The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (27 page)

The key lines of the poem are the following:

Mother below is weeping

weeping

weeping

Thus I knew her

Once, stretched out on her lap

as now on dead tree

I learned to make her smile

to stem her tears

to undo her guilt

to cure her inward death

To enliven her was my living.
¹²

Knowing Winnicott’s work, one can read all kinds of things into the poem, including the fact that his mother’s maiden name was Woods. But even without knowing much about his work, the basic theme is evident. His mother’s smiling face did not make itself spontaneously available to him—young Donald had to work for it. To Winnicott’s way of thinking, this was a form of trauma. A child whose mother was either intrusive or abandoning has to prematurely mobilize a self in order to manage the less than adequate parental environment. This prematurely mobilized self is a life-saving adaptation that eventually squeezes out life. It comes at the expense of the kind of play a more secure child can engage in and results in a self whose rigidity and inflexibility ultimately creates fear or deadness. As a vehicle for connecting with the much beloved parent, such a “caretaker self” has extra staying power, extra value, and extra investment. It is etched deeply into the brain; wired, through a combination of love and necessity, into the fabric of one’s personality. But as a vehicle for connecting more deeply with life, the caretaker self is flawed. Based on an insecure attachment, its stance is inherently mistrustful.

“To enliven her was my living,” Winnicott wrote, with a play on the word “living.” It was his job, and it was also his life: All that he could focus on. This was the classic scenario for Winnicott, the one he described over and over again, in which something critical in the child is sacrificed in order to cope with a less than adequate emotional environment. Winnicott was writing his own version of the koan here. He was describing the trauma that happens when the tree (or mother) withers and her leaves fall. But Winnicott was also demonstrating, in a very personal way, what the Buddha found. The way out of trauma is by going through it. In acknowledging, without rancor, the deadness of his maternal environment, Winnicott was able to turn himself into the relational home he had lacked. He did this for countless patients and he did it for himself.

The golden wind refers back to the implicit relational knowing of the mother, latent in all of us. When our traumas are exposed, when the efforts to resist, deny, overcome or even indulge them are dropped, something unexpected happens. Connection analogous to that of the infant-mother couple naturally arises. A golden wind appears. While it frightened the Buddha when he first remembered it blowing through him under the rose-apple tree, he was curious enough to explore it unabashedly from that moment on. Eventually he found it to be a breeze.

To Robert Thurman for showing me the meaning of words; to Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield for giving me the opportunity to teach with them; to Dan Harris for meaningful conversation; to Ann Epstein for implicit relational knowing and Bernard Edelstein and Michael Vincent Miller for Bromberg; to Mike Eigen for feeling mattering; Nancy Black for Stolorow and Lisa Gornick for the baby’s first steps. To Amy Gross, Robby Stein, Axel Hoffer, and Lindsay Whalen for their careful readings of the text. To Henk Barendregt for Rilke and the “courage de luxe.” To Ann Godoff for guiding me and Anne Edelstein for caring for the book. To Sonia for help with the brain, Will for his support, and Arlene for her understanding.

Chapter One: The Way Out Is Through

1
. Robert Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections
(New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 10.

2
.
The Dhammapada.
Copyright, P. Lal, Writer’s Workshop, 162/92 Lake Gardens, Calcutta, India 7004S (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), p. 115.

3
. Walpola Rahula,
What the Buddha Taught
(New York: Grove, 1974), p. 22.

4
. Richard Gombrich,
What the Buddha Thought
(London: Equinox, 2009), p. 161.

5
.
Ibid
.

6
. Joseph Goldstein,
Abiding in Mindfulness, vol.
1
,
Sounds True
. See also Ana layo Sati
,
The Direct Path to Realization
(Cambridge, Windhorse, 2003), p. 244

7
. Richard Gombrich,
What the Buddha Thought
(London: Equinox, 2009), p. 166.

8
. As recounted in
George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored and Envied by 200 Friends, Lovers, Aquaintances, Rivals—and a Few Unappreciative Observers
. Edited by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 89.

9
. Sharon Salzberg first made me aware of this apparent contradiction.

Chapter Two: Primitive Agony

1
. Bhikkhu
,
The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon
(Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1972/1992), pp. 32, 38.

2
.
Ibid
., p. 39.

3
.
Ibid
., p. 40.

4
. Walpola Rahula,
What the Buddha Taught
(New York: Grove, 1974), p. 12.

5
. Bhikkhu
and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans.,
The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima
(Boston: Wisdom, 1995), MN ii, 258, p. 865.

