Wisdom and Compassion
Buddhist
psychotherapy as skillful means
© 2002 Kerry Moran
William James,
the American writer and psychologist, predicted a century ago that Buddhism would
deeply influence Western psychology. Far ahead of his time as usual, James' prediction
is beginning to materialise. Western psychotherapists are increasingly incorporating
Buddhist principles and practices, applying them in ways suited to our own modern
culture. We see this synthesis in Jon Kabat-Zinn's work with stress reduction,
in techniques like Hakomi and Integrative Processing Therapy, and in Dialectical
Behavioral Therapy, which uses Zen principles to work with personality disorders.
A uniquely Buddhist psychology is being articulated by writers like John Welwood,
Tara Bennett-Goleman, Mark Epstein, and Diane Shainberg.
This new field is
called presence-centered psychotherapy, or sometimes contemplative psychotherapy,
after its meditative roots. It's a way of working that uses the wisdom of the
present moment, enhanced by a patient inquiry into body-centered awareness, to
unfold our innate potential for healing. It sounds simple, but it's radical in
practice.
The blossoming of presence-centered psychotherapy provokes a still
broader inquiry: What would a spiritually astute psychology look like, and where
might it lead? How might basic Buddhist principles like awareness and compassion
be applied in the consulting room? When mindfulness meditation is combined with
depth therapy, what kind of synergy can arise? What happens when we apply pure
awareness to what Daniel Goleman calls "the last great uncharted territory
of the mind" - our own emotions?
In my own life, depth psychology and
Buddhism have proven two mainstays of my personal path. I didn't start off as
a Buddhist practitioner - in fact, I managed to spend three or four years living
in Kathmandu, working as a journalist and trek leader, before I became aware of
a growing imperative inside me that said, Go see this teacher. Get to know him,
let him get to know you. I wrestled with this inner knowing for a while ("Are
you sure you're talking to me?"), because I felt extremely shy and awkward.
Still, some part of me seemed to know that I would just have to give that up.
Finally I went down to the monastery and introduced myself to the lama. It was
hard going for me, but I went back the next week, and the next, because that inner
knowing was still there, still nudging me. A little later I went to a 10-day teaching
seminar, and found the teachings to be pithy, earthy, and utterly sensible. It
was hardly a lightning-bolt conversion - nothing dramatic, no visions or thunderclaps
- but it felt workable, and I knew by that time I needed a spiritual discipline,
or I'd risk wandering in the woods of dilettantism. At the end of the teachings,
I made the decision to take refuge and become a Buddhist.
For the last 14
years I've studied and practiced in the Dzogchen tradition, which emphasises direct
recognition of the nature of mind - the essential pure awareness inherent within
each of us. For the past five years, I've practiced a form of depth psychotherapy
that's been deeply influenced by my Buddhist background. In my personal life as
well as in my work, I have found meditation practice and psychotherapy to be mutually
supportive. Each takes me to places the other doesn't necessarily go; together,
they open up new territory. The two traditions share a common bond in their focus
on deepening and stabilizing awareness. I've also found each to be a profound
source of strength in dealing with suffering, an aspect of life that is explicitly
acknowledged in both systems -- and almost as explicitly avoided by our present
society.
Buddhism and psychology are both technologies of the mind. Buddhism
excels in unbiased seeing, describing both ultimate reality and relative truth
with a clear-eyed profundity and a philosophical astuteness that's seldom been
equaled. Like all great spiritual systems, it offers the possibility of breaking
beyond the limitations of ego to a completely free and open experience of reality
that's known as enlightenment.
Psychotherapy, in contrast, delves into relative
reality -- specifically, the emotions, images and intuitions that shape our inner
lives. Ultimate truth is not the goal here: rather, therapy strives to untie the
knots of painful experiences by reworking past experiences and faulty perceptions.
Depth therapy adds power to this enterprise by cultivating an active relationship
with the unconscious, the uncontrolled but mighty hidden force that shapes our
lives. Therapy's forte is instigating emotional growth and refining interpersonal
skills -- areas that tend to be glossed over in many spiritual traditions.
