New Blog Site

I've moved this blog to my main website, innerintegrity.com. Come over and have a look at ongoing musings!

Touching Enlightenment

Here's Part I of a four-part online meditation retreat with Reggie Ray:
 
http://www.tricycle.com/online-retreats/touching-enlightenment/touching-enlightenment-part-1

Listen to it for some really wonderful meditation instruction from a perspective that fully embraces embodiment. I highly recommend all of Ray's work, including his most recent book, Touching Enlightenment.

What I respect about his approach is the way it effortlessly encompasses and is in fact rooted in the body -- rather than using meditation as a path to transcending 'up and out.' We have huge, huge misconceptions about meditation in this society, of which I will speak more soon. But briefly, meditation is not just a mental trick that we do with our heads. And it is most definitely not something we think. It is the practice of embodied awareness, which is a whole way of being.

In the Comments section below the video, Ray elaborates on a statement he made: "The body is the unconscious, not only in the smaller but also in the largest sense. The body is ultimately our largest person, the buddha nature, of which we are more or less completely unconscious."

This is about as exciting as it gets, in my book: an approach that integrates incarnation and liberation within a single View. Truly Vajrayana.

Dancing with the Emotions

Sometimes I ask a client: “What’s your relationship with depression?” (or anger, or anxiety -- you name it). Often I get a funny look back, and a “What do you mean?”

The way I see it, we have a relationship with our emotions. Take anger, for example. Maybe we keep it at arm’s length (my anger makes me anxious, so I try to control it). Maybe we bury it so deep we don’t even know it exists (I never get angry). Maybe we are seduced by it, swept away by its force – we fall unconscious and it explodes (I lost my temper). Maybe we burst into tears when we’re angry (I’m confused and overwhelmed by this feeling; or perhaps, it's safer to show my vulnerability than my power).

All these are different kinds of relationships, and indeed we can have different relationships with different emotions - close and comfortable with one, unconscious with another, uptight around yet another. When we take a thoughtful look inside, we get a better sense of how we’re dancing with each emotion. 

In the best-case scenario, the emotion arises. I recognize it, greet it warmly, and let it move inside of me in a way that brings me new information, new insight.  I meet it with openness, curiosity, and patience, regardless of the pleasure or pain quotient of the experience. I don’t block or repress the emotion, and I don’t blindly identify with it, either. Awareness is present at all moments -- the kind of awareness that allows the feeling to be just as it is.

In a fulfilled relationship like this, there is no distance between the emotion and myself, no block to its flow. It gets to run its course, whether that is painful or pleasurable (generally the more space it has to move in, the more pleasurable the experience is). When the wave has moved fully through, I am left changed, informed of some aspect reality I didn’t know before.

  

The word emotion comes from the Old French emouvoir, to stir up, which has its origins in the Latin root ex-movere, out + to move. Bottom line: emotions are meant to move us, and to move in us. How we dance with that movement makes all the difference.

What This Blog is About

My intention here is to explore the interface between psychotherapy and Buddhism -- more particularly, my personal take as a practitioner of each. I've been studying and practicing in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism since 1988. I was a Buddhist practitioner long before I become a therapist, so the first time I sat with a client, it seemed only natural to bring in what I'd practiced on the cushion. What could be a bigger or better way to meet another's experience than from the pure natural presence of non-conceptual awareness? The practices of meditation and therapy naturally inform one other, in my experience. More to come on that subject.

I've been marveling recently at how my past life as a travel writer and trek leader dovetails with my current role as a psychotherapist. For starters, both involve exploring new territory, be it outer or inner -- checking out the terrain, leading others through it, observing it together. Hey, did you see that? What about this over here? Hmmm, this is interesting ... what's your take on that? How about this journey, this perspective? And, how does it feel, right here, right now, to be in this landscape, be it Varanasi or Bhaktapur or Lhatse -- or what we've uncovered in the last 15 minutes?

Here's another similarity: guide, journalist, and therapist all involve listening for story. The subtle art of leading someone to reflect on their own perspective by skilfully drawing out themes and evoking observations eventually unearths not just facts, but meaning. This last is a key point. We have a glut of information in this culture, and a terrible dearth of meaning.

Another element that serves me well in my current practice is the double-world experience of being an expatriate. I've spent 15 years of my adult life living abroad, in France, China and Nepal. It's refined my ability to blend in unobtrusively, to tune into what's going on and find a way to seamlessly move into the flow. I've learned patience, perspective, respect, openness and flexibility. It's honed my intuition, rewired my brain to quickly pick up new languages, and opened up my synapses to different ways of being. Living abroad has taught me the relativity of every cultural perspective, and the importance of being grounded in that which is universally true -- the archetypes hardwired into our human being-ness.

The ability to move fluidly and flexibly yet be grounded in deeper values has served me well since I returned to the U.S. in 1998. It gives me the opportunity to be a translator, a bridge between different traditions and methods. I aspire to live and play in each perspective, but not be stuck in any.

The territory I cover is both deep and broad. The fundamentals of my professional practice are depth psychology (a la Jung and Hillman), Vajrayana Buddhism (Dzogchen), and a deep and abiding interest in the body -- its undeniable truth, its often-ignored wisdom, its intuitive capacity. Exploring these territories, and translating one to the other and each to the outside world -- this is several lifetimes of work, really.

