Transcript: Episode 6

Hey friends, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

In last month’s episode, we were talking about the concept of creative genius, and how it can function as a kind of cultural dogma. This month, I want to talk more in depth about dogma and how it intersects with creativity. And just in case that combo of topics wasn’t woo-woo sounding enough, I’m going to approach this specifically from the direction of something called “dogmatic trance,” and the ways it can get all tangled up with that most beloved of creative experiences: the flow state.

I’m guessing that listeners of this pod are going to be at least generally familiar with the concept of flow state – that cognitive state where you get utterly immersed in what you’re creating and expressing, to the extent that concrete reality and time sort of takes a pause while you hammer away at the keyboard. (And then eventually you’re like “why do my wrists hurt, and why are the cats screaming like no one has ever fed them in their entire lives? Oh, it’s because I sat down at five o’clock and it’s now nine.”)

Flow state is a thing we’re pretty familiar with, even if it doesn’t actually happen for us as often as we’d like it to. But if the term “dogmatic trance” is completely unfamiliar to you, that’s because I’m borrowing it from a specific source that has informed and inspired a lot of what I’ll be getting into today.

Just a quick content note here: I’m going to be drawing on terms and concepts connected to religious practice in this episode – and here I’m talking both about conservative forms of Christianity, and more general spiritual technologies like meditation, contemplation, and trance. I’ll also be mentioning some personal experiences with Catholicism, specifically. I will *not* be teaching or advocating any specific spiritual beliefs or practices. But I did just want to provide a heads up for any listeners who carry baggage around religious experiences.

(And just to be clear, I have definitely spent my own share of time swallowed by that proverbial whale. That’s part of why I’m so interested in how dogma and creativity get co-mingled in our psyches and in our lives.)

So: If you’re not up for that topic right now, take care of yourself – you can skip this episode and *I’ll never even know*.

To dive into the topic of dogmatic trance, I want to first offer two definitions that I’m borrowing from trancework teacher Ren Zatopek. Ren runs an online community for folks who essentially want to learn how to reclaim trance practices from dogmatic cultural contexts. (That’s my own wording there, I’m not reading from a bio or anything, but I think Ren would agree with that as a general statement. And if I’m wrong… I guess maybe I’ll be hearing from her after this episode comes out.)

Okay, so what do I mean here by “trance” and “dogma”? Ren’s working definition of dogma goes like this (and here I am quoting): “Dogma is a belief laid down by an individual or collective authority as incontrovertibly true – coupled with either an explicit or implicit threat of dire consequences for questioning the belief.”

The key component of this that isn’t technically included in the dictionary definition of dogma is that second bit – the part about why a dogmatic belief is accepted and upheld as factual truth. Questioning dogma feels dangerous (and sometimes it really is dangerous, in situations where the dogmatic authority can make good on their threats).

So that’s the dogma part of “dogmatic trance.” Ren defines the trance part as “any state that diverts us from mundane, pragmatic, grounded awareness.” And just to throw the Merriam Webster definition into the mix for good measure, trance is any state of “profound abstraction or absorption.”

Mainstream culture doesn’t generally acknowledge trance as part of day-to-day, quote-unquote “normal” existence. But taking the two definitions I just referenced… there are a lot of cognitive states we experience regularly that are, in fact, types of trance. Meditation is a form of trance, in any religious or secular context. Prayer and other contemplative practices are both types of trance, at least when you get deeply into the experience. “Secular” rituals like concerts, festivals, and sports events can include elements of trance, when you get profoundly absorbed into that state of hyped-up, collective energy and emotion and release.

And yes: creative flow state is a type of trance.

Some of the types of trance I just mentioned are pretty obvious – you know you’re in an altered cognitive state when you do any kind of meditation. That’s the whole point of the exercise. But day-to-day trance might seem harder to identify.