Quite often, therapeutic work and spiritual work are placed in different categories,
with spirituality subtly valued as "higher." But we need only take a
look at our friends, our partners, or more importantly ourselves to acknowledge
that a spiritually developed soul is not always emotionally mature. Spiritual
ideals can provide the ultimate refuge from our unfinished emotional business.
John Welwood calls this "spiritual bypassing" - the temptation to go
up into the head, into unembodied spirituality, as a way to avoid our messy, painful
emotional and relational issues; to use our beliefs to defend against our feelings
of inadequacy. The big problem here is that this strategy simply doesn't work:
our unfinished business eventually catches up with us, no matter how hard we try
to "meditate" our way out of it. Whether you call it karma or just the
nature of reality, a basic psychological truth is that that which is repressed
only gains greater power, and that the only way out of an unpleasant situation
is through.
Blending psychological and spiritual work thus offers the potential
for a remarkably skillful approach, one that can both scale the heights and plumb
the depths, working both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of reality - the
spiritual and the embodied aspects of our lives. The two methods, in fact, have
the potential to be mutually reinforcing. An awareness-based spiritual practice
can support our emotional work, providing a spacious arena in which it can fully
unfold. Meanwhile, by wholeheartedly voyaging into our own depths, we embrace
the embodied and immediate aspect of our lives, mining the prima materia, the
raw substance of spiritual transformation. Exploring the depths of our own psyche
can broaden our spiritual understanding, grounding it in our own bodily experience
and honing our ability to compassionately connect with others. It's not a matter
of one method being "better" than the other, but rather a question as
to what particular tool is appropriate for a specific aspect of this individual
being at this exact time.
By working both sides of the equation -- emotional
and spiritual, relative and ultimate, psychology and Buddhism - we are able to
be grounded and open to larger realities, to "grow down," in James Hillman's
phrase, as well as to finally grow up; to develop both a workable, comfortable
human self and a broadened spiritual awareness.
Traditionalists may argue
that formal psychological work was not necessary for the Buddha, for example,
so why should it be for us? I've done a lot of thinking on this question, having
spent much of my adult life outside the United States. It's my observation that
traditional cultures like Nepal (where I lived for more than a decade) do not
experience the level of alienation, self-loathing, and doubt we suffer from here.
The stress of life in a highly competitive, insanely fast-paced materialistic
society creates an insidious form of psychological suffering that is no less painful
for its subtlety. Barraged with a constant stream of manipulative media messages,
isolated from the intricate community and family structures that have traditionally
support human growth, it's easy for us to feel isolated and confused. A pervasive
inner tension seems to distort our emotional lives, warping the natural unfolding
of a human being from child to adult. For many of us, it seems, unconscious patterns
from the past block our ability to be happy and fully present. We often feel separated
from our own experience by an invisible blockage or vague fear, a subtle disconnection
that cuts us off from our own nature.
This is an area where our souls are
begging for psychological as well as spiritual work. It may be that we suffer
such a deep rift in our collective psyche - the ancient Western split between
shadow and spirit, body and mind, materiality and spirituality -- that we need
a certain amount of psychological and emotional exploration to heal this primordial
wound. Without at least grounding ourselves in this process, we may simply not
be ready for intensive spiritual practice.
Tibetan Buddhist practices presuppose
a normally obnoxious human ego, one afflicted by healthy dollops of aggression,
desire, and selfishness. Within this context, an enormous range of techniques
exists to skillfully allow egocentricity to blossom into a more spacious state
of being. But when these fundamentally gritty human qualities are absent - when
early traumas, missed connections, or distortions of the growth process have damaged
ego growth -- there is no sense of self, but only a hollow void, or a storm of
negative voices. I recently read a transcript of a meeting between the Dalai Lama
and a group of Western meditation teachers, in which he was stunned to hear the
extent to which Americans in particular are tormented by what in psychological
language is called "negative self-image." This kind of "self-directed
contempt" doesn't exist in Tibetan culture, he commented.
