The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (9 page)

It sounds like a platitude—
despair is never uniform
—and yet there is something profound in these words.
was enlightened watching the rivulets of water running down the hill in front of her. Those rivulets might well have been her own tears, for all we know. Her trauma, severe as it was, was not outside the natural order of things. As the Buddha told her, trauma has been happening since the beginning of beginningless time. She may not have been able to believe in the absolutisms of daily life any longer, but her reflection on the waters freed her from the absolutism, the singularity, of her grief.

In regaining her mindfulness, as the Buddha had encouraged her to do, she found a way to relate to her pain without turning it into pathology. Entering into dialogue with it, feeling the way it ran through her, gave her a visceral feeling of the “unbearable embeddedness of being”
¹⁵
of which both she and her family were a part. She stayed with this process, and an evolution in the quality of her despair took place.

While I am afraid this story has been used over the years to caution young women against running off impetuously with their lovers, it has, for me, a much deeper purpose.
pain was so intense, her losses so grievous, it was amazing that she could go on at all. I can imagine that nothing else made sense to her than to give the Buddha’s counsel a chance. As
realized in her reflection upon the waters, there may be nothing else to do with the traumas that befall us than to use them for our own awakenings.

Dissociation

W
hen the old monk who led
to the Buddha threw his cloak around her, he was making a vivid psychotherapeutic statement. And when the Buddha, upon hearing her story of trauma, told her that he was one who could serve as her shelter and refuge, he was putting into words what the old disciple had already tangibly displayed. Both men were suggesting that
unbearable experience could be borne, if just barely. And both were addressing what is today recognized as the most common response to trauma: the tendency toward dissociation. In dissociation the personality wards off becoming fragmented. It does this by withdrawing from that which it cannot bear. The shocked self is sacrificed, sent to its room for an endless time-out. It is shunned, split off, shut away, or otherwise quieted. The unbearable nature of its ordeal is more than can be handled, more than can be processed, and certainly more than can be understood. In order to go on, the self cuts its losses and dissociates its alarm. This is a self-preserving strategy, called an “ego defense” in Western psychology, and it is one that has also been implicated in the development of posttraumatic stress. Its goal is to avoid falling apart, and it is usually marginally effective. The problem is that the dissociated aspects of the self do not go away completely. They lurk in the background, unexplored and undigested, and the ego must expend enormous energy keeping them at bay.

When the Buddha suggested that he could serve as
shelter and refuge, he was speaking from experience. He had already worked through his own developmental traumas. He knew firsthand that the defense of dissociation did not have to be the last word, that it is possible to be whole even after a series of traumas. He instructed
in his method of mindfulness and, in so doing, gave her the antidote to dissociation. In teaching her how to release herself into her forbidden feelings, he also showed her how to emerge from them. Her reclamation of her dissociated parts can be seen not just in the image of the cloak around her shoulders but also in her connection with the physical landscape in which she was immersed. No longer needing to hold her losses at arm’s length, she was able to use the waters flowing around her to connect to her own inner state. After learning to be mindfully aware, she found she did not need to sacrifice her emotional body in the pursuit of stability but could open to what Kabat-Zinn
¹
has called “the full catastrophe” of her life.

Given that tales like
are so central to Buddhist culture, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the early death of the Buddha’s mother. One would think that her death would figure prominently in his story because of the way it speaks to his core teachings of impermanence, indeterminacy, and suffering, but there is very little overt mention of her passing. It took me years of immersion in Buddhist thought to even become conscious of it. She is there at the beginning of the Buddha’s life, exits discreetly, and is barely acknowledged thereafter. This rather curious neglect is a sign, I believe, of the traumatic underpinnings of the Buddha’s biography. Even in a culture steeped in the truth of impermanence, the need to dissociate from distress is very strong. People are so eager to get on with the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment that they rush right past the trauma at the heart of his early experience.

In developing the theme of an undercurrent of trauma running through the center of the Buddha’s story, it is clear to me that not all Buddhists may agree. Many people are drawn to contemplative practices as a means of rising above, or distancing themselves from, their most difficult emotions. They see meditation as a way of becoming calm and clear, of removing themselves from the tumult and chaos of daily life. They are not interested in awakening their primitive agonies or being reminded of their buried losses. They see the Buddha as one who has conquered emotion, not as someone who has come to terms with it. Even the Buddha, right up until his final awakening, meditated to escape from himself. He subscribed to the dominant philosophical view of his time that the desires of the flesh bound him to an unsatisfactory existence and that liberation meant separating his consciousness from worldly preoccupations. That he eventually rejected this view is something that even devout Buddhists often do not recognize, although it was the foundation of his awakening.

From my perspective, these two phenomena—the failure of Buddhist culture to take seriously the loss at the heart of the Buddha’s story and his own attempts to escape from himself—are linked. They both reflect the defense of dissociation, the very defense that the Buddha’s teachings are designed to counter. In dissociation, that which is unbearable is closed off and isolated from the rest of the self. The person has to go on, but to do so he or she must turn away from trauma, compartmentalizing it in a way that keeps it out of view. In dissociation there is no self-reflection—in order to survive trauma the devastated self is immobilized and hidden out of view. The emotional impact has nowhere to go, however. It becomes stuck, in a frozen state, inaccessible to the person’s usual waking consciousness. It is never digested, never symbolized or imagined, never processed by thought or language, and never really felt. As the psychologist Harvey L. Schwartz put it in a 1994 article, the mind flees its own subjectivity
²
in order to “evacuate” its pain.

Within the Buddhist literature of the past millennia, there are several references to the Buddha’s loss that reflect this tendency toward dissociation. The famous myth of the baby Buddha taking seven steps to the north immediately after his birth, for example, conveniently passes over the helpless years of his infancy. These years are dissociated, as if they never existed, as if he were never a baby at all. It is as if he is already at least two or three years old, if not totally grown up, walking and talking and thinking clearly, already conscious of the role he is to play in the world at the time of his birth. His need for a mother, in this version of the story, is minimal.

In this depiction of the Buddha’s infancy one can see a culture’s defense mechanism at work. Rather than addressing the impact of his looming loss, the story depicts the baby as already completely self-sufficient. As much as I love the image of the baby Buddha pointing his finger in the air and trumpeting his omnipotence with what would become known as his Lion’s Roar, I cannot help but wonder about the subtext of the story. It reminds me of how my own therapist (a teacher of Gestalt therapy named Isadore From) told me that he could often tell from the way his patients walked into the room who had been prodded by overeager parents into standing and walking before they were ready. The hip bones of infants are softer than those of adults and do not completely fuse for the first year of life. Parents who stand their babies up and make them imitate walking push them into an erect posture they are not physiologically ready for. The child wants to comply to please his doting parents, but such children are robbed of the satisfaction of lifting themselves to standing when their bodies are actually ready. Insecurity lurks within such a compliant personality. A sense of inner confidence is often lacking.

The Buddhist scriptures, while relatively silent on the Buddha’s mother, do not completely ignore her. But when they do address her death, they illuminate the defense of dissociation more than they speak to the possible impact of her demise. Reading the various renditions of the Buddha’s birth that have come down to us, one can feel that something is not being said. Everything is fine, these stories insist. Nothing to worry about. It didn’t matter at all! In the description of her death in the
Lalitavistara Sutra
, for example, a Mahayana scripture written in Sanskrit and preserved in Tibetan, the pressure that must have been applied to the young Buddha to deny the depth of his loss can still be felt:

O monks, seven days after the Boddhisattva’s birth, it came time for his mother,
, to die. And upon her death,
was reborn into the realm of the Thirty-three gods.