The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (23 page)

With encouragement from his meditation teachers, he also saw that he was afraid of what he was unleashing in himself. Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the opposite. While he did retrieve the horrible images, he rediscovered a lost innocence as well. The beauty of the jungle, the glistening white sands of the Vietnamese beaches, and the intense greens of the rice paddies at dawn all filtered back to him. Not only did he remember his trauma, he remembered himself
before
his trauma.

“What also arose at the retreat for the first time was a deep sense of compassion for my past and present self: compassion for the idealistic, young would-be physician forced to witness the unspeakable obscenities of which humankind is capable, and for the haunted veteran who could not let go of memories he could not acknowledge he carried.”
¹⁵

This newfound kindness, toward himself and his history, stayed with him after the retreat. It became a touchstone in his mind that accompanied his troubling recollections, robbing them of their sting. While his memories persisted, his nightmares did not. The last of them occurred while he was fully awake, sitting in silence in the meditation hall, the watchful gaze of a Buddha holding him in its sight.

When I read this passage at a recent talk, a therapist in the audience raised her hand. She was moved by the account and reassured in a fundamental way in terms of her own work. Although she was a trauma therapist, she was anxious about bringing such material, partially submerged or partially repressed, into her patients’ awareness because of the fear of overwhelming them with their own feelings. She was a therapist burdened by all that she had heard, traumatized by trauma, dangerously close to burning out, who had a protective attitude toward her patients, for whom she clearly cared deeply. She was trying to protect them from themselves, however, and so was shouldering their traumas instead of helping them accept what had happened. She was missing, or had lost, the faith or confidence that something greater than trauma could emerge from the therapeutic process. And she was also, I thought, protecting herself from her clients’ pain. Listening to the passage quoted above gave her a vision of what was possible, a vision of the connection both she and her patients were capable of, even in the face of tremendous personal suffering. While the example may seem extreme, its lesson is basic. When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others’, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.

A therapist colleague of mine, a professor at the New School for Social Research named Jeremy Safran, tells a personal story about an encounter with a Tibetan Buddhist lama that makes much the same point. In the epigraph of a book he edited about encounters between Buddhism and psychoanalysis, Safran describes an unexpected exchange with his accomplished teacher that puts me in mind of the Buddha’s dreams. As Safran remembers, his Tibetan teacher, Karma Thinley Rinpoche, once asked him, “in his broken, heavily accented English,” how Western psychology treats nervousness.

“Why do you ask?” Safran responded.

“Well,” he replied, “I’ve always been a nervous person. Even when I was a little boy I was nervous, and I still am. Especially when I have to talk to large groups of people or to people I don’t know, I get nervous.”

It is best to let the rest of the story come directly from Dr. Safran:

As was often the case with the questions that Karma Thinley asked me, I found myself drawing a complete blank. Part of it was the difficulty of trying to find the words to explain something to somebody whose grasp of English was limited, but there was another more important factor. On the face of it this was a simple question. But Karma Thinley was a highly respected lama, now in his sixties, who had spent years mastering the most sophisticated Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques. Those who knew Karma Thinley considered him to be an enlightened being. In the West psychotherapists are increasingly turning to Buddhist meditation as a valuable treatment for a variety of problems including anxiety. Who was I to tell him how to deal with anxiety? And how was it possible that Karma Thinley, with all of his experience meditating could still be troubled by such everyday concerns? How could an enlightened person be socially anxious? Was he really enlightened? What does it mean to be enlightened? My head swirled with all of these inchoate questions, and for a moment my mind stopped. I felt a sense of warmth coming from Karma Thinley and I felt warmly towards him. I felt young, soft, open and uncertain about everything I knew.
¹⁶

