The Trauma of Everyday Life

Rinpoche, once asked him, “in his broken, heavily accented English,” how Western psychology treats nervousness.
    “Why do you ask?” Safran responded.
    “Well,” he replied, “I’ve always been a nervous person. Even when I was a little boy I was nervous, and I still am. Especially when I have to talk to large groups of people or to people I don’t know, I get nervous.”
    It is best to let the rest of the story come directly from Dr. Safran:
As was often the case with the questions that Karma Thinley asked me, I found myself drawing a complete blank. Part of it was the difficulty of trying to find the words to explain something to somebody whose grasp of English was limited, but there was another more important factor. On the face of it this was a simple question. But Karma Thinley was a highly respected lama, now in his sixties, who had spent years mastering the most sophisticated Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques. Those who knew Karma Thinley considered him to be an enlightened being. In the West psychotherapists are increasingly turning to Buddhist meditation as a valuable treatment for a variety of problems including anxiety. Who was I to tell him how to deal with anxiety? And how was it possible that Karma Thinley, with all of his experience meditating could still be troubled by such everyday concerns? How could an enlightened person be socially anxious? Was he really enlightened? What does it mean to be enlightened? My head swirled with all of these inchoate questions, and for a moment my mind stopped. I felt a sense of warmth coming from Karma Thinley and I felt warmly towards him. I felt young, soft, open and uncertain about everything I knew. 16

    When I first read this passage, I called Safran on the phone, even though we did not really know each other. I thought it was a beautiful description of the state of mind that Buddhism encourages. I liked the way the lama used his social anxiety to topple Safran’s expectations of him, and I appreciated the deeper message. Awakening does not mean an end to difficulty; it means a change in the way those difficulties are met. “Young, soft, open and uncertain about everything I knew.” There was a recovery inherent in the passage, a recovery of what Michael Eigen had called the unknown boundless presence at the core of aloneness, of what Duchamp christened the aesthetic echo, of what the Buddha found in his dreams. It is not only trauma that is lodged in implicit memory: The intrinsic relational knowing at the heart of the infant-caregiver bond is hidden there too. The Buddha, in his wakefulness, brought it out of the shadows and let it fill his being. As rejuvenating as this was, in some sense the Buddha was just rediscovering the wheel. Parents the world over have been clued in to their own version of the Buddha’s wisdom for ages. “It is an important part of what a mother does,” wrote Winnicott in a description of how she handles an infant’s rage at the discovery that she is not completely under his control, “to be the first person to take the baby through this first version of the many that will be encountered, of attack that is survived. This is the right moment in the child’s development, because of the child’s relative feebleness, so that destruction can fairly easily be survived.” 17 Like the Buddha, Winnicott knew that trauma was inevitable, even for infants. A mother’s ability to help her baby through it with kindness and care is what the Buddha remembered.
    Safran told me he was grateful for my call. His publisher, a Buddhist press, had urged him to leave this passage out of the book. Like the Buddha in the immediate aftermath of his awakening when he despaired of anyone understanding him, the publisher felt it would be too confusing for the readers.

12
    A Relational Home

    C lear-eyed, compassionate, and awake, the Buddha was a realist. With no dust obscuring his vision, he was able to sum up the entire human predicament in a single word. “
Dukkha
!” he exclaimed in his First Noble Truth as he held to his vow to speak the beneficial truth even if it was disagreeable. Suffering! Its reality permeates our lives, shadowing the good times and insinuating itself into everything. Trauma is a basic fact of life, according to the Buddha. It is not just an occasional thing that happens only to some people; it is there all the time. Things are always slipping away. Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and