The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (13 page)

I remembered my conversation with Joseph when I woke from my dream, my heart pounding from my most recent narrow escape. This was not what I had had in mind when I signed up for the retreat. I had wanted a good night’s sleep, at the very least. And I was still hoping, in my heart of hearts, for a quick infusion of relaxation from all this meditation. I felt chagrined at the level of distress I was subject to, and I had to struggle to bring Joseph’s words back to my mind. But as I continued to have more and more active dreams throughout the week, each of which I remembered vividly upon awakening, the wisdom of his comment became clear. Mindfulness was making it possible for me to observe my dreaming self in a manner not ordinarily available to me. In my regular life, I might be having similar dreams—filled with dissociative elements—but I would forget them immediately upon awakening in my return to everyday life. In the retreat, with so little going on in my outside world, there was tremendous opportunity to explore my inner world. While my days became relatively calm and peaceful, at night, in my sleep, I was racing through a European countryside in a car with no brakes, making 180 degree screeching turns at sixty miles an hour to bring myself to a halt. Whatever else I thought I was doing on my meditation retreat, in my unconscious I was definitely grappling with my anxiety.

Michael Eigen, a psychoanalyst whose work I have already quoted several times, is an expert on dreams. His reflections, which I read months after my retreat, helped me understand what was happening as mindfulness gained strength and my defenses relaxed. “The Talmud says every dream is an unopened letter from God,”
¹
he writes. “We don’t open, or are unable to open, too many of these letters. But sometimes a letter haunts us.” Dreams are a way of revealing and deepening emotional experience, he conjectures, a means of emotional digestion. “The core of the dream is not the manifest content but the emotional experience.” Dreams show us things about ourselves we wish to forget and at the same time help us to forget the things we can’t help but remember. They are a means of holding, and sometimes processing or even resolving, traumatic experiences. As Eigen writes,

Most dreams are aborted. Aborted experience. Something happens to frustrate the dream. An arc of experience falls short, is broken off before completion. Perhaps the dream is attempting to portray something broken, interrupted, incomplete, fragmented. Perhaps the very experience of incompletion and interruption is being dramatized and fed to us. As if the feeling of something being aborted is part of our insides. An intimation of aborted lives or aborted feelings. Something happens that doesn’t go all the way, doesn’t reach absolute fulfillment. A dream breaks off and we have a sense of aborted experiencing. Broken dreams, expressing broken aspects of our beings.
²

This idea, of broken dreams expressing broken aspects of our beings, seems very apropos. It is another way of talking about the trauma of everyday life, about the bits and pieces of catastrophe we dissociate from but still carry with us. These traumatic experiences are left hanging just outside awareness. They peek out from our dreams or nag at us in the privacy of our aloneness, a lurking sense of sorrow or disquiet that underlies our attempts to be “normal,” but it is rare that we feel secure enough to let them fully speak. While I might have preferred to have my retreat be filled with pleasant feeling, this was not the path the Buddha had in mind when he laid out his teachings. My work in the retreat was, in the spirit of curiosity, to make room for the entire range of my emotional experience, to allow the dreams to be dreamed, the feelings to be felt, and my pride to be wounded.

Michael Eigen, in his discussion of broken dreams, maintains that these unwanted aspects of ourselves are in what he calls “constant conjunction” with the acceptable, that the “angry God” and the “benevolent God” are both active in us. Relief comes, in part, when we stop fending off the unpleasant and allow it to be an equal part of our experience. “Our job with our patients and with ourselves is to help make room for this sequence, for this inner rhythm, for different transformations of this constant conjunction. Not to get rid of it. We cannot get rid of it. We’d be getting rid of ourselves. Even in nirvana, you will not get rid of it. One has to learn to live with it, have a larger frame of reference, open the playing field, make more room.”
³
While I thought I knew this already, both theoretically and experientially, I was, nevertheless, taken aback by the intensity of the anxiety in my retreat dreams. “No rest for the weary,” I told myself after the third or fourth anxious night, when I woke suddenly after being unable, in the latest version of my dream, to find my shoes.

