Tara Brach - Awakening from Trance – Embracing Unlived Life

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Awakening from Trance – Embracing Unlived Life - When physical or emotional pain is too much, our conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings. The result is a trance – we are split off from the wholeness of our aliveness, intelligence and capacity to love. This talk explores how this dissociation shows up in our lives and how mindfulness enables us to integrate cut-off parts of our being in a powerful way, and awaken from this trance.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. There's a teaching from my first yoga teacher that I love to share. Very simple. You might remember it. She says, put your right arm over your left and hug yourself. And then she says, put your left arm over your right and hug your right and hug your evil twin. And the understanding is that to be intimate with life, you know, to be fully alive and awake, we need to include and be intimate with all parts of our being, the unpleasant body sensations and the difficult emotions like fear and shame. We need to include it all. And as many are aware, we have very strong conditioning to pull away. And the more unpleasant,

and the experience, the more we dissociate. It's a natural coping strategy. And when it locks in, over time, we're living in a trance. I'd say much of the spiritual path is a reconnecting with what we've pushed away, with the life we pushed away. And the first step is bringing into the light of awareness the signs of dissociating. So, we can, once we see it, with wisdom, with kindness, deepen our attention, reconnect. This is the theme of today's reflection, and it's a meaningful one both on our individual past and also in the world because the more we heal the inner divides, the more we're able to experience and live from our larger belonging.

So thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy. Welcome. I often speak with the languaging of trance that we get caught in in a trance that narrows our world. And I was remembering one of my first conscious experiences of waking up out of a trance. And my entree into a lot of spiritual practice was through yoga. And I remember I was in college and I had done. done a yoga class and we would end our yoga class with meditation with silence. And so my mind was pretty quiet when I walked outside and it was springtime and there were fruit trees. So there's

real the fragrance of the trees and a slight wind and so my senses were taking it all in. And I just stopped and I stopped and it was just the moon and it was kind of one of those clad. I could have ridden a little haiku at the moment but I didn't. But I did have this awareness that it was the first time I consciously felt my body and my mind in the same place at the same time, all there. And it just become increasingly clear to me that in the moments that we're stressed, it's a little bit like we're on a bicycle pedaling and we're just pedaling away from the present moment, that in some way we're on our way to something else that hopefully will feel better or

give us more. I'll share with you a reading some of you might remember called reverse living. Life is tough, takes up a lot of your time in all your weekends, and what do you get at the end of it? Death, a great reward. I think the life cycle's all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way, then you live 20 years in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work for 40 years until you're young and have to enjoy your retirement. You go to college, you party until you're ready for high school. You become a little kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, go back into the room and you spend your last nine months floating and you finish off as a gleam in someone's eye.

There's a magic that happens when we step out of time, this trance that we're on our way somewhere else. I mean, you can just try it for a moment, just very gently whisper to yourself, stop. Just stop. Some way realize there's nothing ahead. Just this. Everything becomes a mystery when we really stop. A mystery that's incredibly alive and also has a lot of space. We're here.

So what happens is we both have a yearning for that. We have a yearning to touch into that stillness and wakefulness. And because there's this background in us of fear and because we get so stressed, we have this conditioning to run. And what happens is that when we regularly leave, when we leave the present moment, we're leaving our bodies and we're also habitually leaving the parts of our experience that we haven't made peace with. So we'll explore this trance, the way we leave some more in this class.

And I'll begin with a classic Zen story that's one of my favorites. And if you've been around for a while, you'll remember it. It's a beautiful one to use as a template for reflection. It's about a young girl named Xenjo. And her older sister and mother have passed away. So she's living with her father and she grows up playing with a next-door neighbor, a young boy named Ocho and they get along really well. So her father would sometimes jokingly say,

you and Ocho, you make such a pair. You'll probably be very happy together this life. She is quite beautiful and as she grew older, a number of suitors were seeking her hand and her father was in a different phase of life trying to find the right match. And one day he told her to sit down. He had found just the right young man

