The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Regain your composure!”), she did. An old disciple threw his cloak around her, and she approached the Buddha to tell him of her losses.
    After listening carefully, the Buddha said the following: “, do not be troubled any more. You have come to one who is able to be your shelter and refuge. It is not only today that you have met with calamity and disaster, but throughout this beginningless round of existence, weeping over the loss of sons and others dear to you, you have shed more tears than the waters of the four oceans.” 11
    Calmed by the Buddha’s words,took refuge with the community of mendicants around him. Some time later, while sitting outside and washing her feet, she noticed water trickling down the slope of a hillside. Something about the scene matched her internal experience. “Some streams sank quickly into the ground, others flowed down a little farther, while others flowed all the way to the bottom of the slope,” 12 she saw. Some were like her children, disappearing very quickly on their journey; some were like her husband, living into young adulthood; and some were like her parents, living into old age. But death was common to everyone. “Having washed my feet, I reflected upon the waters,”later wrote. “When I saw the foot water flow from the high ground down the slope, my mind became concentrated like an excellent thoroughbred steed.” 13 Seeing her reality reflected in the natural environment awoke something in. With every reason in the world to feel sorry for herself, and with the pressures of grief compressing her heart, she managed to see deeply into the nature of reality and let go of being shocked, humiliated, and disgusted. She was still sad, still grief stricken, but seeing the streams of water flowing down the hill did for her what the image of the broken glass had done for Ajahn Chah. While of course her family was precious (as was his glass), she was no longer fighting with the nature of things. Her traumas had opened her up rather than closing her off.
    In exploring his own discontent, in searching for the way out of the conundrum of old age, illness, and death, the Buddha stumbled upon a pivotal truth, one that he put into practice with those, like, who had suffered devastating losses, as well as with those who were doing their best to pretend that such losses could never afflict them. “You have come to one who is able to be your shelter and refuge,” he told. Something in their interaction, some way of relating to the tragedy with attunement and responsiveness, communicated itself to her and allowed her to hold her reality. Therapists today have come to similar conclusions. One of them, the New York psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, has described it like this: “If, for example, one’s emotional reality or truth is despair, what is most important is not
that
one may be in despair, but one’s attitudes
toward
one’s despair. Through one’s basic attentiveness one’s despair can declare itself and tell its story. One enters profound dialogue with it. If one stays with this process, an evolution even in the quality of despair may begin to be perceived, since despair is never uniform.” 14
    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