Presence-centered
psychotherapy offers a creative response to our society's particular forms of
emotional suffering. By blending Eastern and Western wisdom, we are learning to
work with our own unique cultural neuroses in a transformative way, as we begin
to understand ourselves deeply and compassionately enough to create the space
for natural healing.
Skillful
Means
Thabla khepa or "skillful means" is the Tibetan term for the
most effective transformative tool appropriate to a particular moment. Depending
on circumstances, it may be placid or fierce, gentle or rough - whatever best
fits the situation. Compassion is considered the quintessential skillful means:
together with wisdom, it constitutes the basis of Tibetan Buddhist practice. The
bottom line is thus clear-eyed awareness and a fundamental sense of kindness and
acceptance, applied to oneself and the world with equal generosity.
This is
not just theoretical, conceptual truth: it's the kind of truth that's meant to
be lived. I found the practical implications of these theories fleshed out in
living color during my travels in Tibet in the 1980s. Four years in a row I explored
Western and Central Tibet, using my rudimentary Chinese and Tibetan to hitchhike
rides on the backs of open trucks -- the de facto method of public transportation.
Over and over again, I met people who were both grounded and open-hearted, possessed
of both a bawdy sense of humor and a bedrock spiritual faith that was unwavering
despite forty-plus years of Chinese rule. It would have been impossible to remain
untouched by the stories I heard repeated in calm, matter-of-fact voices: parents
killed, relatives imprisoned, families devastated, one blanket and no food for
the children through the cold Tibetan winter. Nearly everyone I met had a story
to tell, especially about the upheavals of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They
did so matter-of-factly, with little bitterness, but all were quietly adamant
on certain things: they want their country back; they want their own government;
most of all, they want the Dalai Lama to return. "When the Dalai Lama comes
back, I can die happy," my friend Tenzin would say. "If I die before
then . . . I cannot die."
Jolting down the dusty dirt roads with groups
of pilgrims and rowdy Khampa traders, I sensed a spiritual grounding that allowed
them to accept the ongoing flow of life, be it pleasant or painful, in a solid
yet graceful way. When a truck would break down unexpectedly in the literal middle
of nowhere, there was no moaning about the misfortune. People just naturally took
care of what needed to be done: some gathered dried yak dung for cooking fuel,
while others hauled jerrycans of water or set up black yak-wool tents. An emissary
would flag down a passing truck to ride a hundred miles down the dirt road to
obtain the necessary mechanical part, and the rest of us would settle in for a
day, or two, or three, of spirited gambling. There was no sense of impatience,
no complaining - just a remarkable ability to deal with reality as it is, rather
than how they wished it could be, a complete openness to experience that I've
come to identify as the essence and fruit of Dharma practice.
In retrospect,
I can say that this was my first inkling that Buddhism was a practical spiritual
path. If these people, shaped by a profoundly Buddhist culture, managed to live
life so completely, I thought, there might be something to this. I don't mean
to paint an overly idealistic picture here: I also met up with some troubled individuals
along the way. But on the whole I remain convinced that traditional Tibetan society
grows exceptional human beings, people who are wonderfully and simply human. This
striking combination of strength and warmth is personified most famously by the
Dalai Lama, whose charisma radiates from his simple genuineness. You sense that
there is no artifice here, just real human warmth, rooted in a deeper strength
that is grounded in the transpersonal.
So my introduction to Tibetan Buddhism
began not with the formal theory, but with the end result: the fully developed
humanity, the cheerful strength and practical wisdom that is the natural result
of Buddhist practice. The Buddhist perspective maintains that these qualities
are inherent within all of us, and that the Dharma practices are tools to clear
away the obscurations that block the full and radiant expression of our innately
complete nature.
Wisdom and compassion are thus matters of practical application,
not just concepts. Presence-centered psychotherapy applies these principles of
wisdom and compassion to our own internal experience as it is in the moment. Virtually
all of us hold tight knots of holding and rejection embedded within our experience.
With a little observation, it's easy to see how when something unpleasant happens,
we tighten up and reject this unwanted sensation. This kind of response seems
natural -- after all, it's only common sense. Pushing away suffering in order
to attain happiness is a simple equation based on Newtonian physics.