There are some pretty reliable hints, though, that you may be in a trance state. Trance might be any moment when…

• Your perception of time is shifted
• You stop tracking the space you’re in and the things physically around you
• You are absorbed in visualizing something as if it’s actually happening
• Or, any moment when autopilot completely takes over while you’re performing a task

A lot of these trance moments are fairly benign: you’re folding the laundry, you get lost in a daydream, you lose track of time and mismatch some of the socks. But day-to-day trance can also have problematic effects, especially for those of us who are more naturally inclined to go pretty deep into trancey places. An anxiety spiral is a trance, as is completely zoning out while washing something extremely sharp.

(If that last one sounds weirdly specific, it’s because that was the cause of my most recent trip to the urgent care clinic. Hurray, trance!)

And beyond the day-to-day (or maybe more accurately, alongside the day-to-day), trance can play a direct role in seeding and reinforcing dogma.

One of the most obvious or common frames of reference for dogmatic trance is religion. Even if you don’t have a religious background, it’s a framework that can help you spot other ways trance and dogma might have played a combined role in your life. But also, those of us who did grow up with dogmatic religion are very often shaped by it in areas that we aren’t especially aware of. Areas like our creativity.

Pretty much any religious ritual you can think of has an element of trance. It’s part of what gives a religious event its power and makes it something outside the mundane. You enter the church or the mosque or the temple, and immediately your behaviors begin to follow a set, repetitive path that encourages cognitive shifts. Trance is a feature of the system, not a bug.

I want to pause and point out that there’s nothing inherently or universally bad about collective experiences of trance, or about religious rituals that intentionally make use of trance. I’m not trying to paint all religious experience with the brush of “bad.” But the reason so many of us have very mixed experiences with religion is that the alchemical formula of trance + dogma can have some really gnarly results on our brains, even under the best of intentions and circumstances. This is a huge part of the reason it’s so vital for leaders in religious contexts to be deeply ethical and empathetic humans.

For ease of getting to my point without having to lean too hard on the kind of generalized disclaimer I just made: I’m going to refer directly to my own personal background and experience here for a couple minutes. I grew up a practicing Catholic – not incredibly strictly so, but like, very much practicing. That was a big part of my identity, and it was something I chose to continue into my early adulthood.

(Spoiler alert, though: I am no longer a practicing Catholic, which I’m sure comes as a surprise to no one who has listened to any single full episode of this podcast. I have respect for those who choose to remain in the Church with a lovingly critical eye and heart, but that wasn’t the choice for me.)

Catholic Mass is highly ritualized, but at least in most mainstream parishes it’s also not generally an especially like… energetic or overtly ecstatic event. So the type of religious trance I have the most experience with is not the kind of overt, high-octane collective trance one might find in worship spaces that include things like rousing rock music or very animated sermons or charismatic practices like speaking in tongues.

But a seemingly tamer form of religious trance can still be a very powerful example of dogmatic trance – sometimes maybe even more so due to the very fact that it’s not an overtly hypnotic or ecstatic experience. You don’t think you’re in a trancey state at all. You’re just sitting in the pew like you do every week, and oh sure, there’s lots of speaking in unison and uncomfortable ritualized body positions and professions of faith you can repeat on autopilot and sometimes you sort of get tunnel vision staring at the altar... but what’s so trancey about that?

One piece of my religious background that continues to have an effect on my life is connected to just how normalized and unobserved the altered-state-ness of religious practice can be in our culture (at least when you’re practicing a mainstream form of Christianity). Even as a queer person who grew up always questioning the Church even as I participated in it and found identity and value in it – I’m still, years later, uncovering bits of dogma in my brain that are much less apparent than the whole “you’re going to hell” thing.

And part of the reason these more subtle bits of dogma are so engrained is trance. I can no longer consciously bring to mind the full text of the Nicene Creed, but my body can still recite it if I start speaking it aloud. And all those repetitive, seasonal and cyclical gospel readings and homilies are still knocking around in there, too. I haven’t re-installed Catholicism in my brain for almost two decades, but trance teaches us things in ways in last – both for better and for worse.

When used in ways that maintain and encourage empathy and evolution and autonomy, trance can be a healthy tool. But when used in dogmatic ways, it can teach us to think and believe harmful things on autopilot.

