The Trauma of Everyday Life

mine.
    Sharon’s experience on her retreat presented her with a dilemma, one that was highlighted by the silence of the environment and her wish to have her teacher’s approval. The self she was attached to, the person she thought she should be, and the image she had of herself did not encompass losing control of her emotions in this way. She resisted her feelings and downplayed them in her interviews.
    When asked repeatedly what was happening in her meditations, she finally indicated that there was a
little
crying going on. “Are you crying a lot?” the Burmese master questioned her. “Not so much,” she said, putting a brave face on. “When you cry in meditation,” he responded, suddenly addressing her very personally, “you should cry with your whole heart.”
    The Burmese teacher’s conversation with Sharon goes to the heart of the Buddha’s understanding. The balance of mindfulness between relaxation and investigation allows us to enter into emotional experience in a full way while simultaneously offering us distance from it. This willingness to embrace disquiet, to “hold” it in meditative embrace, to give it life rather than abort it, is what turns out to be palliative. There is a secret agenda here, one that has its roots in the Buddha’s own life history and one that the Burmese master undoubtedly was aware of when he gave Sharon his advice. The ego can easily trump its own goals. The effort that goes into protecting ourselves from uncomfortable feelings can have untoward consequences. Shutting down one kind of feeling inevitably shuts down all of them. In protecting ourselves from the unbearable affect of trauma, we also close ourselves off from love, joy, and empathy. Our humanity resides in our feelings, and we reclaim our humanity when we direct our curiosity at that which we would prefer to avoid. This was something the Buddha unexpectedly discovered for himself six years after replicating his own trauma and abandoning his wife and newborn child in what has become known as his “going forth.”
    When the Burmese master encouraged Sharon to cry with her whole heart, he was inviting her
into
her sadness, suggesting that she explore it with the curiosity that mindfulness fosters. In trying to keep it at bay, she was unknowingly giving it power over her, making it “really real” in the effort to diminish it and make it “really” unreal. Her teacher was trying to help her heal a split she had created: her ego on one side and her sorrow on the other. He understood that, in crying “with her whole heart,” Sharon could recover not just her emotional pain but her emotional presence. This was his secret agenda: to undermine the ego’s need to protect itself from painful affect and thereby restore its emotional foundation. Mindfulness dropped Sharon into the space between her ego and her unwanted emotion; it positioned her within the split she had made for herself and allowed her to look around. Her teacher, with the wisdom born of similar experience, gave her the key to rapprochement, the means to overcome her self-denigration, and the chance to be at one with herself. It wasn’t just self-observation, and it wasn’t only surrendering into the feeling. In asking her to bring those qualities together, to cry with her whole heart, the Burmese teacher was also showing her something she did not know about her mind. It could use her pain for its own development.

7
    Going Forth

    W hile the use of emotional experience to develop the mind became the keystone of the Buddha’s psychology, this was not something he grasped right away. He had his own journey of discovery, one that has been memorialized in the stories of his enlightenment told over the centuries. His process was an interesting one. It began with a dramatic replication of the trauma he underwent when his mother passed away. This time, it was the Buddha who left abruptly. Just after the birth of his first child, he abandoned his wife and family to seek spiritual sustenance in the wilds of the Indian forests. His mind-set at the time of his “great departure” was radically different from where he ended up. It was much closer to Sharon’s tendency to distance herself from her sorrow or to my own dissociation from my anxiety than to the Burmese master’s understanding of the relationship of suffering to grace.
    It took the Buddha a long time to figure things out. In his early life, as we have seen, he was clearly indulged.