The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (8 page)

On her way she came to a river swollen from the recent storm. Its waters were waist high and there was a strong current. Unable to wade across with both children in her arms, she left the older boy on one bank and ferried her baby across first. Placing him on the far bank, she returned to get her older son. Halfway back to him, she saw a hawk swoop down from the sky and pluck her baby from his resting place on the far bank. Stuck in the middle of the river,
could only scream as she watched the great bird fly off with the infant in its claws. Hearing her cry, her eldest son mistakenly thought she was calling for him, and he jumped into the river to try to come to her. The current was too strong for him and quickly swept him away.

But even this was not the end for
. More suffering awaited her. Like Kisagotami having lost her infant baby,
was, by now, completely traumatized. As she came to the outskirts of her parents’ town, she encountered a traveler coming in the other direction. She asked if he knew her family and he reacted with alarm. “Ask me about any other family but that one,” he said. The previous evening, in the sudden storm, the family’s house had collapsed, killing both the elderly couple and their remaining son. “There,” he said, pointing to a pale blue wisp of smoke in the distance. “If you look where I am pointing you can see the smoke from their funeral pyre.”
collapse was complete. “Those who saw her called her a crazy fool, threw rubbish at her, and pelted her with clods of earth, but she continued on until she reached the outskirts of
-.”
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The Buddha, of course, was residing nearby, surrounded by a number of disciples. He recognized her as “one who was ripe for his message of deliverance” and, against the advice of those around him who cautioned him to keep his distance from the crazy woman, he beckoned her toward him. “Sister,” he cried. “Regain your mindfulness!” And, although it is not clear how she even knew what he was talking about (perhaps he said something more like “Regain your composure!”), she did. An old disciple threw his cloak around her, and she approached the Buddha to tell him of her losses.

After listening carefully, the Buddha said the following: “
, do not be troubled any more. You have come to one who is able to be your shelter and refuge. It is not only today that you have met with calamity and disaster, but throughout this beginningless round of existence, weeping over the loss of sons and others dear to you, you have shed more tears than the waters of the four oceans.”
¹¹

Calmed by the Buddha’s words,
took refuge with the community of mendicants around him. Some time later, while sitting outside and washing her feet, she noticed water trickling down the slope of a hillside. Something about the scene matched her internal experience. “Some streams sank quickly into the ground, others flowed down a little farther, while others flowed all the way to the bottom of the slope,”
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she saw. Some were like her children, disappearing very quickly on their journey; some were like her husband, living into young adulthood; and some were like her parents, living into old age. But death was common to everyone. “Having washed my feet, I reflected upon the waters,”
later wrote. “When I saw the foot water flow from the high ground down the slope, my mind became concentrated like an excellent thoroughbred steed.”
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Seeing her reality reflected in the natural environment awoke something in
. With every reason in the world to feel sorry for herself, and with the pressures of grief compressing her heart, she managed to see deeply into the nature of reality and let go of being shocked, humiliated, and disgusted. She was still sad, still grief stricken, but seeing the streams of water flowing down the hill did for her what the image of the broken glass had done for Ajahn Chah. While of course her family was precious (as was his glass), she was no longer fighting with the nature of things. Her traumas had opened her up rather than closing her off.

In exploring his own discontent, in searching for the way out of the conundrum of old age, illness, and death, the Buddha stumbled upon a pivotal truth, one that he put into practice with those, like
, who had suffered devastating losses, as well as with those who were doing their best to pretend that such losses could never afflict them. “You have come to one who is able to be your shelter and refuge,” he told
. Something in their interaction, some way of relating to the tragedy with attunement and responsiveness, communicated itself to her and allowed her to hold her reality. Therapists today have come to similar conclusions. One of them, the New York psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, has described it like this: “If, for example, one’s emotional reality or truth is despair, what is most important is not
that
one may be in despair, but one’s attitudes
toward
one’s despair. Through one’s basic attentiveness one’s despair can declare itself and tell its story. One enters profound dialogue with it. If one stays with this process, an evolution even in the quality of despair may begin to be perceived, since despair is never uniform.”
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