When I first read this passage, I called Safran on the phone, even though we did not really know each other. I thought it was a beautiful description of the state of mind that Buddhism encourages. I liked the way the lama used his social anxiety to topple Safran’s expectations of him, and I appreciated the deeper message. Awakening does not mean an end to difficulty; it means a change in the way those difficulties are met. “Young, soft, open and uncertain about everything I knew.” There was a recovery inherent in the passage, a recovery of what Michael Eigen had called the unknown boundless presence at the core of aloneness, of what Duchamp christened the aesthetic echo, of what the Buddha found in his dreams. It is not only trauma that is lodged in implicit memory: The intrinsic relational knowing at the heart of the infant-caregiver bond is hidden there too. The Buddha, in his wakefulness, brought it out of the shadows and let it fill his being. As rejuvenating as this was, in some sense the Buddha was just rediscovering the wheel. Parents the world over have been clued in to their own version of the Buddha’s wisdom for ages. “It is an important part of what a mother does,” wrote Winnicott in a description of how she handles an infant’s rage at the discovery that she is not completely under his control, “to be the first person to take the baby through this first version of the many that will be encountered, of attack that is survived. This is the right moment in the child’s development, because of the child’s relative feebleness, so that destruction can fairly easily be survived.”
¹⁷
Like the Buddha, Winnicott knew that trauma was inevitable, even for infants. A mother’s ability to help her baby through it with kindness and care is what the Buddha remembered.

Safran told me he was grateful for my call. His publisher, a Buddhist press, had urged him to leave this passage out of the book. Like the Buddha in the immediate aftermath of his awakening when he despaired of anyone understanding him, the publisher felt it would be too confusing for the readers.

Reflections of Mind

W
hen my father was dying from his brain tumor, I realized that I had never had a conversation with him about anything spiritual. He was a scientist and, while he was proud of my success as a writer, he never expressed any real interest in the kinds of things I was thinking about. I was reluctant to engage him in too much discussion, knowing that he was not interested, and that seemed fine with him. When it became clear that his malignant brain tumor was inoperable, however, and that his days were severely numbered, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t try to talk to him about what I had learned from Buddhism. This was a challenge, not because of his tumor, which was deep in the right side of his brain and had not affected his cognitive abilities, but because I needed to find a way of talking to him in plain language, without recourse to concepts he did not believe in. I called him on the phone from my office, not knowing that several days later he would slip into a coma from which he would never emerge, an unintentional infection from a brain biopsy several weeks previously taking its iatrogenic toll.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, my father, although a physician, successfully avoided the subject of his own mortality for much of his life. This is not an uncommon strategy for dealing with death, and there are many sutras in the Buddhist canon that show the Buddha confronting it with whatever persuasiveness he can muster. In one such sutra, known as the Simile of the Mountain, the Buddha asked a local ruler, King Pasenadi, how he would feel if a huge mountain were to come bearing down on him from the east, crushing all living beings in its path. He conjured the mountain expertly, making the king imagine a gigantic mass moving inexorably toward him, rolling over all things. Then he repeated the question but had the mountain coming from the north, then the south, and finally the west. By the time he was finished, the poor king, ostensibly secure behind his fourfold fortifications of elephants, chariots, cavalry, and infantry, was being crushed from all sides. This is what death is like, the Buddha trumpeted. It’s coming, you don’t know from which direction, and you are powerless to stop it. He seemed almost gleeful.

Why was this such a profound teaching for the king? Even now the words retain their threatening power. Don’t we know all this already? Is death really such a surprise? The Buddha suggested that we do not really know it, even though we may mouth the words. The tendency toward denial runs very deep. We don’t actually think it can happen to
us
. Or rather, we can’t actually
imagine
it happening to us. The Buddha’s incantation brought the reality home, at least for an instant, for King Pasenadi. The king inclined his mind toward the truth, brought it into his explicit awareness, and became receptive to the Buddha’s teachings.

One of the most obvious reasons for avoiding the reality of death is that we do not know how to deal with it. The Buddha, in helping King Pasenadi see the impotence of his fortifications, was making this very point. We think we have to erect barriers to it or find weapons to fight it, but this does not work very well. The Buddha discovered a softer approach, one that he was urging the king toward. In his recovery of implicit relational knowing, as personified in his five great dreams, he found the key to navigating the inevitable traumas of life, including that of death.

My father already had the mountain on top of him. He had worked until he was eighty-four, until he got lost one day driving the same ten-minute route home from work that he had taken for the past forty years. The mountain, in the form of the tumor, was already inside his brain. As he was not used to facing a challenge he could not overcome with his intelligence, there was an air of resignation hovering over this, our last conversation.

