmeric crisis, fascination, magnetism do not replace the ordinary trance with another trance imposed by the practitioner: they free the person from the trance towards a state of Presence that belongs to them as their recovered natural condition. The hallmark is patristic: «to return from what is contrary to nature towards what is proper to it» (John of Damascus).

This ethical framework differentiates the Paret Method from the manipulative applications of hypnosis and suggestion (stage, sales, political persuasion) which, on the contrary, utilize the audience's ordinary trances to induce new ones more functional to the practitioner's purpose. The School recognizes these applications as technically possible but ethically incompatible with its own European magnetic tradition, which from its Mesmerian origins has positioned itself as a therapeutic practice and not as an instrument of social influence.

Sources

Patristic tradition

Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos (4th century).
AA.VV., Philokalia.
Jean-Yves Leloup, Écrits sur l'Hésychasme.

20th-century bodily tradition

Wilhelm Reich, Charakteranalyse (1933).
Gerda Boyesen, Entre psyché et soma (1985).

Ordinary trances in contemporary psychology

Daniel L. Araoz, The New Hypnosis (1985) — the concept of Negative Self Hypnosis.
Stephen Wolinsky, Trances People Live: Healing Approaches in Quantum Psychology (1991).
Stephen Wolinsky, Quantum Consciousness (1993).
Stephen Wolinsky, The Tao of Chaos (1994).

Polyvagal theory

Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory, Norton, 2011.

School publications

Marco Paret, Le Flux Magnétique et les Savoirs Anciens (2017).
Marco Paret, L'Energia Segreta della Mente (2009).
Marco Paret, Hypnosis, Polyvagal Theory, and Somatic Liberation (Springer chapter in preparation).