The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (26 page)

The Buddha’s story illustrates that a relational home can ultimately be found within. This does not mean there is no place for psychotherapy, no role for therapists like Winnicott or Carr, only that the function of such interventions will ultimately be to point the way toward this truth. In losing his mother at such an early age, the Buddha affirmed the underlying and inescapable anguish at the heart of existence. While it is compelling to read his journey toward enlightenment as a process of coming to terms with this trauma, I believe it is much more. Not only did he find a way of awakening to and releasing his own pain, he figured out something that applies across the board. As the Buddha made clear, suffering is a universal truth. While the things that bother us cannot always be eliminated, we can change the way we relate to them. In uncovering the inherent relational capacity of the mind, which finds its natural expression in a mother’s concern for her baby, he found the transformative medicine he was looking for. Trauma, if it doesn’t destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it make us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.

There is a beautiful example of this in the annals of Tibetan Buddhism. An eighteenth-century Mongolian monk, Jankya Rolway Dorje, wrote a poem in the immediate aftermath of his awakening that spoke of his personal agony while clearly laying out the role of trauma in waking up the mind. In so doing, he even anticipated the fundamental rule of Freudian psychoanalysis. “I will speak spontaneously whatever comes to mind!” he began, sounding for all the world like a patient on an analytic couch. He was, in a real sense, writing his own mantra. “I was like a mad child, long lost his old mother. Never could find her, though she was with him always!” Rolway Dorje’s poem literally equated the smiling face of the mother with the implicit relational knowing of the enlightened mind. In his day-to-day reality, as he explained in his verse, he was struggling with feelings of abandonment. While he was already an accomplished lama with a bevy of intellectual and spiritual attainments, in his heart of hearts he was still a crazed and lonely child. No longer pretending otherwise, Rolway Dorje was able, as a prelude to his awakening, to acknowledge and articulate his personal version of
dukkha
. His trauma was no longer dissociated, no longer stuck in his implicit memory; it was available to his conscious mind and able to be used as an object of mindfulness. Dropping the more accomplished and self-protective aspects of his identity, expanding the frame of his ego, he stopped pushing away the mad feelings he was most ashamed of. Able to experience himself without the usual filters of self-judgment, Rolway Dorje had a breakthrough. The mother he was seeking in concrete physical form showed herself within. “But now it seems I’m about to find that kind old Mother,” his poem continued, “Since relationality hints where she hides. I think, ‘Yes, yes!’—then ‘No, no!’—then, ‘Could it be, really!’ These various subjects and objects are my Mother’s smiling face! These births, deaths, and changes are my Mother’s lying words! My undeceiving Mother has deceived me!”
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His own relational awareness, the very essence of the mother he was seeking, came to the fore. The home he was in search of was already present within. Knowing was there, and it was with him always.

Rolway Dorje’s verse was called “The Song of the View.” This title referred back to the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, to his menu for awakening, which consisted of Realistic View, Motivation, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration. The Buddha explained it for the first time in his teaching on the Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path was the Fourth Noble Truth: the way out of suffering. One of the interesting things about the Eightfold Path is the importance the Buddha gave to Realistic View. It came first. Meditation, in the form of Mindfulness and Concentration, came last. Realistic View was concerned with the attitude one takes toward one’s existence and one’s suffering: toward the traumas of everyday life. Before meditation could be of much use, the Eightfold Path made clear, one had to educate the thinking mind. Realistic View was the means of explaining how people could reorient themselves. When that happened successfully, as the Mongolian lama’s poem described, real transformation was possible.

The usual inclination, the one Rolway Dorje quite probably was subject to prior to his breakthrough, was to hunt for some kind of “absolute” escape from the world of suffering. In the spiritual traditions of South Asia, long present before the time of the Buddha, this vision of escape was well established. The Buddha was subject to it too, as his attempts to wipe suffering away during his time in the forest made clear. The Buddha was radical, even in his own time, for eventually proposing another approach. While it may not have been such a revelatory proclamation to say that suffering was an inescapable fact of life, the conclusion the Buddha came to ran counter to most people’s desires.

The most important thing we can do about suffering is to acknowledge it. Simply acknowledging it, while seeming like a minor adjustment, is actually huge. A friend of mine told me how, when his mother died when he was five years old, his father told him one morning that she was gone and would not be coming back and then never talked about her again. While extreme, this response is emblematic of our natural instincts. We would like to pretend that everything is okay, that death does not touch us, that we are not possessed by primitive agonies whose origins are murky at best, that we are somehow immune from the unbearable embeddedness of existance. But trauma is part of our definition as human beings. It is inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives. No one can escape it. Acknowledging it, as Realistic View encourages us to do, brings us closer to the incomprehensible reality of our own deaths. And as far as death is concerned, the way out is most definitely through.

As a therapist, I have found this approach to be enormously helpful, even for people with no relationship to Buddhism and no interest in meditation. If it is a truth, I long ago decided, it must be true no matter what religion one does or does not believe in. Many people, in the aftermath of an acute trauma like the loss of a loved one, for instance, believe they should be able to “get over it” within a discrete period of time. There are five stages of grief, they remind me, quoting the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They should be able to go through them in a year or two, they believe. I am cautious in my response. The Buddha took a different approach, one that seems more realistic. There need be no end to grief, he would say. While it is never static—it is not a single (or even a five-stage) thing—there is no reason to believe it will disappear for good and no need to judge oneself if it does not. Grief turns over and over. It is vibrant, surprising and alive, just as we are.