6
. D. W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” in
The
Motivational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment
(New York: International Universities Press, 1965), p. 39, no 1.

7
. Sandra Boynton,
What’s Wrong, Little Pookie?
(New York: Random House, 2007).

8
. Robert Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence
:
Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections
(New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 3–4.

9
.
Ibid.,
p. 1.

10
. Deborah Baker,
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India
(New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 202–3.

11
. Nyanaponika Thera,
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation
(New York: Samuel Weiser, 1962), p. 30.

12
. D. W. Winnicott,
Babies
and Their Mothers
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), pp. 36–38.

13
. Krishna Das,
Chants of a Lifetime
(Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2010), p. 172.

Chapter Three: Everything Is Burning

1
. Richard Gombrich,
What the Buddha Thought
(London: Equinox, 2009), p. 113.

2
.
Ibid.,
p. 111.

3
. Bhikkhu
,
The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon
(Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1972/1992), p. 64.

4
. Gombrich,
What the Buddha Thought,
p. 112.

5
.
Ibid
.

6
.
Ibid.

7
.
Ibid
., p. 113.

8
.
Ibid
., p. 33.

9
. Robert Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections
(New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 10.

10
. Gombrich,
What the Buddha Thought,
p. 20.

11
. Lucien Stryk,
World of the Buddha
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968), pp. 173–74.

12
.
Ibid
., p. 174.

13
. D. W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality
(London and New York: Routledge, 1971), p. 11.

14
. Michael Eigen,
Contact with the Depths
(London: Karnac, 2011), p. 13.

Chapter Four: The Rush to Normal

1
. Sherab Chödzin Kohn,
A Life of the Buddha
(Boston: Shambhala, 2009), p. 7.

2
.
Ibid.

3
. Bhikkhu
,
The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon
(Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1972/1992), p. 8.

4
.
Ibid
., pp. 8–9.

5
. Robert Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections
(New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 16.

6
.
Ibid
.

7
.
Ibid.

8
.
Ibid.

9
. Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker,
Great Disciples of the Buddha
(Boston: Wisdom, 2003), pp. 293–300.

10
.
Ibid.,
p. 295.

11
.
Ibid.

12
.
Ibid.
p. 297.

13
.
Ibid.
, p. 300.

14
. Michael Eigen,
The Electrified Tightrope
(London: Karnac, 1993/2004), p. 133.

15
. Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence,
p. 16.

Chapter Five: Dissociation

1
. Jon Kabat-Zinn,
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
(New York: Delacorte, 1990)
.

2
. Philip M. Bromberg,
Standing in the Spaces
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1998), p. 190.

3
.
The Voice of the Buddha: The Beauty of Compassion, Volume I
, translated by Gwendolyn Bays (Berkeley, CA: Dharma, 1983), p. 147.

4
. Miranda Shaw,
Buddhist Goddesses of India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 46.

5
. Anahad O’Connor, “Obituary: Nicholas Hughes, 47, Sylvia Plath’s Son,”
New York Times
, March 21, 2009.

6
. Ashva·ghosha,
Life of the Buddha,
trans. Patrick Olivelle (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 73.

7
. Bromberg,
Standing in the Spaces
, p. 6.

8
. Philip M. Bromberg,
Awakening the Dreamer
(Mahwah, NJ: Analytic Press, 2006), p. 33.

9
.
Ibid.

10
.
Ibid.,
p. 7.

11
. Ashva·ghosha,
Life of the Buddha
, p. 41.

12
. D. W. Winnicott, “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945), in
Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis
(New York: Basic Books, 1958), p. 154.

13
. Ashva·ghosha,
Life of the Buddha
, p. 11.

14
. D. W. Winnicott, “
The Newborn and His Mother”
(1964)
,
in
Babies and Their Mothers
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), pp. 30–31.

15
. D. W. Winnicott, “Postscript: D.W.W. on D.W.W.” (1967), in
Psychoanalytic Explorations
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 580.

16
.
Ibid.

17
. T
he Minor Anthologies of the Pali Canon: Part II, Verses of Uplift (Udana),
translated by F. L. Woodward (London: Pali Text Society, 1948), p. 57.

Chapter Six: Curiosity

1
. Michael Eigen,
Eigen in Seoul: Volume One: Madness and Murder
(London: Karnac, 2010), p. 5.

2
.
Ibid.

3
.
Ibid.,
p. 9.

Chapter Seven: Going Forth

1
. Bhikkhu
,
The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon
(Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1972/1992), p. 48.