CORINE SOMBRUN speaker contact

CORINE SOMBRUN passe son enfance en Afrique, au Burkina Faso puis dans le sud de la France. Après des études de musicologie et un premier prix international de Musique de Chambre, elle s’installe à Londres où elle travaille comme pianiste-compositeur puis reporter pour BBC World Service.
Au cours d’un reportage en Mongolie en 2001, le chamane Balgir lui annonce qu’elle est chamane et qu’elle doit suivre un enseignement secret. Elle passe ainsi plusieurs mois par an pendant huit ans à la frontière de la Sibérie auprès de Enkhtuya, chamane de l’ethnie des Tsaatans chargée de lui enseigner les techniques de transe.  CORINE SOMBRUN collabore aujourd’hui avec des scientifiques et est à l’origine du premier protocole de recherche sur la transe chamanique mongole étudiée par les neurosciences.
@ PHOTO Par Castafolle — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38918037


Passionnée par les mondes autochtones et le dialogue interculturel, CORINE SOMBRUN s’attache à les faire découvrir au travers de conférences, de workshop (Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris) et de plusieurs livres dont Journal d’une apprentie chamane (Albin Michel, Pocket), Une parisienne en Mongolie (Albin Michel, Pocket), Dix centimètres loi Carrez (Belfond), Les tribulations d’une chamane à Paris (Albin Michel, Pocket), Sur les pas de Geronimo (Albin Michel, Skyhorse Publishing, Pocket), Les esprits de la steppe (Albin Michel) et Sauver le Planète, le message d’un chef indien d’Amazonie (Albin Michel, mars 2015)”

Ses domaines d’intervention sont essentiellement le chamanisme d’un point de vu scientifique (“La transe chamanique, capacité du cerveau ?”, “Transe chamanique et neurosciences”, “Chamanisme, fantasme ou réalité ?”, “Les mondes invisibles explorés par la science”, “ De l’intuition à la transe chamanique”) . Mais aussi, dans le domaine de l’Art (Workshop à l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris sur le thème “Transe chamanique et création artistique”) et de l’écologie au travers des peuples autochtones (“Plaidoyer pour la planète”, “Sauver la planète, les solutions d’un chef indien d’Amazonie” ).

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Corine Sombrun grew up in Africa and returned to France to study musicology, piano and composition. She settled in London in 1999 as a musician but also undertook projects for the BBC World Service.

One of those reports took her to Mongolia, where a highly respected local Dahrad shaman recognized her as having unique shamanistic capabilities. She was invited to spent several months a year at the border with Siberia to undertake the rigorous and intense training to become a Shaman. After eight years she thus became the first Western woman fully trained in the Mongolian shamanic tradition.

Her unique experience in the practice of shamanic trance and her ability to self-induce it have been a topic of interest for scientists. She has been collaborating with researchers since 2006, in order to show that this shamanic trance indeed modifies the circuits of cerebral functioning

Further research into it, including in the capacity of any human being to reach such a state in a self-induced way, is under way. With researchers she has developed "Cognitive Trance Training", a sound-loop based program to help people experience an altered state of consciousness and to learn how to self-induce it.

Tested in various research settings and workshops, 85% of the people underwent a trance state and are abble to self-induce it.  This shows that trance is more an underused potentiality than an exceptional “shamanic” gift.

It opens door to inducing trance to non-trained people as a means to discover some of the neurologic processes at work during the trance state. New researches are under way in Belgium with Steven Laureys at Liege University.

Corine collaborates extensively with artists, by leading workshops exploring the influence of trance on creativity and more recently with the HEC Paris Executive Education by leading Cognitive Trance Training programs.

She has written several books translated into many languages, including "In Geronimo's footsteps", "Les esprits de la steppe", "Save the planet" (2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Environment/Ecology), et "Mon initiation chez les Chamanes" (adapted for cinema, "Un monde plus grand" by Fabienne Berthaud with Cécile de France)