The Trauma of Everyday Life

Zen master’s response, his innocent question stopping her in her tracks. “How does he even know that revolve means move?” she remembers asking herself.
    Alexa had successfully created a world for her son of which he
was
the center—her exasperated comment only affirmed how productive she had been at fostering this illusion. Her son had what therapists call a healthy attachment to his mother; he was able to take her support entirely for granted; she had given him the attunement and responsiveness necessary to ward off most developmental trauma. She had wanted him to feel like he was the center of the world, and she had succeeded, and she was right to have done so. As today’s therapists conceive of it, her first major task as a mother was mostly done. The second task, of gradually easing her child into “disillusionment,” of failing him just enough that he could begin to know her as a separate person and relate to her empathically, could only be undertaken if and when the first mission was accomplished successfully.
    Winnicott described this double mission of the mother with his usual poetic intensity:
The mother, at the beginning, by an almost 100 per cent adaptation affords the infant the opportunity for the
illusion
that her breast is part of the infant. It is, as it were, under the baby’s magical control. The same can be said in terms of infant care in general, in the quiet times between excitements. Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience. The mother’s eventual task is gradually to disillusion the infant, but she has no hope of success unless at first she has been able to give sufficient opportunity for illusion. 13

    It was my guess that the unexpected friction between Alexa and her son heralded the beginning of a disillusioning process that would likely proceed as smoothly as the first several years had gone. Her son’s unexpected reply, however, tapped into another kind of truth, one closer to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. The world, despite our mothers’ best attempts to shield us,
does
move: incessantly, unpredictably, and without regard for our feelings. As human beings, raised, if we are lucky, to be the centers of our own little worlds, we are continually taken aback by this reality, even if we have been successfully cared for by our good-enough parents. The Buddha, whose meditations resurrect the holding environment and auxiliary ego-function of the good-enough mother, also served as parent in this important way. As he made clear in the Fire Sermon, he did not shrink from disillusioning people who still harbored the impression that the world revolved around them.
    It is in this way that the Buddha’s teachings speak directly to the trauma of everyday life. The quality of bare attention, the nonjudgmental and nonreactive observation that parallels the noninterfering attention of the good-enough mother, is just the first step of the Buddha’s approach. As everyone knows, the role of the mother changes as the child grows. While the basic stance persists, it also matures along with the child. At the right time, the good-enough mother cannot help but begin to disillusion her child. Like Alexa, she just can’t take it anymore. She becomes able to use her anger at her child, and her child’s aggression, to help her child grow. In a similar manner, the observational neutrality of the meditative mind is not neutral when it comes to the ego. Selfishness, conceit, pride, jealousy, and envy are observed without surprise, but they are not indulged. Instead, much as a mother might gently tease a child who is excessively demanding of his or her own way, the meditative mind delights in frustrating the clamoring ego’s insistent demands. This, too, is a therapeutic function, one the Buddha carefully cultivated in all of his teachings.
    I once had the chance to speak with a renowned Thai forest master named Ajahn Chah directly about all this. It was more than thirty years ago, but I remember his words as if it were yesterday. I was traveling in Asia with some of my first American Buddhist teachers and we had made our way to Ajahn Chah’s monastery on the Lao border of Thailand. Ajahn Chah met with us after we shared the monastery lunch. We asked him to explain the Buddhist view. What had he learned from his years of contemplation and study? What could we bring back to share with the West? His answer touched my own sense of residual trauma, my own fear of everything burning.
    Before saying a word,