The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (12 page)

I was struck by how readily our meditation had plucked a relational chord. I had wanted, by focusing on sound as the object of meditation, to help people see that meditation was not just about seeking inner peace, it was about being present with everything. To witness the release of a dissociative defense in the midst of the sound meditation was a very powerful experience. We could literally feel the young woman’s self open up as she brought back her love for her father. The flow of feeling, like the rivulets of water that
saw as she washed her feet after meeting the Buddha, ran through the entire group of people in the room.

This was not an anomaly. There is support for it going all the way back to the Pali Canon. The collection of verses in which the Buddha tells the story of his mother’s death is called
Udana
, which means “cries” or “sighs” of the heart. The reference is to the throat chakra, or center, of classical Indian spiritual anatomy, which, when a person is overwhelmed with joy or rapture, fills to overflow and erupts with song. It is intriguing that the only classical reference to the Buddha’s early loss comes in this particular volume.

“Shortlived are the mothers of Bodhisattvas,” the Buddha is heard to remark, referring to himself as a Bodhisattva, or awakened being.

“When the Bodhisattvas are seven days born, their mothers make an end and are reborn in the company of the Tusita devas.”
¹⁷
*

The Buddha then goes on to give a little inspiration. Everyone faces impermanence, he says. All that comes into being shall eventually depart. There is no absolute safety. Seeing this fact, wise people seek liberation. This is what we would expect him to say. But there is another layer of meaning in his verse as well, one that the young woman’s response to the cell-phone meditation also conveyed. When the dissociative reaction to trauma is relaxed and the self can open to what has previously seemed unbearable, a cry or sigh of release comes forth. By placing his only acknowledgment of his mother’s death in the chapter called
Udana
, the Buddha pointed to an important psychological truth. While dissociation offers immediate protection from the traumas of life, its relaxation connects us to ourselves in a way that brings forth relief from the heart. While the random ringing of the cell phone unexpectedly performed this function in my workshop, the Buddha would not have been surprised. The method he cultivated, of listening unapologetically to the sound of all things, was precisely calibrated to render the defense of dissociation mute. When this happens, the thrill of bliss that so paralyzed his mother can once again be felt.

Curiosity

T
he Buddha was very smart about the mind. Psychiatrists and brain scientists today are just catching up to him. He knew that the mind is not a monolithic entity, that it is not one thing, and that it is capable of incredible plasticity. He could see that it is adept at multiple perspectives, that it can think and be aware of its thinking at the same time. He also understood that the mind’s capacity for self-reflection is the key to finding its way out of trauma. Despite his reputed, but only occasionally manifested, psychic powers, he was not a faith healer and he could not free anyone through the laying on of his hands. But he
was
a teacher, and once he figured out his method he gave it away freely, adapting it to suit the needs of the individuals he came in contact with. When I taught the meditation on sound to the participants at my weekend workshop and had people open to the ringing of their cell phones, I was trying to introduce them to his method. By listening meditatively, we were changing the way we listen, pulling ourselves out of our usual orientation to the world based on our likes and dislikes. Rather than trying to figure out what was going on around us, resisting the unpleasant noises and gravitating toward the mellifluous ones, we were listening in a simpler and more open manner. We had to find and establish another point of reference to listen in this way, one that was outside the ego’s usual territory of control. You might say we were simply listening, but it was actually more complex than that. While listening, we were also aware of ourselves listening, and at the same time we were conscious of what the listening evoked within. Unhooked from our usual preoccupations, we were listening from a neutral place. For the young woman whose father had just died, this exercise, of listening in another way, turned out to be healing.

In the practice of mindfulness, the ego’s usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one’s center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment. As therapists who have worked with dissociation can testify, the self’s primary preoccupation in response to trauma is to protect itself from being overwhelmed or hurt. The effort to maintain cohesion, to avoid fragmentation and distress, is centered in the thinking mind. The ego takes charge, banishes that which is threatening, and carries on in a limited, reduced, or constrained state. The self we ordinarily identify with, the ego, is the caretaker trying to maintain control. Other aspects of the self, including the unbearable feelings evoked by one’s traumas, are relegated to the periphery, often outside conscious awareness. We think of this coping mechanism as a rational process—it certainly employs the machinery of rational thought—but therapists have come to agree with the Buddha that the overinsistence on self-control is severely limiting and ultimately irrational because of the way it excludes feeling.

