Free Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin

flat clay spiral with fingertip-sized grooves in it just for this purpose. Note that some people who are first beginning have trouble trancing and doing something physical—like moving their fingers—at the same time, so it might be best to start with one of the other ideas.
    A Few More Advanced Ways to Induce Trance
    These are “more advanced” because they require movement, training, or both.
    drumming. Beating a drum slowly induces trance because it is repetitive and it generates a wonderful, relaxing vibration. Don’t drum quickly, because that raises energy instead of inducing trance. The idea is to imagine that your heart rate is slowing down with the speed of the drumming.
    trance dance. If you’ve ever been to a pagan or Wiccan event, you’ve probably seen people drumming and dancing around a fire. Dancing is one of the most fun ways to enter an altered state. You can do it alone, in the middle of a crowded club, or with your friends under the moonlight. Spinning—kind of like the Sufi “whirling dervishes” do—will put you in trance pretty quickly too, but be careful, please. It’s easy to lose your balance and whack into the furniture (if you do this inside) or the fire (if you do it outside). If you’re interested in trance dance, check out Gabrielle Roth’s book Sweat Your Prayers .
    tai chi and chi gung. If you have studied tai chi and/or chi gung, you know that these practices are meant to induce a light trance, among other things. My husband and I believe that they are so beneficial to learning about body, energy, and trance work that we require all of our students to learn a little of one or the other.
    Turning Off the “Mind Chatter”
    Concentration is central to good visualization, trance work, and magic. As I’m sure you discovered when you tried some of the trance exercises, sometimes it’s hard to concentrate because your conscious mind is chattering away in the background—making a grocery list, reliving an argument with your ex, wondering what to pack for a trip—nattering on about whatever distracting thing it can obsess itself with at the time. Several of the trance-inducing techniques I just listed can help quiet the chattering mind, especially square breathing, listening to music with headphones, and the notebook, because they engage the brain enough that you can forget about the outside world, but not so much that you can’t relax and trance. Here are a few additional things you can do before trance work or meditation to help turn off the chattering mind. There are many, many techniques for this, so if one of these doesn’t work, try something new. You’ll find the right one for you.
    write the chatter out of your system. Get a notebook and write down all of the gibberish going through your head. Write and write and write until it’s purged. You can also imagine and visualize that you’re writing it rather than actually writing.
    wash it away. Visualize yourself in a river current, with the water washing away all the extraneous stuff that is running through your head.
    a variation on square breathing. Instead of slowly inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding, do one full circuit slowly followed by a quick one, then alternate between the two.
    third eye breathing. Breathe slowly and deeply, imagining that you’re breathing from your third eye, the energy center in your forehead between your brows.
    If you absolutely can’t get the chatter to stop, it might mean that this isn’t a good time for trance work because you have something important that you need to deal with. In this case, it may be best to deal with the outside issue first.
    Trance with a Travel Guidebook:
Meditation and Pathworking
    Meditation and pathworking are extensions of the visualization and trance work you have already done. There are many types of meditation, but for our purposes, meditation is concentrating on an image or desired outcome while in a trance state. Pathworking is taking a mental