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Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. And this is Karen, nicknamed mystic girl in the city. I interviewed Karen about two years ago. And at the time, you know, we both wanted to do another one, eventually, I’m up in Vancouver, to do a series of interviews and attend a retreat. So those of you who watch BatGap regularly, will see a whole batch of them come up in the next few days or weeks. There was a lot of a lot of questions were sent in after Karen’s first interview. And I would actually suggest that people watching this interview, watch that one first, if you haven’t already done so, because it will kind of give you a background of who Karen is and what she’s been through and so on. We don’t we don’t want to rehash all those points in this interview. But a lot of questions were sent in from people. And she and her helpers have collected a bunch of them. So I’m going to ask her some of those during this interview, and also my own variations on those questions and little devil’s advocate points and anything else that comes to mind. But I want to start, since it’s my experience and observation that people just keep growing. And there’s no end to it. I’m always curious if I’m re interviewing somebody after a couple of years, if, if you can possibly remember, like where you’re at two years ago? How you feel you’ve grown since then?
Kiran Trace: Well, you know, it’s that’s a beautiful question. I think it’s a really valuable question, because it’s like, what’s the evolution for all of us are always evolving, but what’s evolution like for awakened clarity? So I would say, you know, the biggest part for me is that the last time we spoke, I had just begun to teach. I had resisted it for such a long time, even though there’d been a lot of pressure from a lot of really great teachers. Really suggesting that that was the right home for me in the right place for me, and I was very resistant about it. So since then, although it’s only been a couple of years, I have worked with 1000s of people now globally, all over the world, or Skype or something. I actually work through the phone app, such as sensitivity to bandwidths and things not problematically but it’s nicer to work on the phone. I like, I think that it’s more accessible for people also to just pick up a phone. So I work with people globally, mostly doing private sessions, because that’s what I love to do. Because I really want to find out exactly where your freedom gets lost. I want to know exactly the moment in your day in your week in your life and your relationship, like what happened, where was the click. And so because I have what people would call clairvoyance, see, but it’s actually just a part of being very, very mindless, so to speak. I can feel the field so I can feel people’s energetic fields, and I can get a sense of how their system is moving against what blocks. So anyways, a private session is really great. I love to work with
Rick Archer: people that way. So when you say you can you want to detect when that freedom gets lost? Does that imply that generally people are free? And then at certain points, they get stuck?
Kiran Trace: Well, our true nature is freedom. And we don’t have to become aware of that to be what we are. We are freedom. I mean, it’s naturally what we are.
Rick Archer: But what do you any good if you’re not aware of it?
Kiran Trace: I think it’s innate. I think it’s, I think awareness itself is already aware of it. But we are so profoundly conditioned, not consciously, but unconsciously through our families, through our cultures and through our societies to live under a certain amount of lack and limitation. So basically, the entire conditioning of our childhood creates this mental loop that goes lack and limitation, lack and limitation, lack and limitation, lack and limitation. And that’s how we live with this lack and limitation, story and filter. And that’s what impacts our freedom. Yeah, and the majority of people do live. That’s how the vast majority people do live. And so when I work with people, I can feel some of the major operating belief systems that are part of that and we can work to pull them out so that they can begin to experience the freedom that they already are.
Rick Archer: So would you summarize them to say A that was the main thing you do with people is unravel some of their most limiting belief systems. And that by doing that they experience an upsurge in freedom.
Kiran Trace: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s exactly what I, what my specific focuses as a teacher is finding where the pain and fear and and deeply rooted toxic conditioning is sitting in your system, not just belief systems in the head, but belief systems in the body. I mean, they’re very implanted physically. So I give people a very concrete map of how to pull them out. And then through working together, we can find where they all are. And again, and again, and again, I’ve had lots of people that I work with that, you know, as soon as you pull one of those deep core ones out of your system, what’s left is freedom, whether you
Rick Archer: use a specific example of somebody with whom you’ve done that without mentioning their name, obviously, but you know, so Joe Schmoe, you worked with him, and this and this, and this happened, and then he experienced this and his life changed in such and such,
Kiran Trace: oh, you know what, like, you can just go to my website and all the testimonials and show you all that. So there’s tons and tons and tons of stuff there. But yeah, so across the board very consistently, that’s what happens, but let’s use an example of Joe Schmo. So well, you know what, I’m gonna use the example of Jane schmo Jane schmo, okay, Jane smo, who came to me read my book actually was recommended my book, tools for sanity through her boss had brought her this book, and he loved the book. And so she read the book, and then called me and said, I’m going to come to you and I’m so committed to leaving all the blocks, and just having some connection to myself to my body, all the constriction in my life, I am ready for it to be over. So I want to fly to you. And I want to stay near you and your town. And I just want to do it all, which was so great. And I left and I said it doesn’t look like that healing doesn’t look like that. But you stay in your home where you are in your life up against all the things that block your freedom. And let’s stop start working together. And so I’d say it took about six months to start to be unraveled of, of a good handful of the major ones and the direct experience. I mean, I have so many like again and again and again, the direct experiences, tremendous amount of freedom. Externally, her life looks totally different. She works for an entirely different company, she makes 10 times the money she was making she she lives in the town she always wanted to live in instead of, you know, the big city where she thought she had to be she moved to the smaller town, she bought her dream home, she is now best friends with her then new, newly separated relationship, her her marriage of a longtime, newly separated, but now she’s reestablished a very close friendship and they found the proper relationships, she’s got new relationships with their kids, you know, like, because everything that was in the way of all of that was not her lack of knowing where freedom was, it was her toxic conditioning and beliefs. And when we pull those away, what there’s no I mean, there’s nothing here but reality and freedom and toxic conditioning. So we pull off the toxic conditioning. And once you just bang up against a spaciousness and a freedom. This is not someone who is necessarily awakened.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I was just gonna say because all the things you just mentioned are of course important. And there are so many different self improvement kinds of things out there that, you know, promise to help you gain better relationships in a better job in a better house and more money, isn’t that and that’s all they focus on.
Kiran Trace: Yeah, but if you can’t go to the core belief systems that are in the way your own conditioning, but what stopping that it doesn’t matter what you put on top of it, you know that what you put on top of it a skill possibly and skill? Even you had mentioned this briefly before we hit the record, but skill is easiest thing to get. I mean, you can just learn skill. And so that stuff is skill, but without actually healing and reprogramming. Our systems healing meaning pull out the junk reprogramming is to rewire ourselves towards sanity. Now you add skill. Now you can. Your freedom is very available externally in material world world but internally, there’s the spaciousness to know that this is a play. This is a this is a joyful, playful realm to just wander around in a good time with enjoy There’s a lot more enjoyment but across the board across the board across the board, you can you can talk to anybody they work with. But it’s like this internal movement where it’s like, oh, all the pain in my life is these deeply insane conditionings that had needed a lot of support, not necessarily skill, all those skills, a great thing, but skill overtop of pain and toxic is not going to help.
