Breaking the Trance

Tara Brach is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and she has been practicing and teaching meditation since 1975. Her new book, The Courageous Heart Workbook: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times, offers a practical guide for awakening courage and cultivating compassion for ourselves and our world.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Brach to discuss the courage of choosing love, the dangers of what she calls the “trance of separation,” how we can recognize our own basic goodness, and the power of reconnecting with our aspiration.

You talk about the trance of separation. So what is this trance? Well, it’s all of our predicament. We all have the perception of separateness, which is natural. We also have the capacity to realize who we are beyond that separation. In a way, this is the core of the whole spiritual path: We sense the suffering that comes with feeling separate, and that suffering wakes us up.

In the darkest ages and in the darkest chapters of our life, we get small because we feel separate, threatened, or deficient. And if we’re willing to open to that suffering, if we have the courage to feel it in our bodies and our hearts, then in that opening, we discover a larger truth, which is that there is a presence, a compassion, a tenderness, a wisdom, a larger field that we’re part of. I often think of it as an ocean with waves. When the waves of feeling separate get really strong, if we open to them, we start discovering the ocean really does have room for all of it.

When we’re in that trance of separation, it can be so easy to slip into tribalism and division. And you’re talking about interrupting that progression, is that right? That is exactly right. The biggest challenge of our times is what you’re pointing to, which is that unprocessed fear turns into aggression. We are in a collective hijack right now, where we know that the Earth is threatened and there’s enormous instability on all levels. We’re breathing in an atmosphere of fear. Every nervous system experiences it. And when fear is not tended to, it turns into hatred, blame, and aggression or indifference, numbness, dissociation, which Joanna Macy talked about as our biggest threat. So the big inquiry is when the fear arises, instead of spiraling into that chain of reactivity and blaming others or shutting down, how do we, instead, use our presence to be able to transform this fear?

There’s a myth that has really inspired me on this. It’s an old Native story. Inside a cave, an old woman is weaving the most beautiful garment ever imagined. But now and then she has to pause and stir a pot over the fire at the back of the cave, and the pot holds all the seeds of the Earth. If it’s left unstirred, the seeds will burn. Life itself will vanish. While she’s away, a black dog slips in and unravels her weaving thread by thread until only chaos remains. And when she returns, she pauses, but not in anger—in stillness, in presence, in this deep inner listening. She brings her heart to all that is, to the suffering and the preciousness of life. She pauses, she opens to the experience of the moment, and then she picks up a thread. And in that thread, she envisions an even more beautiful garment, one that didn’t exist before the unraveling. The elders say not to curse the dog, because if nothing fell apart, nothing new could be imagined.

So we’re in an unraveling right now, and our task as awakening beings is to really train ourselves to pause and start right where we are, with the reality of this moment, and to let ourselves be touched, because that’s what opens us to grieving and, underneath that, to love. Then, from that space, we have the imagination, the energy, and the hope and courage to create a better future.

You also talk about tapping into our own basic goodness, which can help us see the good in others. So can you talk about how we can begin to recognize goodness in ourselves and in others? First of all, as the Buddha says, everyone has buddha-nature. The very heart of this path is that the awareness and love that we call buddha-nature is our source, and it lives through all of us, and it is one of the most profound and necessary practices in the world to learn to see it.

We have all this conditioning where it’s part of the most primitive parts of our brain to scan for what’s wrong in ourselves and others. And the antidote is seeing the goodness that’s everywhere. There are many ways to do it. We can look through the eyes of someone we trust and love. We can look through the eyes of our own wise self. If we don’t see it, we can pray to see it, because that prayer itself comes from our basic goodness. It’s like the love in us is calling us back to love. And it’s incredibly powerful to see it in others and to mirror it.

There’s a story about the power of seeing goodness that really struck me. This is a story about John Lewis, a civil rights leader and congressman. He was talking about being attacked in 1961 at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He and a colleague were beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men, and they didn’t fight back, and they didn’t press charges—they treated their wounds and continued their work. About five decades later, one of the attackers, whose name was Elwin Wilson, walked into Lewis’s Capitol Hill office with his son. He said, “I’m one of the men who beat you, and I want to atone. Will you forgive me?” And so Lewis said, “I forgave him, and we embraced, and he and his son and I, we all wept.” But after he shared that, he said quietly, almost to himself, “People can change.”

Our bodhicitta, our awakened heart, our ability to see that potential in all of us and trusting in that, allows us to keep going. For Lewis, despite everything he had seen that spoke to our capacity for cruelty and injustice and hate, his sense that people can change gave him the spiritual imagination to keep going, to work for change. One of the deepest things to dedicate ourselves to is seeing past the mask of conditioning to the awakening heart. I think of one Tibetan teacher who said, “Never give up on anyone.” It doesn’t mean that people will change on our timeline or the way we expect, but everyone has buddha-nature, and it’s possible to manifest it. People can change.

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Practice: Aspiration

Find a quiet moment. Place a hand on your heart, and take several breaths to arrive fully here.

Now sense the deep care you hold for this cherished world—for your inner life and those who are dear, for all who are suffering, for future generations, for the more healthy and beautiful world you sense is possible.

Let yourself feel both the pain and goodness of what is and the longing for what could be. From this tender, open place, ask yourself:

“What is my deepest aspiration?”

“What matters most to me?”

“How do I want to live, love, and serve in this sacred and fleeting life? What is the vow I want to carry forward from this book into my life?”

Don’t worry about the perfect words. Just let your heart speak. You may wish to express your aspiration aloud or write it down. You might say, for example:

“May I live with a courageous and compassionate heart.”

“May I help others remember their worth and belonging.”

“May I be a voice for justice and a force for love.”

“May my presence bring healing in ways I may never fully see.”

Let this aspiration live in your body. Let it be breathed, whispered, remembered.

♦

From The Courageous Heart Workbook by Tara Brach. Copyright 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.