from several villages over and Senjo collapsed into this crying and despair. Word got around the village and Ocho heard also and his breath stopped and his heart broke. So that night he packed a few things and went down to the river and he took a small rowboat. He was going to leave forever and he saw a shadowy figure running through the trees and it was Sinjo who said I could feel you leaving I couldn't live without you So they left together. And they went down the river some distance and got a plot of land and made a garden and had a family

and were living their lives. One day, Ocho came to the table and breakfast table and found Senjo crying. And she basically confessed that she missed her father and missed the town and just wasn't happy and he said the same that it was in him too. So they decided that they would get an abode and bring their children and what they could carry and go upstream and see if her father would take them back in. So they did that and they arrived at the village around dusk and landed at a dock near Sanjo's home and Ocho decided he better go first to see if he could explain things and he went to the door

and the father opened the door and Sanjo said, oh father please forgive us but I've come home when I brought your daughter back with two fine grandchildren. Please accept us, forgive us for running away. And he looked at cold eyes. He was astonished and angry. And he said, I don't know what girl you're talking about. Since the night you ran away, my daughter has been home sick in bed and unable to speak. So he said, oh, no, no, father, she's there.

Look, she's at the boat. He goes, I'm not going down to any boat, but he sent the servant down. He said, you go look and see what's in that. And the servant went, and sure enough, there was Senjo with two young children. And he came running back and said to the father, she's there, and she's got your grandchildren, and she's on her way to the house. At which point the father shook his head and know when he went up to the bedroom where Sanjo was lying and said, Ocho's come back with another Senjo and your two children.

And her eyes opened in a new way they had not for five years. And she stood as if walking in a dream and walked out the door where her father father followed her and down the road from the dock the other Sanjo was approaching her with the two children. And they met, they embraced and they became one. And then together with father and Ocho became a full family, living and loving fully. So this is the classic Zen story and it's a story of many levels, a story of broken hearts and grave choices and levels of exile. And it's also a very powerful story of what each of us in different ways experiences when we run into difficulty, whether it's in the womb or as young children or different times in our life, and it feels like too much. And some part of us leaves. We leave where the intensity is in our bodies and our hearts.

We push it under and we leave in our thoughts and we leave in our behaviors. We exact that bicycle peddling and just get away from what's too much to feel. So this process is often referred to as dissociation and it's really a universal mechanism for pulling away from what's too much. And when we do, the suffering is that we pull away from what's too much. that we pull away from our wholeness, we fragment. We don't have contact with an integrated whole sense of being and with our full intelligence and with our full capacity for loving.

When we leave, when we don't pay attention to what is there, when we leave it unprocessed, when there's unlived life, then we're not living from a fullness of being. That's the sign. So, we just look a little closer together and as I often do I'll ask you to check in in your own lives on how it is that we split off from parts of ourselves. And the particular practices of presence, and I'll just, I'm going to hone it into one particular practice of mindful presence that directly calls us into touches and

opens us to the places that we've left behind. So I like to always begin by naming trauma because when there's trauma, it really deserves a lot of respect. And it's not like a quick thing where, oh, let's take this powerful mindfulness process and turn it on and reconnect all the wires and we'll be fine because it takes a while. We have neuroplasticity, all of us, and that means that every one of us, no matter how profoundly we were injured and how to then compensate in ways that now cause us trouble, we can decondition those patterns. But sometimes when there's trauma, when there's a real acute overload to the system, it takes the assistance of a therapist and it takes a real gradual approach.

So I wanted to put that out there. trauma is basically when there's an overload of physical or emotional pain, too much to process, so we have to shut off from, can't process what's in our body and it just stays locked in our nervous system. And what's been found in the last 15, 20 years, I think Peter Levine was one of the first to describe how it happened. In the wilds, when animals are traumatized, they'll freeze, they'll go into shutdown mode. as a way to kind of protect themselves.

