The Embodied Trance of Separation

I’ve been familiar with the concept of my ego’s “separateness” - from nature, from other people, from my own soul - for years.

I’d heard it being touted as a common source of fundamental human pain.

And yet, this concept of separateness has, for the most part, remained just that - a concept, an idea - never really landing in my lived experience as an actionable, lived truth.

What I guess this means is that I spend most of my time walking around inside my separateness, thinking this is just how life is. The moments of connection I do feel are hard to hang onto, so I plunge back down into my everyday human experience - lacking connection to nature, others and my own soul - thinking that’s just the way life is.

Recently, I happened to catch a glimpse of three subtle ways my belief in my separateness shows up in my life, and works to keep me, well, stuck. Not just stuck, but feeling purposeless, depressed, anxious, even downright afraid! Not ideal, to be sure.

All of these experiences occurred at different points on our trip to Mexico last month. (Which was fantastic by the way! As an aside, if I had to put my finger on what exactly was so great about our trip to Mexico, it was all the experiences of being “in” Mexico. That is, experiences in the villages, at the taquerias, in the collectivos, with the people - just being a part of the flow of Mexican life. Which, compared to America, I notice is a much more cohesive, connected, participatory experience of life than our siloed, individual separate life up here.)

I’ll tell each story of my separateness in the order it occurred. I’ll also share the power that I sense is available to me when I embody its opposite embodiment, its medicine. I’ll detail what I did to reverse the trance of this false belief, how I did it, and what I discovered in the moments after. Finally, I’ll recap how my belief in my separateness works to keep me stuck in that particular context.

The Power to Surrender (Separateness from Nature)

We took a small plane to the beach, and on the ride back to the city, there was quite a bit of turbulence. It was easy to notice how I reflexively grip - with tension in my body, with stories in my mind, even my teeth were tightly closed together. As if by holding on with everything I have, I will be able to overcome an experience of the plane crashing. Which, obviously, is a ridiculous idea. Next to plant medicine and parenting, I’m not sure there’s a better opportunity for the experience of powerlessness than being in a small plane a few hundred feet over misty mountain peaks in a foreign country, bumping along with no way of controlling the experience.

I remembered in that moment my power to surrender and flow. I softened my belly, relaxed my joints - especially my neck and hips - and linked my breath with the movement of my body. I added subtle micromovements, writhing and pulsing and rolling my torso, legs and arms as if I were a part of the sky, as if each jolt and drop were invitations to move with the breath of God, with the flow that was being invited of my body, moment to moment. I rolled with everything, repeating “all you need is love” (I was also listening to this song by YSRA), and pretty soon, I was chill, happy, alive and empowered. We began our descent to the airport and I enjoyed the rest of our flight.

In this experience, I was reminded that my ego’s tendency to want predictability, control and solidness reveals a kind of white-knuckled inability to let go. In an unpredictable world, by maintaining control (and separateness), I tell myself I’ll be able to keep myself safe. I don’t flow with things, even - especially - when they frighten me. Like turbulence. On a plane or in life.

The Power to Participate (Separateness from Self)

As much as I tried to stay off my phone while on vacation, it became a go-to distraction device a bit more than I’d care to admit. For me, my preferred place of distraction in iPhone-landia are news sites, Twitter and YouTube.

As I careened from tweet to reel to video and back, the minutes turning into hours, I noticed a process happening in my body. Actually, it’s what wasn’t happening in my body that I noticed. While on my phone, I was very much in my head. Not only that, but I was very much in a kind of meta-narrative that all of the content seemed to point towards: a sense of meaningless, dystopic, cultural pessimism that left me, after each session, feeling worse than when I began.

And yet, there was also a competing narrative: I have to keep up. It’s important to know. It’s fun to watch. Yet, as compelling as that competing narrative was, I could sense there was no bottom to my compulsion to know and watch and keep up.

I could sense I was on the wrong track. I detected an unproductive, downard-trending trajectory following the hyper-rational/hyper-emotional content produced for me by the media algorithms.

The other meta-narrative baked into it was a sense of futility: I cannot participate because I am so separate, there is so much wrong, I have no leverage to make change, etc. etc. That’s why I call this the Power to Participate.

I put the phone down, and began to direct my attention down into my body. A question arose. What if all the news I need can be found in my body?

A radical thought. Irresponsible even. I can imagine the reader protesting. What gives you the right to stick your head in the sand while the world around us goes mad?!

Yet it persisted. What if all the news, all the information I need about life is to be found in the moment to moment sensation and content of this body’s experience?