My first dream, in its summoning of the Buddhist phrase “unable to find what I was formerly sure was there,” spoke to a specific discovery of the Buddha, one that emerged from his own curiosity and helped him resolve his own trauma. In the Buddhist approach, the ultimate target of mindfulness meditation is the sense of self. The active side of meditation takes it as a challenge to locate the self we intrinsically believe in and uses emotional experience as an opportunity to exercise this investigation. When one is upset or anxious or frustrated or angry, one tries to find “who” is feeling these things at the same time as one explores the feelings. The search is for what is sometimes called the “intrinsic identity habit” or the “intrinsic identity instinct,” the way we unconsciously take ourselves to be “absolutely” real, as if we are really here,
absolutely
; fixed, enduring and all alone; intensely real and separate; in what is often called, in Buddhist psychology, “the cage of self-absolutization.” Robert Thurman, a professor of religion at Columbia, quotes his old Mongolian Buddhist lama, whom he met in suburban New Jersey in the early 1960s, as explaining to him, “It’s not that you’re not real. We all think we’re real, and that’s not wrong. You are real. But you think you’re
really
real, you exaggerate it.” The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.

My first dream reminded me of this principle. Without my car, without the vehicle of my conveyance, without the self that needs to keep everything together, I began to come undone. But the stability offered by the meditation retreat, by mindfulness itself, made the dislodging of my ego’s preeminence interesting. Over the course of the retreat, I got to explore myself in a richer and deeper way. The broken, interrupted, and fragmented dreams had room to express themselves. And I, less attached to my need to be “really” real, could actually listen to them. What I discovered parallels the experience of the young woman in my workshop who heard her father’s ringtone out of the blue. More connected to lost and broken aspects of myself, I felt myself opening up.

My friend Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist teacher and cofounder of the retreat center I was at, tells a story about her own intensive meditation experience that is similar. In her case, it involved not anxiety but sorrow. Sharon was meditating under the auspices of a very accomplished and strict Burmese meditation master. She had to go to him many times a day and report what she was experiencing in her meditations, giving him a virtual moment-to-moment rendition of what was unfolding in her mind. These meetings had an air of formality about them. They did not last long, although they were frequent, and the master could be gruff, reserved, and intimidating. On this retreat, she was crying quite a bit while she was meditating, but she was uncomfortable telling him the extent of her sadness and somewhat ashamed of the intensity of her feelings. They did not seem to fit with her expectations of herself or with what the practice was supposed to bring any more than the angst of my dreams fit with mine.

Sharon’s experience on her retreat presented her with a dilemma, one that was highlighted by the silence of the environment and her wish to have her teacher’s approval. The self she was attached to, the person she thought she should be, and the image she had of herself did not encompass losing control of her emotions in this way. She resisted her feelings and downplayed them in her interviews.

When asked repeatedly what was happening in her meditations, she finally indicated that there was a
little
crying going on. “Are you crying a lot?” the Burmese master questioned her. “Not so much,” she said, putting a brave face on. “When you cry in meditation,” he responded, suddenly addressing her very personally, “you should cry with your whole heart.”

The Burmese teacher’s conversation with Sharon goes to the heart of the Buddha’s understanding. The balance of mindfulness between relaxation and investigation allows us to enter into emotional experience in a full way while simultaneously offering us distance from it. This willingness to embrace disquiet, to “hold” it in meditative embrace, to give it life rather than abort it, is what turns out to be palliative. There is a secret agenda here, one that has its roots in the Buddha’s own life history and one that the Burmese master undoubtedly was aware of when he gave Sharon his advice. The ego can easily trump its own goals. The effort that goes into protecting ourselves from uncomfortable feelings can have untoward consequences. Shutting down one kind of feeling inevitably shuts down all of them. In protecting ourselves from the unbearable affect of trauma, we also close ourselves off from love, joy, and empathy. Our humanity resides in our feelings, and we reclaim our humanity when we direct our curiosity at that which we would prefer to avoid. This was something the Buddha unexpectedly discovered for himself six years after replicating his own trauma and abandoning his wife and newborn child in what has become known as his “going forth.”