And then when they come out of it, the way they shake off the trauma, they have a way of just kind of shaking it out. So it doesn't stay in their system. But we humans, especially us more civilized ones, don't have a good way of doing that. So it gets locked in for a long periods of time. And then what we do, we split off. We get numb in parts of our body that if we felt them, it would put us back in touch with the wounding.

we go into obsessive thinking a lot of times and into behaviors that aim at soothing. So that's a whole world into itself, but we split off. Now, it doesn't just happen with trauma. Most of us are somewhat dissociated most of the time as a habit. It's a matter of degrees. So whenever there's strong emotional discomfort or physical discomfort, if we can get away from it, we will. That's our habit. Emotionally if we were neglected or if we felt rejected or had a lot of criticism,

what happens is that touches into the place in us that feels unlovable or not respectable or unworthy. And we don't want to hang out there. So we leave. We go elsewhere. We also internalize the messages. And so we not only, do we leave our bodies? There's a sense of a bad self that we reject and that splits us further. Lily Tomlin had said that self-knowledge is not necessarily good news, you know. She says, I always knew I wanted to be somebody but I guess I should have been more specific, you know. One of the big domains where we split, where we fragment, we're no longer whole, is when we reject parts of ourselves.

And we reject the parts of ourselves that our parents basically criticized. Sometimes it's the parts of ourselves that the culture says don't fit in. I mean, I think immediately of how, you know, classically males are not supposed to feel their feelings and be vulnerable. So there's a lot more males

that are unable to feel parts of the, body and feel the vulnerability and insecurity and fear and, you know, and feel it and stay with it than females. And I remember one of my favorite cartoons that must have been like 20 years ago. It was one of the Sylvia cartoons. And she was in the guys, one of her habitual guys was as a fortune teller kind of. So she's being the psychic and somebody came to her and said, you know, my husband, he doesn't talk about his feelings.

we don't have enough intimacy, and so Sylvie said, all right, well, what's new? So she goes into her fortune-telling thing, and she says, beginning in January, 2016, men will start talking about their feelings. Within moments, women everywhere will be sorry. So it's fun, and we know that this culture, especially the dominant culture, has certain standards for what is good and what is successful and what a successful and what appearance is the appearance to have, and if we don't fit in, there's the potential for that splitting off of a part of ourselves.

Read you this. Am I gorgeous, my child asked, drawing the word out like pulled happy? Yes, I say you are. The pink and teal dress is probably made of highly flammable material, some chemist's approximation of tole and satin. Pudgy fingers decorated with pink polish and trawl. and trace the sequins on the bodice. I love this.

A giant pair of bubble gum pink wings flap slowly. Little feet dance and sparkly red slippers. I'm just like a real princess. Yes, I say you are. The thick blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, flawless skin. This child is the American epitome of beauty. This child, my son. He's four years old and prefers to wear dresses.

Maybe it's a phase. be not. Even as I look, even as I wonder how I produce such an angelic-looking creature, I wish he would put on some pants and go back to playing with toy tractors, not because it matters to me. It doesn't, but because I'm already hearing in my head the name calling he'll face in kindergarten. Many adults already seem a bit disturbed by the dresses. Strangers utter awkward apologies when they realize he's not female. This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball trucks and trains. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous. He picks up a parasol, a neighbor gave him, and opens it jauntily over his shoulder. Am I beautiful?

he asks. I sweep him into my arms and plant a kiss on his cheek. Always. So we have to open to that how many suffer from the implicit biases in this culture. And knowingly or not knowingly, reject a part of themselves for not fitting in. So we're splitting off from rawness. We're splitting off from a feeling of what's not okay with either the culture or parents and then that it gets internalized into ourselves. Now the signs, how do we know? How do we know when we've been fragmented in some way?