I am in this moment compelled to share the words of William Carlos Williams’s words, perhaps embodying a similar intuition:

It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there

In this experience, I was reminded that my ego’s tendency to want predictability, control and solidness reveals a kind of fearful, heady sense of separation. In an unpredictable world, by constantly keeping up to date with what is happening on the news, I tell myself I’ll be able to keep myself safe, even thrive. Instead of listening to my body, instead of sourcing my experience from intuition and revelation, I am like a human-brain-pinball - bouncing from thought to thought, cut off from the flow in my body that might actually provide a safe and meaningful path through. I don’t flow with things, even - especially - when I think the key to knowing is to be found outside of myself.

The Power to Manifest (Separateness from Others)

This one feels a bit personal!

When I’m stressed about money, I default to a narrative that seems to directly link my labor to the resources I’m able to accumulate. Some people may read that and think “yeah, so?” But when I scratch a layer deeper, this narrative reflects a deep separateness and a sense of scarcity about the world and about energy and how it flows.

Said differently, somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that money and resources accrue to what I do, rather than how I am. This belief assumes that only measurable labor is valuable. Further, it incentivizes me to see the world as a place I must extract from, rather than give myself to. This narrative has me look out and see a competitive landscape, put on my marketing hat and wonder What can I do that people would pay me for?

I’m wrestling lately with the (very real) external pressure that I have to make money and the internal knowing that there has to be another way.

An opposite narrative, one built on connection, might go something like: I truly want of nothing. Everything that I desire will be provided. Where can I generate energy and goodness on behalf of others today?

In this experience, I was reminded that my ego’s tendency to want predictability, control and solidness actually works against me, by making me work harder when in fact, less effort, less gripping, less control will yield results. I’m actually not totally sure about this one yet, but I sense its truth. I want to bring more attention to this way of my separateness and explore ways to actualize my embodiment of its opposite. Stuck in this separation, I can sense futility and frustration. The other side, letting go of this embodied belief of separateness, holds fulfillment, relationship and true abundance. I can feel it.

Becoming a Transmission of Connection

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara

Keep falling into wildness.
Bill Plotkin

All you need is love.
John Lennon

What you resist persists.
Carl Jung

I want to be more connected to myself, to nature and to others. I have a sense it makes me more authentic, more alive, more abundant. I recognize that the patterns of my separateness - my real fear of letting go into the unpredictability of life - are rooted so deeply in my body, for example my pelvis, my stomach, my entire nervous system.

I am addicted to separateness.

What will help me shift?

I spent the morning reflecting on this question. It is so tempting to come up with a solution (plant medicine! meditation! chi gong! cold plunges!) that addresses all three ways I disconnect from the truth of reality. Surely there’s some daily practice I can adopt, some coach I can hire, some transformational workshop I can take!

Then I realized: approaching separateness as a problem to fix is another instance of the belief of separateness. When I look at any part of my experience and dismiss it as wrong or other than it should be, I have separated myself from myself.

Of course, it does help to notice beliefs or behaviors that are counter-productive. But if I don’t take that as a queue to learn why I’m doing that - and then go beneath it to the part of me responsible, and hold that place of pain or fear with love and compassion - I will only build a divide within myself. I will only judge myself as wrong, cordoning off a part of myself without addressing the terrain from which it sprang.

This, incidentally, is the basic loop of alcoholism and other patterns of compulsive substance abuse. The shame an alcoholic feel towards her behavior ensures that the behavior won’t see the light of day, which then makes it far more likely that it will be repeated. Again and again, until the process of self-compassion, the why, is undertaken.

I realized that these instances of separation - gripping when afraid, endlessly consuming media, locating agency outside myself - are all instances of my own fragmented parts taking over my experience in an effort to protect me from harm. Further, the reason they are so unconscious and automatic is because they were installed way back when I needed such protection, when I was a vulnerable little boy.

When I turn to look at an instance of separation-based behavior, I see a part of me, alone on the floor, head in his knees, crying and shivering, feeling unseen by those he needs to love him. If I can get myself to slow down, to settle, to really open, what follows are steps that look something like this:

I relax back and release my behavior, whatever it is. I put the phone down. I close my eyes.

I breathe into my body, contacting my inner somatic experience.

I feel a small pain, a fear, a touchiness.

I bring love to that place, using my breath, movement, my own hands– whatever feels right.

I thank the parts of me who took on the work of protecting this part of me from being felt.

I thank them for doing it when I couldn’t, and when others didn’t.

I thank them for helping alert me to his pain.

I tell them that I will take it from here.

I hold myself, I hold my pain, I breathe into my experience. I settle, settle, settle.

I embrace my separateness.

In this embrace, I am no longer separate.

I am whole.