Unfortunately
for us, Newton was wrong. We actually live in a quantum universe where all points
are connected throughout space and time in an invisible web -- and the sooner
our emotional intelligence catches up with this reality, the better. Suffering
and happiness, samsara and nirvana, are not mutually exclusive opposites; rather,
they are as closely linked as the back and front of your hand. Buddhism points
out that it's our attitude towards experience, much more than the experience itself,
which creates pleasure and pain.
By blindly grasping and rejecting, choosing
and pushing away, we slip into a frantic tailspin of hope and fear. Our single-minded
fixation only ends up creating more of the pain it seeks to push away. This tangle
of emotions becomes like a chronically tight knot within our inner selves. In
rejecting our own experience, we reject our own being, and this becomes an ongoing
source of pain, confusion and alienation.
As a Buddhist, I am committed to
the unfolding of awareness in the present moment. As a psychotherapist, I am in
continual awe of the healing that occurs when awareness is brought to our old
wounds, our contractions and rigidities. The awareness I am speaking of here is
not conceptual awareness, of the "my-mother-did-this-to-me-when-I-was-five-years-old-and-I'm-still-screwed-up"
variety. Rather, it's awareness itself, awareness pure and simple, awareness of
the type that is cultivated in meditation. This type of awareness applied in the
therapeutic context is an exceedingly powerful skillful means, because it taps
into what in Buddhism is known as "the spontaneous pure presence of natural
mind."
Postulating the human mind as inherently free and flawless is
a radical statement, especially from the disease-oriented medical perspective
of mainstream psychology. Our psyches, however, are not merely offshoots of our
bodies; nor are they mechanistic pieces of equipment. Our culture errs in describing
the personality exclusively through biology and brain chemistry, and errs further
in overemphasizing chemical means of resolution for psychic pain. I'm not denying
the blessings of psychopharmacology: rather, I'm saying that mainstream psychology
desperately needs an enhanced spiritual awareness to open up its claustrophobically
narrow view of the human soul.
The truth is that awareness itself is healing.
In recognising the truth of our own experiences as they exist in the moment, they
are released. The Dzogchen term for this is "natural self-liberation."
Recognising the essential nature of mind, our holding is naturally released, just
as the snake uncoils itself out of a knot, just as a word traced on the surface
of water disappears in the very moment it is written.
Mindfulness practice as embodied in meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness towards our own experience. It involves the radical practice of just being, without trying to do anything about how we are. To simply be with our own experience on a moment-by-moment basis and to treat it with a friendly attitude - this is the essence of mindfulness. It is a discipline, a skill, an art, a game, an endlessly fascinating pursuit with the potential to pervade every moment of life, awake and asleep.
Radical awareness
The
simplest proposition is also the most radical: that our basic nature is open space
infused with pure awareness. Beyond all our constructs and beneath all our holding,
each of us is no more and no less than spacious awareness - the capacity to know,
pure and simple. This "empty essence fused with luminous knowing" is
our absolute true nature, shared by all sentient beings.
Buddhist psychology
is rooted in this fundamental capacity for consciousness, this pure potential
inherent in all beings. When we recognise this seed of awareness at our core,
we realise that there's no need to embroider upon the fundamentally pure qualities
within us. It's not a question of self-improvement, of somehow making ourselves
into a "good person." Rather, it's simply a matter of releasing the
temporary obscurations that block us from manifesting our pure nature. Simple
but profound, this shift in attitude changes everything. We stop struggling with
our own nature, trying to make ourselves into something that we are not. We stop
identifying with the steady flow of conceptual thought that normally fills our
mind, and start identifying with our essence. Rather than constantly trying to
actualise ourselves, we wake up to our own actuality.
For most of us, this
is not an overnight event, but the gradual result of study, investigation, and
meditation practice, preferably under the guidance of an accomplished spiritual
teacher. In the Dzogchen tradition, the nature of mind is directly "pointed
out" to qualified students by a master who transmits his or her own realisation
in that moment. Even if we lack the opportunity to receive such teachings, simply
allowing for the mere possibility of enlightened essence can be psychologically
liberating. The need to try hard, to improve the self, to struggle for perfection,
is so deeply ingrained in the way we treat ourselves. Natural perfection is a
radical doctrine, subversive in its simplicity.
