The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (22 page)

One association comes to mind in reference to this fourth dream of the Buddha. It has to do with a patient of mine who suffered a terrible loss of multiple members of her family in a tragic accident. Several years afterward, she began to write of the life she had lived. She wrote a series of remarkable pieces, each one redolent of one of her deceased family members or of an earlier time with them. The actual writing put her into an almost hypnotic reverie in which the reality of the lost time was more vivid than the one she was now living in. Each piece of writing was a bit of recovery that made her feel less lost herself. But after composing each piece, she was for a long time unable or unwilling to read any of them over. Each fragment of her life had its own reality, but the totality of her loss was too much to bear at any one time. The Buddha’s dream, of the four birds coming together as one, speaks to my patient’s predicament. It was a difficult thing to bring those fragments together. For a long time she could not.

The Buddha’s fifth dream evokes both the extraordinary and the ordinary nature of his achievement. He walks on a mountain of dirt and is not fouled by it. Note that the dirt is not transformed into gold or anything. It stays dirty. But the Buddha, astride his pile of dirt, is untouched by it. This is another version of the third dream, in which that which was seen as a barrier to awakening is now known as the foundation upon which it rests. Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything; it means changing one’s frame of reference so that all things become enlightening. The unity of the Buddha’s experience is emphasized in this dream; he is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and not been taken down.

All five of the Buddha’s dreams make this point. Rather than incompleteness or interruption, he is dreaming tolerance and wholeness. All of his previous efforts to eliminate the dirt from his being were overkill. What he found, instead, in his discovery of the Middle Path, was an incredible balancing capacity. He need not sleep on a bed of nails, nor walk on water; he could simply rest in his own skin without picking at it. That his dreams showed him this capacity in imagery steeped in the mother-infant bond speaks to the essential relational nature of his awakening. The same themes that Western therapists describe between mother and infant found their mature expression in the Buddha’s self-analysis.

Before his turnaround under the rose-apple tree, the Buddha was in rebellion against being. He was trying to extinguish it by any means possible, using all of his masculine energy to subdue, control, and conquer his body and soul. The ideology behind this effort was one of master and slave. Being was thought to obscure spirit. One could find God by squeezing out the life energy or by rising above it. This was the motivation behind virtually all of the Buddha’s preenlightenment efforts. After his memory, his whole approach changed. No longer driven by self-hatred and no longer exclusively identified with being the
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, the Buddha became able to give himself room. He opened the playing field and became curious about what was there. His dreams heralded the recovery of his female element, the emerging freedom of his creative capacities, and the reestablishment of the maternal holding environment from which he had become estranged. He could now reach inside and dream.

The Buddha, in summoning imagery of his long-forgotten mother, not only dreamed the origin of his trauma but also dreamed the means of its release. As I tried to explain to the gentleman in my workshop, the acknowledgment of personal agony sometimes connects a person to who they were before they were traumatized. This seems to have been the case for the Buddha. His five dreams, taken together, paint a picture of the recovery of what is today called “implicit relational knowing.”
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This is a form of “collaborative communication”
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with deep roots in early life that researchers have identified as the most important bulwark against developmental trauma.

In implicit relational knowing, there is a nonconscious flow of feelings between people that helps them know how to be with each other. This is the form of communication that infants and their parents rely upon before language. It is different from the reflective/verbal knowing that grows out of speech and it seems to be mediated by what brain scientists are now calling “mirror neurons.” Mirror neurons are brain cells in the motor cortex that fire when one person sees another person do something. They mimic the observed behavior: They reflect it, so that the brain does not know if you are doing the action or if I am. They are vehicles of empathy, automatically tying people together, mixing up experience between self and other. When I see my baby grimace, my mirror neurons give me the immediate sensation of grimacing. I know what she is experiencing without having to think about it and, if I am positively engaged, I will automatically do something to help her. “The human brain cannot develop and sustain itself without relatedness, which is a continuously active condition of mental life,”
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writes one contemporary researcher. “How well the infant-caregiver relationship maintains positive engagement and regulates the infant’s fearful arousal will have escalating consequences.”
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Parents make use of implicit relational knowing to help their infants cope with difficult feelings. An attuned and responsive caregiver senses what a baby is experiencing and strives to make things tolerable. He does this not by thinking about it but by simply knowing and responding.

The Buddha’s dreams put him back in touch with his own capacity for knowing. After reconnecting to the joyful and creative element encapsulated by his childhood memory, he found a maternal energy infusing his imagination in his dreams. He moved from a position in which he was a lonely, isolated individual struggling to subdue his unruly self to one in which he was irrevocably aware of the intrinsic relational backdrop of his being. Despite the early loss of his biological mother, he now saw his rootedness in relationship as primary. As Michael Eigen, one of the few contemporary psychoanalysts who does not shy away from the mystical aspects of the field, has described it, “If you penetrate to the core of your aloneness you will not only find yourself, there will also be this unknown boundless presence. Is it you? Is it other than you? What is it? An unknown, boundless presence at the very core of your aloneness. No matter how deep you go, you’ll find it there.”
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The Buddha’s dreams, envisaged when he was awakening, reveal his version of this unknown, boundless support. Coming on the heels of his memory, they are evidence of his psyche in upheaval. No longer driven by an ideology of subjugation, the Buddha can be seen in the process of reconfiguring himself. What is most apparent in the dreams is the opening up of his self. It is as if all the doors and windows are thrown ajar. The sun and the wind and the waters and the earth and the birds and the plants and even the bugs and dirt come streaming in. The lonely, isolated individual struggling with the feelings of being an ill-fitting axle in the wheel of life suddenly finds himself supported by the very world that was heretofore felt to be threatening. And this happens through the depiction in narrative memory of the connection with his mother that he had previously been unable to acknowledge or articulate.

