Trance: Unlived Life (AHCW)

Notes:

Trance: Unlived Life

• Our Most Precious Moments are Embodied
• When we leave, we leave through our thinking which means we leave our bodies. Doesn't mean we cannot have thoughts, but when we are really cut off, and not awake in our bodies we are in a trance. 
• A trance is a distorted fragment of reality, living in something smaller than the whole. There is a lot of suffering that comes from that. 
• The wilderness really the domain that lets us manifest our full potential.
• When we consider moments in the past that felt really precious and sacred to you, remember those moments.
• Moments of creativity, of opening up to something, intimacy, of healing..
• You might sense that whatever you are reflecting on you were not lost in thought in those moments. When we are experiencing what is most precious to us we are there for it. We are embodied. They things that most matter to us, like love, are not abstract. They do not happen through virtual reality, they are experienced in a very visceral way. True wisdom. We need to be embodied. We can think about things, but the moments there is true insight, it is coming from a direct engagement with reality itself. There is no interference or interpretation of thoughts.

• Being in Nature
• Precious moments are when we are living from out in the wilderness. Moments of epiphany, or moments that were scared always seems to be out in nature. The scenery, the smells, the feeling of a gentle breeze. Body and mind at the same place at the same time. Touching into the wilderness. "Inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The god whom I love is inside.
• Exploring into how we cut off and how we return. Firstly, it is not our fault. Spiritual life, an integrated mature, living fully, loving fully, requires that willingness to enter the wilderness. It is natural to get cut off, but there is an intention to really be here.

• Understanding a full spiritual life
• Other spiritual traditions: Christian; desert fathers go out into the desert. Thai Buddhist Forest Monks; Forest was their place of refuge. Native Americans; the sacred is shining through every living being and every part of nature.
• Being in nature is part of my spiritual awakening. "Responding to the call of nature.

• Unlived Life: What Is It, Really?
• The suffering we experience, it really comes from conditioning (cultural, in our families). It is from the existential clutching that is defending our existence. The suffering that we experience is the sense of not being able to live in our fullness. Carl Young: "One of the greatest on their offspring and themselves is the unlived life of the parents."
• Unlived life, you may see it as doing something like i.e. wanting to pursue a music career but settled computer programming instead. That is one level.
• The unlived life is energetic. It is that in us that we were unwilling to drop into, and open to and feel. Whether that is the loneliness, or the shame, or the fear, or the passion, or the longing. It is unlived life. Because whatever is left unfelt or unseen, we are identified with, and it keeps us small.
• One of the things that we can sense into our life is that for many people there really is an undercurrent of disappointment, feeling of falling short, that has to do with not living the life fully. There is a sense of possibility that is not being manifested. That is unlived life. There is something we are habitually moving away from that we are not willing to open to. For many people, this is the most clear convergent of Buddhist psychology and Western psychology, which is that we need to shine the light of awareness on whatever parts of the psyche we are not really open to. If we look a little more closely, on how we leave and then look at how to reenter the wilderness. Using RAIN, guided practice of mindfulness and heartfulness, of mindfulness and compassion. How does RAIN help up reinhabit? How does it help us embrace the unlived life? This is something to explore during this course, and following.
• The trance, the leaving, is sustained by being lost in thought. We all get lost in thought.
• The future, the past, we have commentary going on, and at any moment you can come back. It is interesting to check when you come back from thoughts, just notice - have you been aware of the sounds that are here? The feelings? The sensations? You'll realize, it is really a cut-off. We are really cut-off in those moments.

