The Trauma of Everyday Life

approach that stayed relentlessly in the present. And he affirmed, in his First Noble Truth, that some residual feelings of deficiency are inevitable, no matter how good the parenting.
    There is a beautiful example of what I take to be the Buddha’s approach in a recent book about the poet Allen Ginsberg’s first journey to India in 1961. Called
A Blue Hand
, Deborah Baker’s work chronicles Ginsberg’s early explorations of spiritual India, undertaken when he was in his early thirties. Ginsberg and several friends, including his longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky, spent their time in the company of whatever yogis, lamas, sadhus, charlatans, and saints they could find. In many ways, they were intent on uncovering what was left of the wild spiritual wilderness in which the Buddha wandered before his awakening. In one particularly poignant vignette toward the end of his odyssey, after a bitter fight with Orlovsky, Ginsberg had an encounter with a holy man named Devraha Baba in Benares, not far from where the Buddha gave his first teachings of the Four Noble Truths. A matted-haired, Shiva-worshipping ascetic whose only possessions were a deerskin rug, a wooden pot, a jute mat, and wooden sandals, Devraha Baba was famous for his irascibility. For example, when Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, came to see him, sitting on a platform in the water on the far side of the Ganges River, he pointed the bottoms of his feet at her in the Indian gesture of contempt and refused to talk with her. But Ginsberg was given
darshan
, a chance to sit and talk with the Baba, although the exchange was interrupted when Devraha Baba, spotting Orlovsky in the distance, asked for him to come join their conversation. When Orlovsky refused, Devraha dismissed Ginsberg, telling him to come back when his friend was ready to join him. Ginsberg stayed put, however, and after some time of reflection in which he admitted to himself, perhaps for the first time, how he and Orlovsky had grown apart, he confessed his loneliness to Devraha Baba. Baker completes the story as follows:
On his tiny platform suspended over the rushing waters of the Ganges, Devraha Baba looked at Allen. He tilted his head from side to side and sucked his teeth.
“Oh!” he exclaimed. And with a tenderness that struck deep at Allen’s heart, he said softly: “How wounded, how wounded.” 10

    Devraha’s intervention, subtle though it was, captures the essence of the Buddha’s approach to developmental trauma. In his gentle, caring, but unsparing and unsentimental way, the Baba’s retort helped bring Ginsberg’s self-identification as a wounded soul into awareness. He focused all of his light on Ginsberg’s darkest spot. The wounded nature of Ginsberg’s self, originating perhaps in the childhood loss of his mother to psychosis but fed by the lability of his relationship with Orlovsky, may have been fundamental to Ginsberg’s identity, but it was not something he had yet completely admitted to. Of note is the Baba’s refusal to try to do anything about Ginsberg’s plight. He did not counsel Ginsberg about his true nature, he did not urge him to meditate the feelings away, nor did he try to fill the emptiness of Ginsberg’s soul. He simply noted the truth compassionately. To progress on the spiritual path, Ginsberg, who some years later embraced Buddhism, had to start where he was.
    The observational posture that Buddhist psychology counsels is sometimes called bare attention. Its nakedness refers to the absence of reactivity in its response, to its pure and unadorned relatedness. Bare attention has been defined as the “clear and single-minded awareness of what happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception.” 11 In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, this is sometimes evoked through the setting up of what is called a spy consciousness in the corner of the mind, watching or feeling everything that unfolds in the theater of the mind and body. Sometimes called mindfulness, it is described using metaphors ranging from climbing a tall water tower to look down from above to acting like a surgeon’s probe, going deep into the afflicted area. This combination of detachment and engagement is characteristic of the attentional stance that is recommended. Bare attention also has a quality of renunciation to it. It asks us to defer our usual reactions in the service of something less egocentric; the instructions are not to cling to what is