Rick Archer: All right, I totally agree that it’s important to root out the pain and toxicity and the deep conditioning, and so on and so forth. Not only for the sake of living a more happy life, in terms of your relationships, and all the things that you know, people care about, but also in terms of a whole spiritual awakening thing. I mean, well, you’re carrying all that baggage. And you know, what the show is primarily about is spiritual awakening, some people have seemed to have the attitude that all this surface stuff doesn’t matter, you know, your job, your relationships, and all that what really matters is this, you know, to hell with all that it’s an illusion, but what really matters is your spiritual realization, I would tend to think more in terms of 200% that, that you want the whole package, and that if spiritual awakening is genuine, then it should percolate up into a smoother, more conflict free, more successful life. Do you agree with that? And is that kind of your orientation or, or so far,
Kiran Trace: the truth of the matter is, is that you can, you can have it all, it’s your who and what you are. And so I certainly understand that point of view that says, Well, this is illusionary This is a dream. And there’s just nothing more important than being connected to this deep field of being in this deep presence. And there are certainly a lot of people and certainly a lot of amazing teachers, that that’s really the point of view and the perspective. And I think that that’s profoundly valuable, and I and I get it, it’s not my orientation, it’s not who I am as a teacher. And I don’t think I need to do it. We have people like Mooji, and Adi Shanti, and Rupert Spira, who are these extraordinarily skilled teachers, to teach you about what is this deep field of stillness, what is reality, I find Adyashanti to be extraordinarily articulate, like, in the of the inarticulate, you know, so I don’t need to repeat the wheel that they have so masterfully done, and it’s not my way. So for me, what I teach what I bring, and how I live is about very much where that includes form, and how form is essential. But it’s, if you just focus on the form, and you lose track of the profound piece of the formlessness, that is creating it all. In this moment, the form is very empty. And if you only focus on the internal stuff, which many people will know, in these master fill teachers I talked about, the stillness is very empty, the spaciousness is very empty. So for where I stand and how I experienced reality, the point of the vast spacious stillness is for me, consciousness is forming. It’s. So for me, from my perspective, it’s such an incredibly obvious thing. It’s like, it’s a miracle that there’s all this spaciousness. And then here it is, it comes into these forms of our bodies in our lives. And it feels so clear to me that that’s the point of it. So it has to include it. Now, I think the difference between when I work with Joe Schmo, and all the Joe Schmo is many of whom do not even necessarily know about Enlightenment or non Enlightenment, they’re just coming to me for support with a very accelerated path of healing. What they can get is a tremendous internal freedom as well as great function outside but the app so for me, what I consider awakening or Enlightenment is when the apparatus that identifies as the separate being dissolves and they can’t come back and there’s so there’s this for me it’s like you know, for me, it happened suddenly one day my intuition
Rick Archer: dissolves not the eyebrows. I mean, this is your apparatus
Kiran Trace: apparatus that allows me to identify, dissolve, okay, yeah. So, so all of this all this is the same as this is the same as this, right? This is all form. But it there’s an inability here to identify that little whatever that little switch was that that so the people I work with who are not awakened or you know, haven’t had that apparatus switch off, they have equal access to freedom, and they can live freedom, the thing that dissolves that apparatus, so that there’s no more ability to identify is, personally I think, is not in our hands, I think it’s a bit like falling in love, it’s essential, it’s inevitable, it will happen to every single being, at some point, the ability to control that apparatus, I don’t think is something in our control.
Rick Archer: Two points on that. Well, using your falling in love metaphor, you know, if you, let’s say, spend your time hanging out in strip joints or something, you’re not likely to meet the kind of person that you’re really going to fall in love with. Whereas if you, you know, engage in activities with people who resonate with, you know, your, your way of being, then you’re more likely to let’s say, you’re into meditation or something, you’re you go to meditation retreats, you might meet the person who is resonant with, with your way of being. So there’s some choice there. And so the second part of that metaphor is, if you just do whatever the hell you please all your life, without any attention or thought given to spiritual development, spiritual awakening may happen, when it did, in your case, out of the blue, but you know, that’s like sort of, you know, playing the lottery as a retirement plan, it’s not going to happen to too many people. Whereas there’s more of a track record of people who’ve actually focused on this kind of thing, awakening,
Kiran Trace: I think it goes like this, I think your point is really true. I think it goes like this, or this is how I explain it. So let’s use the metaphor of levels stay there. So let’s say one day, you’re just going about your average life, and you’re at the bus stop. And there’s a woman at the bus stop. And for some magical reason, you connect, and you chat, and you chat to the point that you actually it just becomes very natural to exchange numbers and go get a coffee. And that’s, and as you get on the bus, it’s so magical and rare that that, like you’re at the bus every day, you’ve even met a woman or two, but you’ve never gotten to that place. But it was just this form of magic. Now, say you go on a date or two, and nothing much happens from it, it was a nice person, love Allah. However, now, you know, magic is possible. And you’re available. So now when you’re at a bookstore, you’re at your class, or you’re walking down the street, there’s a part of you that’s waiting for the magic that’s looking for it that knows this about life now, that it could happen to you. And so a part of you becomes available and willing, and a part of you also becomes very curiously engaged with this dance of magic. And now, yes, that person is going to now become available to all kinds of opportunities that were happening way before the bus chop, you know, but they were close to it, they weren’t available to it for whatever reason. But now these little little, you know, love and I think also something like Enlightenment, these are ephemeral things like they’re so I think the the direct interface that we might have in our lives at some point, which may be listening to a Buddha at the Gas Pump, which is highly effective, or listening to a spiritual teacher, something is like that bus stop meeting. And now you know, there’s this magic, yeah. And so of course, you cannot go back to the bus stop and expect the next person to come like, it’s not going to happen exactly that way again, but it makes you available, and starting to notice what’s actually here, what’s what’s around.
Rick Archer: So in case people are getting lost in the metaphor, what we’re what we started talking about here was whether spiritual awakening just happens out of the blue by accident, you have no control over making it more probable or likely, or whether you can actually, by by where you put your attention and how you spend your energy. Make the likelihood of it greater.
Kiran Trace: Yeah, I would say I would agree with you. Because I say it’s not in our hands, whether we fall in love or not. But it’s definitely in our hands, the opportunity to follow up. We hang out with environments, how open we are, how available, right?
Rick Archer: The how, how we culture, our personality, and our life to make us potentially more interesting to somebody.
Kiran Trace: Some people are deeply called to fall in love, others are not. And we and that’s a mystery. And those that are deeply called to fall in love are going to be cultivating it anyway. Because it nourishes them, the cultivation is nourishing, and they’re not more likely to fall in love, frankly, than the people who are not true to like because it’s inevitable
Rick Archer: that we’re falling in love. This is just a metaphor.
Kiran Trace: metaphor because it’s very much similar like Guess what coming home is it’s
Rick Archer: translating are saying some people are just more likely to fall in love because they’re they’re inclined to, some people are more likely to get awakened or enlightened because they’re there, they’re sort of the flow of their life is in that direction around that noticed. And the thing that
Kiran Trace: I’m totally agreeing with you with is that little thing, it’s like, I think across the board, we all have equal opportunity for Enlightenment. And it’s not in our hands. However, what is in our hands is the probability like the probability to cultivate it. Yeah, so we can, we can be in dating coach seminars, and we can, you know, go to singles events, and matchmaking, you know, we can go to meditation, we can go to Satsang, we can follow teachers, we can read books, I project, if you’re doing that, that was your natural call to begin with. And that is a nourishment in itself. And does that make you more likely to actually become enlightened, then. And again, I’m, quite frankly, I’m the wrong person to ask these questions with because none of this is the focus of my teaching, because I could give a flying, you know, F, about Enlightenment or non Enlightenment, like, I could care less. So odd is the person to really have this conversation with or Rupert, but from my point of view, having become, you know, massively in like meeting people all the time in my practice, who were totally unaware that it even existed, never been to a meditation, never went to a talk never had any relationship to it at all. And out of the blue, what happens happens happens and tons of people who are incredibly devoted, and it’s their hearts true passion, and it hasn’t occurred. And I don’t think it’s because of an action one is doing and not the other. I think it’s because like, love, it’s out of our hands. But I hope that you’re listening to these talks and doing meditations because they nourish you. Yeah. As opposed to drive a sense of failure, in you a sense of not good enough or haven’t gotten there yet.
Rick Archer: Well, it’s an interesting discussion, actually. I mean, it’s a cart and horse kind of question. Are people interested in meditation and stuff like that? Because they’re destined to awaken pretty soon, and therefore, it’s piqued their interest in these things? Or do they awaken because they’ve gotten in meditation and done all these things? I’m not sure. It’s chicken and egg, you know,
Kiran Trace: it’s very chicken and egg. Yeah. And it’s very based on the perspective of who’s talking very chicken and egg. And I don’t know if we, from the chicken one point of view from the egg and other. So
Rick Archer: there’s that old Zen saying, which I’ve said far too many times in interviews, which is that, you know, Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident prone.
Kiran Trace: And which I think is exactly true. And you could be exactly falling in love is an accident. But being available and knowing magic exists, and love exists, makes it probable. And it’s so sweet to get to know love, whether you fall in love or not, doesn’t take you out of love. So in Satsang, in a conversation like this, in a book, it doesn’t mean it’s not like you’re enlightened or not, it’s getting you getting to know this vast, spacious, beautiful field here. And the true nature that we are all this consciousness, you get to experience that now not one day.
Rick Archer: Well, either. I mean, you speak of that, rather, you know, adoringly? Like, that’s a wonderful experience to have. And it’s a blessing for anyone to have it. And so, so how does that reconcile what you said a minute ago that you could give a flying F about Enlightenment,
Kiran Trace: because you don’t have to be enlightened to experience it. You can listen to this conversation and get to know a bit more about consciousness so you can have a taste of it. Yeah, just like you know, you may not fall in love. But you are putting yourself around love and feeling love. And that’s a beautiful thing. So it’s a beautiful thing to get to know stillness. Do you have to be enlightened to be stillness? No.