When the Burmese master encouraged Sharon to cry with her whole heart, he was inviting her
into
her sadness, suggesting that she explore it with the curiosity that mindfulness fosters. In trying to keep it at bay, she was unknowingly giving it power over her, making it “really real” in the effort to diminish it and make it “really” unreal. Her teacher was trying to help her heal a split she had created: her ego on one side and her sorrow on the other. He understood that, in crying “with her whole heart,” Sharon could recover not just her emotional pain but her emotional presence. This was his secret agenda: to undermine the ego’s need to protect itself from painful affect and thereby restore its emotional foundation. Mindfulness dropped Sharon into the space between her ego and her unwanted emotion; it positioned her within the split she had made for herself and allowed her to look around. Her teacher, with the wisdom born of similar experience, gave her the key to rapprochement, the means to overcome her self-denigration, and the chance to be at one with herself. It wasn’t just self-observation, and it wasn’t only surrendering into the feeling. In asking her to bring those qualities together, to cry with her whole heart, the Burmese teacher was also showing her something she did not know about her mind. It could use her pain for its own development.

Going Forth

W
hile the use of emotional experience to develop the mind became the keystone of the Buddha’s psychology, this was not something he grasped right away. He had his own journey of discovery, one that has been memorialized in the stories of his enlightenment told over the centuries. His process was an interesting one. It began with a dramatic replication of the trauma he underwent when his mother passed away. This time, it was the Buddha who left abruptly. Just after the birth of his first child, he abandoned his wife and family to seek spiritual sustenance in the wilds of the Indian forests. His mind-set at the time of his “great departure” was radically different from where he ended up. It was much closer to Sharon’s tendency to distance herself from her sorrow or to my own dissociation from my anxiety than to the Burmese master’s understanding of the relationship of suffering to grace.

It took the Buddha a long time to figure things out. In his early life, as we have seen, he was clearly indulged. However we interpret the stories of his growing up—whether we imagine him protected behind the palace walls from any knowledge of death, illness, or old age, or whether we see him caged by conceit so that he could not relate to others who were suffering—it is clear that he was raised to not have to think about unpleasant things like the death of his mother. He was protected, as much as humanly possible, from the traumatic underpinnings of life. For a long time, he accepted this as the status quo and felt entitled to it. He liked his lily pools, his sandalwood, his Benares silks, and the white sunshade held over him. But at some point, the unreliable nature of material comforts began to reveal itself. Death, old age, and illness began to intrude, and the conceit he had grown up with began to seem objectionable. Gotama had a rather violent reaction. He left everything, in what has come to be called his “going forth,” and set out to destroy his attachments.

A famous story in the Pali Canon about one of the Buddha’s first followers, a rich merchant’s son from Benares named Yasa, explores this very theme. Yasa’s story, like that of the Four Messengers, has, over time, melded into the Buddha’s own biography, so that many people think the events described happened to the Buddha rather than to him. But the Pali Canon is very clear about it. Soon after giving his first discourse on the Four Noble Truths and just before his famous Fire Sermon, in the first flush of his enlightenment, the Buddha had a pivotal exchange with Yasa. Their encounter was a spontaneous one, the first he was to have with someone from the merchant class, and similar to one a contemporary therapist might have with someone suffering from panic attacks or phobias. It grew out of a sudden crisis in Yasa’s mind, an anxiety attack that eventually brought him face to face with the Buddha. Their exchange sheds enormous light on the revolution in the Buddha’s own thinking. For Yasa was struggling with something the Buddha had also wrestled with—and resolved.

Yasa, like the Buddha, was raised in privilege and delicately brought up. Like the Buddha, his family also had three houses, one for the winter, one for the summer, and one for the rains. For the four months of the rainy season, he never went down to the city, staying in his country house where he was entertained nightly by female minstrels. He had quite the life. One evening, Yasa and his attendants fell asleep early. While it was dark outside, an all-night lamp burned dimly in their room. Before dawn, Yasa awoke and saw the women sleeping all around him in various states of disarray, their images partially distorted in the shadows created by the burning light. One woman was sleeping with her lute under her arm and another with her tambourine under her chin, while a third had her small drum nestled beneath her. “The hair of one had come unfastened, another was dribbling, others were muttering. It seemed like a charnel ground. When he saw it, when its squalor squarely struck him, he was sick at heart, and he exclaimed, ‘It is fearful, it is horrible.’”
¹

Yasa went running out of his house, the dire images of the beloved female musicians disgusting him so. Not quite ready to abandon all vestiges of luxury, he paused as he was going out to put on his gold slippers and then proceeded to walk to the city’s edge, to the deer park at Isipatana, where the Buddha was camping with his five ascetic followers, newly enlightened after hearing his first discourses. The Buddha had risen before dawn and was pacing back and forth in the park, getting his blood moving while doing his walking meditation. When he saw Yasa approaching in the distance, his golden slippers shining in the early-morning light, he sat down and waited for his arrival. As Yasa approached the Buddha, he called out, once again, “It is fearful, it is horrible!” Obsessive rumination had taken root in his mind.