“You know the feeling of yourself deep inside that hasn’t really changed since you were a boy?” I began. “The way you have felt the same to yourself as a young man, in middle age, and even now?”

My father voiced his assent. I was trying to summon the place of intrinsic relational knowing for him. It is there, in our own subjectivity, although it is difficult to describe. We know ourselves from the inside: We have an intuitive feel for ourselves that is outside thought. And we relate to other people, indeed to the world, from this place. Most of the time, in our active and harried lives, we gloss right over it, but it is there in the background and we return to it in our private, unscripted, moments: when listening to music, taking a walk, or going to sleep, for example. In my mind I was remembering one of my Buddhist teachers asking me to find “what” (not “who”) was knowing the sounds I was hearing when I was meditating. “Can you find what is knowing?” he would often question, as I turned my attention to the sounds of the meditation hall. The very effort to find “what is knowing” (although it was impossible to find) opened up a peaceful oasis of calm awareness in which I learned to abide. “Even though we can’t find what is knowing, knowing is there,” my teacher would say. This affirmation was a traditional Buddhist way of bringing implicit relational knowing into explicit awareness. “Knowing is there.” It was impossible to refute.

My father, as best as I could gather, seemed to understand what I was getting at.

“It’s kind of transparent, that feeling,” I went on. “You know what it is, but it’s hard to put your finger on it. You can just relax your mind into that space, though. The body comes apart but you can rest in who you have always been.” Death is like taking off a tight shoe, I wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure he would believe me if I went that far in the conversation. Yet I thought, with his scientist mind, he might just sense the possibility of investigating what I was suggesting. If the Buddha was to be believed, there was a place of lucidity from which even dying could be observed.

“Okay, darling, I’ll try,” he replied. I wondered for an instant if he was being patronizing but decided he was not. He often called me darling, and I was glad for it, in the end.

The stance I was suggesting to my father was akin to what the Buddha found in his dreams, the one that parents use to know what their infants are going through, that infants use to sense their parents’ attunement, and that people continue to use to relate to one another empathically. This implicit relational knowing is immediate. It operates independently of language and opens a window into what is. It oriented us at the beginning of life, when our parents were our major lifelines, and it can be accessed even in death. The Buddha found that it was critical to his process of awakening and he deployed it, just as I hoped my father might, not only when he was dying but in his final struggle for enlightenment. Implicit knowing usually takes place outside awareness. It is generally nonconscious, operating on its own neurological pathways. Buddha found a way of resting the mind in its true relational nature, of bringing implicit awareness out of the darkness and making it conscious. As dramatized in the story of his enlightenment, he then discovered that old patterns of reactivity, stored as they are in implicit memory, could be deactivated when held in the light of unspoken knowing. Under the rubric of bare attention and mindfulness of mind, this became the fulcrum of the Buddha’s method of mental development.

In his recovery of implicit relational knowing, catalyzed by his childhood memory and elaborated in his five great dreams, the Buddha found the key to navigating the inevitable traumas of life and death. He did not make his method up out of the blue; it was already there in embryonic form in his mind, hidden away in the vestiges of the earliest relationship of his life, but the Buddha had to go through a lengthy process to rediscover it. Buddhist masters ever since have had to come up with creative ways of communicating the simple bearing I was trying to help my father find. Its very simplicity often makes it difficult to grasp. The Thai forest master Ajahn Chah, whose metaphor of the glass as already broken so captivated me when I first heard it, had a particularly clear way of conveying it. In describing the Buddha’s method of evenly suspended attention—in which all phenomena, be they pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, are related to without clinging or condemning—he gave a wonderful description of the stance the Buddha learned to deploy.

In our practice, we think that noises, cars, voices, sights, are distractions that come and bother us when we want to be quiet. But who is bothering whom? Actually, we are the ones who go and bother them. The car, the sound, is just following its own nature. We bother things through some false idea that they are outside us and cling to the ideal of remaining quiet, undisturbed.