The Buddha’s mother, an enlivening presence stripped away before she could be really known, pervades his dreams and becomes the substrate of his enlightenment. She imbues his imagination and, in so doing, returns to him a capacity for relating in a maternal way. The Buddha’s genius lay in his ability to take this capacity, newly returned to his mind, and deploy it in his spiritual search. He took the hint from his dreams and used it to balance his striving. Out of his implicit memory he found the female element he needed to make a stable path for himself. A comment from the artist Marcel Duchamp makes clear that this opening of a channel from implicit to narrative memory can have just this quality of joyful recovery. “Art cannot be understood through the intellect,” wrote Duchamp, “but is felt through an emotion presenting some analogy with a religious faith or a sexual attraction—an aesthetic echo. The ‘victim’ of an aesthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and, helpless, submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint. While exercising his taste, he adopts a commanding attitude. When touched by the aesthetic revelation, the same man, in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.”
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The Buddha, before his aesthetic echo, was in the classic position of a traumatized individual acting out dissociated feelings without knowing what was being expressed. In his renunciation of desire, as enacted first in his abandonment of his wife and child and then in his ascetic practices, he was expressing the same “loss of faith in human relatedness”
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that children with developmental trauma also show. Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or aggressive, but they exhibit much more “apprehension, hesitation or withdrawal”
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in response to their children’s overtures than other parents. While they give in to their infant’s entreaties eventually, they “often hesitated, moved away, or tried to deflect the infant’s requests for close contact before giving in.”
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The children of such parents, researchers have found, become increasingly disorganized and defeated as they grow. They feel invalidated, as if crucial aspects of their experience do not matter. They use dissociative strategies to cope with their difficult feelings rather than turning to their uncomfortable parents for help, and they often resort to one of two interpersonal coping strategies by the age of three to five. In the first, termed a controlling-caregiving strategy of attachment, they find some way of taking care of the parent in lieu of being taken care of themselves. In the second, termed a controlling-punitive strategy, they garner a parent’s attention by “entering into angry, coercive, or humiliating interactions with the parent.”
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The controlling nature of both of these strategies makes satisfying later relationships much more difficult to achieve.

If the tendency in Buddhist culture to diminish the import of the Buddha’s early loss of his mother can be taken as reflective of his own early experience, then we can assume a kind of invalidation at the heart of the Buddha’s being. While his family, like the culture in general, may have been eager to make it seem as if it did not matter that his mother had died, the young child may have been consistently given a message that his deepest feelings had no foundation in reality. This could account for his self-reported “delicate” nature. The family’s helpless and fearful attitude could have easily been internalized, obscuring the more complex mix of emotions that might be expected.

The Buddha’s dreams show him to be healing himself through the very dissociative defenses he must have once used to cope with his trauma. But instead of those defenses cutting him off from imponderable agonies, they are now used to return a sense of unknown boundless presence. In letting the imagery of the mother move from implicit to narrative memory, as the Buddha did in remembering his dreams, his own implicit relational capacities, locked up and dissociated by the early trauma, could be set free. In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic. What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby. One does not have to be helpless and fearful, nor does one have to be hostile and self-referential. The mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired.

There is a passage in a Buddhist book by Jack Kornfield, written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, that shows how useful this meditative version of implicit relational knowing can be in the treatment of trauma. The passage describes the experience of a Vietnam veteran at a meditation retreat who finds himself confronted by memories of atrocities he witnessed while a soldier. While it is specifically about the trauma of war, it can also be read as a metaphor for any kind of disruptive emotional experience.

The passage begins with the traumatized veteran reminiscing about his time as a field medical corpsman with the Marine Corps ground forces in the mountains on the border between North and South Vietnam. He saw many people, both soldiers and civilians, killed and injured. For years after his discharge he had recurring nightmares at least twice a week about being back in the war zone, “facing the same dangers, witnessing the same incalculable suffering, waking suddenly alert, sweating, scared.”
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After eight years, he attended his first meditation retreat and found, to his horror, that in the silence of the sanctuary his nightmares came to fill his waking consciousness as well. The peaceful California redwood grove in which the retreat was held became the scene of multiple wartime flashbacks redolent of the hospital, morgue, and battlefield of the war. It was not what he was expecting nor was it what he wanted. But he came to understand that he was finally experiencing emotions he had been unprepared for when he entered the Marines. This gave him some courage to stay with the feelings longer than he really wanted to.

“I began to realize that my mind was gradually yielding up memories so terrifying, so life-denying, and so spiritually eroding that I had ceased to be consciously aware that I was still carrying them around. I was, in short, beginning to undergo a profound catharsis by openly facing that which I had most feared and therefore most strongly suppressed.”
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