philosophy also gives us a wonderful practice to help us out of these problems with avoiding the dark material. It is known as upeksha (pronounced like oo-PAKE-shuh, rhyming with “take”). This roughly translates as “even-mindedness.” When life is good, we can be happy and appreciate it, but stay even-minded and not become overly attached to it. When life is difficult, or when we encounter situations, people, and aspects of ourselves that we judge as “bad,” negative, or even wicked, we need even-mindedness all the more. It is the ability to step back and see what is without reaction, assumptions, jumping to conclusions, or blaming ourselves or anyone else.
Even-mindedness helps us to accept the unacceptable without condoning it. We can still take action to work with our less-than-desirable selves and help those aspects heal and transform. We may still feel called to help right the wrongs we see done in the world. During our current times, the Shadow may seem to be looming larger than ever. But it’s important not to give in to the fear and run away. Upeksha helps us stay steady and aware without reacting so that we can respond effectively to whatever provokes our worries. We can remain rooted in our inner calm, even in the moments when the dark seems to overtake the light and our anxiety rears its head.
Spiritual Mistake #3 Leaving Your Body
“It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the ‘I am,’ our real presence, can awaken.”
—G.I. Gurdjieff
Often, a spiritual person may find comfort in out-of-body experiences, spending time up in the head (in thinking, imagining, and visioning), and going to other dimensions or divine realms. I consider all of these some form of leaving your body.
There certainly are benefits, both spiritual and psychological, to leaving the body. It can temporarily relieve some of the anxiety that troubles us, and these experiences can be inspiring and awaken us to transcendent realities. When we’re being creative, whether dancing, painting, singing, or writing, we often tap into other realms and allow them to be expressed through us. Experiencing an altered state of consciousness can be a positive and life-changing experience. Leaving your body, whether literally or in the imagination, can help us to gain perspective to be able to step back from ourselves and see our situation differently.
Dissociation
From the psychological perspective, leaving the body is referred to as dissociation. Much of what I’m talking about isn’t clinical dissociation, though. Many of us experience a bit of dissociation. The Sidran Institute, an organization dedicated to helping people understand, manage, and treat trauma and dissociation, defines dissociation as “a mental process that creates a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of who he or she is.” Daydreaming, becoming lost in a book or a movie, or driving down the highway and realizing we have lost awareness of what we passed are all examples of mild, common dissociation.
Dissociation often kicks in when we’re faced with trauma or situations that cause us great anxiety. In the moment, just as in a car accident, it can assist us in dealing with a frightening, painful, shocking event so that we can get to safety or get medical care for our injuries. It’s a defense mechanism to help us get through situations in which panic would likely reduce our chances for survival.
If we were abused as children, or even at other times in our adulthood, we may have employed dissociation in order to survive through those traumatizing times. It may have felt unsafe to be in the body, and dissociation, to some degree, may have become our go-to defense mechanism. Then as we grow up, we might begin to employ dissociation any time we’re faced with something uncomfortable. This can become an unhealthy pattern.
Enter Out-of-Body Experiences
If we have found dissociation to ease our fears and distance ourselves from them (another subtle method of Flight to Light), discovering that many spiritual practices encourage some form of leaving the body or spending time in visualization can seem like a boon. Hooray, I can spend more time in some beautiful, transcendent experience and out of this painful, frightening world and body! We may feel we’ve found paradise in the spiritual realm.
However, if we are habitually depending on leaving our body in order to deal with stress, anxiety, and upset, we move into the realm of unhealthy dissociation. In the long term, this is likely to increase anxiety.
Nobody Home!
Here’s why leaving your body backfires as a way of deflecting anxiety. Think about a young child, maybe a toddler. Toddlers need to stay very close to their primary caretakers (usually, but not always, their mothers) in order to feel safe. They may test the waters and walk away a bit, but they always want to be nearby so they can come back to their mothers and receive physical contact and the reassurance that they are safe.
Imagine what would happen if you left a toddler alone in the house for fifteen minutes or an hour. How would they respond? They’d likely panic: “Nobody’s home! Where is mommy? What is this world where I’m all alone? Am I safe?” Of course, we wouldn’t do that, would we? It would be child abandonment. The toddler could encounter all kinds of dangers and hurt herself, or even die. Somebody needs to be home and nearby to protect, soothe, and calm her.
When you leave your body to escape what you’re feeling, especially habitually or for extended periods of time, your body feels like that toddler: “There’s nobody home here! No one is here to make sure I’m safe, to take care of any threats that could show up, to deal with this project sitting on my desk, to make sure the doors are locked before bed, or to look after the kids, etc.” Your body quite simply freaks out.
And what happens when the body is freaked out? The nervous system—specifically, the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response—kicks into high gear. Adrenaline courses through your veins. Your senses are on high alert. And your anxiety, from first a physiological and then a psychological response, is stimulated.
This is not the same as doing a guided meditation for a short period of time, in a room where you’re safe, for a particular purpose. But if you desire to live in that other imaginary world, or in a spiritual state that disconnects you from your body frequently, this is how your body can feel. When you come back into your body and experience what is here, you’ll feel the anxiety as a physical nervous system response to the body’s feeling, “Where the hell were you? You left me here alone and vulnerable!” You may have left your body to escape your anxiety, but coming back to anxiety that you’ve avoided feels worse! And this creates a vicious circle of avoiding anxiety, leaving the body, returning to the body, feeling more anxiety… You get the picture.
Being in the Body Feels Safe for the Body
The solution to this dilemma is learning how to be present in the body. The “Presence” and “Embodiment” chapters cover these skills in detail. For now, just know that it is possible to feel safe in your body in the here and now, and that by being in your body, you can develop proficiency at shifting out of the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic—the relaxation response. That is far more effective at calming anxiety than dissociating from the body and abandoning it!
Spiritual Mistake #4 You Create Your Reality
“As soon as you allow where you are to be
