The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (11 page)

I was moved, however, not only by the thought of the infant Buddha without his mother to absorb his love but also by the image of a mother unable to bear her delight. Having fathered two children myself, I felt a vague sympathy for Maya. In psychoanalysis these days, the emphasis is so often on the psychic state of the infant that the intensity of adult experience is commonly shortchanged. And it seems easier for psychoanalysts to talk about negative feelings—aggression and its derivatives—than about ordinary ecstatic ones that evoke fear as well as pleasure. The delight of the parent seems a wonderful thing to highlight.

Ashva·ghosha’s biography actually makes another reference to the Buddha’s parents’ delight, in its first chapter, when describing their reactions to his birth. Both parents can be seen trying to contain a mix of hope and dread, as if anticipating Maya’s capitulation a week later.

When he saw the wondrous birth of his son,

the king, although steadfast, was much perturbed;

and from his love two streams of tears surged forth,

rising from apprehension and delight.

The queen was overcome with fear and joy,

like a mixed stream of water, hot and cold;

both because her son’s power was other than human,

and because of a mother’s natural weakness.
¹³

The idea of the Buddha’s parents having a hard time with the feelings evoked by their baby moved me because it hinted at a truth I never could have articulated but that fit with my experience. Love enlivens but also frightens, not only when it falters or when it is unrequited but also when it is unleashed, dissolving us in the heat of its expression. It takes stamina and faith to maintain oneself in the midst of such passion. Maya was not the first, nor the last, to retreat from it, to question her ability to survive its intensity.

Within the psychoanalytic tradition, it was Winnicott who first paid attention to this dimension of the mother-infant relationship. He looked at it through the lens of breast-feeding, which at the time was under assault by the medicalization and mechanization of childrearing. It took Winnicott to remind therapists—and parents—how meaningful nursing can be for a mother. With care to avoid presuming that it was right for everyone or every situation, and with barely concealed horror at those who would “make” mothers breast-feed, Winnicott nevertheless took care to repeatedly affirm its primal power at a time (in the early 1960s) when the medical establishment was counseling just the opposite.

Alongside the observation of the baby’s experiences which are richer when the breast is being used than with a bottle, one has to put all that the mother herself feels and experiences. I prefer to leave it to your imagination, but it is important to draw attention to the fact that although the feeding of a baby can be very satisfactory, however it is done, the satisfaction is of a different order altogether for the woman who is able to use part of her own body in this way. The satisfaction links up with her own experiences when she was a baby, and the whole thing goes back to the beginning of time when human beings had scarcely moved from the position of mammalian animal life.
¹⁴

There is something in the nursing experience that connects a woman not only to her infant but to her selfless self. The Sanskrit verse says much the same thing. Maya felt the vast luster of her connection with her child but did not think she could sustain the thrill of bliss it brought her. The feelings evoked, although positive, were unbearable, and her only solution was to dissociate herself from them. She left her physical body behind and retreated to the only place that felt safe enough to sustain the thrill of bliss she could not otherwise process: a heaven realm where, according to Buddhist cosmology, beings have bodies of bliss rather than flesh and blood. Her son, meanwhile, was left to work things out for himself.

From a trauma perspective, Queen Maya’s death had to impact her child, even if the care he received from her surrogates turned out to be loving and tender. There could be no way to entirely paper over the cut. At the beginning of life, as Winnicott once put it, it “seems impossible to talk about the individual without talking about the mother.”
¹⁵
While an infant already has the potential for separateness, he is in a state of absolute dependency such that the mother’s relating cannot be discriminated from the baby’s own self. “How the mother behaves is really part of the infant,” Winnicott surmised. “I think the difficulty is that there’s a paradox. The paradox is that the environment is part of the infant and at the same time it isn’t. The infant has to accept this eventually in order to become a grown-up at all.”
¹⁶