In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from there. The breath, or sound, becomes the central object of focus, as opposed to thought. Thinking becomes one more thing to observe in the field of awareness but is robbed of its preeminent position. Do not grasp after the pleasant or push away the unpleasant, but give equal attention to everything there is to observe, taught the Buddha. This is difficult at first but becomes remarkably easy once one gets the hang of it. One learns first to bring one’s attention to the neutral object and then to relax into a state of choiceless awareness rather than always trying to maintain control. As the ego’s position is weakened, waking life takes on aspects of dream life to the extent that new surprises keep unexpectedly emerging. In the cell-phone meditation, the surprise for the woman I have described was her father’s ringtone, redolent with personal meaning. But there are many other such surprises.

There is no single word for meditation in the original language of Buddhism. The closest is one that translates as “mental development.” Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, is a means of investigating the mind by bringing the entire range of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations into awareness. This not only makes what we would today call “the unconscious” conscious but also makes the conscious more conscious. There were already various forms of meditation widely practiced in the Buddha’s day, but they were all techniques that solely emphasized concentration. The Buddha, before his awakening, mastered each of them but still felt uneasy. It was fine to rest the mind on a single object: a sound (like a mantra), an image (like a candle flame), a feeling (like love or compassion), or an idea. This gave strength to the mind, a feeling of stability, of peace and tranquility, a sense of what Freud, knowing just a little about Eastern philosophy, came to call the “oceanic feeling.” While this could be relaxing, it did not free the mind from the traumas that had conditioned it. The Buddha was after something more.

The meditation that the Buddha found most helpful was moment-to-moment awareness of what is actually happening at successive moments of perception. This did not mean resting the mind on a single object but meant observing the mind in action from a neutral place. Human beings have the peculiar ability to be self-reflective, to witness themselves even as they are in process. The Buddha’s method harnessed this ability and developed it. Tibetan Buddhists describe this kind of meditation as setting up a spy-consciousness in the corner of the mind, eavesdropping on whatever is going on. Freud described something similar when he invited psychoanalysts to “suspend judgment and give impartial attention to everything there is to observe.” People are surprised to find that the mind, when subjected to this kind of self-awareness, reveals all kinds of secrets. The Buddha called this form of mental development “mindfulness” and suggested the breath as a starting point. Watching the breath trains you to watch the mind, to observe the flow instead of reacting to it. It is the cloak that Buddha’s disciple threw over the devastated
after the death of her entire family and it is the shelter the Buddha offered to everyone. Clinicians from many schools of psychotherapy have discovered mindfulness and have begun teaching it as a method of stress relief and as an adjunct to therapy. Brain scientists have shown that areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion grow in response to it.

To experience a taste of this, try sitting quietly in an upright posture. It could be in a chair or on the sofa or cross-legged on the floor. Keep your back straight. Or lie down if you would rather. Let your eyes gently close. And just listen. Listen to the sounds and the silence that surround you. Let the sounds come and go as they may without choosing one over another. Try to listen to the entire sound, noticing when your mind identifies it as whatever it is: a car horn, the refrigerator, the heat coming on, children’s voices, the dog, or nothing. Don’t let your identification of the sound stop you from listening. Simply note the thought and return to the bare sounds, to the act of listening. If your mind wanders, as it will, bring your attention back to the sounds. It might be after a moment or two, or it might be after a whole cascade of thoughts; it doesn’t matter. At some point you will realize, “Oh, I’m not listening, I’m thinking,” and at that point you can return attention to the sounds. Treat your mind the way you would a young child who doesn’t know any better. Be gentle but firm. Meditation means bringing your mind back when you notice it has wandered; it’s not about keeping your mind from wandering in the first place. You will notice that you instinctively prefer some sounds over others—don’t let this influence your listening. Observe the liking or the not liking, but don’t let it control you. Listen to everything, the way you would listen to music.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn’t matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

This is the first step, but it is not the whole meditative process. Mindfulness, in its fullest flowering, actually balances two distinct mental qualities: relaxation and investigation. In the above exercise, the relaxing aspect is in the lead and is creating the possibility for investigation. Settling into the sounds drops us into a space between our thinking mind and all that we are dissociated from. The self shifts into neutral, but we do not go blank. We are still there, more aligned with the breath or the sounds than with our discursive mind and able to observe from a new place. This “dropping back” or “settling in” is an accomplishment, and it often feels like a surprise. I always assumed that whoever it was that was doing the thinking inside my head was the real me. When I shifted my awareness in meditation, so that I was observing my thoughts instead of being run by them, it felt like a revelation.

