thoughts, emotions, feelings, or sensations you have just recognized. You initiate it by gently asking, “Can I be with this?” or “Can I let this be?” It’s natural to feel resistance at this point—you wish some

Sense that you have the space of awareness to include everything you’ve discovered, that you can fully allow it to be as it is. You can even say yes to the parts of you that are saying no and resisting what’s happening.

You are in a state of presence (above the line) when you’re aware of the blaming thoughts and physical experience of anger. During these moments, in addition to the anger, there’s a sense of witnessing the anger and some choice in how you respond. In contrast, you’re in trance if you’re lost inside the cycling thoughts and feelings of blame, with

Many spiritual traditions describe presence as an open, sunlit sky. When presence is full, like the sky it is luminous and boundless, and it provides warmth and nourishment for life. All kinds of weather systems pass through it—happiness, sorrow, fear, excitement, grief—but like the sky itself, presence can hold them all.

It’s entirely natural to want to feel special, to want to be treated in certain ways, to want a particular person as a partner. Yet this wanting can cause suffering if it takes over. Our attention becomes fixated on an external source, as if who we are and our entire well-being depended on someone relating to us in a certain way. The purpose of

“Our issues are in our tissues.”

Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in that space is your power and your freedom. • VIKTOR FRANKL The deepest transformations in our lives come down to something very simple: We learn to respond, not react, to what is going on inside us.

The more quickly we become aware of our “no,” the better we can respond to Mara. The difficult situations that evoke a habitual “no”

Or look back on your day and scan for the times when you were under the line. Can you identify some of the flags of trance for you? Sometimes in trance there’s just enough consciousness to recognize