Rick Archer: But it sounds to me like you’re saying that you’re like, we’re comparing glimpses, with the full enchilada of the thing. So there’s all kinds of love and bliss and stillness and peace and all sorts of things like that. But but the Enlightenment would be all those glimpses in spades. 24/7.
Kiran Trace: Well, you’re married. Yeah. So you’re in love with a wonderful person. Right? Right. So do you experience love more than Mark Are you do you have somebody else? Yeah. Okay, so, do you experience love much more than someone who’s single?
Rick Archer: Not necessarily Not necessarily. But
Kiran Trace: Do you have the whole enchilada? And they don’t
Rick Archer: know. But let’s keep dwelling on this. Let’s look I don’t know if this metaphor metaphor is serving us very well.
Kiran Trace: I think it’s exactly on point, the same exact thing,
Rick Archer: like we almost spiritual seekers, and maybe they’ve been meditating for decades.
Kiran Trace: That’s the single person,
Rick Archer: okay, whatever. And they’ve, they’ve had all sorts of glimpses and tastes and wonderful experiences, and those things come and go. And then, you know, at a certain point, maybe something shifts for them. And they they wake up in a way which well, many of them say it all those little all those experiences and glimpses didn’t do justice to this, this is not an experience. This is not just bliss. This is not just, you know, some insight And do they say that now this is the first time they’ve ever known that. And it’s never been here before? No, you know, was maybe some do, but I think more often than not, I hear people say, Wow, this has always been here.
Kiran Trace: That’s my, that’s my point, right there.
Rick Archer: But that’s, but by that token, it’s like, Okay, another metaphor, everyone in the world is a millionaire, they have a million dollars in the bank, but hardly anybody has been told they have a million in the bank. And among those who have been told it, hardly anybody has been given access to the bank account. And then you know, a few people get access to the bank account, get their million and begin living like millionaires. So you know, every
Kiran Trace: 7 billion people and the reason that one doesn’t work the same way, is because somebody’s controlling their money, and they don’t have access to it. Love, or our true nature, no one’s controlling it, we always have access to it. So so you may not know anything about it. But you have a sunset, you had a new baby or grandbaby, you had a first love when you were 16 all the time. It’s like, if you were gonna use your current analogy of money and say, like, suddenly, there was a million dollars in front of me, then there was a million dollars, and I spent it, and I used it. And I realized, you know, like, the reason that analogy doesn’t work is it’s in a bank controlled, and no one knows about it. And that’s not true about who we are, yeah, and what we are,
Rick Archer: right, but the fact remains that the vast majority of people in the world, you know, 99.999, something percent, aren’t awake to their true nature. And nor do they all have to
Kiran Trace: be in order to be their true nature. 99 9% of people in the entire world have had moments, if not, weeks, or months, where they had a complete sense of, there’s something more here, there’s magic in the world. What I’m looking at and who I’m thinking is not everything that’s here. Questions of who am I like no one needs to teach people that. So what’s the difference between
Rick Archer: somebody who is awake to their true nature, and somebody who doesn’t need to be as you just put it, but as free of
Kiran Trace: all toxic conditioning? So so let’s say what’s the difference between someone who’s awake to their true nature, versus someone who’s entirely free of toxic conditioning? It still is condition conditioning, because this is a condition but it’s there’s nothing toxic, there’s no little story of lack or limitation. What’s the difference between the two? This one has no ability to identify the apparatus that makes one identify
Rick Archer: is gone. Finally, identify I
Kiran Trace: am these stories in my head, I am this lack of limitation. I am this name. I am this body. I am this person. This one still has identification. That’s the only difference. Okay?
Rick Archer: But this one URI of toxic conditioning, it’s
Kiran Trace: all just dreams. This one’s lucid dreaming, leap. This one’s not lucid dreaming. It’s exactly the same. Same, same, same one. We’re all the same. Same dreamer dreaming exactly the same. This one dreams lucidly. What’s the difference of a lucid dream versus a, you know, you’re both having great dreams. You’re both having flying dreams. This one knows I am dreaming a flying dream. This one says, I’m flying.
Rick Archer: Right? That’s the difference, saying that there’s no qualitative difference between those two. There’s no preference between one or the other. Are you saying it would be good to shift this one over to that one? It would,
Kiran Trace: I don’t have preference. You have others might have preferences and it’s not my job to argue it. Why don’t you because I can see you and I are one. Yeah, we’re exactly the same. And you are myself. Yeah, having this extraordinary experience of you over here. You are the same having this like it’s all a It’s all just one. And I know that this I know there’s no difference between us. I don’t think that it’s better to be me than you
Rick Archer: at all, of course that but on the level of me and you we’re not talking about the oneness we’re talking about individual level
Kiran Trace: of oneness. I don’t think from oneness doesn’t wish it was me, not you. Once this is very gloriously in love with every moment of Rick, and would not miss one moment of it. Not one moment. It’s so delicious, amazing.
Rick Archer: It’s anthropomorphizing to say this, but does oneness want to awaken in the form of Karen or Rick or marker? Anybody? Is there sort of a, an innate drive within the oneness? To awaken to itself? Within forum? We talked
Kiran Trace: about the scenario, the first interview Yeah, so my answer, I have to say is the same. That in every moment, here’s a different way to answer the same question in every moment. We have this freedom we have free will we are, we are who we are, who we are, a dog is a dog is a dog doesn’t need to know it’s a dog to a dog. We are innately free we are beings of conscious of as consciousness where consciousness coming into form. And in every moment, there’s this vast free choice, freedom is very, very, very big. And we are welcome to choose our conditioning. So we’re welcome to let’s just say in a moment, you’re in the grocery store, and your neighbor comes up behind you who’s a little bit irritating, and you have a hard time with in this moment right there, right in that moment, you have a vast array of choices. Now your own toxic conditioning may predispose you to saying well, I must turn around and I must say, Hello. And so I will go do this. Now. And that’s in freedom, this is free. But you could choose a number of any options. Now, the way I make it sound easy, when I’m talking to people in my students, is I say you can choose from fear, which is the basis of most conditioning. Or you can choose from clarity, which is very different. Clarity is always at the other end of stillness. But once you spend enough time with stillness, clarity is very available for you very accessible. So now in any moment, you can choose fear or clarity. And fear. When you make a choice from fear, it will run this experience for you. If you make a choice from clarity, it runs a very different experience for you. That’s experiencing evolution, thriving safety, you choose fear, you start to choose lack limitation, the beginnings of abuse and war and you know, but in all this freedom, you’re welcome at every moment to choose either way. So does consciousness want this choice? No, it’s very, very free. But in every single moment, every single moment, clarity is equally available in every, every every moment. So there’s no place that is so dark that is so lost, that is so painful, that there’s not a clear choice that will bring you to thrive, that will bring you to safety that will bring you to freedom. Right there.
Rick Archer: 100% freedom are a step in that direction,
Kiran Trace: certainly a step in that direction, a step that will move you there. I love you know what I love the way the Christians speak about this, because I think so much of Christianity is based right there in that story, which is that the story that Jesus is here for you in any moment. And you are always forgiven again and again. And you’re always, you know, I think the way that they talk about is you bring yourself to God, and God is there for you for ever, regardless of what’s gone on or what’s happening. And in your darkest times, they say, you know, it’s he will pick you up or you know, the storyline right, but I think it’s so beautifully spoken about this piece which is which for me, clarity is always available. Does consciousness wants you to choose clarity, I would say no, I say it’s bigger. It’s way, way, way more free than that. Freedom is. You cannot believe how huge freedom is. I mean, it is one very, very, very vast, eternal movement of vastness and the freedom is very, very big. So it’s nice to have some rules. And that’s where the spiritual handbook I call it the spiritual handbook comes in where there’s higher and lower there’s good and bad. There’s you know, things of spirit are more valuable. Then things of money or things of body, you know, where all life is valuable and eating animals is is wrong, you know, and these are difficult things. It’s nice to have a rulebook in spiritual handbook, I call it vs reality, which is, has none of that none of that is true. In reality, it’s so much bigger.
