Trance Experiences: The Root of Transcendence
Exploring How Embodied Trance Leads to Spiritual Transformation
Authors – Paul & Laura Lee Robear ©2025
In our work with Ritual Postures for Ecstatic Trance, trance is the gateway to transcendence. it’s a journey, ordinary to non-oridnary. From our body’s everyday mode of functioning and perceiving, to that normal natural shift allowing us to navigate an Alternate Reality, our inner senses awakening to perceive it anew. For us, transcendence begins with its root word: trance.
Our journey into transcendence is not an upward reach toward a distant, spiritual ideal. We go inward, into the body, into sensation, into the ancient rhythm that opens us to a deeper intelligence. Trance is the doorway; transcendence the journey, an expanded state of being awaits on the other side. One arises from the other — a lived experience, something we feel, reshaping us from within.
All this is no longer common in our current culture, though it is normal and natural. This capacity is built in, it’s a birthright. Our bodies already know how to do shift gears, how to navigate these realms, how to flourish in this state. Trance and transcendence is less something to “achieve”; more something we return to, a remembering of an older language the body-mind-soul still speaks, and fluently.
The word trance points to an altered state of consciousness accessed with ritual intention, a shift that brings a heightened awareness where our ordinary sense of self opens up, allows itself to expand, embracing a larger, quieter, and wiser field of being.
The term trance in the context of anthropology, as used by Cuyamungue Institute’s founder Dr. Felicitas Goodman, can be defined as a culturally shaped, non-ordinary state of consciousness entered voluntarily through ritual for spiritual purposes such as healing or divination. A self-induced state, serving specific individual and community needs, rooted in long-standing human traditions.
Trance also serves as a bridge, reconnecting deeply buried threads of the ancestral wisdom stored in the body. Our daily life is good at disconnecting us from our instincts, our imagination, and a palpable sense of belonging. Embodied trance becomes a pathway home.
In peak moments, the experience is ecstatic. Communing with the All, with Source, is a surprisingly intimate experience. In this softened, receptive state, we connect with something larger than ourselves. Transcending from “me” to “we” is the ultimate in community building.
Ritual matters. It is surprisingly potent. Ritual creates the safe container in which this shift can unfold. How ancient this pattern must be, that our ancestors were recording, in their art, postures as ritual instructions. Using drums, rattles, clapping, foot stomping, dance and voice, to lay the rhythmic beat. To sing to the Earth and to the stars entreating this ancient, long-standing portal to swings open. To slip across the threshold between the realms.
For tens of thousands of years, ritual trance brought guidance, healing, and connection to the elements of Nature, the spirits, ancestors, and larger community, and to the deepest parts of themselves. As we too open our inner ears and eyes, our hearts in the sessions we host, we often hear, “I don’t know how I know this… I just know it.” That kind of knowing doesn’t come from books. It comes from the body, from memory, from instinct, from something ancient that still lives within us. In our modern world, where so much pulls us out of our body’s knowing and into our heads, reclaiming this doorway feels more needed than ever.
The journey from trance to transcendence brings us back to presence in the fullest sense — grounded, awake, and embracing the mystery that lives inside us and all around us. This is where creativity blossoms, where healing accelerates, where meaning arises naturally. This is the essence of Transcendence for us: not a technique or a theory, but a journey home, a journey the body has been waiting for us to take. Through this lens, transcendence is not a “going above” but a going deep, into our lineage, inner knowing, and the living memory of the human experience.
“Trance is the doorway; transcendence is what waits on the other side.” Paul Robear
The name “CUYA” carries with it both history and vision. Rooted in our origins as the Cuyamungue Institute, it now also serves as an acronym — C.U.Y.A. — a guiding symbol that unites our mission:
C — Consciousness: The field of shared awareness that arises in Collective Presence, where the “We” awakens beyond the “I” – moving from the “Me to the We.”
U — Unity: Our alignment with the Cycles of Nature and the rhythms of the cosmos, reminding us that we are woven into a greater fabric of reality. This sense of unity reminds us that our awareness is the shared consciousness that connects all living beings.
Y — Your Awakening: The inner journey of Embodiment and Wisdom, where through direct experience the body remembers. At the CUYA Institute, this awakening is nurtured through Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, where the body itself becomes the doorway to wisdom, presence, and transformation.
A — Ancestral Wisdom: Roots. Our connection to Sacred Lineage, honoring those who walked before us and rooting us in belonging and continuity. Our founder, anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman looked to some of the oldest, most authentic ancestral records we have — the world’s collection of early and indigenous art — and decoded selected artifacts as embodied “ritual instructions.”
Together, the Four Pathways of C.U.Y.A. — Consciousness, Unity, Your Awakening, and Ancestral Wisdom — form a single tapestry of practice. They remind us that awakening is not an abstract idea but something we live: through the body in Your Awakening, through nature’s cycles in Unity, through community in shared Consciousness, and through the guidance of Ancestral Wisdom.
- …. CONTINUE