Over the years, I have seen references to this story many times. It is depicted in countless works of art and described, with various embellishments, in many versions of the life of the Buddha. Most often, though, it is told as if it were Gotama waking in his palace and seeing his own allegedly desirable attendants in a ghastly light. The episode is commonly portrayed as the immediate instigation for his abandonment of his wife and child, the Buddha’s first glimpse of the underside of carnal desire. I have always shied away from this tale because of its implicit condemnation of sensual desire and the way it disparages the women, making caricatures of them. I understand the ostensible teaching that lust disappoints, that beauty fades, and that addiction to sexual excitement becomes a misery, but I have a hard time, in many of the story’s iterations, with the disgust the protagonist feels upon seeing the slobbering sleepers. It comes too close to the widespread male fear of female sexuality, or to male disparagement of sexuality in general, to make me comfortable. In many versions of the story, for example, the artists take great delight in rendering the attendants as prostitutes, painting them lasciviously while having the virtuous male protagonist stalk off. The judgment involved has always seemed to me unworthy of a Buddhist fable.

It was not until I actually started reading the sutras for myself that I discovered that the common renderings of this story are not the original ones. The level of subtlety in the sutras is much greater. The Buddha, upon hearing Yasa’s panicked exclamations, did not support them. While he, too, during his phase of self-mortification, might once have responded similarly, he moved Yasa in a different direction. In an intimate conversation with the panic-stricken merchant’s son, the Buddha began to articulate his own unique understanding of the importance of curiosity, even in the face of the worst.

“This is not fearful,” explained the Buddha, “this is not horrible. Come, Yasa, sit down. I shall teach you the Dhamma.”

Yasa was immediately relieved. “‘This is not fearful, it seems, this is not horrible,’” he repeated, “and he was happy and hopeful. He took off his gold slippers and went to where the Blessed One was.”
²
Then, according to the text, the Buddha laid out a sequence of teachings. He took Yasa through a condensed version of what would eventually come to be called Buddhism. At the core was an effort to reorient Yasa, to teach him an attitude toward the world that was not frightened or judgmental but was, instead, at once realistic and hopeful. The seeds of this attitude lay in the Buddha’s own transformational journey, in which he moved from a similar tendency toward dissociation to a stance based in relaxation, investigation, and curiosity, in which he abandoned the extremes of self-indulgence and self-judgment (and self-torture) and embraced the joyful kindness essential to human nature. As the text describes it, Yasa sat down to the side of the Buddha.

“When he had done so, the Blessed One gave him progressive instruction, that is to say, talk on giving, on virtue, on the heavens; he explained the dangers, the vanity and the defilement in sensual pleasures and the blessings in renunciation. When he saw that Yasa’s mind was ready, receptive, free from hindrance, eager and trustful, he expounded to him the teaching peculiar to the Buddhas: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. Just as a clean cloth with all marks removed would take dye evenly, so too while Yasa sat there the spotless, immaculate vision of the Dhamma arose in him: All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.”
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This image of Yasa as a clean cloth taking the dye evenly is important. It suggests, in allegorical rather than psychodynamic language, that he was no longer dissociating aspects of himself. There was no longer a split between his ego and his unwanted feelings; there were no wrinkles or tangles to obstruct the fluidity of the Buddha’s insights. And with this as a foundation, Yasa was able to tolerate the traumatic truth: All that arises is subject to cessation.

