The Trauma of Everyday Life

already belonged. Walking through the New England countryside thinking, I felt light and happy. The dotted lines of the medical school diagram held me in their sway.
    When I left the retreat the next morning, something stayed with me. I drove out early and made it to the highway by ten o’clock in the morning. I started to get hungry and stopped at a highway rest area, not the kind of place I ordinarily would feed myself from. The fast food restaurant there, a vaguely Italian establishment, was virtually empty. There were two local teenagers, a boy and a girl, working behind the counter. I could sense my own internal patterning—I would not normally make much eye contact and would treat them politely but at a great remove. But these were the first people I could talk to after a week of silence. “What can I eat here?” I asked them. “I’m just coming from a retreat and should probably have a vegetarian something.” I smiled at them and looked them straight in the eye and their acned faces shone. They were full of love. “We’ll make you a stir-fry with melted cheese,” one of them said and ten minutes later they brought it over to me on a paper plate. It was delicious. I was grateful. The exchange made all of us happy for the time being. I could tell that, at least for the moment, the retreat had changed something in me. No longer staving off my own traumas, I was much more open. Instead of remaining an obstacle, my mind was allowing me to connect.
    The Buddha did not teach the four foundations as a ladder toward the sublime. That would have reinforced the tendency toward dissociation that his childhood memory encouraged him to give up. He taught them as a means of connecting people to their own humanity, much as I found that morning on the highway. While he did encourage beginning with mindfulness of the body and progressing through feelings to the mind, he also taught that all four foci existed simultaneously and that to privilege any one of them over another reinforced a tendency toward clinging. And the Buddha suggested that the steady application of mindfullness could have a palliative, even a transformational, effect on the way we handle life’s difficulties. In the stories that accompany his teachings he makes this abundantly clear.
    There is one sutra, called the Splinter of Rock Discourse, * which describes this in very physical terms. When I first came upon it, I liked the title right away. What was the Buddha going to say about a splinter of rock? In it, the Buddha is surrounded by seven hundred
devas
(godlike beings who often found it edifying to hang around him) who praise him for his fortitude in enduring the pain of a splinter of rock lodged in his foot. “Not complaining at all,” the sutra reads, the Buddha “endured the pain with mindfulness and comprehension. He lay on his right side on the great robe which was spread on the ground folded fourfold, with one foot slightly further than the other one on which it rested.” I was struck by the image of the Buddha nursing a painful wound. Even though he was a Buddha, he still was subject to pain. While I knew it was not a psychological wound, I could not help imagining that it might be. I read the concluding stanza avidly, curious about what advice he might give to his admiring audience of otherworldly beings.
    “In this world, he who is conceited lacks self-control,” the Buddha said. “He who abandons conceit, who has a tranquil mind, and who has wisdom is free from all existence. A forest-dweller leading a lonely life, if he practices mindfulness, can cross over the planes of existence where death prevails to the other shore.” His well-chosen words certainly seemed to hold out hope for those who suffered emotional as well as physical distress. Someone leading a “lonely life” could cross over from the “planes of existence where death prevails” to another shore. There, lying on his robe on the ground, the Buddha was talking quite personally.
    I closed the book for a moment the first time I read the sutra and paused to reflect. There seemed to be a hidden psychological teaching here. Despite the presence of a splinter of pain, it was possible to abandon conceit and practice mindfulness. I remembered a phrase I had scribbled down a number of times upon hearing it, over the years, from Joseph Goldstein. “It’s not
what
you are experiencing that’s important,” Joseph would often say. “It’s how you
relate
to it that