Rick Archer: The two points that you’ve made in the lesson in this conversation that I want to reach back and bring in. One was a few minutes ago, you said something about stillness. Enabling one to deal better with less clarity, access, clarity, right? And so how do you culture stillness?
Kiran Trace: I think every culture has ways that they do that. And they’re so beautiful. Where I come from, which is up north in the Arctic people go hunting trip from Yukon Territory. So yeah, yeah. So people go hunting, they go. Things are getting a bit intense. Yeah. They just think nature, they get out in nature. And they’re quiet. They stop thinking for a few days, and they get some clarity. Well, I think that is something Yeah. Where you are? Well, whether they do or not, you know, I come from a culture that hunts for for their food. Yeah, there’s very cultural never
Rick Archer: catch anything. They just like to sit there at the side of the river.
Kiran Trace: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can’t I personally in this moment, can’t make these calls on what is the right way or wrong way to do it. But I can tell you that that’s how they access stillness, of culturing, standing on a boat sitting on your porch, front porch. Farmers in Iowa, probably just spent a lot of time in the evening sitting on the porch and getting to stillness. Meditation is a very beautiful way to do that. Because it gives you a structure, it gives you a repeatable structure. So if you find a structure that’s really great for you, it’s it’s lovely. It’s a it’s a direct interface with
Rick Archer: another question that I had based on something we spoke earlier is that, you know, this whole thing about either dismissing the world is an illusion, or taking it as a beautiful expression of the divine and taking it somewhat seriously, is, I think it kind of relates in a way to the fact that traditionally, there are two lifestyles, you know, there’s, there’s a recluse lifestyle, and a householder lifestyle, and the vast majority of people are better suited to the ladder. And the but a lot of the spiritual traditions have, the custodians of them have been reclusive. And so they put an emphasis on recruits, values. And so there’s this all these books and all this talk about all the world is an illusion, and you know, it’s all worthless, and all that stuff. And a lot of that sort of filters are seeps into the psychology of people who aren’t cut out for a recluse lifestyle, but are interested in spirituality. And so it kind of confuses them, or perhaps even makes them impractical or something because they’re, you know, they’re kind of withdrawing from things in the world and in a sincere desire to know God or to know to know, you know, the true nature.
Kiran Trace: I think it’s really, it’s a great point, I think, those people who are naturally introverted, or extremely introverted, I think a recluse lifestyle was actually quite fulfilling. And it’s a beautiful fulfillment of coming to know God and coming to know oneself as that experience. So I think so I would call it more like, introverted versus extroverted experiences of God, because an extrovert is not going to do great in a reclusive way, or vice versa, and vice versa. So I would define it in those ways. And I would also suggest that the discovery of stillness itself is still rather new for our world. And we have these early teachers that we know like Jesus or Buddha, or Confucius, where they’re only teaching is really like, like P S, there’s God, like, and then and I feel like even by when we come up to today, this is, of course, my vast generalization here we come up to today, where we have an amazing, amazing amount of teachers, and so many of them masterful in different perspectives. We’re still very much on the threshold of, you know, PS, there’s stillness. If we look at someone like Eckhart, who’s the big gun out there with 510 25 million people that he’s connecting with. He has I mean, his teaching is this big, right? PS there stillness, and it’s still 25 million versus the three point whatever billion or 7 billion on our planet, right? It’s so small, right? So for the whole world, this is enough right now. That’s radical. And let’s say following up behind them, this is just my story here, say pharma behind them someone like Byron Katie or something that goes PS, question your thoughts, you know, like,
Rick Archer: so each have a tool, it’s just this
Kiran Trace: one tiny little tool. It’s a screwdriver, a pair of pliers. And that’s who’s read, that’s the forefront reaching so many people because it’s radical. Now someone like myself, and I put someone like Jeff foster in the category of me. I am really at the very leading edge frontier that says, and so how do you live your life? What does it look like? And this is a much more challenging place, person from the perspective of PST or stillness. This is actually
Rick Archer: their industry, everybody’s starting to talk about embodiment. And do they live it to actually live it is a real thing. They’re getting concerned with it. Let’s say they’re getting concerned with it. God, yeah. And Francis Bennett did this thing about years ago about that point, makes me laugh. 10 years ago, I tried to talk about that nobody wants to hear it. Now we’re talking about it.
Kiran Trace: But it doesn’t have karma. He didn’t have much karma. He came with a very little toxic conditioning. So he has not had to figure out how to live his life, from toxic conditioning, being awakened, doesn’t suddenly let all your conditioning go. It doesn’t. And the lie or the myth of the story is that if I get awakened, this little apparatus, what I’m calling the apparatus that makes me identify dissolves, and therefore poof, all my conditioning goes, except in reality, we can see that is 100% not true. Go look at anybody who became enlightened. It’s not true. So someone like Audra, who is ultimately I mean, I cannot respect this man,
Rick Archer: Barry Bonds that have conditioning, but it no longer binds.
Kiran Trace: They’re not bothered by the fact that it’s happening, right? It’s irrelevant.
Rick Archer: And some of that conditioning can be
Kiran Trace: sexist. illegally, it can be illegal. We see this all over, we see it happening everywhere this, but the the one who’s conditioned this way is not bothered, because they’re not identified. But it doesn’t change the conditioning, we have to heal, what Audra would call an internal revolution. I call healing. And so when we look at someone who is this great, like, again, who I respect so much, he’s extraordinary, as a teacher, he’s not who you’re gonna go to with extreme anxiety disorder, he doesn’t know anything about it. He loves you. And when you ask the question, his entire being wants to answer it for you, because He loves you and wants to help. But he’s never, he doesn’t know what it is what it’s look like how to root it out how to get another system, like, he doesn’t know so so he’ll give you brilliant advice about reality, but he’s not going to give you the nitty gritties, where someone like Jeff Foster, who has had, you know, some real conditioning, and had to get through it is going to give you a very different perspective. And it’s a direct experience. So I’d say to live in your own life, awake are not a light wake, but to live it free in freedom to live your relationships to live your every house, your house of relationship, your house of finance, your connection to God, your connection to your body, these houses need healing. And that’s how we, the more we heal, the more free we are, the more we heal, and more free we are, the more he and that and that is a journey of embodiment. And the reason that’s my specialty is because there ain’t no one who’s got worse conditioning or harder conditioning than me. There may be a few. I’ve never heard the big leagues. I am in the big leagues, I come from severe ritual abuse. I have an adult teenagehood and early adulthood full with multiple sexual traumas and attacks. And you know, like, I’ve been beaten, I’ve been raped. I’ve been used up everywhere my in my life as I live, so I’m in the dark because it gets yes, me and teal are sisters like, teal, teal and I are the same, like that’s the dark karma that I have lived. You
Rick Archer: know, one thing I was wondering, I mean, you have a lot of wisdom and a lot of clarity and everything. And so this may be a bit of a silly point. But maybe you could comment on it, though, because some people might be wondering this, and that is that, you know, a lot of times when people undergo a lot of severe trauma, they they have this disassociative disorder, which in some way resembles awakening because there’s detachment, you know, sense of not being the body, things like that. So how would you contrast or compare some sort of disassociation with actual breaking of identification in the spiritual spiritual sense?
Kiran Trace: That’s really good. Question. I just finished writing a big essay about it. Frankly, I have a book. It’s a free book on my website. Now it’s called from fear to freedom where I talk about the very detailed aspects of fear and how fear moves in your body. And they close the book with a chapter on disassociation. Because this association doesn’t actually come from fear. It’s not actually a movement of resistance. It’s a very different movement. And I have heard other teachers who don’t have a direct experience of disassociation refer to it as some kind of extreme avoidance or something like
Rick Archer: this escape multiple personnel. Yeah, it’s
Kiran Trace: totally wrong. They’re totally totally wrong. I know dissociation really well, and we’re sitting here, my mother is sitting here while we’re doing this conversation, and she has many, many nights that I was in, you know, sometimes I would disassociate for weeks, and she would receive a phone call. And she would have to talk me through what’s your name? Like? Where do you look around Karen and see if you can see a street sign. Let’s see what town you’re in. Let’s like she would have to talk me through because it would be.
