The Trauma of Everyday Life

matters.” I always found this shocking—each time I heard it, I felt like I was hearing it for the first time. Splinters of pain did not have to be obstacles to awakening; they could become vehicles of it once the “conceit” that attaches to them is abandoned.
    I thought again of the Buddha’s early loss of his mother. Maybe the splinter of rock was not just a splinter of rock. Maybe it was a stand-in for all of the pain we can do nothing about. Whether or not this was actually true, I began to consider it as another example of the place where Buddha and Winnicott overlapped. Developmental trauma leaves us with feelings we cannot control, feelings that rise in the night, feelings that color our minds without our really knowing where they come from. The rush to leave those feelings behind, to pretend they are not there, only leaves us more in their sway. The Buddha was modeling a different approach in this little discourse. He was lying there showing the gods what it meant to be human.
    The Splinter of Rock Discourse helped me with my own anxious feelings. I thought of them as like his splinter. Children who in one way or another lose their connection with their mothers or fathers seem to internalize their loss in some way, not as a thought, or even as a memory, but as a feeling. These “self-feelings,” described by Winnicott in his list that included “falling forever, going to pieces, and losing all vestige of hope in the renewal of contacts,” 4 become the anxious and unstable foundations of the emerging self, the insecurities upon which identity is constructed. “It is a joy to be hidden,” wrote Winnicott of the struggles of such children, “but disaster not to be found.” 5
    Meditation often becomes a vehicle for being found, for bringing the splinters of rock, the internalized remnants of childhood traumas, into conscious awareness. As day-to-day thoughts and preoccupations become less dominant, the lurking feelings that tint the personality begin to emerge. These more primitive and emotionally tinged identifications, the ones Winnicott hailed as primitive agonies, lie beneath the surface of the mind and find ways of expressing themselves when given the chance. Therapists know this and are trained to let their encounters with patients expose the traces of these early experiences. The Buddha’s Splinter of Rock Discourse suggests that something similar can happen in meditation.
    When the Buddha spoke of making unworldly or nonsensual feelings an essential part of the foundation of mindfulness, he was making room for what psychotherapists like Winnicott would describe twenty-five hundred years later. There are feelings we carry in our minds, ones that are not dependent on our immediate sensory surroundings but ones that define who we think we are, that entangle themselves with our sense of personal continuity. Often such feelings come from an early place, so early that they were there before we were, before our selves were formed enough to hold or understand them. These feelings demand attention, even when we are at rest. Meditation, the Buddha discovered, can work with these feeling tones productively.
    I had a chance to speak with Joseph Goldstein about all of this once. We were teaching together in a daylong workshop. I had spoken in the morning, outlining my ideas about the Buddha’s loss of his mother, and he came in the afternoon. Given my questions to him, he spoke about his own experience of the mindfulness of unpleasant feeling. In his years of intensive practice, Joseph said, he had to deal with a lot of fear. Even as he trained himself to be mindful of it, he became aware that he was actually waiting for it to go away. His fear did not seem related to anything he was actually going through in his meditation—yet it filled his mind while he was sitting. It seemed to fit the definition of a nonsensual, unpleasant feeling, and Joseph did not like it, despite his attempts to be with it mindfully. He had a slight prejudice against it because of how unpleasant it was, and he was always hoping, in the back of his mind, even though he knew better, that he could manage to get rid of it. His fear was a recurrent presence, and it was not until he resolved, after years of doing otherwise, to treat it as if it would
never
go away—even if it were to kill him—that it began to actually inform his practice. Rather than pulling away from it just a bit, in a subtle form of dissociation, he learned