The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (14 page)

Barendregt’s conclusion was that most obsessive anxieties and fears are reactions to the terrifying intimation of one’s own insubstantiality. The
situation
in which the vision of chaos takes place becomes the focus of the fear rather than the vision itself. So someone like Yasa would become panicked at female sexuality because that was the setting in which his tenuous insight occurred. I might develop obsessive or compulsive rituals around food because my terror was aroused in the context of eating a piece of toast. We dissociate from that which seems unbearable and reorient ourselves around something we can conceive of. As Barendregt described his patients’ predicament, “This ‘it’ situation is so unreal, so absurd, that they desperately try to recover their bearings and find them in fear, which is preferable to the void of ‘it.’ Since their fear is itself a very negative experience, coping mechanisms are developed to channel and rationalize it.”
⁵

When the Buddha sat down with Yasa, he helped him avoid this common pitfall. He countered Yasa’s obsessive anxiety and gave him the means to integrate his vision of depersonalization. Much as Sharon had hoped to keep her Burmese teacher, and herself, from the depths of her sadness, Yasa was trying his best to keep the impact of his revelation at bay. Fleeing from his disturbing insight, he came to the Buddha with his bruised ego firmly in the lead. In his repetition of the phrase “It is fearful, it is horrible,” we can see the telltale beginnings of a phobia. The Buddha, however, redirected Yasa, helping him to
see
impermanence, rather than supporting his fear of it. Notice that he did not tell Yasa that sensual pleasure
was
a defilement, as many Buddhists believe; he showed him
the defilement
and the vanity
in sensual pleasure: the way people use sensual pleasure to avoid dealing with the truth of insubstantiality. There is an important difference here, one that is key to the Buddha’s teachings. Pleasure is not the problem, the Buddha taught: Attachment is. While this insight is now enshrined in the practice of mindfulness, it was not an approach that came easily to the Buddha. He had a lot to work out in the process of discovering it.

In his first forays into homelessness, the Buddha turned away from the preoccupations of family life. Just as Yasa could not help blaming his terrifying vision on his female attendants, the Buddha at first thought householder life to be the problem. Like Yasa, he seems to have had a moment of existential dread when the reality of old age, illness, and death could not be avoided. After leaving his wife and newborn son, he went to the forest to study with the most accomplished therapists, the most adept meditators, of his day and age. There was already a strong and well-established tradition of yoga, meditation, and renunciation in the forests of northern India, and Gotama set out to learn from the acknowledged masters of his time and place, people who had already rejected everyday life, with its emphasis on material acquisitions and sensual pleasure, and held it in contempt. There were essentially two types of practice available to him, one that used yoga and meditation to reach for the sublime and the other that relied on self-punishment to achieve a state of invulnerability. One reached for the infinite sky of the transcendental spirit, while the other sought to tame the restless and boisterous sea of the body and the passions. These two strains of spiritual striving have a long history in South Asia. They predated the Buddha by thousands of years and have survived to this day, long after Buddhism virtually disappeared in India in the face of Islamic conquest a thousand years ago.

Gotama rather quickly mastered the transcendental practices—he found two highly realized masters but left each disappointed with the scope of their accomplishments. Despite learning to stabilize his mind and evoke prolonged mystical states of oneness or merger, he was unable to find lasting relief in these oceanic meditative states. In some way, he was mimicking his mother’s flight to the heaven realm, leaving behind his earthly preoccupations for the exalted abode of the gods. These experiences reinforced his tendency toward dissociation by removing him even more completely from his body and everyday mind, but they removed him in a way that left his preoccupation with the traumatic underpinnings of life untouched. When he returned from the sublime states of meditation, he was still there, with the same profound sense of dis-ease that continued to torment him. Upon questioning his teachers, he found that they, too, had not been able to conquer their most fundamental fears. They could suspend themselves in states of hypnotic equipoise, but they did not emerge from those states any more enlightened than when they entered them. Each offered to have him stay and take over his role as guru, but Gotama was not so inclined. Like a well-analyzed patient of our own time who, while finally clear about the childhood origins of her neuroses, still loses her temper with her husband and children, Gotama became disillusioned with the traditional approaches available to him. He turned, in frustration, to the competing ideology of his time, that of self-punishment and self-mortification.