So here’s the little truth bomb bringing this around to creative work: The types of flow states that we’re often chasing in our creative practices are exactly the types of states where we are susceptible to the lingering effects of dogmatic trance.

Whatever trancey dogma is rattling around in our brains, and whatever its source – creative flow is like *just barely down the hall* from that part of our psyches. And sometimes these parts might be an overlapping Venn diagram. Or hotel suites with a conjoining door, to keep up the hallway metaphor.

Obviously this talk of conjoined hotel rooms is not an especially scientific explanation of what’s happening in our brains in creative flow state vs. other kinds of trance – I’m not claiming that’s what the MRI would look like. But as I’ve been engaging with Ren Zatopek’s work and applying her concept of dogmatic trance to my own experiences… the more I see that my states of writing flow are often interrupted or infiltrated by dogmatic trance.

I start reciting harmful things on autopilot. Things like “your voice only has value if you are Good, and you are fundamentally Not Good.” Or “you should only write if you are gifted, and any mistake or learning curve or bad draft proves that you are not gifted.” Or “show don’t tell, show don’t tell, show don’t tell…”

(That last one isn’t so much a harmful bit of dogma as a bit that I find infinitely and perpetually unhelpful for my own writing.)

This direct connection between the mental mechanics of flow state and dogmatic trance is I think why maladaptive creative habits and mindsets are *so hard* to shift – no matter how much we might have been able to distance ourselves intellectually from those mindsets. Each time we’re in flow state and a pernicious bit of creative dogma breaks into that trance, our brains are essentially primed and ready to be like, “Yes, this is truth.”

And not only does that dogma feel like a fundamental truth, it feels like a fundamental truth that it is dangerous for us to question.

One of Ren’s metaphors for dogmatic trance is that it’s a bit like going down into a doomsday bunker, even though the world is demonstrably not ending. When you’re in the grips of dogmatic trance, it becomes reasonable to cling to the perceived safety of the bunker rather than risking the perceived danger of questioning the idea that the world is ending. In a weird, usually unconscious way, we would sort of rather that the world actually be ending, because it allows us to maintain the bunker status quo.

Sometimes we want to stay in the bunker because we’re actively enmeshed in a community that has threatened us with dire consequences for leaving it. But sometimes we stay in the bunker because we’re not even aware of how our beliefs and hopes and fears have been reduced and restrained by dogma. We just feel this vague but bone-deep sense that certain things are true, and it’s dangerous to think otherwise.

We have to actively learn to see dogmatic trance at work in us. That’s part of the whole legacy of dogma – it thrives in spaces where it is normalized and therefore invisible. But once we do start to recognize dogmatic trance, its power over us wanes. Even in the moments when we do experience it, we’re less likely to get lost in it. We’re already halfway out of the bunker.

Maybe all this talk of dogma is feeling a little overwrought and overdramatic in the context of creating a healthy writing practice. But I ultimately don’t think it is. Remember earlier in the episode when I shared those general definitions of trance? They weren’t all earth-shaking religious experiences. Trance is a day-to-day cognitive experience.

One of the places trance can show up is in learning environments. There’s a lot of cultural criticism about how our standard classroom pedagogy can create a space where students aren’t really being taught how to think or learn. We’re being taught how to pass specific, often arbitrary tests and how to meet the expectations of authority figures (regardless of how those authority figures behave themselves).

Combine that with a simple dose of day-to-day trance, and you can end up with a dogmatic trance experience – especially if you’ve already got some trancey dogma in your brain. If you’ve spent time around religious dogma, or if unsafe situations in your life have seeded their own dogma, then you may be more likely to drop into that space where belief meets threat. As Ren puts it, “the existence of some underlying trances can turn situations that shouldn't be dogmatic into dogmatic experiences.”

So while the big, dramatic types of dogmatic trance will certainly shape our relationship to creativity and storytelling – so will less dramatic sources of dogma. Anybody who’s taken a poorly led writing class will know how easy it is for a single, limiting idea of “good writing” to utterly dominate the discussion. And in many workshop-style classes, questioning the collective assessment of your work is literally forbidden by the rules of the classroom.