• Recognizing the Flags of Trance: Speeding, Judging:
• Thoughts are useful. They are not good masters, but they are good servants. But they take over. It is like being at the movies. We are spending 24/7 dreaming asleep or day dreaming. We are at the movies.
• The pathway to homecoming, to the wilderness to the God that we love. 
• Recognizing the trance.
• It is part of our condition to go into trance, it is also part of our capacity to notice it, and this is what mindfulness does.
• Catching yourself when you have been gone and come back.
• We get that we leave, it is like a train ride of virtual world, and then we step off the train. You can do it in a half second.
• First step is to notice, we have dissociated.  That possibility with noticing is it can become quicker, cleaner, and more regular for all of us. That is the possibility. Every one of us can strengthen that capacity to recognize.  We have that mindfulness, that this isn't reality, lets pull the curtain. The practice is to notice being off in thought, and not to judge it. If you judge being in trance, you deepen the trance. Try not to add that "second arrow." Any time you have caught on "I'm in trance," you actually have the capacity to arrive right here. You begin to really strengthen a muscle of remembrance. That is a gift.
• First step, recognize the flags of trance.
• And in our external way of moving through the world:
• Speeding; moving really fast trying to move somewhere. The undercurrent of all these flags of trance, is there is a limiting belief that is going on is that I don't have enough time, and I need to get more done. Most people can relate to that one. That is one of the bigger ones. Going half as fast, you notice twice as much.
• Remember trance is that contracted, distorted fragment of reality. We notice a lot more when we slow down.
• Judgement; when the mind is judging "you're wrong" or "I'm wrong" that habit. Underneath that is the belief that something is wrong and things should be different. 
• Obsession; where we are worrying, and planning, and strategizing because again there is a sense somewhere that again, something is wrong and we have to do something.  
• This is the egoic trance, where we feel like we need to keep controlling things in order to make things right. Notice, and watch yourself through the day. Most of the time there is a sense that there is a problem, that I need to be solving. As yourself "Who would I be if there was no problem to be solving?" Relief. Trying to do things and control things.
• Distracting and numbing ourselves; hooked online, over eating
• We get it, in all these moments we are not here.

• Trance Originating and Reappearing in Relationships.
• When we are not here we are not able to draw in our deepest heart and our deepest wisdom.
• "How do I know how to trust if this is the right person? If we are going about it the right way?"
• Not really checking in with body, and heart. Not embodied. The only real way we can have wisdom.
• When this all comes up, come into body. Anxiety. Stay with the anxiety. You’ll see it is merely excitement. Communicate with partner with intimacy, without worry.
• When we are in a thought trance, we miss out on reality. We cannot find out. For empathic connection, science shows, you have to be embodied to have the mere neurons activating that lets you attune to another. We can't attune.
• The challenge is this, that was in relationship, there is wounding and the severed belonging in relationships because we were often young, or it was too much handle was caused the cutting off in the first place. For many people because of neglect, or abuse, or lack of attunement this is all a matter of degree. Early on there is a sense of fear, confusion, or shame (whatever is too much) "I have to leave. Many of us, have to a decent degree have a habit of being really comfortable or traumatized to what is here. So we leave a lot.
• To summarize the trance part. We disassociate, because there is pain, there is intensity, it is unfamiliar, we do not feel in control. We can't feel who we are, the ego self who is managing things, so we leave the body. Yet, when we leave the body we are in a trance. There is unlived life, we are unable to access our heart and our awareness.
• There is a formula that goes here. Pain X Resistance = Suffering.

• Practice Exercise: Our Kinesthetic Senses
• How come it is so hard to really live from the inside out and feel our bodies?
• Practice - close your eyes. Helps get in touch with kinesthetic senses. And have the intention to feel the life of the body from the inside out. You might even drop the inquiry "What is between me and being at home in my body this moment?" Experience the aliveness that is here. Your intention to stay, awake. Feeling from the inside out. What many notice, is we get uneasy. Or we leave out of habit. Restlessness happens, anxiety. A way to understand it, is when we enter our body we enter the wilderness. We are leaving the domain where its mapped and controlled by the brain, and we are entering the wilderness. In the body is the domain there is a play of pleasantness and pleasantness, both guaranteed. As a human, or any organism on this planet. It is how we are wired. We get uneasy because we cannot control it. When we are in our bodies, and just feeling, by nature we are in a being state. As long as we start doing we are no longer receptively aware of what is going on in our bodies. We are completely conditioned and programmed to be identified as doers. So we get very uneasy. It is an existentially uncomfortable thing because the doing self is out of a job. Our basic way of controlling our life is to leave the premises.