A traditional Buddhist metaphor
compares our essential nature to the sky, and the disturbing emotions we experience
to clouds. In truth, the sky is always there behind the clouds, whether or not
we see it -- the sky, in fact, accommodates the clouds, without being the least
bit disturbed by them. Our mind is the same, in its capacity to remain fundamentally
pure as it accommodates these endlessly arising emotions and thoughts. The Tibetan
yogi Milarepa said a thousand years ago:
In the gap between two thoughts
Thought-free
wakefulness manifests unceasingly.
When this understanding is applied to our
own inner being, we begin to relate to our problems from the spacious awareness
that is our basic nature. We learn to embrace the ongoing process of life with
a degree of calmness and acceptance. Problems become somewhat less tight knots
to be struggled with, and somewhat more intriguing phenomena arising within our
field of awareness. This is not to say that we pretend to like painful situations,
or that we paste a smiley face over our very real pain. Rather, through patient
practice, we somehow find we can allow space for our dislike, our suffering, and
our confusion - our actual and own experience.
And here is the incredibly
hard part - we start to drop our addiction to knowing, to analysing, to working
things out in our heads. Resting in mindfulness shows how all of these strategies
are simply masquerades for the fundamental need to be in control. It's not that
conceptual thinking is bad, so much as it is irrelevant. It clutters our innate
spaciousness, chopping up our intrinsic awareness into little bits.
All too
often, we simply get in our own way. We ornament our innate awareness with concepts,
and soon these concepts become a confining prison - a prison we forget we ourselves
created. Thinking is a vital skill, intelligence a saving grace. But used without
attention to what the heart or the body or one's larger awareness says about the
truth of a situation, cerebral intelligence becomes unskillful means.
Letting
go of concepts doesn't mean we drop our ability to discern. Far from it! Freed
from the fixation of judgment, we find ourselves keener observers, able to recognise
the more nuanced aspects of reality and to respond to circumstances in a more
flexible way. Discernment doesn't require us to solidify our experience by holding
onto concepts about something. We can let go of concepts and take in our experience
in a direct, fresh way: the blue vase on the windowsill, the squish of rain-soaked
leaves underfoot, the cap left off the toothpaste (again - and here a concept
interjects itself).
Relinquishing judgment also doesn't mean we passively
accept everything that comes our way. We can still hate the experience of the
capless and crusty toothpaste tube created by our thoughtless partner. We can
be fully aware of our aversion, and consciously decide how we are going to respond
to the situation, rather than automatically reacting to it. Cultivating awareness
doesn't mean we turn into a bowl of mush. It does mean we have more tools at our
disposal. We are fine-tuning our perceptions, a process which can be painful,
but which over the course of time results in a more accurate experience of reality.
In the state of choiceless awareness that is mindfulness, we find the ability
to just let things be, regardless of our like or dislike of the situation. This
discovery can be remarkably liberating. Over time, it opens us up to a larger
sense of trust. We are cultivating the ability to see through all the busy clutter
of our lives to the core: to the bottom-line truth that our essential nature is
awareness, pure and simple, and that this pure and simple awareness has its own
healing energy, its own path and power.
Here's another popular misconception:
that mindfulness practice means detaching from one's feelings. Again, this is
far from the truth. If anything, we find ourselves feeling more intensely, once
we've scraped away the overlay of neurotic angst that formerly filtered our experiences.
Feelings most definitely arise within a state of mindfulness, as strong and clear
as ever. And they pass away, just as they always have. The goal here is not detachment,
but a full and free experiencing of whatever arises in the moment, unobstructed
by conceptual judgment. So often we hold ourselves back from our own experience,
subtly freezing it into constructs and thoughts. This pulling back from the flow
of life is itself the essence of suffering.