If you question the dogma, you may be labelled as “too emotional” or “not a mature writer.” Your grade may get docked. Your instructor may not recommend you for advanced study or for other opportunities.

It’s clearly not the same as being told you’re going to hell. But when you love storytelling, or any creative craft, being dismissed in the very place you’re trying to learn your craft does feel pretty dire. And it becomes very hard to discern the lines between truth and opinion.

There’s an amazing book by Matthew Salesses called Craft in the Real World that has received a lot of attention since it came out a couple years ago, and it’s very much worth the hype if you haven’t read it. I’m sure I’ll talk about this book more in future episodes, but just in brief, the book is a critique of the ubiquitous American writing workshop format. Salesses breaks down why it tends to churn out the same type of writing, even when writing instructors have the best of intentions. And that workshop format is especially restrictive to writers with any kind of marginalized perspective.

The life of a writer, or any creative, is often filled with doubt. (Or, at least it is for many of us.) We doubt our abilities and our value as creatives. We doubt our capacity to navigate the world of publishing or the world of the workshop or the writers group. And those doubts are normalized and sometimes even encouraged. We don’t live in a society that values its artists.

But any doubts we have about whether writing has to feel or look this way are not encouraged. They feel dangerous. If we can’t please the gatekeepers, how will our stories be heard? How will our desire to tell stories in the first place receive the blessing of validity?

Here’s another quote from Ren: “Dogma shuns doubt. And as we’re… gagging and silencing all of this doubt inside of us, we’re just silencing great swaths of our inner landscape, our capacity for creativity, for imagination, for invention – all of our unique virtues, our voice, our conscience.”

To use another example from my own experience – I’ve been lucky to have a couple especially great writing teachers (and a few not as great ones). But even the two teachers who have taught me the most have also left some little bits of creative dogma rattling around in my brain, right alongside the religious dogmas of sin and silence and sacrifice. I’m fairly confident all that heavier-hitting religious trance and dogma made me susceptible to creative dogma in ways I wouldn’t have been otherwise.

But when I write, when I dip into states of flow, there’s always a bone-deep sense that no matter what I’m creating, or why I’m creating it, I have to prove right now right this second that I’m not pathetic, that I’m not wasting everybody’s time. That I’m not, in the end, just being annoying.

One of my otherwise-beloved teachers had this one thing they would write in the margins of my stories, to indicate lines or sections that weren’t working well. In a sort of italicized version of their handwriting, they would write the word Sigh, with a vertical bracket line indicating whatever swath of my story was sigh-worthy.

Now, let’s be clear: this was done with good intent. It was supposed to be a humorous shorthand, some tongue-in-cheek snark to make the medicine go down easier. And this teacher gave me reams of encouraging margin notes as well.

But, dear listener, do you think I can specifically remember any of those uplifting margin notes? Nope. I cannot. After all, they were different each time, specific to the context of the lines. The thing that was the same every single time, that became a sort of ritualized refrain of rebuke, was that one italicized word: Sigh.

That word crept deeper and deeper into my creative flow state. And I got really, really good at reading my own work specifically looking for where this teacher would write sigh. Where they would find my creative work to be, in other words, annoying. How am I being annoying right now on this page? How might I make myself less annoying? Is it even possible to make myself less annoying, or is sigh actually just the deepest and truest essence of myself as a storyteller and a human??

And if I am inherently just the embodiment of sigh – how will I ever validate my creativity? How will I ever be good?? (Catholicism has entered the chat.)

This is not at all what my teacher intended for me to learn. But sometimes dogma sneaks up on us, especially inside the container of trance.

Here’s the really weird part (or the totally expected part, thinking from the angle of dogmatic trance). For years I was super proud of my ingrained, hyper-vigilant habit of looking for the sigh-worthy bits of my own stories. I’d talk about it as a funny anecdote – here’s this goofy way I write better drafts, but it totally works!