Rick Archer: And this is because of your trauma that says, my trauma, your spiritual, this is my
Kiran Trace: trauma, and my early life is trauma. So I have a very deep relationship with disassociation. I know what it is exactly. And basically, when we have trauma trauma stores inside of our body, period, everybody across the board, especially when we’re little people, we don’t have an ability to process trauma. It doesn’t come till much later. 1415 is where it starts to begin. But we’re really in our 20s Before an ability to process a psych, which is a psychological thing can happen this is not developed. So our family as much as they love us as big hearted as they are, they don’t have any skills, or any tools. And both my mother and my father had no right to have children, they had not a single skill, or, you know, they they weren’t prepared for it. My, my trauma happened at my father’s home. But as a little person, trauma happens and the body starts just gyrating with the emotion of it and the intensity of it. And our primal survival instincts, which is a whole wired system in our body comes up, grabs it, and encapsulates it and buries it in the tissue of our body and the connective tissue, which is all around our body. Now you’re moving along in your life, and life happens to hit up against these very traumas. And they trigger us these are triggers, and everybody has them. Everybody has trauma, everybody has triggers. Now, when the trigger happens if you if that if what’s coming up is too stressful for the organism, primal survival flit hits a switch and takes you out, which is what disassociation is it’s like I call it recess for big kids who are have too much stress. And basically, it’s like it flips a switch, you’re in recess. And my tool for everyone, I said, Everyone, do not fear fear, it’s not something to be afraid of, it’s not something that there’s something terribly wrong with you, everybody’s going to do it in our spiritual path, we’re going to go looking for a lot of things that they did not teach us in kindergarten. And we’re gonna come face to face with parts of ourselves. And there’ll be times when it’s just stressful. And we need a timeout. And I always say to people, Ben, you just get low. If you’re too far from your own bed, wherever low is, if there’s some grass, if there’s like, get low, literally get literally get, like, lay on the ground Exactly. In a place that feels safe, make body positions that feel safe, that make you feel safety, you need to so you can just get it’s, it’s just basically too much stress, we’re taking you out, now find safety, and eventually you’ll make it home to your own bed, however long that takes. And once you’re there, it could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for the body to reset and get you back in the game. And it’s great. I mean, it’s it mean it’s a great thing to do is like lay down and be still and if you have kids or family, they can crawl into bed with you everybody could use a you know, a few hours to a few days of just chilling out and being safe and we all have
Rick Archer: little furry mammals somewhere back in the recesses of our brain Yeah,
Kiran Trace: little primal mind at work here. And it’s very very it runs the body in a very dominant way fight or flight. All of our endocrine system is entirely wired to this entire you know, the pituitary, the hypothalamus, all our endocrine glands. I mean, this is where our trauma and our responses are so we can question our thoughts and question our mind but you got buried trauma, you’re gonna have to find it, you’re gonna have to dig it out. So that this doesn’t happen. So disassociation for me is very literally that movement is very literally that experience. And it’s a very normal normal experience for everybody in spiritual work in deep meditation, healing, any kind of trauma therapy, and directly coming up against, you know, you wander into that vast field of stillness, which is here, right now in this moment you’re saturated in it is looking out your eyes, is listening to my words, right now, this is, ever since you first opened your eyes as a new body, you have been home in this vast stillness. But when your awareness, which is usually captivated with thoughts, comes right up against it, and starts to explore what’s here, that primal survival system goes and sends a massive jolt of fear through your system, because it’s wired to separation. It’s wired to an AI separate body from this body. And this is a potential threat to this one says primal survival. So it when we come up against this vast stillness, the first thing that’s there is there’s no separation, all one which is home, and is our actual survival system. Because clarity lives there, and clarity has been keeping us safe. If we relied on this primal system, we would have been dead a long time ago. It’s our actual survival system is clarity.
Rick Archer: So to summarize, then, what is the distinction between this association due to as a reaction or response to trauma, and liberation in the sense of being freed of identification, as happened to you later on?
Kiran Trace: Yeah, this association is a movement of primal survival from clarity, not fear, but to take us out and give us a break. It’s not it’s not a movement where we come to know our true nature. And we come home to ourselves. So but they have a lot of similarities in the sense that neither are particularly in our control. We can control this association.
Rick Archer: So we can sort of see the similarities. What are the differences? What are the what is the core difference?
Kiran Trace: When you come to know your true nature, awakened or not, there’s a very deep sense of familiarity of safety, of WoW, of awe, of magic of great relief. When you are disassociated. You are somewhere very somewhere who knows were curled small into your to your body or out, or you’ve left your body. And there’s a tremendous dis disorientation. And
Rick Archer: this is true nature or disassociation.
Kiran Trace: Disassociation
Rick Archer: Let me throw this out. Yeah. When I was talking to Teal Swan, she was advocating kind of out of body experiences as a technique.
Kiran Trace: Yeah.
Rick Archer: of some sort. And I said, I said, you know, I mean, your true nature is not it’s, it’s universal, it’s fundamental. It’s everywhere. It’s not. And so this out of body experience thing seems to me to be just a sort of a form of disassociation, where you’re, you’re taking some aspect of your individuality and separating it from some other aspect of your individuality, and to my way of understanding that there is little relevance to liberation, which is, you know, settling into the ground of being which is omnipresent versal. Potential, this conversation, he has a way of describing the difference between dissociation and liberation. Yeah,
Kiran Trace: you’re very, I think you’re really articulate and true. It’s right what you’re saying. Teal is an amazing teacher. And she affects a lot of people in her work. She, she’s, she affects me, she’s an amazing, amazing person. And God, she’s so brave and courageous. I mean, to stand where we stand, and do what we do, given the past that we have had, is acts of unbelievable courage. So she’s so inspiring to me, and she touches me all the time with her work. She is a spiritual teacher, and she’s very interested in showing you how to explore let’s say, for lack of better words, the fourth dimension, which is also the fifth or sixth or seventh or eighth dimension, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff here in the universe, you know, and this is third dimension here, we all are in third dimension. So most of her work, which is beautiful, and has a lot to offer is about exploring these other dimensions. Now, let’s say that our true nature is zero dimension, but just for lack of better ability. Let’s say it’s inside, not outside. It’s not the universe. It’s your true nature. It’s ground so we go ground and then we’ve got you know, first like, first through third dimension is home to nature being body embodiment. So and that’s maybe the maybe the vast difference between two villainize I teach reality I’m a, I’m a non dual teacher, I talk about our true nature. Teal is none of those things. Teal is a teacher, spiritual teacher, to help you explore all these other amazing dimensions. Now, if that’s where you’re called to go, great, if where you’re actually called to go is, I say in I sit like the universe is a big, big bad place, man you can get everything is there angels and angelic realms and our Akashic records, but also demons in hell realms. And if you open yourself up, you better have some skill and tools to figure out how to navigate this incredible Autobahn of stuff, you know, versus, to nature’s none at all of it is light. And that’s the thing, I think the beautiful thing between teal and iron, which is the same is that in my experience of life, I have very literally looked at the devil the way nobody has, has, like, I know, I know, that you cannot scare me, because I have lived it, but I have lived it and seen it was God, I have seen the light, I have seen it was a dream, it was an illusion, it’s literally made of light. And I’ve looked at God and seen the devil scene, I’ve looked at the light and seeing the form it can take as a pure darkness and pure evil. So
Rick Archer: because if there’s really only one reality, then what is the dark stuff made of light must be made at that time,
Kiran Trace: reality is my mind when I work with because I do have a branch in my private practice of working with ritually abused people, because nothing like the you know, like nothing like direct experience to help. And the kind of liberation if you look at TEALS life, or if you look at my life, it’s extraordinary A that we could survive, but be that we could have these lives. It’s such a testament to what kind of healing is possible for all of us. And so when I work with people who have come from very dark abuse, I’m always pointing for them to discover themselves, which is very available, the light in those dark, when their body memories come up. And it’s so horrifying. And it’s more than what any single person psyche could even handle has happened to them. But when they can look back in memory and peel through and see that it was like, it was just light, it can just, I can just liberate that trauma. Incidentally, for
Rick Archer: those who are interested in this topic of abuse, and, you know, having a happy outcome eventually, after having done one other interview, you might want to check out as Shelly Ray whom I interviewed some months ago, you know, Shelley,
Kiran Trace: I’ve heard I’ve heard that she’s great, though. Yeah, she’s really she was raped
Rick Archer: by her father from the age of nine through 14 and then got heavily into drugs for many years, all kinds of drugs and intense and came out the other side, you know, and
Kiran Trace: our ability to heal is infinite. It’s amazing. It’s always available. And saying that, like the body’s ability to heal healing is, isn’t we’re just like, we’re just a dream, we can dream pretty much anything, but we need to be able to clear out the conditioning in order to do that. So our conditioning limits it.
