Current mood:	pleased
Entry tags:	parenting, trance

Dual voice trance with a 6 year old
No, I'm not talking about offering dual voice trance to 6 year olds. I'm talking about the 6 year old was one voice and I was the other. Okay, she will be 7 next month, but still.

Let me interrupt my story with a little information. Here is how dual voice trance is defined at Diana's Grove: "Trance speaks to the subconscious in its own native tongue--that of imagery and metaphor. Dual-voice trance, in which two voices speak at the same time, confuses the conscious mind with two streams of thematically-linked but linearly divergent language. The steady beat of the drum becomes an anchor of stability, an island of safety on which to stand when the conscious mind gives up, lets old patterns fall away, and the subconscious takes over, hearing only what it needs to hear, and beginning to fill that space with its own personal story." (- raenefall and sisalfish)

Now I will admit we didn't use a drum (I can't make a steady beat while talking, so I knew it was better to do without) and we did not speak exactly at the same time; I did something of an echo voice.

So back to my story. Yesterday it was our family's turn to plan and lead our local children's circle. After talking about this time beween the holidays of Summer Solstice and August Eve and reading several stories, Zoe and I chose a theme--vegetation gods--and planned several activities around this.

After a discussion on that topic we wanted to offer a meditation or trance piece on the experience of being a plant going through the cycle of seed, growth, harvest, rebirth. I thought that she was going to do the "find a comfortable position and get settled" part and that I was going to lead the trace for all the children. However, after she got us settled she told us to imagine that we are a seed, and then she kept going! As she went through the whole cycle, I threw out questions like, "what do your leaves feel like?" and "what fruit do you bear?" She kept up the main part and brought it to conclusion.

I'll be honest that I was so caught up in my proud mama moment, that I didn't really check the others in the circle for any kind of feedback on how the trance was working for them. Nobody got up and wandered away, anyway. :-) I was really focused on her in the moment and supporting her in any way I could to make this experience as successful as possible for her.