The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (2 page)

But my understanding of no-self was limited at this point. I took it to mean that my inner anxiety, my “self,” was unreal and would drop away once I woke up. It was confusing to find that meditation—rather than dropping me into a void of no-self—backed me into myself. It tricked me, so to speak. The paradox that lured me to Buddhism in the beginning did not resolve as I became more familiar with the Buddha’s words; it deepened. While meditation was teaching me to hold myself with a light touch, it was also helping me to emerge, to emerge
through
my suffering, not in spite of it. I continued to study Buddhist theory, of course, and I understood, theoretically, that there was no self to be found, that what we took for a self was only a conglomeration of parts, just as a car is made up of wheels, axles, motors, chassis, and so forth. In the Buddhist sutras, the Buddha called the parts that are construed in their interaction as a self the five
skandhas
, the five “heaps” or “aggregates.” Form, feelings, perceptions, mental processes, and consciousness were the five
skandhas
; I knew that. There was no self; there were only the aggregates. That was one of the fundamental principles of the Buddhist path, repeated at the outset of every teaching. Yet the more experience I had with meditation, the more connected I felt with myself. Where before I had been living on the surface, secretly afraid that I was missing something or that there was something off about me, I now felt—how else can I phrase it?—more at home. Instead of dropping away permanently, as I, newly schooled in Buddhist metaphysics, hoped and expected it would do, my self seemed to be broadening its horizons.

Affirmation that I might not be completely off base came to me from the Buddhist sutras themselves. In one, there is a story about a conversation between the Buddha and the king of Kosala, one of the kingdoms where the Buddha roamed. Why is it that your followers seem so different from those of other teachers and sects? this king wanted to know. You emphasize the inescapability of
dukkha
, the truth of suffering, and yet your monks look so full of life. The followers of other religions look “haggard, coarse, pale, emaciated, and unprepossessing,” the king went on, while your disciples are “joyful, elated, jubilant, and exultant.” They even seem “light-hearted,” the king continued, as if they have “a gazelle’s mind.”
³
This was indeed a strange religion. How was it that a willingness to embrace suffering yielded such a sense of vitality?

The king was seeing what I was feeling. The fruits of meditation—balance, ease, joyfulness, and humor—seemed to emerge in conjunction with an acknowledgment of suffering. This was strange, I thought. But I could not ignore the shift that was taking place inside of me. While Buddhism taught about no-self, my own experience was to feel more connected, more alive, less at odds with or afraid of myself, and more able to rest in my own consciousness. I was less fraught, less worried about the state of myself, less preoccupied with what was wrong with me and more able to just be. The feelings of being like a fish out of water were beginning to diminish.

I have come to realize that this paradoxical strategy was one of the Buddha’s greatest discoveries. Trauma happens to everyone. The potential for it is part of the precariousness of human existence. Some traumas—loss, death, accidents, disease, and abuse—are explicit; others—like the emotional deprivation of an unloved child—are more subtle; and some, like my own feelings of estrangement, seem to come from nowhere. But it is hard to imagine the scope of an individual life without envisioning some kind of trauma, and it is hard for most people to know what to do about it. I remember talking to my father just before he died from a malignant brain tumor a couple of years ago. He was eighty-four years old, an accomplished physician who had lived a long and productive life and had worked steadily until his tumor was discovered a month or so earlier, too late for treatment.

“Have you made your peace with what is happening?” I asked him somewhat awkwardly in one of our final conversations, tiptoeing around the dreaded word “death.”

“I could say that I’m trying,” he said, his words coming slowly and haltingly now. “But I feel like I’m finally up against something I can’t do anything about.”

It is rare for someone to get through life without facing trauma. I know my father had his share—at fifteen he injected his own father with morphine as he lay dying of mesothelioma, an asbestos-caused lung cancer he came down with after insulating his own attic—but I think he did his best to keep it out of his consciousness for as long as he could. The Buddha counseled another way. He saw the mind and the heart as one and he used a rather strange phrase to talk about how a realistic view of trauma helps people. It “gladdens their hearts,” he said on many occasions. The king of Kosala noticed it in his time and I noticed it in mine but it was not the conventional approach in his era and it is certainly not the standard in ours.