Rick Archer: Alright, wouldn’t go on for an hour. Okay, we took a little break. And I’m going to ask a few of the questions that some of Karen’s friends and students have submitted. The first is from Gloria, she asked, many fear the cave mentality of withdrawing from the world, when they hear realized beings speak. I’d love for you to address just how much the realize being is truly here. I’d love for you to unpack the paradox right down to the depth of our formless nature and form as a movement. Thank you, Sister.
Kiran Trace: So this is a great question. And similar to what you were asking about recluse versus versus living our lives as householders and things like that. But I think the heart of what she’s asking here is really about unawakened life is not a life that is without form or without difficulty. It’s not like there’s, our bodies go away, our relationships go away. And I think a lot of people fear that that would occur. So I’ll just use my own life as an example. So I had this really tough conditioning, you know, from a child, but a large part of the conditioning I got as a child, was that there was that my body was shameful, and it was a justification of while the violence could happen to my body, but I certainly became a card carrying member of a story about bodies having to be a certain shape a certain look, and that equals valuable or beautiful. So I was prior to awakening a card carrying member of this and I lived as I was a dancer and an actor, so you I was like a professional athlete, which really made me very aligned to the story about what a body should look like and what size it should be. And so I lived with this, however, I always lived with this incredible paradox, which is that I have this body. And this is a voluptuous body. This is a very curvaceous, big body versus that story.
Rick Archer: I’m laughing because my wife says the word that way too voluptuous, but it’s actually voluptuous, better love.
Kiran Trace: voluptuous. So I have this body, I’ve always had this body even when I was dancing, I had this body professional as a professional. So my reality, let’s say, was very different than what my conditioned beliefs were. And then the paradox that that puts me in, it strung me between these two opposing ends, one being my conditioning, which I was so deeply conditioned in my personal life at home. But also we have this big collective story, when we have these big collective beliefs, they have absolutely start to create such a sticky thickness when it matches this big cultural belief. So I’m a card carrying member is very, very thick about what a woman’s body is supposed to be what shape it is, in reality, I have a very beautiful, beautiful, strong fit. Full of soft curves and beautiful flesh. And that’s the reality. And because this polar extreme has been my life, it has literally made me it has made me who I am today, it is brought me to an immense freedom. And that freedom has been because I have had to deep dive so deeply past this story. To get to reality to get free. I had to go to truth, because this is so freakin painful. And as I dive through, through that place, I meet layers and layers and layers of wearing this horrible story, which is totally not true. It’s completely a lie. It’s so petty. It’s so stupid. It completely dissed you know, humanity is got extraordinary spectrum of beauty. When we have such mediated political stupid storylines, about I don’t know, body fat percentages and fitness, it’s all lie, it’s all a lie. And I live the lie in was in tremendous, tremendous pain constantly. And so to get out of the pain, which is the journey of all of us with all of our conditioning, whatever the conditioning is, it hurts so bad, because the lie because it’s a lie. And we have to find truth. And that we have to dive incredibly deep past these condition lies, to find the ground of truth for me to find the ground of truth, because because even after my mind blew a fuse, and that apparatus and that identification wasn’t there, the conditioning still moved through a deep conditioning of all this petty crap. And pulling out the lies, pulling out the lies, pulling out the lies meant coming right into my body and finding literally all this buried trauma, like in my whole endocrine system, like I have in the lies, not just I wish I was this body. The lie is also I’m terrified to be this body. Because that makes me available for harassment and abuse and pay I’m afraid to be seen, I’m afraid to be beautiful, because it’s going to people will harm me if that’s the case. And then there’s flip sides of other beliefs where it’s like, I am valueless, and I have nothing, no agency and no power unless I’m that body and this is all wired in my whole system. So I have to go to these. There. It’s in my solar plexus. It’s in my liver. It’s in my ovaries. It’s in my you know, chess like it has to be unstrung, but as it gets unstrung it a it’s the most unbelievable adventure. I mean, healing is the most extraordinary venture and people think healing is you call an offside, you have a bunch of cathartic reliefs, and then game on, which is not healing at all healing puts you so deep into living because it puts you into truth you have to find truth and that brings you into life. And so in that journey where I started to really find truth and living, I started to find such immense love and and when you find truth and you find reality, where our bodies are unbelievable. They’re woven of light the most light is our bodies, more than animals more than the ocean and trees. When you see where how I see which is I can see where I see the light more than I can see the forms. The bodies are just these emanations have unbelievable light and intelligence and beauty. And it’s so petty and ridiculous to have a story called it’s not this shape or it’s this age. You know this is an old body and this is a young but this is an able bodied and this is a disabled by this is a black body, this is a white body, this is a you know, blond hair blue eyed, 22 year old, so it has value. And this one that is 75 and brown and, you know, able and disabled, you know, is is so insane. There’s no reality to it. But that journey to dig, dig, dig, dig and find the pool of what you you don’t just find a place where there’s no longer that belief. You you come home to what is really here, which is such a Nancy, and
Rick Archer: people listening to this and saying, Okay, sounds great. Karen has been doing this, it seems to have helped her a lot. I want to do it too. What do I do? How do I
Kiran Trace: start? Well, the first thing we have to do is we have to first be aware of how fear and conditioning is playing on our playing on us. So we’ll actually I have exactly the map for you. Because I’ve because I’ve just finished writing a new book about the body. And it’s all about the body. So we’ve just finished this book. And so the first thing we need to do is learn how to listen to the body because this incredible intelligence is here. And it’s we have not even scratched the surface when we listen to doctors and nutritionists who are valuable. And there’s great points but versus what our own body has to tell us. So first, we have to listen to our own bodies. And we have to understand the intelligence that’s there, we have to learn how to do that in order. So first off,
Rick Archer: keep the house in mind as soon as you say the
Kiran Trace: first thing we need to do is learn how to listen to our body and how we do it. I begin in my book, we’re listening, how to learn how to listen to your belly, and your actual belly will start to tell you incredibly, incredibly how to eat. And I’ve been teaching a class on body for a couple of years now and all students from all over the world. And they come with like the most amazing journey happens when we start to learn how to listen to our bodies. It’s a comp, it’s a little bit of a complicated process. And we have just a bit of time. But step one, here’s your quick route, step one, learn how to listen to your belly. That’s going to start with the basic nutrition and they’ll start to teach you how to listen because your exercise and your sleep and everything is about that, then, but very quickly, you will come up against your own condition storyline. And if I had a condition, if I still held the condition storyline, that my body had to be this shape to be beautiful, had to be this shape to be fit had to be this shape, I could not hear my own body’s voice. And when we start to listen to our limitations, all of those lacks, we have to discover our lacks and our storylines, and conditionings of that so so in my book, I have a whole chapter about how to start to isolate and find those, and how to understand what equals true self esteem are, are the kind of all that our bodies are and beauty that we are and how to see that which we naturally see you see it when you go to the ocean, you don’t look at the ocean and go Well, you know, if this ocean was a little bit smaller around the edges, and if this ocean was a little more blue instead of green, you know, then it would be beautiful, right? We never do that with it because the movement of the ocean affects us. And that effect is beauty. And bodies are very similar across the board. They affect us they’re beautiful. And so when we can find that ground, we have to dig out all the the these conditioned card carried storylines most of us have it around age around body around fitness around ability, when we can dig out those lies, we start to be able to come much more able to listen to the body itself, then we have to come into those deeper healings because then you’re going to come face to face with I’m listening to the body and this is still very much where I live today. I’m still in this planet where I listening to the body and certainly given the massive stress of my childhood in the extreme post traumatic stress disorder. The endocrine system is wiped out you know, those adrenals were spent by the time I was 17. So the hormone imbalance is crazy. And so the adrenals organs have this endless ability to heal. I mean, we can see this medically that the Oregon’s ability to heal and rejuvenate is limitless it’s amazing. But But it can’t so long as it’s got all this deep conditioning still in there these fears these tears these. So it’s not until we begin to unravel, like bring all that to surface. And so the back half of this book is how to work with those deeper core traumas and how to start to find them and just lay them out because once we’re listening to our body once we’ve thrown away the had the belief systems and were much more capable of knowing what truth and reality is, then we’re still going to come face to face with with traumas held in the body. And anything, any kind of physical thing we have with our bodies, any condition, any illness, any ability, or disability, or that kind of stuff is all going to stem from these deeper pains, these deeper traumas, and they need to be brought out of the body. And that is an extraordinary journey, you do not want to miss like, you want a friend, you want to be the front seat pass to your own transformation of your body. Like it’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. It’s climbing Mount Everest 100 times, it’s so sweet, it’s so beautiful. And that journey that’s that’s what it has made me this is where I tell people all the time, don’t be afraid of your karma, your karma is what will make you I was strong between these polar ends. And working in a profession that defined these polar ends. And I was a card carrying member of this is a beautiful body, which kept me out kept me unspecial not valuable, not beautiful, you know, kept me on the outside the whole time, my own storyline. And that strong was so so so painful, and to come home to a place where the body is so loved, and seen as beautiful and listen to so that all of the healing that needs to happen, can start to happen in the body tells me how and it’s a journey. It’s not a snap your fingers in your there. I suspect it’s a journey that goes your entire life of the body. I think it never changes the chemistry of our bodies changes the shapes of our bodies, the abilities, the the movements, and we can listen to our body and find what needs support. So you know, I’m in an amazing process right now where I’m working with all kinds of nutritional support, which I think of like crutches until my endocrine system can stand on its own, I have these little crutches of how I eat and exercise and do all my stuff. But in their journey, I can’t believe the stories that are that my endocrine has been holding and, and the pain of my body and how extraordinary my body has been given what’s actually here that needs to be healed. And I cannot stand here I can only ever tell you my direct experience. But from somebody who has no ability to identify, and I still, I still heal, I’m still healing healing happens here. And it happens from a place of immense love and needing so deeply define reality. So is this the life of a householder or like, you know, does a cave mentality? Like if we’re talking about recluse versus living in your life? I don’t think we can miss this journey.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think it’s probably a little tangential to that. To that, you know, consideration of householder versus reckless because I mean, there are plenty of recluse Yogi’s who have spent decades trying to purify their bodies through various practices and austerities and yoga and everything like that.