If how the mother behaves is really part of the infant, then the young boy who was to become the Buddha had to make sense out of something quite confusing. At the very beginning of his life, a tremendous disruption took place, a disruption for which there could have been no words. And if the silence about Queen Maya’s death that has come to characterize Asian culture was present in the Buddha’s day as well, it is likely that there were never words about it, even as the child matured. Having been let down, the young Buddha was given a very early, if momentary, taste of aloneness. His mother’s disappearance would have become part of him, and while it would be premature to assume that he took her abandonment personally (since there was very little of a person present yet to take it that way), it is fair to wonder whether his personality would have been conditioned by his mother’s sudden absence. Her inability to sustain the thrill of bliss he brought her would have stayed with him, in one form or another.

Maya’s predicament mirrored one that the Buddha would confront over and over again in his adult years. People could not believe in their own Buddha nature. Even Gotama himself, in his preenlightenment years, could not believe in his inherent perfection. He thought he had to extinguish himself to find transcendence. His mother acted out of a similar belief. Unable to stay with the thrill in her human embodiment, unable to believe that her physical body could bear her joy, Maya was forced to take refuge in her celestial bliss body, the only one that could hold the feelings evoked by her child. In so doing, the Buddha’s mother acted out an inadequacy that many a mother—like many a lover—is vulnerable to, an inadequacy fed by thoughts of doubt and fear that erode confidence and corrode connection. Doubting the capacity of her physical form to sustain the thrill of her motherhood, Maya was compelled to seek a self-state that split her off from her child. Like an infant forced to disconnect from his ruthless self when his mother fails to receive it, Maya could endure only by dissociating. Forsaking her body and her child, she survived by departing her physical form.

While the main Buddhist commentaries emphasize Maya’s altruism in bearing the infant Gotama and then fulfilling her preordained role as a future Buddha’s mother by dying when she was supposed to, this other dynamic deepens her connection to the Buddha’s awakening. Many years later, after a six-year struggle and one of the world’s great self-analyses, the Buddha attained his enlightenment. Although he has become known for his proclamation of the universality of suffering, the Buddha’s most radical statement was not about suffering at all; it was about joy. The actual nature of life is bliss, the Buddha said, but this bliss is too often obscured by our habitual misperceptions. It is the egocentric life that is suffering, the Buddha realized, the life conditioned by conceit that needs a self to be built up and protected and separated out, in its own version of dissociation, from the rest of the universe. The Buddha’s discovery was not of suffering but of freedom. He did not need to discover suffering: Its existence was already obvious to everyone. What the Buddha found was that suffering was not irredeemable, that it is dependent, not only on the way things are but on the way we think and react. In uncovering the defense of dissociation, the Buddha spoke to his own mother’s dilemma, to the conundrum or conflict that his birth had forced on her but that she was unable to process. The thrill of bliss
can
be sustained in a human body, he proclaimed, once this bliss is understood as an expression of the compassionate connection that binds us all the way a mother is naturally connected to her baby.

No one doubts, as today’s therapists like to remind people, that mothers suffer. But mothers (and fathers, too), through their identifications with their babies, do not ordinarily let their suffering be the last word. Love lifts them out of self-preoccupation and connects them to a joy greater than that obtainable through the satisfaction of egocentric desires. The Buddha’s mother glimpsed this truth but, to fulfill her function as the mother of a future Buddha, she worried about her ability to sustain it. The Buddha, in his awakening, saw the potential for boundless compassion inherent in everyone and realized that it need not make us afraid. Early in his teaching career, during the three-month period of the Indian summer monsoon, the Buddha, according to legend, traveled to the heaven realm where his mother had taken refuge to acknowledge the truth of the bliss she had felt when he was born. He taught her the basics of his psychology, as if to enlighten her about her own true nature. He had an obligation to the mother who had borne him and a rupture to repair. Having discovered his own bliss body, he needed to reassure his mother that he had not forgotten hers.