In a similar way, the primitive agonies of our childhoods live on into adulthood. Many of my patients, conditioned by Western psychology, feel that once they have some understanding of where their feelings come from, they should be finished with them. But we are not built that way. Primitive feelings continue to be stirred up throughout adult life. Understanding them does not turn them off. They are our history, our emotional memories; part of the people we have become. A patient of mine whose mother killed herself when my patient was four years old became unusually anxious when she was engaged to be married recently. She knew why, of course. What if her new husband were to disappear as precipitously as her mother did? But knowing why was not what the Buddha meant by Realistic View. He meant something much more direct. Realistic View means examining feelings rather than running away from them, acknowledging trauma rather than pretending all is normal. My patient’s betrothal gave her another chance to face emotions that had been too overwhelming to face at the time of her mother’s death. She was being given a window into herself, into her history and into her pain. In taking possession of those traumatic feelings, she was also being freed from the grip of them. Rather than enacting her panic and fleeing from her new husband, she could settle in to her present-day relationship with a newfound compassion for the bereft girl still soldiering on inside herself. Like a mad child long lost her old mother, my patient came to see that the maternal energy she needed was actually present within. Changing her attitude, changing the way she related to her panicky feelings, gave her access to that all-important energy and allowed her to go forward in her life.

In the Zen tradition of China, the wisdom of the Buddha’s awakening has been preserved in a collection of one hundred koans called the Blue Cliff Record. These koans
,
dating from the eleventh-century Sung Dynasty, dare students to move beyond their conventional ways of thinking and to align their minds with the perfection of wisdom implicit in their true natures. They pose paradoxical questions that are meant to confuse the thinking mind and open access to an alternative channel of communication. Working with them is a means of cultivating Realistic View. The koans challenge the mind just as trauma does, asking us to make sense of the inconceivable and to explain the unexplainable. Many of the koans play on the notion of suffering and its release, pointing the way toward the Buddha’s own transformative vision. The memory of his childhood joy under the rose-apple tree can be seen as an early example of a koan
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It confounded the Buddha at first but eventually transformed the way he oriented himself in the world.

The koans in the Blue Cliff Record do their best to introduce people to their true natures. One of them (number 27 out of 100) quotes a monk asking the master Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?” There are many ways to interpret the question, of course. On one level, it is an allusion to old age, death or the loss of a loved one. The tree withers and the leaves fall just as the body shrivels and the life runs out. On another level, the koan speaks of the more fundamental question of trauma. What is it like when our defenses wither, when we stop believing in the absolutisms of everyday life? What happens when we surrender the reassuring myths we use to prop ourselves up, when the stable and predictable world is revealed as fluid, chaotic, and tumultuous, when the isolated self recognizes its own embeddedness of being? Therapists who study trauma know what happens in such cases. As Stolorow has written, a “deep chasm” opens “in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.”
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Yet the Blue Cliff Record, fueled by the Buddha’s discoveries, comes to a different conclusion.

The classical answer, the one given by Yun Men, a master so irascible that he forbade his disciples to record any of his notoriously abstruse sayings (forcing them to surreptitiously write them down on a paper robe) was: “Body exposed in the golden wind.”
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Even before I tried to grapple with what Yun Men was saying, I loved his response. Something about it made me happy, this body exposed in a golden wind. I imagined myself on a beach, the sun-drenched air gusting off the water, feeling safe, warm, and connected even while I lay there alone. With the leaves falling, without the usual array of comforts and consolations, in the depths of my solitude, was an unknown boundless presence: a golden wind enveloping my uncovered form.

The question asked of Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?” also refers back to all of the trees that were so important in the life history of the Buddha, trees that offered him shelter and support as he confronted the world of suffering. His mother grasped the low-hanging limb of a
sala
tree as she gave birth to him from her side. He sat under the shade of a rose-apple tree as a youth and felt an inexplicable joy arise in the midst of his aloneness, the memory of which reoriented him on his path to enlightenment. And he found the exact spot for his awakening under a fig tree by the sparkling Neranjara River; a tree, now known as the
bodhi tree
, a descendant of which still flourishes on that spot in the North Indian village of Bodh Gaya. The koan asks us to imagine what it would be like if even those trees were to wither and die. It refers back to the death of the Buddha’s mother, for whom the trees, in his biography, serve as a kind of stand-in. And the answer, in the form of the golden wind, comes through loud and clear. The Buddha’s relational home was not dependent on any external thing: not on any of the trees and not even on the continuing presence of his biological mother. Even when he was completely exposed, it was there with him. As important as the trees may have been as placeholders along the way, his liberation came, purely and simply, from within.

In Yun Men’s time, there was a famous saying that attempted to capture this important truth. Buddha, the saying inferred, was able to open himself “fearlessly and calmly to the tumult of the sublime.”
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“The Buddhas of past, present, and future turn the Great Wheel of Dharma upon flames of fire,” this saying read, making reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, to his well-known teaching that everything is burning. Yun Men turned even this version around.

“The flames of fire expound the Dharma,” he is reputed to have said. “The Buddhas of past, present, and future stand there and listen.”
¹¹

The koan of the tree withering and its leaves falling also unwittingly ties into the work of Winnicott on developmental trauma. When he was sixty-seven years old, Winnicott, uncharacteristically, wrote a very personal poem about his own mother. The poem, which is called “The Tree,” seemed to have emerged rather unexpectedly. It conjured up the favorite tree in his family’s garden that Winnicott climbed to do his homework in when he was a boy. Winnicott sent the poem to his brother-in-law with the following note: “Do you mind seeing this that hurt coming out of me. I think it had some thorns sticking out somehow. It’s not happened to me before & I hope it doesn’t again.”