In my own life, it's an ongoing
process - I sometimes want to say "struggle" - to apply this knowledge
to my everyday experience. Although I'm privileged to witness the transformative
power of awareness first-hand as a psychotherapist, this doesn't mean I always
apply it gracefully to myself. But I do have the conviction, based on personal
experience, that the practices of mindfulness and compassion have an enormous
power to relieve suffering and generate healing.
Much of this I learned the
hard way. My husband and I awoke on a rainy March morning in 1993 to find our
15-month-old son dead in his crib, victim of an illness that should not have been
fatal, but was. The shock, the horror, the enormous guilt that I immediately locked
away because it was too much to bear - it was all too much to bear. The event
shattered my defenses utterly. That night, I laid down in a haze of grief and
exhaustion and sensed a very fine pain at the core of my heart, like a straw had
been inserted in a subtle channel deep inside. Heartbreak, it seems, is a literal
experience.
I had to get through the days and weeks and months that followed;
I had to somehow survive. Killing myself to escape the pain was not an option,
though I certainly entertained the notion. But we had a four-year-old daughter
to take care of, and I had an intuition that physical death would not resolve
the situation; that I would wake up on the other side and find my disembodied
grief a hundred times worse. I had to take care of myself in a way that I'd never
done before. I had to be present for my own experience and somehow contain it
without trying to control it, because my control mechanisms had been blown to
bits.
I dragged a cushion into Nick's room, and sat there every day with my
grief, anger, and pain. Whenever I felt the waves coming up inside, I'd sit and
be with my feelings with a ferocious intensity. Somehow the awareness took off
some of the pressure. It let the waves flow in their own rhythm, battering the
shore, then receding for a few hours. I learned that if I could just be present
for whatever emotions arose, if I could just embrace them as fully and completely
as possible, the storm would pass more easily.
I began to practice tonglen,
the Tibetan meditation on 'sending and receiving,' in which you imagine yourself
taking in the suffering of others with every inhalation, and with every exhalation
send them all your happiness, all your joy, all your strength. This worked like
nothing else did to ease my own suffering. In some mysterious alchemical fashion,
the pain in my heart melted when I connected with the pain of others. I didn't
stop to think why this might be so, or how it worked. I simply sat and took in
more, grateful for even a few breaths of relief.
Grief took away my life energy
in the way that serious illness does. Those first few months, I'd wake in the
morning to find my body lying peacefully in bed -- then remember what had happened,
and feel the physical weight of irreversible loss descend upon me like a ton of
bricks. In the middle of the tempest, though, I found a sort of peace. Seated
in the eye of the hurricane, emotional currents swirling all around, I experienced
a steady sense of grounded presence that alone helped me bear the grief. It became
clear that this awareness was not going to run away, though I at times might choose
to. It was always present, spacious and accommodating, despite the awful turbulence
of my emotions. It was as if uniting with the seed impetus of those emotions allowed
them to unfold as they would, unencumbered by the added pain of resistance. It
was an awareness that was larger than thought, larger than emotion, an awareness
that preceded and contained both of these.
Mindfulness:
The practice of awareness
Staying with our own experience as it unfolds moment
to moment can be the hardest thing we'll ever do. Painful feelings are avoided
or repressed for good reason: they hurt. Facing the emotional traumas embedded
in the body requires intention and a great deal of courage -- the kind of courage
that doesn't deny the presence of fear, but rather acknowledges the fear and does
it anyway, with consideration and kindness for one's own pain. Spiritual practice
is where the "Big No" -- our basic rejection of experience -- meets
the "Big Yes" -- our compassionate awareness.
It can take only a
few weeks of self-investigation to reveal the suffering that arises when we freeze
and contract around our own pain - a reaction which creates a whole new layer
of suffering on top of the original pain. One could say it's the essence of neurosis,
the places where we block ourselves from letting in life.
Presence-centered
psychotherapy works with these frozen feelings, thawing them into fluidity through
the patient heat of our attention. So often we run away from our own experience.