Kiran Trace: It’s a different level, though, when you’re pushed up against a whole community that’s telling me what shaped my body should be. I mean, I think that if, if you look at the like, we talked about this before, I mean, somebody literally wrote in the comments, this woman is so overweight, who could listen to this woman or, you know, like that on your, on your YouTube on the Buddha at the Gas Pump, like some story of this. Now, who cares? Obviously, this person has some serious delusions and some problems and obviously lives with more pain than I live. But ultimately, when I’m pushed up against a society that’s projecting a story on me, that’s going to put pressure on my karma in a way that I couldn’t in a cave. Now, cave gives you some space. And it’s a beautiful thing. And I think ultimately, our journeys in our lives are going to be some cave and some community, in my, in my work as a teacher, I have these, the way I’ve organized the teachings is, is on these levels. First, let’s free your mind. Then let’s move into the body then let’s get some deep accelerated healing for all these deep pieces. Now we need to learn how to navigate this effortless. If it’s all a dream, and we can have anything in the dream. How do you do that? Unless we have a must we have liberated our minds, they come into our bodies healed all the big pieces, we can’t really fly there. Then I have a level called Mastery and it’s all about community. It’s just 100% community. It’s a social I call it a social platform for the sane and conscious which I think is really cheeky. But basically it’s like a it’s really fun to play with community when everybody’s seen So accessing clarity and never fooled by fear. That’s a joy but also Once you reach that place of sanity, you’re still in a world where mostly everybody’s insane. And you’re still going to be possibly, you know, possibly in your marriage, you’re the same one versus your kids, your partner, your work relationships, and you love these people, and this is your life. So we need real skills on how to navigate that role, you know, of like, how do you be the point of clarity when everyone else has such a deep current of fear? And how do you move that, and that’s at the mastery level, I have about a, you know, half a dozen people in that, that level right now. To work and play and share together and figure all that sort of stuff out. But you absolutely is the point in our personal evolution, you have to come out of the cave regardless, because you have to have this collective belief system, push against, to root out those last bits of, of stories of limitation, that are limiting your freedom, and only community can do that. And that is the gift also, it’s like but who, who wants doesn’t like no one wants to miss that, you know, if you can, if there’s a same pathway, to be in community, it’s refuge, it’s ourselves. It’s love. It’s, it’s such an essential part of our journey. And it’s so valuable. But it’s, it’s a skill.
Rick Archer: There’s a beautiful point Jhana, the end of the 10th Mando, the Rigveda. You know how that goes more. It’s something about a community is significant in unity, and the community and the collection of the enlightened or something is so much more than the sum of its parts. And it goes on very poetically and beautifully. But there’s tremendous potential in that. I think you’re alluding to something
Kiran Trace: like, Yeah, I think that in there’s two fold, right? When you bring a whole lot of this powerful, beautiful energy together of a lot of sane people meditating together, there’s a lot of powerful work that can be done in terms of world peace and world issues. Because there’s not an agenda. There’s not a, there shouldn’t be a war, there should not be a war, we should, you know, be eating animals, we should not if there’s no agenda, and it’s just pure, that stillness that can basically help to open up possibilities of clarity. That’s, you know, the work. So it’s so great to dance together to heat to do this like to heal our world and to work on projects, but we have freedom. So it’s not an agenda base, it’s all fun. But then at the same time, to be able to get to a place this is really the this is really the catalyst to get to a place where you see your community, even if they are wildly insane, as unbelievable catalyst filtering your own story back to you. And that this is all just one. And so my, you know, neighbor, who is bringing the chipper on, and chipping all the trees at 6am, on Sunday morning, you know, is a glorious movement of myself to either help me bring agency to my rage, you know, because it’s a great way to bring it up. Or it’s a glorious aspect of some deeper dance, you know, and to be able to actually function in everyday life like that. So let’s go back to Joe Schmo at the beginning. So my beautiful Josephine schmo who is just one of many, many, many, you can just go on to my website, you’ll see many of my students that are like this, but she hope she’s okay with me telling the story, even though it’s not her name. So she was in a meeting with two upper level bosses that came in and it was supposed to be like a, just a kind of evaluation of where we are today. And it was they came in and these guys lost their sight. Like they just went insane. And totally, it started attacking her in a really inappropriate way. And she sat in that meeting and went, Wow, this is really bringing up how much I want people to like me, like I can see this belief system or she does in her own set how she wasn’t, she was not, she was not like, oh my god, I might be losing my job, what’s happening? And how could I have been so wrong? And why are they talking to me like this? She just sat there like, wow, because she just felt this whole pressure on that belief system. And she just watched the whole belief system came up. And then she got her car and she drove home and the whole time because she called me later and told me about this. And she said the whole time she was just saying thank you, like not from some frickin mindfulness practice or some teaching or some just it was a true movement in herself to just go, Oh my god. Thank you. And it’s just this grin of just like, I know exactly where that belief is. I can see the history of it. I felt it I’m gonna go home and pull that sucker out. Because Wow. And just this like, thank you. Because the sweetness of that the beauty of that it’s way better than anything else. It’s so fulfilling. And it’s it was just such a fulfilling moment. So that my friends is clarity. And that is needing some community. And now remember, Josephine schmo is not that she’s not clear. She’s not like, she’s not an awakened clarity. She’s, she’s a human with very little limited conditioning now.
Rick Archer: Because we’ve all heard the saying that, you know, everything God does is for the best and that the world is my guru. And that, you know, things don’t happen capriciously, or arbitrarily, that there’s a meaning or value or an evolutionary purpose to every little thing that happens. And we’ve heard these philosophical things. And you know, it’s a little bit harder to live that in the thick of it. But there’s an example of someone who took a difficult situation, and did just that. And it
Kiran Trace: was never difficult for her. Yeah, she never experienced a difficult situation. It
Rick Archer: is an evolutionary opera. Yeah,
Kiran Trace: exactly. And that’s, that’s it exactly.
Rick Archer: On one look, to she’s to talk about the value of being under the influence of a petty tyrant. Because it would sort of help you to work out your stuff a lot more effectively than if your life was just sort of easy peasy. Yes.
