Trainings
Generative Trance Certification
Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D
Generative Trance certification training is one of our core pathways for qualifying for IAGC professional membership.
This Generative Trance training is an experiential program for those interested in exploring trance and its relevance to creativity and change. This is a fantastic opportunity to work with people from a variety of backgrounds and professions– coaches, therapists, business leaders and people interested in personal transformation—to deeply immerse in how to help yourself and others to experience “Generative Trance” as a method for deep change work.
This Generative Trance training is also known as “Trance Camp” which was aptly named by previous participants on Stephen’s summer residential program. They felt the training to be like an amazing and timeless “summer camp” where people gather to enjoy a safe and intensive transformational community experience.
The experience of Generative Trance has many dimensions. The course usually runs from 9 – 6 pm each day. Each day is filled with Dr. Gilligan’s talks, group trances, Dr. Gilligan’s work with volunteer clients, Generative Trance exercises with partners, and group discussions. The trances start out simple and short, and progressively deepen and extend into core pieces of transformational work. A group of experienced assistants is there to help as needed, and we all work to ensure that the group space is safe, intimate, and lots of fun. In addition to the main course, there are optional early morning chi gong classes and optional evening events (a 45 Minute movement practice, dance journey to self as well as presentations on related topics, and the last evening “trance follies” talent show).
What can you do with certification?
- Certification is not a license
- Certified participants may professionally represent themselves as a – Practitioner of Generative Change: Generative Coaching
- It is the responsibility of each certified person to conduct their practice within the scope of their training and licensure (i.e., coaches are not clinical psychologists, doctors, financial advisors, etc.)
- The certified person should know when to refer a client to someone else who has the necessary expertise (as an analogy, a sports coach would refer an athlete who has broken a bone to a doctor)
- Certified persons are eligible for IAGC Professional membership
- Certified persons are only eligible to teach generative coaching work after achieving IAGC Authorization or Affiliation
2021 Trance Camp Participants
What is “Trance?”
Trance is seen primarily as a naturalistic learning state that occurs from within, not an artificial state created or controlled by an outside “hypnotist.” Generative Trance teaches skills for cultivating these higher states of consciousness for purposes of improved health, happiness, healing, and helpfulness to others. Generative Trance is open to those seriously interested in generative personal change and altered states of consciousness. It is not a workshop for receiving personal therapy or learning to do therapy with others; it is an experiential community for learning how to experience and utilize generative states of consciousness. It sees each trance as an experiment in consciousness and shows how trance skills can allow those experiments to lead to many new patterns. The goal is to learn how to create a Generative Self-capable of transforming one’s life in many powerful ways.
Week one:
Trance Camp Week 1
Generative Trance: A Conversation Between The Visionary Dreamer And The Practical Realist
This course focuses on Dr. Gilligan’s Generative Trance work as a way to deeply awaken creativity—in reaching goals, transforming problems, being “in love” with your life, and opening the imagination. The course is practical, stimulating, deeply experiential, and transformative. There will be many demonstrations, group trances, and practicing with partners. You will learn new ways to help yourself and others to live a successful and fulfilling life, to release long-standing limitations, and to move through each day with wonderment, awareness, and connection. It is based on Dr. Gilligan’s 40 years of experience in hypnosis, trance, meditation, martial arts, and creative change work. It is original, practical, transformative, and lots of fun.
Generative Trance is not the traditional trance where the conscious mind is “put to sleep” and the unconscious is programmed with external suggestions. A core underlying idea is that creativity is a conversation between two worlds—the “dreamer” or “visionary” world of the creative unconscious, and the “realist” and “practical” world of the conscious mind.
Each requires and completes the other, and Generative Trance helps you to forge the integrated consciousness that “includes yet transcends” both minds.
In this course, you will learn how, why, and when to use Generative Trance to create change in the three general life areas: professional (work) life, personal relationships (intimacy, family, friends), and self-relationship (body image, emotional history, “negative parts”).
We will see how reality is constructed through mind/body maps, and how in Generative Trance these identity maps can be safely accessed, updated, transformed, or created anew. This changes the unconscious “blueprint” that guides a person in living their life. The practical path for making such changes is provided by the 5-step model of Generative Trance. The first step opens a creative space (I am safe, I am positively connected, I am here). The second step sets intention (There’s something I want to create….), and welcomes the central ingredients of a Generative Trance—goals, resources, obstacles, beliefs, etc. The third step stirs these ingredients to form a Generative Trance (I open into a special learning field…). In the fourth step, transformational changes are developed (I create positive changes). And in the final step, these trance learnings are applied into real life (I can live these changes into the world).
In learning each of these steps, you are discovering how to carefully and effectively make deep changes in life. The training community deeply supports you in integrating this into your daily life. We hope and expect that you will come away from the training with an amazing sense of what’s possible for you and others in life.
Week two:
(Requires completion of Week 1)
Systemic Trance: A Process for Sustainable Creativity
This course is an exploration of Dr. Gilligan’s Systemic Trance Work (STW). STW premises creativity as the core dimension of human being and looks at how creativity occurs through filters (somatic, cognitive, and social). In this process, (performance) systems are the prototype filter; that is, we generate our realities via the (mostly unconscious) maps of who we are, and what the world is. These systemic filters can be held negatively (in neuromuscular lock) or generatively (in creative flow), resulting in either problems or positive solutions.
In the course, you will learn how to identify each part of an identity system, move it into its positive form(s), and then integrate the multiple (sometimes contradictory) parts into a “high-performance holon.” Generative Trance is the means by which these transformational “miracles” can happen. Generative Trance is a “special learning state” that can fluidly hold all the different parts of a system in a sort of “shimmering quantum field of infinite possibilities,” such that negatively conditioned systems can be released and generative systems can be born.
Taken as a whole, STW sees life as a great journey of consciousness and utilizes Generative Trance and systemic integration to realize this journey. You will learn the framework, principles, step-by-step process, and skills for how to do this with yourself and others.
Some basic topics to be covered:
- How to identify the core parts of any performance system (e.g., purpose, present state, operating rules and patterns, resources and obstacles);
- How Generative Trance can release negatively conditioned systems, and create positive “flow” systems in their place;
- How to create a “generative field mind” that allows both coach and client to work in a positive and creative way;
- How to see each part of a system, especially persistent “problems,” as a “resource” and “competency” that plays an integral, essential role in creative change;
- How to activate the deeper “unwounded (Generative) Self” as the basis for transforming and healing the “wounded (ego) self;”
- How trance phenomena are models for creative change, and how they can be integrated into systemic change work;
- How to create harmonious balance between the “managerial” conscious mind and the “artistic” creative unconscious mind;
- How Systemic Trance Work can be applied in work with individuals, personal relationships, groups, and businesses.
- This is the newest development in Dr. Gilligan’s work. Come with a commitment to deep lasting change, and learn how to make your dreams come true.
Generative Coaching
S. Gilligan & R. Dilts
Generative Trance
Stephen Gilligan
Generative
Business
Robert Dilts