And I mentioned before one of the signs is obsessive, addictive thinking when we're just constantly thinking, that means we're in some way racing away from our body. We just don't want to be here. It's like that reverse living thing. We're just like tumbling into the future. Obsessive thinking, limiting beliefs, beliefs that are fear-driven, where our mind is spinning, trying to soothe, trying to comfort. I read something Eckert Tolly wrote about two ducks when they get in a fight. It says, it never lasts long their fights. Then they say, separate and they float off into opposite directions. And each duck, much like other animals in the wild, so flap its wings vigorously, it's like a few times, it's just releasing all the surplus

energy from the fight. And after they do that, they float on peacefully as if nothing ever happened. Whereas, you know, if a duck had a human mind, think of it that way, you know, it would just, it would float off and be making up all these stories. It would probably be, you know, I can't believe he just did. He came within five inches of me. He thinks he owns his pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I'll never trust him again. Next time he'll try something just to annoy me. I'm sure he's plotting something right now. I'm not going to stand this. I'll teach him a lesson. He won't forget. You get the idea, right? So this is again, when we're splitting off, when there's anger or hurt, rather than being with what's there, we go out with our stories.

Okay? Then there's the addictive consuming, that most of us have some way of consuming, some substance, some something that we use to soothe ourself because we don't want to just be here and feel what's here. It's just very, very deep and very, very broad in the culture. And every culture has it by the way. Every culture has some plants or some chemicals that humans when they get stressed or tense or trying to escape how it is here, you use. to feel different, right? That's why probably the most, this is the line, a priest, a rabbi, and a vicar walk into a bar. The barman says, is this some kind of joke? But you, I mean, it's like the bar is the epitome in our culture of let's get away from how we're feeling

and feel differently. And then what happens in the body? So this is where all the actions at. When we don't want to be with what's in the present moment, we kind of cut off or shut down the flow in different parts of our body. So when the throat gets tight, I mean, how many of you have noticed your throat getting tight at times? Many, many? Yeah. When the throat gets tight, that's one of the stress responses, there's a kind of a shutting down here, so that we can't really freely express ourselves. Okay? When the heart gets tight, we can't open to feel our senses and our tenderness and the realm of feeling and emotion. When the belly gets tight, we lose access to our power.

The belly is related to the ego or the power center. We get clutched up, we can't let real power flow through. When the pelvic area gets tightened up that all the creative juices close down. So for many of us we're not aware of when we're shutting down creative juices or or when we're not feeling with the same tenderness, because it's so habitual. We're just not aware that we've in some way numbed out and left these different centers of aliveness in our body because at some point things were too much and we didn't stay. So the reason I find that Senjo's story really instructive is because, like Senjo,

we all hit times where there's some loss or some hurt or something that feels like too much. And there is very, it's a very exaggerated illustration that a part of her, it was too much and she just shut down and part of her died. It was like that depression that we lose hope. Just no life force at all. She just cut away from her body totally. The other part went into a kind of trance of living where you could just feel they went down river and they found a garden flood and they had a family and children. It's like

it's not real. We're living in a story. And that's that sense of living our lives on automatic like we're moving through the day and trying to get through things and we're on our way somewhere. And it's like we're skimming the surface but we're not arriving in our lives. Does that make sense? This trance? So often there's, we're split. We're split. and there's different forms of it, the depression, the automatic. For many, there's the undercurrent of anxiety, like something around the corner is going to be too much. So for many of us, we've cut off in the body and then it takes shape and our behaviors and it gets played out. And it might be the behavior like Senjo when she's shut down where we completely withdraw.

It might be that we're going through the motions. And for others, the behaviors are more the kind of defensiveness. We're protecting ourselves from others and kind of having to justify. And for others it's aggressive and sometimes it's really dramatic and sometimes it's more of a kind of a just in some way trying to prove something. But in a deep way our body lets us know. That's the deepest way. our body that the flows have stopped. This is author and psychotherapist Alice Miller. She says

there's no way to avoid what's in the body. If we don't pay attention to it, we'll suffer the consequences. And I'm going to read you. I think a paragraph she wrote that I think is so powerful. The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived. Our feelings manipulative. and conceptions confused and our body tricked with medication, but someday our body will present its bill for it is as incorruptible as a child who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or excuses and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth. Carl Jung put it similarly. He said our suffering and our neurosis comes from the unfelt, unseen parts of our psyche, the body psyche.