I was thinking about this not long ago when teaching a weekend workshop on Buddhism and psychotherapy in New York City, where I live. It was a workshop in which I tried to balance talk with silent meditation so people could get a glimpse of how mindfulness actually works to counter the defense of dissociation. I led off the morning session with a meditation on sound. I asked everyone to take out their cell phones and turn them on, preferably with a favorite ringtone, so that the phones would make noise when they went off. My idea was to counter the usual notions of meditation as demanding silence and to encourage an attitude of openness to all experience, even that which can feel unbearable. I was trying to show how meditation can be therapeutic, how it teaches a nonjudgmental way of attending to thoughts and feelings, and how listening to sounds can be practice for listening to feelings.

I liked the idea of the cell phones going off randomly in the midst of our group meditation as people got calls, voice messages, e-mails, and texts. I saw the resulting cacophony as a metaphor not only for the traumas of daily life but also for its emotional impact as well: unpredictable, chaotic, inconvenient, and emerging in its own way and on its own schedule. Many people have the idea that meditation means shutting down thought or shutting off emotions the way we are often asked to shut down our phones before a movie or a talk. I wanted to use the ubiquitous presence of sound as an object of meditation rather than seeing it as an unwanted disturbance. By inference I was suggesting that emotional life could be part of the meditative experience, not something reserved for one’s diary, one’s partner, or one’s therapy and not something to be ashamed of or to squelch in the hopes of a more “spiritual” experience. I enjoyed seeing people’s surprise when I first suggested the exercise. Their nervous laughter gladdened my therapist heart.

“You’ll see,” I said encouragingly. “You’re not as popular as you might think. Who’s going to be calling you on a Saturday morning anyway? We’ll still have plenty of silence in the room.” I asked the participants to use the sounds that did come as reminders to pay attention, the way Zen meditators might use the striking of a stick on the shoulders as a means of staying alert. I asked everyone to make the exercise a meditation on hearing, and I quoted Freud giving recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis. He had one important secret for therapists. “Simply listen,” Freud suggested, “and don’t bother about keeping anything in mind.” I told them how Freud’s daughter, Anna, had said that the therapist sits in the center of an equilateral triangle, equidistant from id, ego, and superego, consciously not aligning herself with any aspect of her patient’s psyche. In meditation, we similarly sit without judgment, equidistant from instinct, ego, and self-criticism.

The meditation proceeded without a hitch. There was an intermittent low swishing sound that seemed to come from the ventilation system, a whooshing noise that was gently soothing and easy to attend to. People shifted in their chairs and coughed occasionally while random noises filtered in from the street. And once in a while someone’s phone would go off, a sudden burst of fireworks: a bit of Motown, a flurry of salsa, little musical explosions piercing the room’s relative silence. The zings and zats of sound lent an electrical charge to the meditation, sparkling like slivers of stars in the stillness that settled over the group as we sat.

After the meditation there was time for questions. The third or fourth person to raise a hand was a young Hispanic woman who seemed reluctant to speak, even as she waited her turn. But when she began, she captured everyone’s attention. “My father died several months ago,” she began. Her voice quavered but grew stronger as she continued. “He was sick for about a year before he died. I helped to take care of him—I had a special ring in my phone for him so I would know when he was calling me. But since he died, I haven’t been able to look at certain things that remind me of him, or listen to things, like his voice on the answering machine. I put his ringtone away; I would never use it for anyone else, and I couldn’t bear to hear it anymore. But in this group, someone else had the same tone, the one I had saved for my father. And when it went off while we were sitting, it was like my father calling to me again—it brought him back. I felt so lucky to be hearing it now, for the first time after his death, in this room, with all of you. I was afraid to face it, but I felt as if everyone was supporting me while I listened. I was scared of what I would feel, but it was good.”

I have never seen this woman again but her response, or the spirit behind her response, has stayed with me. It was much more moving than I am capable of conveying on the page. Her love for her father came shining through for everyone to see. The meditation, in inadvertently summoning him, had reached deep inside her heart and released its sweetness. By chance, it had brought her father back, opening her once again to the sound of him.