Learn to see that it is not things that bother us, that we go out to bother them. See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of mind. When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truth and brings understanding.
¹

Ajahn Chah framed his discussion in terms of the minor irritations that arise in silent meditation: the bothersome noises, sights, and distractions that make meditation challenging, but he was also, by implication, talking about the major irritations of old age, illness, and death. When he said that
every
experience reveals truth and brings understanding, he was not excluding the most traumatic ones. For Ajahn Chah, the ability to see the world as a mirror, to relate to it with the attunement, engagement, and care that a parent naturally showers upon an infant, was the greatest accomplishment.

In his teachings on the Foundations of Mindfulness, the Buddha laid out his perspective in starkly beautiful terms. “Monks,” he said, “this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of
dukkha
and discontent, for acquiring the true method, for the realization of
.”
²
His approach was informed by his recollection of childhood joy under the rose-apple tree when he was at the height of his austerities. His memory created the conditions for a compassionate approach to his predicament; it began the process by which his mother’s benevolent energy was gradually returned to him. In his previous attempts to free himself, the Buddha had oscillated between his two primary strategies. In the first, under the guidance of his two well-intentioned teachers, he had sought meditative transcendence. In this approach he unconsciously mimicked that of his frightened mother, who needed to leave her body in order to tolerate her bliss. In the second, he was driven by the belief that pain and deprivation could purify him of attachment, setting his spirit free. Both strategies suffered from a split, a dualism that envisioned freedom as lying somewhere outside his everyday, ordinary experience. The Buddha’s memory reoriented him, and his dreams gave him the means of knowing ordinary experience in a different way. Rather than being driven by a desire for escape, the Buddha learned to see the world as a reflection of mind. It was this capacity, evoked in him as he worked through the trauma of his mother’s demise, that enabled him, in his final enlightenment, to see through death.

In the mythic retelling of the Buddha’s awakening, the central narrative speaks, in symbolic form, of the Buddha’s use of implicit relational knowing to see everything as a reflection of mind. In the classic version of the story, on a late-spring day not long after his five dreams, the Buddha settled himself under a fig tree close by the glistening Neranjara River and vowed not to get up until he had attained nirvana. Sitting down under the tree was no easy task, however. In the legends that have grown up over the years, it is made clear that the Buddha had to find the
exact spot
to sit upon. He was still in the process of zeroing in on his method, of finding the place of internal balance from which he could relate without strain. He tried the southern side of the tree first, but the earth began to shake as if to dissuade him. He went to the western side next, then the northern side, but the earth protested at those locations too. Finally, he settled himself on a grass seat on the eastern side of the tree. The earth was quiet there—he had found the “stable spot”
³
from which all Buddhas reach enlightenment. “My body may shrivel up, my skin, my bones, my flesh may dissolve, but I will not move from this very seat until I have obtained enlightenment,” he was reputed to have declared. This stable spot was the one Ajahn Chah was referring to, the one that does not go out and bother things but sees everything as a reflection of mind.

From this spot Buddha had to face his demons. He was challenged in a series of dramatic encounters by his alter ego, Mara, a famous figure in the Buddhist world. Mara is often depicted as a devil—an embodiment of evil, death, or darkness, a kind of Buddhist version of Satan—but this is not quite right. In South Asian cosmology, Mara was actually a godlike figure, a lord of the Desire Realm, whose efforts were directed at keeping the Buddha from freeing himself from the cycle of death and rebirth. As the lord of desire, he represented the forces of clinging or craving that keep people attached to the world. Because of this, he was also intimately bound up with trauma. In psychological terms, Mara represented the Buddha’s ego, “that desperate longing for a self and a world that are comprehensible, manageable, and safe.”
⁴
As ego, Mara represented the endless attempt to shield oneself from the inevitable traumas of this world. One of his nicknames was the “drought demon” because of the way he tried to hold back the waters of change. Mara was roused by the Buddha’s discovery of his “stable spot.” He assailed the Buddha with all kinds of trauma, trying to dislodge him from his seat of stability, much as an infant’s ruthless attacks on a parent threaten her poise and self-confidence.