We avoid being present because we are so unhappy. Yet we only make ourselves unhappier
through clinging to stories and concepts that further alienate us from what is
going on in the moment. The key, the turn-around moment, is in just giving our
own experience the space to exist: in paying attention to it and actually experiencing
it rather than compressing or contracting or running away, rather than attacking
or rejecting or judging it, rather than drugging ourselves numb against it or
exaggerating our reaction into hysteria. Each of us has a virtuoso repertoire
of negative responses to undesirable experiences. And life provides us with endless
opportunities to realise that ultimately, none of them work.
Our fear, our
disbelief, says, "What's the point?" It believes that paying attention
to painful things only leads to more pain. Obsessing or fixating on painful matters
certainly does creates more pain -- but open awareness is a different matter entirely.
It's the difference between being squeezed in a closed fist and resting lightly
on an open palm. Held in the open palm of awareness, painful experience has a
chance to decompress and expand, to gentle itself into its own true nature. So
much of the pain we experience is in the contraction, rather than the original
wound.
The key, again, is asking the simple question: "What's going on
right now? What am I experiencing in this moment?" Turning inside, we check
out our experience at the inner level of felt bodily sensation, not the cerebral
level of what the head says, yammering away. To be mindful is to be fully present
in the moment, relinquishing the urge to control our experience. Just being aware,
just noticing: the ache in my right shoulder, the breath going in, the hiss of
a car moving down the rain-slicked street, a catch in my throat, a flutter of
fear, a tightening in the lower back. Underlying this never-ending process, we
subtly notice that which notices. Just noticing, just being aware.
The essence
of this process is direct experience: noting what arises, and staying with it
as it unfolds. Slowly we discover that it's our resistance to our own experience
that makes certain situations so painful, more than the experience itself. Even
overwhelming emotions like grief can expand and blossom in the moment-by-moment
attention to what is happening, and the commitment to stay with the experience
for just one more breath. We learn to open to the actual quality of the feeling,
the pure painfulness of the pain, rather than trying to control it or reject it.
And it is in this precise attention to detail, this exquisitely scrupulous awareness
of exactly what is happening, that the knot unties in space. We learn to ride
the waves of emotion, to move with them rather than struggle against them. Emotions
are inevitable; they exist to the point of enlightenment and no doubt beyond.
Spiritual practice in the Dzogchen tradition does not involve suppressing our
emotions or overcoming them, but simply allowing them to flow freely through us,
without grasping. The same applies to psychological health.
When we practice
mindfulness, we are cultivating a deliberate vulnerability. As Ron Kurtz, the
founder of Hakomi, succinctly sums up: "Mindfulness is undefended consciousness."
It is an exquisitely poignant process of dismantling our armor, our expectations,
our efforts to control; a bittersweet unfolding of the pleasure and pain inherent
in every moment. And this fuels the therapeutic process with some very high-octane
energy. When we open up to our own inner process, we open the gates of self-exploration
and new discovery.
Psychologist Eugene Gendlin has found that the single determining
factor in a therapy's effectiveness is how well a client is able to stay with
his or her own experience. The type of therapy practiced, the duration of the
work, even the particular therapist, did not matter nearly as much as this basic
ability to simply experience what one is experiencing. And this ability, Gendlin
notes, is seldom taught in therapy (though he developed his Focusing technique
around this very point). It seems that the client walks in the door either with
it or without it, and flails away valiantly regardless. By bringing aspects of
mindfulness meditation into the therapeutic process, we tap into the potential
to go beyond superficial cognitive-behavioral solutions to the deepest roots of
body, mind, and psyche.
Applied
Compassion
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche uses the term "fundamental sanity"
to describe the solid and clear ground of our basic nature, our birthright as
human beings. Dharma practice is meant to bring us back to this place of our original
essence. It seems to me that we Westerners have developed a particularly imaginative
repertoire of ways to cut ourselves off from this basic state. Apart from our
superb collection of distractions, we can choose from addictions, denial, busyness,
workaholism, rationalisation . . . the list of accredited, socially approved ways
to flee our ourselves goes on and on.
One pattern I see quite often is how
we give absolute credence to the ghost in the machine, the neurotic soundtrack
that accompanies our lives, unleashing its negative commentary as our life unfolds.