Yasa’s first response, that his vision was fearful and horrible, speaks to the traumatic nature of his insight. He saw something that broke through one of his core “absolutisms of daily life” and made him sick at heart. Perhaps he had the sudden understanding that the sensual pleasures he was relying on to support his ego were inherently insubstantial. Or maybe he was confronted with the pain of his own addictive craving. A careful reading of the sutra suggests that Yasa’s crisis was an existential one. It was as if he saw through the props he was using to avoid the traumatic underpinnings of life. His vision of his female attendants in disarray opened him briefly to the unstable nature of reality, but he could not sustain his insight. It frightened him and he cast about for someone or something to blame. Buddhist culture has unwittingly replicated his defensive maneuver. Why not blame the women? Or sexuality? Or both? In responding in this way, Yasa was actually mimicking the Buddha’s own initial tendencies, and this is undoubtedly why their stories have become conflated. He was making the same mistake that the Buddha had made, one that had taken him six years to correct. For the Buddha, too, sought first to deal with the trauma of everyday life by taking extreme measures. He also felt that things were fearful and horrible and that he was “not safe,” and he tried whatever he could find to make those feelings go away. But by the time Yasa came to him, he had established a different approach. He had found a way to make the experience of groundlessness nourishing rather than frightening.

On my most recent retreat at the Forest Refuge, a year after the one filled with anxious dreams, I had a moment that reminded me of Yasa. Perhaps it is too much of a stretch to make the comparison—it is not as though there were female musicians in states of disarray to frighten me in the middle of the night—but I did have an experience of the ground being pulled out from under me, and I could sense how unnerving it could be. It happened at breakfast toward the end of my week there. I had been craving toast for several days. The food had been remarkably good, but I had gotten it in my head that what was lacking was fresh-baked bread. It didn’t seem like such a big thing to wish for—the vegetarian meals just needed this one little touch to feel complete. On this morning, six days into my stay, the bread finally appeared. Granted, it was gluten free and made from chickpea flour, but it still looked good. I cut myself a slice, toasted and buttered it, took a little bit of apricot jam, made myself a cup of tea, and settled silently into my seat to relish it all. I was very mindful and lifted the toast to my lips to take a bite. It was delicious. I chewed and tasted and swallowed and noticed how I wanted the next bite before I had completely finished the first. When the sweetness faded and the remnants of toast turned to cardboard in my mouth, I was ready for more. I waited, though, remembering the instructions for mindful eating: Finish each mouthful completely before taking the next bite.

I have only a vague recollection of what happened next. I believe my mind wandered to the laundry I had to do the next morning. There wasn’t that much to think about anymore, but that didn’t seem to be stopping me. Would I do one load or two? Could I put them both in at the same time? My wife would be happy if I came home with all my clothes washed. The next thing I remember was that my toast was gone. “Who ate my toast?” my mind cried as I stared at my empty plate. And for a brief second, before the humor of the situation could take hold, the whole thing became a metaphor for my entire life. Ready to relish it and it was already gone. I was staring into a big, empty, devouring hole where my toast, and my life, used to be. “Who ate my toast?” I repeated once again as I swiped my finger at the few crumbs left on the plate.

I had an immediate identification with Yasa. “It is fearful, it is horrible!” I understood where he was coming from. He had seen the dark side of his female attendants and I had witnessed the disappearance of my toast. The yawning jaws of death were all around me and I had a choice. I could panic or I could return to my mindfulness. I decided to go for a walk.

In the early 1980s, a Dutch psychologist named Johan Barendregt wrote a paper on the origin of phobias that is relevant to the Buddha’s conversation with Yasa and to my lost breakfast moment. Barendregt proposed that phobias and related fears have their origins in intimations of groundlessness. Like Yasa glimpsing the traumatic underpinnings of life, or me staring into the place where my toast used to be, these perceptions of the impermanent and impersonal nature of things strip away the absolutisms of daily life that we rely upon. Such glimpses come unpredictably and in many guises. They may appear when people are smoking marijuana or traveling in a foreign country or listening to music or sitting in church. Most people cannot handle them and rush to replace them with something they
can
handle, even if it is an obsessive fear or anxiety. The beast we know is better than the one we do not. Barendregt quoted Rilke as wishing he had the “
courage de luxe
” to face up to “it,” and he went on to describe, in the behaviorist language he was comfortable with, how his anxious patients attempted to describe what “it” was: “What ‘it’ means is described vaguely and indirectly, because the very essence of ‘it’ is bewilderment. ‘It’ is the experience that one’s existing repertoire of categories of perception, thought and feeling—the systems and behavioral patterns that make it possible to organize one’s perceptions and respond meaningfully—no longer suffice, and that one is no longer able to assign meanings, see connections or act functionally; ‘it’ is the experience of disorganization or—to put it in perhaps too extreme terms—irrationality.”
⁴