This is a tricky subject because its one of those things that’s hard to define or prove scientifically but there is a Wikipedia article on it here
What I would like to discuss here is the observable phenomenon that Avatar Masters and Trainers would call a student becoming “ungrounded” and the process they use to get students back in their body. It may sound a bit too Voodoo for some but humor me for a bit as I’ll explain it in terms of what actually happened for me.
On the Avatar course you can choose to explore different areas of your consciousness. Some of this exploration can have you either deliberately exploring or accidentally bumping into things that have occurred in your past that create a strong emotional reaction. People who have been subjected to Trauma or violent attack seem to be the most susceptible to these experiences.
What appears to occur is that when the student hits this area of prior upset or trauma the student can experience the loss of control or sensation of their own bodies and they can appear to be spaced out. When it occurred for me I started to lose the sensation of being connected to my body. I didn’t feel as though I had left it and floated off to some other part of the room, it was more like I was under a local anaesthetic, fully conscious and fully present but not really connected to my physical form. I couldn’t feel my hands apart from a sort of numb feeling and I lost the sensation of the muscles in my face and couldn’t talk. I could move when instructed by the Avatar Master but had extremely limited sensation in some parts of my body. I could move my arms for example but my hands and fingers had no feeling in them at all. With this occurring for me and the Master observing that I seemed to be spacing out they quickly checked in with a Trainer for what to do.
Avatar has a specific grounding process that they use when this phenomena occurs in students. I cant recall the specific details but they run you through a series of exercises (a debug) designed to return the student to the body (or probably more accurately to return the normal sensations of being in and having a body)
The process goes something like this:
The student is given certain objects to hold and squeeze (the objects selected are usually large with lots of texture) and is asked to state what the different objects feel like. This process is repeated with different objects until the sensation of being in your body fully returns. The process can take up to half an hour. I think there may be a cautionary note somewhere in the Avatar Master materials that it is undesirable to leave a student in this ungrounded state for more than half an hour. I suspect that left longer than this a severe psychotic episode may occur possibly lasting for days or in extreme cases even weeks.
In my time as a Master I experienced courses where this didn’t occur at all and some courses where it occurred with multiple students throughout the 9 days. It wasn’t just students that experienced it as sometimes a Master helping with the delivery of the course could experience it too.
As Masters and Trainers we talked about it behind the scenes as though it was no big deal and the explanation of the Trainers was that what was occurring was that the student was approaching a memory with so much emotional charge and trauma attached to it that the defence mechanism of the mind was to disassociate with the body to avoid experiencing the unpleasantness of the feelings, emotions, thoughts associated with the situation. The attitude varied between “the student just didn’t want to go there and became ungrounded in order to avoid the experiencing it” and that they had hit a part of their consciousness that really needed some work on it to release the student from this past trauma. In Avatar there is always the attitude that the tools will handle anything that crops up and that you need to fully experience things to let them go. That’s what the Creation Handling Procedure is for, however students can become ungrounded before they have learned the CHP.
Another seemingly plausible explanation that I was given was that when someone is exposed to a violent attack that their mind pulls the escape cord and the person (metaphorically) leaves their body to avoid feeling the physical sensations of pain and the strong emotions like terror. This sort of makes sense to me as I know some people faint in frightening situations and I also know from painful personal experience of physical injuries that I have a finite capacity for pain and that I go unconscious when a certain pain level is reached.
So what I know from observation and first hand experience is this,
a) some people do experience this phenomena of losing physical sensation of their bodies while on the Avatar Course.
b) The Avatar terminology for this phenomena is “becoming ungrounded”.
c) It can occur at anytime during the 9 days.
d) That when this occurs the Trainers always keep an eye on the person who it’s happening to and also are responsible for instructing the Master how to deal with it by assigning them the various exercises or processes to return the student to a normal state.
e) There is no medical or scientific explanation that is given or discussed behind the scenes with the Masters and Trainers. Like most things in Avatar you don’t get to ask lots of questions about it, you are just expected to have faith that the tools can handle any situation. There is a caveat here in that the Trainers will have no hesitation in sending someone off to Hospital if the tools aren’t returning a student to a normal mental state. Messy scenes in the Hotels where the courses are delivered are not good for the reputation of Avatar or for the other students on the course.
On the Avatar Course application form there is a question that the student must answer which is from memory “Have you ever been subject to violent trauma or attack?” It appears that this is a fairly useful indicator that the student my be at risk requiring some monitoring more closely than the average student or in some cases not being accepted for the course if further investigation reveals that the student has significant mental issues.
So there you have it, students becoming ungrounded or having out-of-body experiences on the Avatar course does occur. Most get handled in the course environment without the need for emergency medical intervention although it is possible that some people who require hospitalization post course may have also experienced being ungrounded during the course.
We have no way of knowing if it causes lasting damage to a persons mental state as the data just doesn’t exist and I am sure Harry would not willingly permit any form of study on it from a University or a Health Organisation.
Knowing that it does occur for some allows the prospective student to weigh up the risks of participating in the course and for some the possible dangers could add to the level of excitement. Avatar is a bit like Extreme Sports for the Mind.
Lets be careful out there!
harleystrangelove 