So in order to reconnect, usually there is some awareness of the suffering of what's going on. Our body's acting up. We kind of get it. where we do behaviors that goes so over the edge that then they stir up something in a relationship and we have to face it. But there's some amount of suffering that lets us know, like Senjo's tears at the breakfast table, that we have split off from a part of ourselves and it's time to reintegrate. It's time to come back into wholeness. So there's an attitude that we begin with. And it's never too late to say, okay, I really want to turn towards and re-embrace.

And the attitude is really one of sincerity that we're willing to have the courage, the greatness of heart, to be with what we weren't with before. Some of you might remember that great inquiry that this real wise sage put out. He said, just ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel? feel? It's so simple. What am I unwilling to feel? When I ask myself that in any moment, like right this moment, what am I unwilling to feel, it brings my attention right to the places of vulnerability or tenderness that in some way aren't so safe or comfortable, they're more edgy. What am I unwilling to feel? Elizabeth Lernery. Elizabeth,

Lesser has a prayer I love. She says, this is my prayer to God every day. Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fear. We start with this attitude where there's something in us that says, you know, I really want to live from the wholeness of my being. I want to love without holding back. You know, I want to be in this life, not skimming the surface. And then there's that prayer. Okay, so let me learn to stay. Let me see what's really here. And then now we're going to move to the practice that helps us to embrace the unlived life, to really embrace it. And we come back as we always do to these two basic wings of awareness. And one of the wings, in the wings,

order to re-embrace the unlived life is to have mindful contact with what's here, to find our way back into our body. You have to feel what's going on. Mindful contact. And the other wing is to relate with a quality of openness and kindness towards what we contact. And I think probably the best metaphor is we're contacting the waves of the ocean and we're remembering the ocean, the space that has room for them. The ocean can cradle the waves that are on its surface. In other words, in order to re-embrace the unlived life, you have to remember what's large enough to include it. Otherwise, it'll feel like too much. One of the ways that I have found the most useful to practice embracing unlived life is with the help of the

breath. And you can just try this right now. I'll just give you the the language that I sometimes use, and we're going to, we'll practice this at the end also. So there's the wing of contacting and there's the wing of sensing the space that can include. You can very simply imagine with your in-breath that this is your way of contacting or connecting with what's inside your body. And if it helps to put your hand on your heart to kind of draw your attention, the parts of the body that where we hold unlived life are often, in the throat, the heart, and the belly. So just breathe in and feel the breath coming into these areas of potential vulnerability. The sound support you and guide your attention too.

Why not? So for now you just feel the in-breath, feel the breath and let it help you contact whatever perhaps you're not paying attention to inside you. So the in-breath is to help you get into your body and to feel that you're contacting directly the waves of experience inside you. And the out breath is like you're surrendering that wave into the larger ocean, you're letting go into the space around you. So whatever you feel, the in-breath, sense with the out-breath that it can float or be delivered into or surrendered into the space around you, the whole ocean of experience.

breathing in, feeling the wave, the specific contact with sensation, and breathing out, sensing space. You might even listen to sound and sense the space around you until you feel you're getting a little bit of the knack of contacting the wave and sensing the larger space around you. We're going to go back to this in a bit for a little bit more practice but I'll just speak a little more about this. So let's say you're approaching an interview or a presentation or a social situation that evokes fear. And let's say you're the fear of failure, Fof that we talked about the other day. Remember the two little furry Muppets of Fear, that Fof and FOMO? If you remember that, for those you were here, fear of missing out and fear of failure. And then Jonathan added

Fobai, which is the fear of being included, which is another version. We got all these versions of fear. So let's say a version of fear is coming up in you and it's your habit to have anxiety when you're approaching things and then to have it kind of cut off with obsessive thinking or maybe what you do with it is overeat or maybe you get irritable with others and you tense your body but there's a chain reaction and let's say you want to use this and instead of leaving and dissociating in that chain you want to learn to stay. So you begin when you've gotten triggered by some stimulus, you've thought, oh yeah, I've got to make that presentation or oh yeah, that party on Saturday.

And when it comes up in your mind, the first thing always is pause. The pause is the beginning of any intervention of mindfulness. If you want to change your patterning, if you want to undo something that's trapping you in trance, you pause. And then you might even ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel? feel. Okay? And then you begin breathing indirectly to where that fear lives. And you really pay attention. And it helps if you get interested in something and you just says, I just want to feel it. It's okay. Like really, you have to kind of coach yourself a little to really feel it.

