The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (16 page)

The Buddha, in the aftermath of his meal, did not swing back to an embrace of luxury. He actually resolved something. There was a middle way, he decided. While he did not have to be driven by his feelings, by his body, or by his thoughts, he did not have to eliminate them either. His understanding deepened and his tolerance for ambiguity soared. His whole approach to meditation took a radical turn. Instead of seeking to break his mind with his mind, he let the joy of his childhood memory and the curiosity it evoked infuse and inform his technique. He let it become the platform for his awakening. While not forsaking the self-inquiry he had already begun, he let up on himself. He noted that his pleasure-driven thoughts and feelings, if carefully observed, did not provoke him to act. Like bubbles in a stream, they would come to the surface of his mind and pop. By not identifying with them, by not being caught up in their content, he could have access to a deeper joy, one that bore a stark resemblance to that which he had stumbled upon, and then forgotten about, in his childhood under the rose-apple tree and one that went all the way back to the thrill of bliss he had evoked in his mother at birth. Later, after his enlightenment, he called this new way of relating “mindfulness.”

The Buddha’s discovery empowered him. In a short time, after walking to the site of the present-day Indian village Bodh Gaya and sitting under a large fig tree by the banks of the Neranjara River, he was filled with a rush of realizations. Primary among them was a fundamental shift in the way he approached himself. As one of his biographers, Karen Armstrong, has described it, he no longer had to pounce on his failings but could use his reflective awareness to become acquainted with how his mind worked, in order to “exploit its capacities.”
²³
His days of dissociation were over. In its place was a newfound ability, one very similar to that discovered by Winnicott when he broke himself of his need to show off his intelligence to his patients and learned to wait for the joy of their self-discoveries. “I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever,”
²⁴
wrote Winnicott. The Buddha found something similar. In enjoying his joy, he allowed his mind to unfurl. In a carefree gesture long celebrated in Buddhist traditions, upon finishing his milk rice the Buddha tossed his bowl into the river. It floated upstream, signifying the change in direction the Buddha now embraced, and then sank to the bottom of the river, nestling on top of the bowls of the three previous Buddhas from different eras, all of whom had had similar awakenings at the same spot. The clinking of one bowl striking the others was said to awaken the
naga
, or serpent, king dwelling there, alerting him to the proximity of yet another Buddha. This waking of the unconscious, as personified by the rousing of the serpent at the bottom of the river, was another way of describing the return of the Buddha’s dissociated affect. No longer plagued by a feeling of not fitting in, and no longer tortured by the belief in his own intrinsic badness, the Buddha-to-be embraced the thrill of bliss that had driven his mother to distraction. With this joy as his support and his humanity restored, his journey to enlightenment gathered momentum.

Feelings Matter

T
he Buddha once gave a teaching in response to his followers’ repeated requests to explain the mysteries of the universe to them. Known to possess a “divine eye,” the Buddha was asked over and over again to talk about how everything really worked. Okay, he finally cried. I give up. You want to know about the world? I’ll tell you. The world that matters is what you experience. The world is your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and mind; your sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, thoughts, and feelings; the visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and intuitive consciousnesses that accompany them. Like a contemporary neurobiologist, the Buddha explained how each of his disciples was constantly remaking the world through his own sense organs, breaking it down and reconstructing it through his own relational mental processes. You and the world are not really separate, he explained, although that’s the way it seems. In fact, each person, each organism, is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of the world, constantly reproducing a version of it through their interactive, sense-based, experience of it. The self is not the same as any of these processes, nor could it be said to exist separately from them, he affirmed. The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not. While other spiritual disciplines counseled a rejection of the body, suppression of the emotions, or the eradication of the personality in the hopes of connecting with a divine soul or spirit or essence that could survive death, the Buddha taught his students simply to attend to the shifting landscape of mind and body. Nothing else matters, he claimed. Only this.