The Buddha was not a physician, although he was often described as one, at least partly because he gave his first set of teachings, on the Four Noble Truths, in the form traditionally used by doctors of his time to present their cases.
⁴
Like them, he described the illness, gave its cause, declared that a cure was available, and laid out the components of the treatment. In so doing, he pushed against the constraints of his culture. An ancient Sanskrit proverb declares, “One should not speak unless what one says is both true and pleasant.”
⁵
Buddha rejected this view. There was nothing pleasant about his First Noble Truth, spoken by him in the form of a one-word exclamation: “
Dukkha
!” The word, generally translated as “suffering” but carrying the literal meaning of “hard to face,” was the Buddha’s emphatic summary of the entire human predicament. When forced to elaborate on what he meant, the Buddha let loose with a torrent of explanation. Birth, aging, sickness, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are inescapable; being close to those who are disagreeable, being separated from those who are loved, and not getting what one wants are all unpleasant facts of life; indeed, just being a person in this world brings suffering because of how insignificant we feel and how impermanent we are. Even pleasant experiences carry a whiff of dissatisfaction because of their inability to provide ultimate comfort. No matter how fulfilling, they eventually run their course.

But there was another quality to the
dukkha
the Buddha described, a more subtle description of the unsatisfactory nature of the human predicament. The word itself is a compound with an interesting derivation. The prefix “duh” means badness or difficulty, while the suffix “kha” can refer to the hole at the center of a wheel into which an axle fits. The word thus connotes a bad fit making for a bumpy ride.
⁶
For me this image of a poorly fitting axle was another way of describing the sense of not fitting in, of not quite belonging, of being slightly at odds with oneself, that had afflicted me for as long as I could remember. It was probably no accident, given the derivation of the word, that the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths was entitled “Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma.” His listeners would have been aware of the connotations of the word
dukkha
and would have appreciated the imagery of the Buddha turning a wheel smoothly.

Questioned some years after his enlightenment by a local prince about his penchant for delivering bad news, Buddha said that he could no longer abide by the traditional Sanskrit principle of saying only what was true and pleasant. He marched to a different drum, he maintained, and would speak of what was “true and beneficial even if it was disagreeable.” To illustrate his point, he pointed to a baby on the prince’s lap. What if the infant put a stick or a pebble in his mouth? Wouldn’t the prince pull it out even if doing so were likely to cause the baby some distress? Wasn’t that what a doctor sometimes had to do? Not to mention a mother? But he added one caveat. He would speak the beneficial, if disagreeable, truth only if he “knew the time to say it.”
⁷
As is the case with good therapists today, tact was a major concern of the Buddha. If someone was not ready to acknowledge his or her trauma, he would not force the issue. Each individual had to liberate him- or herself, after all. The best a teacher, even a Buddha, can do is to show them how.

“This generation is entangled in a tangle,” began one of the earliest commentaries on the Buddha’s teachings, written many generations ago in Sri Lanka, somewhere around the fifth century of the common era. The “tangle” refers to the way we only want to hear what is “true and pleasant,” the way we refuse what is “disagreeable.” In the Buddha’s time as well as in our own, there was a rush toward some imagined version of normal, an intolerance of the precarious foundation upon which we are perched. It was true thousands of years ago and it remains true to this day. The novelist William Styron once expressed this perfectly. Overheard when he was a young man in Paris drunkenly falling into his oysters and pleading to his friends for relief, Styron gave voice to what for most people remains an unacknowledged whisper in the back of their minds. “Ah ain’ got no mo ree-sistunce to change than a
snow
-flake,” Styron moaned. “Ah’m goin’ home to the James Rivuh and grow
pee
-nuts.”
⁸
Styron’s willingness to acknowledge his trauma is unusual—most of us refuse to admit it, even to ourselves, but live in a state of entanglement with it nonetheless.

