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Carl Jung describes that when we're cut off from aliveness,
he describes it in psychological terms, he says: "One of the greatest influences
on their children and on their own lives is the unlived life of the parents."
"The greatest influence on their children and their own lives is the unlived life of the parents."
And it could be on the level of "Oh, I never pursued music" or, you know,
"I didn't pursue some art form or the career that I'd really wanted because
I had a family" or whatever; but there's a deeper meaning, also, which is:
"I never really arrived in the parts of my body and being that needed attention,
I never opened to the passion or the fear or the aliveness that's right here."
The unlived life... and trance means unlived life - it's unmanifested spirit.
And we can sense that in our own lives,
I mean so many have a background feeling of disappointment,
that their life isn't really the life they had imagined or hoped for,
that it's falling short in some way, that we're skimming the surface.
One woman I worked with had that around relationships that she's just repeating
the same patterns and that she was never going to live really fully
a meaningful relationship, and so we looked at it together and she had this habit of
having a lot of thoughts about how she was falling short and was going
to be found wanting, not be appealing to someone, be rejected, be pushed away...
and in anticipation of that, she would do the very behaviors that would distance
and this is a very familiar pattern; I'm sure many of you
know it, have seen it in yourself or others. And so
what would happen is she would start thinking those thoughts that
"I'm not going to be accepted" and she'd get very tight
and she'd get very unnatural in her behaviors,
and she'd get critical; like, put the criticism in and put the criticism out.
So I asked her, you know, "If you had to put down all those thoughts
what is it you're most unwilling to feel
when you start being engaged in a close relationship?"
And she got in touch with a very old fear, insecurity
- you know, her parents were very critical and not present, it was a very young place -
and it was a fear that somebody just wasn't going to want to be with her
and I asked her: "So what does that place most need?"
and she said: "It needs me to stay with it."
And so really her practice was to stay in her body with that vulnerability
with a tremendous amount of compassion
and she started doing that, she sent the message: "I'm here, I'm not leaving".
We dissociate, we leave; we're not just leaving our bodies, we're leaving
the wounded places in our bodies.
There's parts of us that need to feel accompanied and we leave...
So for her to keep saying: "I'm not leaving", you know, "I'm staying",
and feel and be with that vulnerability
created a lot more of a space of compassion, a space of presence,
and she started having more choice in whether she was gonna buy into the thoughts.
She was in a relationship and
she'd have the same thoughts of: "Oh, he's going to push me away because of this"
and she'd say: "It's just a thought."
because she was inhabiting a larger space of her being;
she had more choice.
When there's unlived life, we don't have so much choice;
we're under the line, we keep repeating the same patterns.
Becoming awake in the body begins to
open us to a much larger awareness.
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