This way of speaking was the Buddha’s introduction to his biggest discovery, known in its shorthand version as the doctrine of “no-self.” The shorthand version is a bit of a problem, because the Buddha’s teachings on the subject were actually quite nuanced and always varied depending on whom he was talking to. If the person believed strongly in a concrete soul or self or spirit, the Buddha would emphasize its empty nature, but if they believed in an empty self, if they were convinced they were vacant or hollow or unworthy or didn’t matter, he would tell them that too was mistaken, that they were attached to emptiness, that their human birth was immensely precious. For the supersophisticated, he would often say there is neither self nor nonself and then further confuse them by saying that if they took that too seriously they would be wrong too. His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright. The Buddha understood the traumas of everyday life, but he was determined to challenge both the protective reactions of dissociation and the underlying hopelessness that accompanies them.

To this end—as he did for all of the individuals, like Yasa and
, who came to him in distress—he taught the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Preserved in the Pali Canon in a sutra called the
Sutta
, his instructions were remarkably clear and straightforward. They codified his pivotal understanding that the path out of fear and dissociation depends on the ability to use reflective awareness to study the nature of everyday experience. For the Buddha, this was not some kind of elevated philosophical inquiry. It meant the actual investigation, in real time, of the moment-to-moment unfolding of the mental, emotional, and physical components of the self. That is why, in his lecture to his followers on the mysteries of the universe, he stressed the centrality of the five senses and the mind. He made much the same argument in his sutra on mindfulness.

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are the domains of personal experience—the foci—in which mindfulness can be practiced. The Buddha specified them as consisting of the body (or breath), feelings, the mind, and mental objects like thoughts and emotions. This was another way of breaking down subjective experience so that it could be opened up to meditative scrutiny, just as he did in his teaching on the nature of the universe. After rejecting his ascetic attempts to suppress his physical and emotional self, the Buddha came to see that freedom actually came from within. The sutra on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness was his way of describing how to make that freedom happen.

The Buddha structured his teachings on the foundations of mindfulness in a very careful way. Recognizing, from his own obsessive immersion in austerity, that the most common reaction to the trauma of everyday life was a flight from bodily experience, he made mindfulness of the body the first foundation of his teaching. This was his way of countering the grossest form of dissociation, known in today’s psychological language as “derealization,” in which the defense of dissociation is applied to physical experience. In severe trauma, after rape or war or abuse or horrible accidents, this kind of reaction is well-known. Nothing seems real. The body seems alien. Physical things lose their solidity. But there is a spectrum of this kind of dissociation, as therapists have come to realize. The character armor that hardens muscles while protecting people from being emotionally hurt also limits their availability: to life, to love, to themselves and others. Children who suffer from developmental trauma, as Winnicott always pointed out, flee from their physical experience to a haven in their minds he called their “caretaker self” and suffer from a reduced sense of their own vitality. The Buddha acted out this flight from the body in his six years of austerities, and he enshrined its reversal in his first foundation. By using the body as a beginning focus of meditation, by gradually easing oneself into the moment-to-moment reality of physical embodiment, the mind begins to learn an alternative to dissociation.

The first foundation of mindfulness is very specific. It involves watching the breath enter and leave the body or, in some of the many variations that have been developed over time, listening to sounds come and go or watching physical sensations arise and pass away. It focuses on what are called the five sense doors—the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and body—and guides the attention to the bare facts of what each sense organ registers at the boundary between the internal and the external environments. It can be applied to physical activities like walking or eating and is the mainstay of what has come to be known as “sitting” meditation practice. But this is only the beginning: the first of the four foci the Buddha knew to be important for training the mind. The second foundation, mindfulness of feelings, is the bridge between the body and the mind. It is the one that the Buddha’s childhood memory alerted him to, the one that took him out of his attachment to asceticism and returned him to the world.

According to the Buddha’s psychology, feelings are always present. They accompany every moment of awareness. They can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and they can be based in the body or in the mind. They flow continuously, although we tend to intervene reactively, dissociating from the painful feelings, clinging to the pleasant ones, and ignoring the neutral. Our egos, in our relentless rush to normal, pull us away from our feelings when they are difficult and immerse us in them unconditionally when they are alluring. In the practice of mindfulness, these habitual tendencies in relationship to our feelings are countered. One learns to abide in the flow of feeling, not pushing away the uncomfortable and not hanging on to the pleasurable. A deepening of internal experience inevitably results.

