The Trauma of Everyday Life

accounts of this memory, young Gotama was soon filled with tenderness and settled into the beautiful day, “and a feeling of pure joy rose up unbidden in his heart.” 16 Sitting under the
jambu
, or rose-apple, tree, he was suffused with this feeling, as if he himself were the tree with the sap rising within. It is also said in some later versions that the shadow of the rose-apple tree did not move as the afternoon progressed. The shadow remained still, sheltering the young boy as he sat cross-legged beneath it, 17 marking the moment as a special one.
    However peculiar to be suddenly overtaken by this memory at the height of self-mortification, even stranger was the fact that it made him anxious and afraid. “What is this fear about?” the Buddha wondered to himself, summoning the curiosity that was to become a hallmark of his method. “Maybe I should take a look.”
    In the self-analysis that followed, the Buddha came to the conclusion that the joy that had arisen under the rose-apple tree could well be something unexpectedly essential to the enlightenment he was seeking. Up until the dawning of this memory, he was driven by the belief that he had to purify himself of all feeling and lift himself out of his human embodiment to connect with something greater than himself. The defense of dissociation was, up to this point, unconsciously guiding his approach. In my analysis, he was also driven by his mother’s inability to tolerate the bliss he brought her, an inability he must have internalized and used against himself, fueling his unworthiness. After investigating the memory, which was in some way a rediscovery of that very bliss, the Buddha changed his mind.
    “‘Why am I afraid of such pleasure? It is a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensual desires and unwholesome things.’ Then I thought: ‘I am not afraid of such pleasure,’” the Buddha considered, “‘for it has nothing to do with sensual desires and unwholesome things.’” 18
    This was the Buddha’s critical insight and the pivot point for his entire journey. It was the moment when he began to trust himself, when he stopped being seduced by the appearance of holiness and made himself, in his own words, “a lamp unto himself.” His memory is talked about as the foundation of his Middle Path, the route he found between sensory indulgence on the one hand and self-loathing on the other. It was a new discovery, one that Winnicott was intuitively following in his clinical work, where he was fostering the conditions for self-knowledge by “giving understanding” to that which could not be ordinarily conceived. It was the moment when the Buddha began to chart a novel course for himself, going against the grain of his culture while opening up a new formula for self-investigation. And it was the moment when the defense of dissociation cracked and he arrived at his understanding, in Winnicott’s words, “creatively and with immense joy.”
    The implications of the Buddha’s discovery are relevant even in our time. There are certainly people, even today, who are torturing themselves with self-hatred or self-denial in an attempt to shake themselves free. Anorectic patients, for instance, refuse food with as mighty an intensity as the Buddha mustered, and it is often the case that they are refusing feelings as well, substituting an obsessive need for control for their more volatile emotional lives. There are less obvious variations on this theme. A recent patient of mine, a speechwriter in his late forties with a longstanding but private interest in Eastern spirituality, came to me for guidance in learning about Buddhism. He was surprised when I urged him to relax into his conscious awareness of whatever arose in his mind or body. “I thought the point was to get rid of that awareness,” he said. Like the Buddha before his childhood memory, he wanted an escape from himself, imagining that the release of meditation was akin to a good rest. He was disoriented at first when he found that meditation, more than anything, made him more alert to the natural world. Walking in the forest with his young daughter, he was touched by how alive everything began to seem. The rest he was seeking came as a heightening of awareness, not a diminishment of it.
    The Buddha’s rejection of the extremes speaks to another tendency in our culture. In our flight from the traumatic underpinnings of everyday life, we have become the opposite of the abstemious Buddha.