And you do that until you feel you're in touch. You breathe, you concentrate on the in breath. You're still breathing out, but you concentrate in the in breath until you really feel you're okay, I'm feeling this in my body. And then you begin to sense with the breathing out that I'm feeling it and I can let it be held in something larger. There's more. You see, there's two truths. There's the truth of the wave that's happening here. But that truth is it's also made of water, made of this ocean of awareness. There's more. And you have to remember the larger belonging to. So you begin to emphasize the out breath. Now for some people the best way to contact the space of the out breath is to literally imagine space around you and listening

to sound will help you. Just you just listen and you go, oh yeah, there's space and you breathe out and kind of let go the fear into that space. It's also possible to begin to sense that that space is filled with presence and with love and that will deepen the space. the healing. If you can breathe in and feel fear and breathe out and sense you're offering it into a very loving kind of awareness, there is much more quickly a sense of integration. So you begin to experiment and sense as you breathe out imagining space, imagining love, imagining presence. Now two more things before we practice. If your challenge is it's hard to feel your body. then practice with the breathing in. And even if that's for some weeks, some months,

you're practicing breathing in and feeling your body. Maybe you practice feeling your hands and your feet, the sensations there. And then you start seeing if you can feel other areas that are more obvious. Because for some of us we've been dissociated from our bodies for decades. So you take your time. That's your practice. Now for others, you can feel the intensity of the body, but it's really hard to sense there's anything big enough to hold it. And the metaphor here is you can sense what happens if dye is in a little sink. It colors all the water. But if you put that same dye in a lake, it no longer has it influence.

The out breath is finding the lake, finding the larger space. So your practice is the out breath. You might feel what's there but keep on breathing out and imagining letting it go into something larger. Letting it go, letting it go. So this is something that you have to play with yourself. For those that feel very agitated, if you have the breaths equal like six counts for the in-breath as you feel, feel, feel with tears, six counts for the out-breath, let go, let go, let go, that will soothe the sympathetic nervous system. It just, that's what happens with pranayam with a six-count breath.

So that's just another piece I'm putting out a lot right now and you have to practice this at your own pace. But we'll try it out right now, if you will, just to take a moment, to close your eyes. And you begin with attitude that we're going to explore paying attention to what we habitually don't pay attention to. And so just since that sincere place in you that wants to wake up from trance, that wants your body and mind to be in the same place at the same time, and that has a willingness to explore the life that's here.

And to encourage that, read you a little poem by the poet Dana Falls. It's called allow. There is no controlling life. Try corraling a lightning bolt containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow and grace will carry you to a higher ground. The only safety lies in letting it all in,

the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures, and successes. When loss rips off the doors of the heart or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth in the choice to let go of your known way of being. The whole world is revealed to your new eyes. So just asking yourself that question, what am I unwilling to pay attention to? And there may be a story of something going on in your life right now. Or you might simply notice in your body right now places that feel uncomfortable, unpleasant. You might find that you feel numb.

You might find that there's really nothing that you're unwilling to pay attention to. Whatever is here that's predominant that comes into your awareness, just begin breathing with that. You may scan gently the throat, the chest, the belly and see where the there's vulnerability there. And as we've been exploring, let the breath guide you. Just for now, see how that works for you. Breathing in slowly, letting the breath help you find your way right to where the vulnerability is, right into the core of the vulnerability. And with the out breath, a slow out breath, sense that you could really release whatever's here into the vastness

of the space around you, letting go. Slow in breath, contacting perhaps in the heart area or wherever you feel vulnerability, right into the center and the core. And breathing out, hearing sounds around you, letting go into the vast space, the sea of awareness, breathing in, willing to feel what's here, contacting, letting yourself be touched by what's here, and breathing out, sensing that you can surrender it into a loving presence, that there's something intrinsically benevolent in your own awakened awareness, breathing in and touching what's here, the very core of it. Breathing out and sensing the space inside that vulnerability and around it that's

intrinsically tender, vast, has room, breathing in, feeling and touching right into the essence of vulnerability, breathing out, sensing the space that's interior and vast that surrounds, letting go. Breathing in, contacting exactly what's here, breathing out and letting it float in a larger sea of presence in the silence continuing for a few moments and then letting go of the elongated breath and just sense whatever has been difficult as a wave of experience that's floating in a tender space of awareness, unfolding itself, without resistance, feel your own beingness as that space, that loving space that has room for the life that's here.