The Buddha came to accept the importance of feelings when he recovered his childhood memory and saw that he was afraid of the pleasure it held. In that tiny but crucial moment the Buddha saw the importance of both unpleasant and pleasant feeling, of both fear and joy. His interest in his own emotional experience was piqued and he began a new process of attending, without judgment, to both the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of mental and emotional life. Opening himself to his own subjective flow of feeling, he stopped trying to make it go away. He realized that he mattered, that he did not have to destroy himself, even as he was setting the stage for an equally profound realization: that he was not the limited individual he thought he was.

At that moment, remembering his childhood joy, he also made the crucial distinction between “sensual” and “nonsensual” feelings that became an essential part of his teachings on mindfulness. Sensual feelings were clearly dependent on sensory events, and their pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral qualities were easy to apprehend. But “nonsensual,” or “nonworldly” feelings, like the kind he recovered in his childhood memory, were more mysterious. They seemed to be experienced in the mind as much as in the body, and they carried hints of the past while also being able to fill the mind in the present. This distinction between the two kinds of feelings freed him up and gave him a new approach to working with the anguish, or
dukkha
, that had driven him into the forest in the first place
.
It showed him another kind of pleasure besides the physical one that was less dependent on sensory gratification and more related to simple being. And it gave shape and history to the fear that had propelled his spiritual search in the first place. He was able to make this fear an object of inquiry instead of something he needed to run away from. In reorienting himself in this way, the Buddha was firmly in line with the psychotherapy tradition of our own time. Accepting the importance of internal feelings, the Buddha opened himself to the mystery of the self. He validated psychological experience and made the psyche, as he had the body, available for subjective exploration.

As the great contemporary scholar of Buddhism at Oxford, Richard Gombrich, has repeatedly pointed out, people tend to construe the Buddhist concept of no-self or no-soul as “denying a principle of continuity.”
¹
Gombrich pulls no punches when addressing this misconception. “That is totally wrong,” he asserts. “The idea that Buddhism denies personal continuity could not be further from the truth.”
²
The Buddha taught that there is no unchanging essence in people or in things, that what we ordinarily take to be objects are, in fact, processes, but he did not deny the sense of individual subjectivity, of interiority, or of personal continuity. In fact, the general thrust of his teachings was to encourage exactly that sense of personal continuity that people mistakenly think he denied, a continuity that derives in good part from the flow of feeling that underlies our lives.

In the Buddha’s uncovering of the Middle Path lay a profound and fundamental shift in the spiritual approach to pleasure and unpleasure. The dominant spiritual ideology of his time suggested that pleasant feelings were to be shunned
³
and unpleasant feelings cultivated for their purifying effects. The Buddha, who tried his best to emulate this approach, was ultimately urged into a confrontation with this ideology and turned it on its head. He did not swing to the opposite, to the materialist stance that was widespread in his time and remains dominant in ours, where we believe that unpleasant feelings should be avoided and pleasant ones accumulated for their invigorating effects, but he opened up the realm of feelings, in all of their variety, to meditative scrutiny. This led him directly to the third and fourth foundations of mindfulness, to the potential of mind and mental objects as vehicles of meditative examination. Nothing in the psyche needs to be excluded, the Buddha taught. It can all be held in a meditative embrace. In today’s psychodynamic language, we might say that the Buddha discovered the unconscious and put it to use as grist for the spiritual mill.

The Buddha did not call it the unconscious, however; he simply called it “mind.” The mind has its own capacity for feeling, he deduced, over and above the corporeal dimension of the five traditional senses. His embrace of the mental dimension of pleasure and pain, which involved opening himself to the interior of his psyche—to its memories, dreams, and reflections and to its continuity over time—allowed him to expand the scope of meditation. No longer idealizing the peaceful quiescence of hypnotic tranquility and no longer trying to escape from himself, the Buddha saw that it was possible to “give understanding” not only to the pleasant and painful aspects of mental feeling but to the entirety of personal experience. The mind itself could become an object of mindfulness.