My notes:

I really enjoyed this “second chapter” of the course. Very clear, but also evoking. The idea of trance causing suffering is on target. We suffer when we leave. We get lost in thought in something that is not real, something that exists. We imprison ourselves and we don’t have to.

The “wilderness” is new to me, but not the concept. I love being in nature. Hiking, backpacking, the ocean.. I feel so much peace, I feel collected, and safe. I’m in my element. When she had us remember a moment that was sacred to us, I can remember now being in the “now” and feeling and absorbing everything. I wasn’t letting the past bring me down nor the future worry me, I was enjoying those moments to a full degree of awareness. Embodied. A “direct engagement with reality.” I also enjoyed her examples of other spiritual traditions and their need to be part of nature. Instinctively I think we all know this deep down, spiritual or not, nature is healing to our souls.

The explanation of an unlived life was also helpful, it is energetic. We are conditioned to react to things a certain, whether because of the culture we are in and/or the family we grew up with. Grew up with, grew as a person into this world. Our first human relationships are with our parents, think about it. We are conditioned. I don’t want to stay stuck and remain small. Taking accountability for what is under the line and looking for it, here it is called “unseen,” will use help us live and experience life to the fullest.

I love the acronym RAIN. R is for recognize, A allow, I investigate, and N nurture. It is a full blown understanding of what is going on, why, what to do next, and to do it in a self-loving manner. Again, harshness is the double arrow. One arrow into our system is the trance, and the second is attacking the trance with judgement. Avoid the second arrow, I am learning to do this better. This explains a lot of the times I have not grown, but felt like I’ve regressed. I was judging myself, and at times punishing myself for my mistakes.  Not self-compassionate, and most certainly not effective. Nurture.

I do not want to continue these habits, I do not want to be stuck in thought, I don’t want to be lost in trance, I do not want to leave my body.. I want to learn to be quicker to recognizing, allowing, identifying, and nurturing myself through it. Step one, identify. Step two, walk yourself through it. One of my biggest challenged, and probably most of you is too, are the commentaries. The lies, the things my mind plays as a movie. It is not reality. Be present.

I liked the section about the “flags of trance.” These are so true, and so obvious. I go through this so much. The ones Tara listed include speeding, obsessing, judging, and lastly distracting and numbing ourselves. I am always rushing, and worrying, and being hard on myself (and be to close ones), and I definitely do not always sit with what is going on.. we all look for ways to feel better. Sometimes this is a distraction, sometimes we become numb to what is going on, and then the patterns continue. I don’t want this.

The portion in this “second chapter” about the trance in relationships is really good. I identify (not supposed to identify with anything!), I mean I can relate with the example in the lecture. I worried so much, and have in the past also, and was so anxious about doing the right thing that I wasn’t there living fully with the man I loved. Instead I pushed him away. I’ve learned through my trances how to manage. Stay. Sit with the anxiety. What really are these feelings?

I love this: “For empathic connection, science shows, you have to be embodied to have the mere neurons activating that lets you attune to another.”

Jump off that train of trance. Come back Denia to the pathway of homecoming. I feel like I am there, but I also know it will be a life long journey and practice. But also, with practice it will get easier, and I’ll be quicker, and do it cleaner. Takes work.

The formula of pain x resistance = suffering – that is real. Do not resist. Pain will come, do not resist. Don’t add suffering to the pain that is already there.

Kinesthetic senses, feeling the life of the body inside and out. We do not always have to be doers 24/7, we are programmed this way but what I’m really starting to understand is the important of knowing what is going on with your body. Allowing it to go through. Spending time investigating why or where it comes from (we are conditioned, and we are triggered), and nurturing through it. What can I do?