If a therapist were to comment on the Buddha’s going forth, he would most likely frame the commentary around the contrast between the Buddha’s self-described delicate nature and the violence of his leaving home and subsequent ascetic practices. Trying hard to be a good son, to satisfy the demands of his father and stepmother, the Buddha constructed a “caretaker” self that we might label as “false,” created for the benefit and protection of his parents but lacking in authenticity and therefore “delicate.” Winnicott wrote a case study in 1969 of just such a patient, who was dominated by a scream that could not be expressed. She, too, had dissociated her earliest feelings and was troubled by her broken dreams. “It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient’s sessions that if she could scream she would be well,” wrote Winnicott. “The great non-event of every session is screaming.”
⁶
The Burmese master who counseled Sharon was making much the same point. In encouraging her to cry her heart out, he was countering her inclination to make crying the “great non-event” of every meditation session. Like the Burmese teacher, Winnicott felt that if his patient could cry her heart out, her psyche would grow.

In a beautiful passage in Winnicott’s case history, dated though it might now seem, he described the theory behind much of his clinical work. “If we take the situation in which she is a child playing while her mother is occupied with some activity such as sewing, this is the good pattern in which growth is taking place. At any moment the child may make a gesture and the mother will transfer her interest from her sewing to the child. If the mother is preoccupied and does not at first notice the child’s need, the child has only to begin to cry and the mother is available. In the bad pattern which is at the root of this patient’s illness, the child cried and the mother did not appear. In other words the scream that she is looking for is
the last scream just before hope was abandoned
. Since then screaming has been of no use because it fails in its purpose.”
⁷

Winnicott revealed something important about therapy in his case study. The best the therapist can do with a patient like this, he remarked, is to “give understanding.” Like the Buddha with Yasa, he did not take the position that the situation was fearful and horrible but instead made room for a feeling that had been, over the years, dissociated. A compassionate attitude toward the bad pattern “points toward” the good pattern that had been long forgotten. “Profound understanding leads of course towards screaming, that is to say towards screaming again, this time with hope.”
⁸

Winnicott went on to describe how, some time into her therapy, his patient dreamed herself screaming and then began to notice significant relief in waking life. Much as I began to dream on my retreat, Winnicott’s patient, safely ensconced in her relationship with him, found that she was also able to remember, and make use of, her dreams. Coincidentally to this process, she reported being able to sing at a community event. Dreaming of screaming led to her singing. And Winnicott described how she was then able to speak up when he was late to a session. Her anger was no longer felt to be impotent but could be martialed in service of the therapeutic relationship. “We need to dream our scream for it to become real and we need to experience our dream as part of the real-izing process,”
⁹
wrote Michael Eigen years later about this case.

Winnicott’s case study illuminates something critical about the Buddha’s path. While he was not yet ready to dream his traumatized self, the Buddha, without realizing it at first, acted out his trauma in the pursuit of self-punishment and self-mortification. Like Yasa running from his disturbing vision of sexuality the Buddha became consumed with how fearsome and horrible human needs could be. Winnicott’s case study describes how therapists now understand the evolution of this kind of shame. The raw vision of one’s helplessness and dependency, the feeling of groundlessness, as exemplified in his case study by the mother who was not there to hear her child’s scream, is too overwhelming to bear, too primordial to symbolize. It cannot be held by the mind. Something has to take its place, and this often takes the shape of a neurotic symptom or set of symptoms, a fear or a phobia or an obsessive determination to control one’s body or mind. A conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with oneself or one’s world, painful though that might be, is more tolerable than staring into the void.