(Spoiler alert number two: It was totally not totally working. I did this as I was revising, which wasn’t always so bad. But I also did this while I was just trying to get a messy first draft out of my head and onto the page. I’d get unconsciously obsessed with avoiding letting anything even potentially sigh-worthy escape onto the page, instead of actually discovering the story – instead of being with the story’s presence. And then I’d wonder why I struggle so much to write.)

Until really recently, I was unable to question whether this was actually a useful and appropriate way to engage with my own writing. I had to make it something positive, even when it was making my experience of writing deeply miserable. Questioning that bit of dogma felt like giving up on my writing – or more specifically, giving up on shaping my writing into something that beloved and talented teacher would approve of.

Is this all sort of a bonkers, bunker-brain reaction to a silly thing somebody wrote on some story drafts almost twenty years ago in college? Yeah, it is. But dogmatic trance is like that. It makes us believe and repeat harmful things on autopilot, even when they don’t make sense.

Our creative bunker is both our cage and our comfort. We think it’s the best sanctuary we have for the sacred work of storytelling, even when it’s the thing keeping us hiding underground.

There’s a silver lining to this, though. Like I mentioned earlier, once you spot dogmatic trance at work, you’re already halfway out of the bunker. Your ingrained dogmatic assumptions stop being invisible truths and become something you can name and examine and question. You can begin to discern different flavors of  trance – the different scents of creative flow and dogmatic haunting.

The first step is figuring out what your dogmatic beliefs about creativity actually are, and where they came from. When feeling out the sharp-and-hidden edges of dogma, Ren suggests a trick for making things a little easier and less immediately loaded. Instead of jumping straight to “what do I believe about my creativity,” you can ask yourself “what things have I heard about creativity” or “What do people say about creativity?” Just start listing stuff, and see where it takes you.

As the ideas start emerging, try asking yourself who or what you perceive as authorities on creativity. What do those authorities say about creativity in general? About your creativity, specifically?

These authorities can be individual authorities, like my example with the specific teacher. They can be specific groups you’ve been part of. But they can also be more general collective authorities – any sort of group think vibes like repeated advice or writing memes. I put stuff like “show don’t tell” in this category, stuff that I’ve heard so many times I couldn’t begin to assign it to an individual authority or group. The ubiquity itself lends the authoritative air.

Once you’re feeling ready to go deeper, here’s the next thing to explore, the thing that will really start to expose the walls of your creative bunker: How have these dogmatic authorities usurped your personal authority on your own creativity?

The answer to this might be something well-intentioned that went horribly wrong – your own version of sigh written in the margins. Or you might uncover things with heavier implications – ways your creativity was actively suppressed, ways that ideas like sin and worthiness and safety became tangled around your concept of storytelling.

Whatever emerges, be gentle with yourself. Explore your bunker as slowly as you need to. No matter what it looks like, breaking out of it is a process that has to be grieved. To quote Ren one more time, “if there actually aren’t fire and zombies out there and you were wrong… you’ve already spent 15 years of your life or 30 years of your life in a bunker. You have to grieve that.”

For this month’s newsletter, I’m sharing some expanded prompts to help you explore the bunker, plus an exercise to help you consciously choose some new, supportive creative authorities. If you’d like to get access to those resources – plus all future episode resources, right in your inbox each month – scroll down to the link in the show notes to join the newsletter circle.

And to galvanize you for the work of identifying the creative dogma that has shaped your storytelling, to start getting your creativity out in the open, bunker-less air, here are the two core questions to consider.

What is at risk if you question that dogma? And what is at risk if you don’t?

If you are a bit of a woo-inclined human and you were at all intrigued by my references to Ren Zatopek’s work in this episode, I highly recommend checking out her online community Hedge+Riders. Ren’s approach to working with spiritual tech like trance has been a great resource for me as someone who is continuously working on reintegrating spiritual practice into my life and my creativity in healthy, non-dogmatic ways. You can find Ren at renspiritwork.com, which I’ve linked in the show notes.

And if you enjoyed this month’s episode of the pod, please do share it with a friend! Word of mouth (or word of email or direct message) really helps the podcast grow, and I would so appreciate the support. Until next time, friends – keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.