The Trauma of Everyday Life

way of awakening to and releasing his own pain, he figured out something that applies across the board. As the Buddha made clear, suffering is a universal truth. While the things that bother us cannot always be eliminated, we can change the way we relate to them. In uncovering the inherent relational capacity of the mind, which finds its natural expression in a mother’s concern for her baby, he found the transformative medicine he was looking for. Trauma, if it doesn’t destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it make us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.
    There is a beautiful example of this in the annals of Tibetan Buddhism. An eighteenth-century Mongolian monk, Jankya Rolway Dorje, wrote a poem in the immediate aftermath of his awakening that spoke of his personal agony while clearly laying out the role of trauma in waking up the mind. In so doing, he even anticipated the fundamental rule of Freudian psychoanalysis. “I will speak spontaneously whatever comes to mind!” he began, sounding for all the world like a patient on an analytic couch. He was, in a real sense, writing his own mantra. “I was like a mad child, long lost his old mother. Never could find her, though she was with him always!” Rolway Dorje’s poem literally equated the smiling face of the mother with the implicit relational knowing of the enlightened mind. In his day-to-day reality, as he explained in his verse, he was struggling with feelings of abandonment. While he was already an accomplished lama with a bevy of intellectual and spiritual attainments, in his heart of hearts he was still a crazed and lonely child. No longer pretending otherwise, Rolway Dorje was able, as a prelude to his awakening, to acknowledge and articulate his personal version of
dukkha
. His trauma was no longer dissociated, no longer stuck in his implicit memory; it was available to his conscious mind and able to be used as an object of mindfulness. Dropping the more accomplished and self-protective aspects of his identity, expanding the frame of his ego, he stopped pushing away the mad feelings he was most ashamed of. Able to experience himself without the usual filters of self-judgment, Rolway Dorje had a breakthrough. The mother he was seeking in concrete physical form showed herself within. “But now it seems I’m about to find that kind old Mother,” his poem continued, “Since relationality hints where she hides. I think, ‘Yes, yes!’—then ‘No, no!’—then, ‘Could it be, really!’ These various subjects and objects are my Mother’s smiling face! These births, deaths, and changes are my Mother’s lying words! My undeceiving Mother has deceived me!” 7 His own relational awareness, the very essence of the mother he was seeking, came to the fore. The home he was in search of was already present within. Knowing was there, and it was with him always.
    Rolway Dorje’s verse was called “The Song of the View.” This title referred back to the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, to his menu for awakening, which consisted of Realistic View, Motivation, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration. The Buddha explained it for the first time in his teaching on the Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path was the Fourth Noble Truth: the way out of suffering. One of the interesting things about the Eightfold Path is the importance the Buddha gave to Realistic View. It came first. Meditation, in the form of Mindfulness and Concentration, came last. Realistic View was concerned with the attitude one takes toward one’s existence and one’s suffering: toward the traumas of everyday life. Before meditation could be of much use, the Eightfold Path made clear, one had to educate the thinking mind. Realistic View was the means of explaining how people could reorient themselves. When that happened successfully, as the Mongolian lama’s poem described, real transformation was possible.
    The usual inclination, the one Rolway Dorje quite probably was subject to prior to his breakthrough, was to hunt for some kind of “absolute” escape from the world of suffering. In the spiritual traditions of South Asia, long present before the time of the Buddha, this vision of escape was well established. The Buddha was subject to it too, as his attempts to wipe suffering away during his time in the forest made clear. The Buddha was radical, even in his own time, for