Now when we begin more and more to wake up from this trans and embrace the unlived life within us, become more whole, we start living from that wholeness. And there's a capacity, it's almost like we become a spacious, tender domain for other people and there's a way in which we become healing in that. So there's a real direct link between within our own being, including what's been left out, and then holding a space and being much more in a loving field with others. I wanted to, by way of example, share this is from a book called Offerings at the Wall, and it's from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection.

This is what one man wrote, and some of you might know that this collection was taken from notes that were written and left at the Vietnam Memorial by both those that went to Vietnam and also their families. but this one says, Dear Sir, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day that we faced one another on the trail in Chulai, Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life, I'll never know.

You stared at me for so long armed with your AK-47 at you didn't fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained to kill VC. So many times over the years I've stared at your picture and your daughter. I suspect. Each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt I have two daughters myself now. I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can respect the importance that life held for you. I suppose that's why I'm able to be here today. It's time for me to continue the life process and release my pain and guilt. Forgive me, sir. This is a man who felt

the pain and also felt the larger space that could hold it, releasing it into that larger space. Now, the story didn't end with that letter as it turned out that he left it on the wall, but then it got into the book that I just read you from and then it came back to him in the form of the book and also he had left that little photograph that's in the letter of this man with his daughter. And so his name is Richard Lattrell. He decided he wanted to go to Vietnam to meet the daughter of the man that he had killed. So he did his own healing. We're talking like kind of woke himself up from his own trance. He was with what needed attention, open to it. He decided to go and meet with her. So he located her. Her name was La Trong Noun, the daughter of the man he had

killed and he and his wife flew to Vietnam and through an interpreter he introduced himself and he said tell her this is the photo i took from her father's wallet the day i shot and killed him and i'm returning it with a cracking voice he then asked for her forgiveness and after an awkward moment lon burst into tears and fell into his arms and there the two held each other up sobbing and embracing. It's described she clutches Richard as if he were her father himself and finally coming home for more. And then her brother explained that both of them believe their father's spirit lives on and rich. They expect for him that their father's spirit has come home to them. So I wanted to share this because I heard this story years ago and then I heard the follow-up

piece actually just a few years ago. And it to me was such a beautiful. beautiful example of how this inner work of embracing what we have the unlived life and really becoming more integrated and whole naturally ripples out. It can't not ripple out. When you are no longer blocking off a part of your body, it's like that love and that creativity and that natural intelligence is able to flow freely and open up a space of loving presence with others. So trance, just as a way of closing, we're going to close with a very, very short little meditation, but just to say that trance means we're cut off from the whole. It's any moment that we've really kind of peddled away from the present moment and if it's a stressful

moment when we're locked into our minds and reactivity, we're basically living from the less devolved parts of our being and we're cut off from our awakened. heart. So the pathway home, re-contact the life that's here and remember the space that can hold it over and over. So let's just once again, just to kind of enter into that field again together, I'd like to invite you, you'll find that if you do this a lot, it becomes more and more natural and easy. To just in the same way ask yourself, well, what am I unwilling? to pay attention to in this moment. And with interest and kindness, feel your breath, that slow breath, breathing in, contacting the life that's here, breathing out, hearing the sounds around

you and the space that's here and letting go. Again from poet Dana Falls, she says, home, you've sought it everywhere, but you're already there. Home. The flowing river of the heart, love holding you in close embrace. It's not a place but a state of being. Grace received and offered back. Home, the taste of truth and refuge. Namaste and thank you for your attention.