The Trauma of Everyday Life

had people open to the ringing of their cell phones, I was trying to introduce them to his method. By listening meditatively, we were changing the way we listen, pulling ourselves out of our usual orientation to the world based on our likes and dislikes. Rather than trying to figure out what was going on around us, resisting the unpleasant noises and gravitating toward the mellifluous ones, we were listening in a simpler and more open manner. We had to find and establish another point of reference to listen in this way, one that was outside the ego’s usual territory of control. You might say we were simply listening, but it was actually more complex than that. While listening, we were also aware of ourselves listening, and at the same time we were conscious of what the listening evoked within. Unhooked from our usual preoccupations, we were listening from a neutral place. For the young woman whose father had just died, this exercise, of listening in another way, turned out to be healing.
    In the practice of mindfulness, the ego’s usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one’s center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment. As therapists who have worked with dissociation can testify, the self’s primary preoccupation in response to trauma is to protect itself from being overwhelmed or hurt. The effort to maintain cohesion, to avoid fragmentation and distress, is centered in the thinking mind. The ego takes charge, banishes that which is threatening, and carries on in a limited, reduced, or constrained state. The self we ordinarily identify with, the ego, is the caretaker trying to maintain control. Other aspects of the self, including the unbearable feelings evoked by one’s traumas, are relegated to the periphery, often outside conscious awareness. We think of this coping mechanism as a rational process—it certainly employs the machinery of rational thought—but therapists have come to agree with the Buddha that the overinsistence on self-control is severely limiting and ultimately irrational because of the way it excludes feeling.
    In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from there. The breath, or sound, becomes the central object of focus, as opposed to thought. Thinking becomes one more thing to observe in the field of awareness but is robbed of its preeminent position. Do not grasp after the pleasant or push away the unpleasant, but give equal attention to everything there is to observe, taught the Buddha. This is difficult at first but becomes remarkably easy once one gets the hang of it. One learns first to bring one’s attention to the neutral object and then to relax into a state of choiceless awareness rather than always trying to maintain control. As the ego’s position is weakened, waking life takes on aspects of dream life to the extent that new surprises keep unexpectedly emerging. In the cell-phone meditation, the surprise for the woman I have described was her father’s ringtone, redolent with personal meaning. But there are many other such surprises.
    There is no single word for meditation in the original language of Buddhism. The closest is one that translates as “mental development.” Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, is a means of investigating the mind by bringing the entire range of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations into awareness. This not only makes what we would today call “the unconscious” conscious but also makes the conscious more conscious. There were already various forms of meditation widely practiced in the Buddha’s day, but they were all techniques that solely emphasized concentration. The Buddha, before his awakening, mastered each of them but still felt uneasy. It was fine to rest the mind on a single object: a sound (like a mantra), an image (like a candle flame), a feeling (like love or compassion), or an idea. This gave strength to the mind, a feeling of stability, of peace and tranquility, a sense of what Freud, knowing just a little about Eastern philosophy, came to call the “oceanic feeling.” While this could be relaxing, it did not free the mind from the traumas that had conditioned it. The Buddha was