When the Buddha compared mindfulness to both the impartiality of someone observing from on high and the penetration of a surgeon’s probe, he was highlighting its double-edged nature. It encourages both detachment
and
investigation; release into a neutral space and critical inquiry when one is there. It has both passive and active qualities. Mindfulness does not mean stewing in one’s own juices or merely accepting what is. A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own shit. The active and investigative dimension of mindfulness opposes this tendency. It encourages one to examine the strangeness of one’s own internal landscape from a neutral perspective. No longer being exclusively identified with the ego’s need for structure and stability, no longer being driven by the “face” one puts on for the world (or for oneself), creates the possibility of releasing oneself from old habits that have become ingrained in the personality.

I was reminded of this not long ago while on my way to a weeklong silent retreat in rural Massachusetts. The retreat is an opportunity to practice mindfulness uninterruptedly, to allow it to gather force when one is free from the distractions and responsibilities of ordinary life. It is a chance to dwell in the neutral space that mindfulness makes available for a prolonged period of time and to see what happens. I have been to a lot of these retreats, and I always look forward to them with a mix of hope and dread. The experience can be delightful, but it can also be tedious or excruciating, and it is often a challenging mix of all three. It is, above all else, entirely unpredictable.

Before checking in to the retreat, I stopped by to visit with Joseph Goldstein, who lives nearby. Joseph is the Buddhist teacher whom I have studied with for the longest time. He founded the retreat center where I was going to meditate, and he is a real expert on the ins and outs of intensive meditation. I have known him since I was twenty years old and first became drawn to meditation, and I consider him to be a kind of mentor.

“Everyone’s asking me if I’m excited to be going on retreat,” I told him. “‘Excited’ doesn’t seem like the best word,” I added, thinking of the countless hours of silent sitting and walking I had in front of me, “but I couldn’t quite come up with the right adjective. ‘Relieved’ didn’t seem quite right, either.”

“How about ‘curious’?” Joseph responded.

I was struck by his reply. Despite years of experience with these retreats, ‘curious’ would not have been a word I would have come up with on my own. Like many people drawn to the Buddhist world, I am probably too attached to the relaxation that meditation sometimes offers and driven to these retreats by an underlying hope for a transcendental experience. When the retreats turn out to be more of a struggle, I sometimes feel cheated or defeated, as if the only real point of them were to vacation in a heaven realm. I was glad to have had this brief conversation with Joseph before this particular retreat. It helped prepare me for what I was about to encounter.

On the second night of the retreat, I awoke suddenly at three thirty in the morning with a burst of anxiety. I remember being upset with myself that I wasn’t sleeping through the night. I don’t know what woke me up—some kind of tension in my sleep, probably, a dream I could not recall—but suddenly, there I was. Awake. After a day or two of meditation I was expecting to be calmed down and sleeping through the night, not waking up and feeling stressed out, but there was nothing to do about it. Taking Ambien on a meditation retreat didn’t make any sense. I resigned myself to being up and dragged myself to a sitting position. Wide eyed in the middle of the cold February night, I wrapped myself in a blanket and positioned myself on my cushion. I did my best to remain mindful. When I lay back down after about an hour, I dreamed the following dream.

I was driving home with my wife in a car that was filled with stuff: a new computer or iPad, bunches of suitcases, a stroller, and boxes of art supplies. My wife got out of the car, fell, got up, and walked away in the direction of home. I pulled over, began to unpack the car, took out the stroller, pulled my sweater off over my head, looked back, and saw that the car was gone. A familiar phrase ran through my head as I scanned the horizon for my automobile: “unable to find what I was formerly sure was there.” I remember chuckling to myself in my dream, almost as if I were aware I was dreaming, even while I was filled with trepidation at the loss of my car and all my belongings. That phrase is a Buddhist phrase. It refers to the experience in meditation when the self that one was formerly sure was there becomes impossible to locate. The feeling of not being able to find the presumed self is said to be a vertiginous one, and the feeling in the dream bore this out. It was a confusing sensation. I called my wife, got no answer, and then called the police. They put me on hold and I walked home, scared to tell my wife what I had lost. “Prepare yourself,” I told her. But she was not upset. Relieved, I walked with her across an athletic field. People were playing boules on the lawn. One ball came flying toward my head; I ducked to avoid it and woke up with my heart racing. Once again. Now it was six in the morning.