This superficial narrative cuts us off from our own complexity and depth. We believe
the voices in our head as they unreel in a devastating commentary on our own self:
"You're too this, too that. Too shy. Too fat. Too needy. Too ugly. Too stupid.
You never do that. Screwed up again, didn't you? Who do you think you are? Why
bother, it's always going to be like this." And on and on, endlessly.
It's difficult to argue with these voices, because they are primed for debate.
Apply the clarity of aware emptiness to this scenario, however, and gradually
it starts to dissolve. Embrace it with compassion for the suffering involved,
and it melts like the Wicked Witch. Rejection can't hold a candle to compassion.
Awareness or mindfulness on its own, however clear it may be, is not enough to
support deep change. Love, in the sense of basic warmth and compassion towards
ourselves and our own experience, is also necessary. These twin qualities, self-awareness
and basic kindness, are inseparable. In the Tibetan tradition they are called
wisdom and compassion, or "warmth and wakefulness," as Trungpa Rinpoche
phrased it. Compassion is said to be an intrinsic quality of the nature of mind,
radiating automatically and effortlessly from the empty, aware essence that is
our basic nature.
Compassion plays a major role in psychotherapy as well,
though it isn't a subject taught in schools or discussed in seminars. Emotional
healing requires a warm, receptive, attentive listener; someone who is willing
to take in our own experience and feel it fully. The power of this "suffering
with" - the root origin of the word "com-passion" -- cannot be
overestimated. It extends far beyond the unburdening we experience when we talk
about our problems with a sympathetic friend. That kind of conversation often
concludes with a bit of well-meaning advice or an attempt to cheer us up. That
is different than exploring our difficulties in the presence of another who is
open, relaxed, and aware; someone who is willing to completely be with us without
having to change our situation in any way. In some mysterious way, being fully
seen and understood by another, even if that understanding is entirely wordless,
can support us in understanding ourselves.
It's as if awareness is contagious.
By being fully present for our difficult feelings, yet not needing to manipulate
reality in any way, the other models self-compassion. This unconditional loving
presence provides the context for deep emotional healing. It is profound, fundamental,
open-handed love, with no expectations and no judgment. Compassion provides non-egocentric
nourishment. It's the kind of unconditional positive regard we all need as children,
yet we don't always get. However late it comes, it is always a most welcome experience.
It creates the space in which we can unfold ourselves and grow.
Loving kindness
applied to ourselves helps us fully experience our own feelings, however negative
or difficult they might be. Breathing in, we embrace our pain with compassion.
Breathing out, we stay with our present experience as it unfolds in the moment.
It's that simple. Over time, this process of compassionate attention heals our
restless need to struggle with reality, to strive for something better or different
or more. Eventually, it heals our separation from our own selves. To be able to
stay with our own experience and allow it to be just as it is - this is the practice
of awareness and compassion combined. Presence-centered psychotherapy uses these
as tools for awakening and deepening. Through cultivating awareness, we create
a container for our experience. Through cultivating compassion, we open this vessel
to the world.
Awareness and compassion are thus two key elements of spiritually
oriented psychotherapy - skillful means for the heart and soul. Unlike so many
external goals we strive for, they are intrinsic to our nature. Unlike so many
pop psych fads, they are grounded in millennia of actual practice. They manifest
as regularly, as inevitably, and as naturally as the breath itself.
Presence-centered
psychotherapy blends the wisdom of meditation and psychology. Psychotherapy uses
the presence and awareness of the other - the therapist - to hone self-awareness.
In meditation practice, we refine the application of awareness on our own. Quietly
seated by ourselves, we become aware of the faintest aspect of the breath, the
subtlest movement of the mind. Therapy happens once or twice a week: the rest
of the time, you might reflect on the hour and muse a bit, letting the resulting
awareness percolate through your system. Meditation can happen any time, any place,
but again, the process of letting the resulting awareness filter through the body/mind
is as important as the practice itself. The precise methodologies differ, but
the goal is the same: to immerse ourselves fully in the flow of life by embracing
our awareness of our own experience.