The Trauma of Everyday Life

feels like an impossible situation. The Buddha stressed the burning nature of the world in order to show his listeners what they were afraid of. By placing their spiritual aspirations outside themselves they were shoring up their egocentric defenses. Only by looking into the traumas they were made of could they find release.
    He continued to use this imagery when describing his awakening. “” (in Pali) means “going out.” The word is derived from the Sanskrit root
va-
, meaning “to blow,” and the prefix
nir
, meaning “cease to burn” or “go out” (like a flame). 5 But the verb is intransitive and—this is important—it means that there is no agent doing the blowing, no
one
who causes the flame to go out. “” means “going out”: It just happens when conditions are right; no one makes it happen. The fires of trauma—of greed, hatred, and delusion and of birth, aging, and death—are self-liberating. They blow out when conditions in the mind are right. The first step, as the Buddha described in the Fire Sermon, is to deal with the fear we harbor about the traumatic nature of things. This fear leads us either to ignore the flames we are made of or to hope that, through some magic, it might be possible to get rid of them altogether. But the flames can go out only when we stop pretending they are not there.
    As moving as this aspect of the Fire Sermon may be, this is not the end of the Buddha’s use of the metaphor. It is the so-called negative view of nirvana but not the only way of describing it. The positive view points to the underlying nature of reality. It tends to imply, erroneously, that nirvana is a place or a state to be achieved, something apart from the everyday world. Nevertheless, at times the Buddha leaned toward this description. He used a different word, one that sounded similar but came from different roots and carried a vastly different meaning (
nirvrti
in Sanskrit
or nibbuti
in Pali).
means “bliss,” 6 and there is a related word meaning “blissful” that describes how the world appears when the wisdom eye is opened. “When the fires of passion, hatred and delusion die out within one,” writes Richard Gombrich, one of Oxford’s foremost scholars of the Buddha’s thought, “one experiences bliss.” 7 Everything is burning, then, not only with impermanence and pain but also with bliss. The vision of one leads to the knowledge of the other.
    In spelling out the connection between acknowledging trauma and experiencing its release, the Buddha was describing something that today’s psychotherapists have also found. I had a serendipitous discussion with a friend of mine recently that encapsulates the connection. My wife and I were having brunch with another couple and talking about what we were all working on. I was trying to describe this particular Buddhist concept, the one I am writing about here: that the blissful nature of reality is part and parcel of the fact that everything is burning. I used the shorthand phrase, common in Buddhist circles but unfamiliar to my friends, “nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana” to describe it. “” is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of rebirth. It means “keeping going” 8 and connotes the everyday world of conventional suffering driven by egocentric preoccupation. The idea is that nirvana is not a separate place that we can get to when we eliminate what we don’t like about ourselves but is already here, hidden behind our likes and dislikes, in the everyday.
    My friend, unfamiliar with my Buddhist lingo, thought I said, “Nirvana is some sorrow, some sorrow is nirvana.” She had a flash of insight and thought she understood what I meant. She had recently started group therapy and discovered that, in her tendency to try to make everything okay for everyone, she was avoiding her own anger. Acknowledging her anger in therapy had opened up a feeling of sadness, a willingness to own the feelings of disappointment or betrayal she sometimes felt, and felt ashamed of. Like my patient who had cried and cried in her car when feeling the fleeting nature of her life but had been moved by the love her sorrow contained, my friend at brunch understood that acknowledging her sorrow opened her in a deeper way than was possible by always trying to be “nice.” There was a freedom in “some sorrow” that gave her a brief hint of nirvana.
    Trauma experts report something similar. “It cannot be overemphasized that injurious childhood