A patient of mine recently gave voice to a similar sentiment in the midst of her therapy with me. She was sober, and she had a different image for her suffering, but she was pleading in much the same way as William Styron: “I feel like a person alone in a sailboat in the middle of the ocean clinging for dear life to the mast,” Monica confided as she began to well up, the silence of her therapy session cushioning her tears. “It’s too much; I can’t hang on any longer; I don’t know what else to do.” An accomplished and beloved professor in her midfifties, Monica was astute enough to be able to give language to her trauma, one that many people feel but shy away from. She, too, was like a fish out of water. There was an urgency to her communication, I remember, a desperation, but also an honesty. I think it came in the context of talking about her mother’s declining health, but I recognized the feeling and did not think it was only about her mother’s impending demise. I was too familiar with what she was talking about to attribute it solely to the approaching loss of her mom.

Life’s difficulties often reduce us to the feeling Monica was talking about, I thought. What with war and earthquakes and rape and disease, it’s a wonder life is not more difficult more of the time. But even if we push natural or man-made disasters to one side and try to stick to normal everyday life, things are still a struggle. Life is beautiful sometimes, for sure; in fact, it’s totally amazing, every day a good day; but that doesn’t stop things from being fragile and precarious, nor does it stop us from feeling all too alone. Of course, the line between normal everyday life and calamity seems extraordinarily thin sometimes, but regular life, even in its glory, is difficult. Things don’t always go the way they should. Our friends and loved ones struggle. The specter of loss is always hovering. And we often feel adrift, unmoored, fearful, and out of our depth.

Luckily, I did not relay any of these thoughts to Monica. Something more vital popped out of my mouth.

“But you’re the ocean, as well,” I replied.

Several years later, after her mother had passed away, Monica reminded me of my comment. It had had a tremendous impact, she said. I was surprised—I could have just as easily made a case for her
not
being the ocean—but I was glad I had been able to say something that mattered, something she remembered, something that made her think. So much of therapy happens in the moment and passes right out of memory. There was a Buddhist slant to my retort, I reflected. It hit on something I had learned from my own experience. Trauma is the way into the self, and the way out. To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all. To understand selflessness—the central and liberating concept I was reaching for when I reminded Monica of her oceanic nature—we have to first find the self that we take to be so real, the one that is pushing us around in life, the one that feels traumatized, entangled in a tangle. The freedom the Buddha envisioned does not come from jettisoning imprisoning thoughts and feelings or from abandoning the suffering self; it comes from learning how to hold it all differently, juggling them rather than cleaving to their ultimate realities.

Monica was at a pivotal point in therapy, a pivotal point in her life. Some might say she was regressed, but there is an inherent prejudice in this word that connotes an almost universal fear of the emergence of such strong feelings of dread. Monica was in touch with herself on a primitive level, and this was a real accomplishment. She really did feel alone, adrift, and afraid. However much I might have wanted to comfort her, to show her how her current feelings were conditioned by early childhood experiences of deprivation and were therefore presently unreal, I restrained myself. From my perspective, her willingness to expose her true feelings was a great opportunity. On one level, Monica was in touch with her reality. There she was, clutching the mast of her identity. On another level, she was poised for a breakthrough. All around her, just outside her apprehension, was the liberating ocean of her mind.

I was reaching for this when I was speaking with Monica. I was not thinking of Freud’s oceanic feeling, of the way Freud reduced spiritual experience to a resurrection of infantile oneness with the mother at the breast. I was not trying to tell her that she and her mom were one despite her mother’s impending death, and I was not trying to show her the childhood or infantile origins of her painful feelings: I was indicating to her that she was actually one step away from understanding her true nature. Her conviction about her predicament was inadvertently summoning an image of its release. Convinced that she was clinging to the mast of her ship, she was nonetheless painting a picture of the sea. And somewhere inside, when I pointed out the huge part of her internal landscape she was ignoring, Monica let go, just a little.