Happy July! This is the month of Bastille Day in France. and July 4th here in the States. This seems the perfect time to take a moment to consider what it means to be free inside.
“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell,” writes C.S. Lewis . “Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and i have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil spell of worldliness….”
Once a student confessed that she worried a little bit that I was casting a spell. She loved being guided in meditation. Being invited to soften and open into presence made her remember that she was so much more than a thought machine. She also loved hearing dharma talks. The big insights the Buddha made so much sense to her. But still, she worried that she was being lulled into a trance. Everything felt so relaxing and right and one day she and her fellow meditators would be led pied-piper style into a weird cult.
This student laughed as she described this fear, which passed as years went by and there was no creepy revelation. And yet this underlying anxiety draws out the reality in C. S Lewis’s statement. We are always being influenced by something. Whether we recognize it or not, we are in a trance–entranced by underlying beliefs, by the voices in our head. Our growth and awakening depends on finding good spells to help us break dark enchantments.
One Independence Day, my daughter, a few friends, and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn’t plan to do this. We were headed downtown to walk around revolutionary sites. But we happened to emerge from the subway right where the walkway to the bridge starts, and those iconic arches looming above us, just beckoned to us. Come across! Visit the Great Holy Land of Brooklyn.
I used to call it that because my daughter mourned the loss of it so intensely when we moved to the suburbs when she was ten. For years, walking around Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill filled her with terrible nostalgia—a fierce longing for her what she regards to be her true home, the place of her happiest years. It was like taking a very old person back to the homeland they lost to war or pogrom. Fortunately, as the years passed and Brooklyn transformed, she began to experience Brooklyn with more equanimity, and focus more on the future.
But even though Brooklyn (and both of us) had changed since we lived, my body knew the way through the brownstone streets, We remembered the old haunts–the bookstore, the little park with the dolphin statue, the cafe. We remembered them even when they weren’t there anymore. I felt the ghosts of old experiences, old hopes and dreams and disappointments.
My friend observed that my daughter and I seemed to be walking around Brooklyn in a trance of memory–reliving earlier times. This is a benevolent (if poignant) example of the way our brains are wired to repeat history. We don’t see things as they are. We see things through the net of our conditioning–our experiences, the beliefs and ideas that come to us from family and culture.
There are ideas that come from another level of clarity and insight. In a sense, when we practice meditation and study the dharma, we are seeking a spell to awaken us from the dark enchantment of our conditioning. The Buddha taught that the heart of our suffering–the suffering under all our suffering–is the trance of separation. In my experience, it is this belief that fuels shame. We are ashamed by that which separates us from belonging to a greater whole. Our inner freedom comes as we learn to drop our stubborn belief in our independence and discover (or rediscover) our profound interdependence with others and we life.
As we spend more time with ourselves, which is another way of thinking about practice, we may discover (or rediscover) feelings for the earth and the sun and the stars. We remember that we belong not just to families or even a species but to life itself.
This month, can we reflect on what it could mean to break out of the trance of our separation? Can we look at practice and dharma as a way to dwell in a space larger than our usual trance allows because that is all too often what psychologist and dharma teacher Tara Brach calls a “trance of unworthiness.”
This July, if you wish, dare to explore your interdependence. See if it doesn’t set you free.
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Tracy Cochran 