Kiran Trace: And it gives you an extraordinary life. That’s what I like the my petty tyrant, was this card carrying ridiculous belief system about what my body should look like. And it was so painful and awful. And it made me and it gave me an extraordinary ability to no self love. Like if I had not had that belief, if I had not had that petty tyrant. I would not have this if I just had some easy body that could eat anything it wanted, and was whatever was part of that storyline. I would never question that story. And I would have never found the kind of love of body and what body really is like, I would have never found that ground of reality. And it was my petty tyrant that brought me there.
Rick Archer: Let’s see if we can get another question. Might be what you just said. This is from someone named Maurice. He said, My question is, is it worth it? Well, the extreme shit you’ve gone through based on where you are now was the pain and suffering worth it?
Kiran Trace: That’s a great question for Maurice. Yeah. Was it worth it? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 100% I had this
Rick Archer: I guess one question, maybe what was what worth it because you went through horrendous childhood and adolescence? So is that worth it? Is he asking or is it worth it? The all the all the transformational stuff you’ve had to go through since your awakening, but it’s assume it’s that the transfer, the whole post awakening phase is a lot more enjoyable than the pre awakening phase where you’re getting you know, abused, and all that stuff in
Kiran Trace: my experience, because my karma was so dark the actual awakening for me which was spontaneous and I knew nothing about it, it was just a spontaneous my mind wipe, that actually was bigger hell than the hell it was almost like my childhood was a bootcamp to get me ready for the kind of house for the first five years. A because I suddenly had no mind and filters that could block or repress so I was face planted with an immense amount of viruses fast as fast as it wanted to. And also, I was such a massive opening. Like literally no form for many, many, many, many, many months. Like I couldn’t find bodies and walls and things which brought me to such an immense clairvoyant see, and there was no buddy home doing nothing at all, and there was nothing here and it was all a dream. And yet these huge karmic movements globally, like you know, whole Mongolian wars, like an orphanage from the 17th century would just pour through me and I had no filter so I was witnessing I was pure love, witnessing pure hate, and not just hate but pure violence, fewer abuse,
Rick Archer: are you serving as a washing machine for that stuff? Do you think cleaning it up and resolving it? Definitely
Kiran Trace: in the many years since similar experiences happened to me all the time, and now I can navigate them and they’re very sweet. It feels much like making love or something quite honestly. When they happen to me, it’s very clear sometimes it’s, it’s, you know, people have died and they don’t know they’ve died or there’s movements and a world event or something that will just clear itself through me and it’s a sweet thing. But back then it was just like, and I often I felt like I lived like The Exorcist, like, like my head’s been around. I was constantly Kundalini and shaking and I’d have like 16 hour day seizures that was just Kundalini, moving this extraordinary movement like so it was, there was no functioning. It was insane. There was these five years of just pure, just pure pain and being pure love witnessing pure pain and it was very, very hard.
Rick Archer: Incidentally, one thing I learned since our last interview I learned quite recently, since interviewing John Harrigan, who wrote who has the Kundalini Care Institute in Tennessee and wrote Kundalini vision is that for some traumatic experiences can initiate or instigate a Kundalini awakening, you know, severe trauma stuff, and it almost seems like that was your path. Now, you may have done stuff in previous lives that that made you more sort of ready for Kundalini awakening, but you know, I, I’ve talked to several people since then, who said, Yeah, I got, I went through all this intense stuff. One friend said, I was tortured in a past life and others said I was raped in a past life a lot. In their Kundalini, and then in this life, they took a different path. Well,
Kiran Trace: the truth is, every one of us have we’ve all been thrown on the stake and burnt as witches. We’ve all been the accusers that accused the witches. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been raped and violated. We’ve all been at war. We’ve all been slaves. We’ve all been men and women. We’ve all Yeah, we’ve been the judge. We’ve been the judge jeje the victim in the jet. We’ve all been at all in all kinds of lifetimes. Like apparently.
Rick Archer: There’s this thing called Kundalini awakening, which maybe doesn’t happen until there is
Kiran Trace: I don’t I don’t subscribe to any of that story. But I totally understand people do Kundalini is when I talk about Kundalini, it’s just simply presence. It comes when you walk in the forest, you have a
Rick Archer: 15 hour day, convulsions, Kundalini stuff going on.
Kiran Trace: Yeah. So what I’m talking about is when you walk in the trees in the forest, you feel an energy come off. It’s why you like being in the trees. That’s presence. That’s just pure energy. Every being emanates a pure energy. Kundalini is that is basically that same energy, but it’s jacked up at a much higher power level, because it has no form. There’s no form, there’s no tree, there’s no body. So without form, it comes with such an intensity. It’s so effortless, and form is beginning to be more effort. There’s the it takes effort, there’s effort and form. So when pure presence moves in pure effortlessness, to form, it feels like intensity. So it’s super, super intense movement. Now my experience of Kundalini which is my own personal but also it’s like, you can take a whole bunch of drugs and have a Kundalini awakening, you can take have amazing sexual experience with some big Tantra practice and it’ll open up your Kundalini, you can have a deep meditation and in total stillness and have a Kundalini, you can do it through a Kundalini yoga practices. You can there’s you can also do it through severe trauma and severe abuse and all is doing is this presence that’s coming off of you right now me right now, the trees, the forest, all that’s happening is a little channel where there’s no form is slipping through the body. And you can have it when you’re working with an energy worker, you could just somebody referred you to an energy worker, you started working with them and opened up this Kundalini, which is your own presence, which you always had with you. And it’s beginning to move in a way with it’s formless and it comes through and it hits a block hits these emotional blocks these these blocks in our bodies and bang against them. And that’s where people get the heat and the slips out and the epileptics and the kind of movements. I tell people is like a hose, if you turn your hose on full blast, and there’s kinks in your hose gonna flip around. And so a lot of the work I teach and I teach about healing, when I’m working with people Kundalini is how to hold the hose straight so that the kinks get blown out with the water with so it doesn’t have to happen just from the energy itself. But I don’t subscribe to a story that there’s a certain thing you did in another life that made you available in this life. Because we’ve all been at all. Every one of us it’s just one here. No problem.
Rick Archer: So we have to wrap it up because I have to catch a ferry to go to another island. So what would you like to say in conclusion to leave people with obviously come to your website, because you’re gonna find out a lot of tools on
Kiran Trace: the website. I only do very few lot. Mostly it’s courses and privates. I don’t do Satsang it’s, it’s just not a business model that works for me. In my industry. That’s the business model. doesn’t work for me. But I will be in LA and then Oh, hi, in November. So be the only time this year you could see me in person, your website. That’s all on my website. I think. I think I’m really grateful to I think the moral of Maurices story but what was it worth it? I have so much gratitude in a way that is not a practice way you know, not not in a like daily gratitude practice way, but it’s just enough natural way that I move every day where there’s just so much life. And I’m so extraordinarily amazed at the life and I’m so touched at each of us uniquely and who we are and what we’ve done and what we’re working with and, and the kind of evolution that we’re doing. That’s it just it just makes my heart. So bow down and gratitude for the whole thing. So it’s so been worth it. It’s been such an extraordinary journey. And, and I don’t think we need to miss the journey any of us. We don’t need to be afraid of our karma. It will make us if we are in if you’re a card carrying member of I need to be enlightened. And I am not, you know, that’s your polar that’s going to make you if you need to be. Whatever your journey is, it’s an amazing journey not to be missed. It’s it’s beautiful. And I’m grateful.
Rick Archer: That’s all God. Entertaining himself.
Kiran Trace: Yeah. In the most glorious way.
Rick Archer: Yeah. All right. Great. Well, thank you. We’re concluding remarks. It’s been a lot of fun. You and I could go on all day.
Kiran Trace: Would you may in coming days, but not not for the camera.
Rick Archer: And for those watching, you’ve probably seen some of my interviews before, if you haven’t, then there’s a website batgap.com, where they’re all archived, and categorized in five or six, four or five different ways. Under the past interviews menu. There’s the future interviews menu, you can see what’s upcoming, there’s a lot going on this fall. There’s the donate button, which I always mentioned in passing, I like to kind of keep a light touch on that. But it’s essential for making this possible. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted usually once a week. And there’s an audio podcast, which is almost has as many listeners as the YouTube channel has viewers. And there’s a place on the site to sign up for the audio podcast. So check all that stuff out. And there will be a link to Karen’s website probably to her new book and your old book and everything else. Seeing click on those and I hope that you’ve enjoyed this and benefited from it and stay tuned because I’ve got another five or six coming up in the next couple of weeks. So thanks for listening or watching
