I have been thinking, lately, about what it means to be entranced. To be hypnotized. To be enchanted. I’ve been thinking about how for most of our long history as humans on this planet, the state of trance was sacred. Trance was entered into consciously, on purpose, likely with equal parts fear and desire. Trepidation and hunger. Because we knew the power it held.

We entered into trance in community. With a wise woman or shaman or with our peers, the men and the women, or with the entire village. We entered into trance with dance, or drumming, or plants, or hunting, or weaving, or humming. We knew the drums or the dance or the hunt could drive us into a frenzy or deep into the underworld. We approached the mystery, and it was dangerous.
Wild. Mystical. Alive.

We are entranced now, too. We are entranced with Instagram and Netflix and advertisements and podcasts and shows and our phones. We are entranced by memes and ideas, thought forms, the egregores that we accidentally created, accidentally worshipping hollow gods.

What to do? Our brains are wired for trance. Our brains are exhausted from being in a constant state of tracking, scanning, analyzing, sniffing for danger, for a tiger that never comes. There is no tiger. But we can feel that something isn’t right. We feel the planet burning. We feel war and injustice and children suffering, and we feel, even if we can’t name it, that we’re supposed to be deeply connected to it all, but how? How? How can we bear it?

So of course we entrance ourselves. Of course we find an ideology or a show or a podcast or a screen to turn our attention to. We don’t know what else to do.

We need trance. We long for it. We evolved to feel the day that the season changes, and to smell on the wind a bear on the ridge. We evolved to experience the forest and the ocean and the mountains and each other as wild, ecstatic, overwhelming mysteries. We needed to know where we were in relation to it all. Our bodies are thirsty to attune. Where to turn when the world around us is only dead materialism. Reductionist, dry, hollow, consumerism. Where can we quench our thirst?

I recently experienced being in a circle of women. We were chanting and dancing, drumming and sobbing, laughing and touching. I found myself enchanted. Entranced. And when I woke from the trance I was on my knees, and there was a woman to my right and my left and my arms were around their shoulders and their arms were around mine and around the women next to them and we were a holy circle of ten.

On my knees, in this circle, the wild cries and dances now complete, it was still. Quiet. It was all bright eyes and parted lips and the thin sheen of sweat and our chests and breath rising and falling in unison. The air was thick with us. A mist hung among us and we breathed it in through our skin. Alive, caught in the mystery of the trance we’d been in.

Something deep inside of me was healed.

Francis Weller says that there are 5 Gateways of Grief. One of them is: The Thing I Expected And Did Not Receive. My skin grieves for the village I did not receive. My heart longs for the trance that comes with ritual and drumming and dance. My eyes are hungry for unmasked faces. My body longs for people and spaces and places to contain my unfettered grief and my ecstasy.

I am hypnotized by the world. I can’t help it. I’m human. But I can choose what I will let entrance me. Not technology and media, so good at giving us just the right hit so we keep coming back. Not dehumanizing ideologies that separate us from ourselves. Not endless lines of endless things to buy. I don’t want to be hypnotized by the parched, barren world.
My teacher, Sarah of Magdalene, uses the phrase Plastic Spring. The fantasy. The illusion that everything is okay. The illusion that what we are doing can be sustained.

I want to be entranced by poets and artists. I want to be entranced by the wind in the grass. I want to lose myself for half a day, writing this essay. I want to watch a ladybug make its way through the constellation of freckles on my arm. I want to listen to a woman speaking wisdom, lulling me into finding my own conviction. I want to be enchanted by the distant thunder and by my dreams and by the people I love.
I want to awaken, alive, panting, on my knees.
I want to be hypnotized by the hum of the bees.