The bulk of Gotama’s six years of wandering were spent in the company of five companions practicing austerities, the same five to whom he later gave the teachings of the Four Noble Truths and who then watched as he settled Yasa down and gave him hope. The general idea of their asceticism was that since pleasure led to attachment, the elimination of pleasure could break the hold of this illusory world and release one into the realm of pure spirit. By depriving the body of its everyday needs one could build up a kind of spiritual power or “heat” that could bring one into contact with the divine. If indulging one’s needs for comfort, food, safety, or sex led to bondage, then a refusal to yield to one’s desires must lead to freedom. Ascetic practitioners were widespread in the wilds of India in the Buddha’s time—they can still be found, as Allen Ginsberg discovered on his first trip to India, on the periphery of Indian society today.

One of the most interesting things about reading traditional accounts of the Buddha’s austerities is how aggressive he sounds. He is far from the delicate creature he once was. No longer clad in the expensive silks of Benares, he becomes as fierce as any matted-haired, fire-worshipping, snake-garlanded ascetic of his time. As the Buddha implied when he reflected upon his own delicate nature, he was raised in such a way that the most troubling feelings were kept apart from everyday life. As legend came to describe, walls were built around any intimation of death, destruction, or loss. In his ascetic practices, the Buddha turned all this around. If he had been shielded from distress in his childhood, he flung himself into it in the forest. One can almost hear a therapist like Winnicott describing the Buddha’s “ruthless rejection of his own female element,” with his “unwelcome male element threatening to take over his whole personality.”
¹⁰

Ascetic practices brought Gotama’s aggression out into the open and gave it a means of expression. In making his own body/mind the object of assault, he found a safe object to attack, albeit one that was under constant threat of collapse. Gotama’s spiritual pursuits had him hitting his head against the wall of his own suffering, trying to find relief through the attempted destruction of his own support. His ideal during this time, as recounted in the Pali Canon, was to become like a “dry, sapless piece of wood lying on dry land,” ready, at the first opportunity, to burst into flames. The imagery is almost too perfect. Draining himself of all of what is called
rasa
in Sanskrit—the juice, flavor, taste, essence, or emotion of desire
¹¹
—the Buddha was hoping to become free of his human foibles. He was literally attempting to empty himself of the sap that ran through his veins, turning himself into kindling for one of the sacrificial fires so common to the wandering forest ascetics.

By subjugating his passions, keeping himself walled off from temptation, and deliberately challenging his body, Gotama hoped that he could drain himself of instinct and leapfrog into the divine. With the juice squeezed out, Gotama expected to make himself a pure vehicle, one free of earthly toxins and capable of spiritual sublimation. He was aiming to go directly from solid to spirit through his own personal alchemy of self-deprivation. He was said to make four times the effort of the other recluses, such that he came to be called
Mahashramana,
the “Great Wanderer.”
¹²
The traditional texts of the Pali Canon are unsparing in their descriptions of his dedicated self-abuse.

I thought: “Suppose, with my teeth clenched and my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I beat down, constrain and crush my mind with my mind?” Then, as a strong man might seize a weaker by the head or shoulders and beat him down, constrain him and crush him, so with my teeth clenched and my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I beat down, constrained and crushed my mind with my mind. Sweat ran from my armpits while I did so.

I thought: “Suppose I practise the meditation that is without breathing?” I stopped the in-breaths and out-breaths in my mouth and nose. When I did so, there was a loud sound of winds coming from my ear holes, as there is a loud sound when a smith’s bellows are blown.

I stopped the in-breaths and out-breaths in my mouth and nose and ears. When I did so, violent winds racked my head, as if a strong man were splitting my head open with a sharp sword. And then there were violent pains in my head, as if a strong man were tightening a tough leather strap round my head, as a head-band. And then violent winds carved up my belly, as a clever butcher or his apprentice carves up an ox’s belly with a sharp knife. And then there was a violent burning in my belly, as if two strong men had seized a weaker man by both arms and were roasting him over a pit of live coals.
¹³