An Arrow to the Heart

I love this book. What I love most about it is that it’s not even a book, really – more the literary equivalent of yellowcake uranium, meant to blow the mind open to ultimate reality. This is book as verb, not noun – book as instigator of awareness.

The Heart Sutra is a classic text of Mahayana Buddhism, recited daily in Tibet, China, Japan and Korea. Profound and pithy, it summarises the truth of emptiness in a few brief paragraphs. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form, go its most famous lines. Emptiness is not other than form. Form is not other than emptiness.

Author Ken McLeod takes this enigmatic text, and in a spare 150 pages provokes the reader into a direct understanding of the essence of wisdom. His unorthodox commentary opens up the work in a way that’s playful and inviting, never dogmatic. He aims not to explain the truth of emptiness, but to elicit a direct experience of it – something far less simple and far more valuable. He succeeds brilliantly.

McLeod approaches the sutra with improvisatory freedom. With each page he takes a few lines and riffs on the subject, pulling in references to Rumi, Nietzsche, Springsteen, Chuang Tzu, Lewis Carroll -- Zen koans, Tibetan texts -- whatever it takes to transform this 1,900-year-old text into a living, breathing experience. Here’s a quote he pulls from Henry Miller: “Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.”

This is a book to ingest in nonlinear fashion. Pull it off the shelf, open to any page, read a few lines, pause, breathe, and allow concepts to collapse. It’s a direct hit of reality, as bracing as a plunge into a glacial lake. The illustrations, pen-and-ink sketches of a wildly playful arrow and its target, somehow amplify the inexpressible.

In the Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism, the natural state of every being is pure primordial awareness. Meditation in Dzogchen involves removing the obstacles to this knowing, then simply resting in the natural state. By generating a gap in ordinary thinking, a space is recognized in which emptiness arises in direct experience.

Humorous, playful, profoundly subversive, An Arrow to the Heart has the power to open up your mind in a whole new way. In true Dzogchen fashion, it strips the mind bare of concepts, nakedly exposing the essence. When we drop the subject/object framework, we find the naked awareness that is always naturally present.

Perfection of Wisdom, inexpressible, inconceivable, indescribable,
Not created, not restricted, just like the sky,
The experience of pristine awareness, knowing itself:
To the mother of the buddhas of the three times, I bow.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon.

Therapeutic Myths

A few popular myths I've encountered over the years that seem to inform people's perception of therapy. Unfortunately, they are not true.

Pushing through things is the way to go: "If I can just talk about my problems enough, think about them enough, figure them out with my head, they'll eventually be solved." Endurance is the main virtue espoused by this perspective, and while there is something to be said for persistence, it is a fallacy to imagine that intellect alone can resolve everything. If it could, everyone in our exceedingly smart society would have become problem-free a long time ago. This myth ignores the power of the unconscious, intuition, silence, the felt sense, and everything below the neck.

Trauma needs to be talked out: "If I repeat the story often enough, it will lose its effect on me." While desensitization therapy can help reduce certain phobias, simply talking about trauma is a blunt instrument for a delicate job. Sometimes telling the story over and over again reactivates the stress, wearing the grooves deeper. Working with the physiological charge of trauma in a more skillful and intuitive way (see Somatic Experiencing) can truly rewire the nervous system , releasing the frozen experience that is the essence of trauma.

If I can just understand why I do something, that knowledge will solve the problem: This misconception -- that intellectual understanding is the silver bullet-- is the source of a great deal of disappointment. I can't count the number of people I've worked with who, thanks to years of therapeutic work, are able to intelligently articulate the sources of their problems, yet still wrestle with them.

What comes next? Often it's being with the body, listening to what it has to say. A more skillful, nuanced approach to one's inner world brings the ability to listen at a different level -- to sensations, symptoms, dreams, images, internal voices. We bring in open, nonjudgmental awareness, the most single powerful agent for change. And compassion, opening the power of the heart to oneself.

All a therapist has to do is listen: Note how this fits hand in glove with the above myth, that talking alone will solve the problem. Nonjudgmental, open awareness is a fundamental attribute of therapy, but it doesn't always equate with silence. Again, I've heard too many stories from individuals who faithfully reported their story, worked their process, examined and explored and puzzled over their feelings -- for years -- with therapists who said little more than 'mmmm-hmmm' and the occasional "I see."

There is a tremendous power in silence, a deep art in letting the client go over her own edge into the unknown. But that is no excuse for years and years of coasting.

Experience should be pathologised rather than worked with: The medical model currently applied to therapy reinforces the tendency to view symptoms as manifestations of disorder/disease, rather than the efforts of a highly intelligent and well-organised system to heal itself. I think that every problem, every symptom, has a very good reason for being there. Often that's one of our first tasks in therapy -- to figure out what that might be.

Symptoms, whether they are mental or physical, are doorways into inner reality. Simply labelling something as screwed up is deeply unhelpful, and can create a great deal of self-blame and despair. At root, it is deeply unskillful -- in fact, impossible -- to attempt to change anything we haven't first accepted. James Hillman writes eloquently about this. 

My problems are the result of my character faults: I'm just too lazy, disorganised, uncommitted, or stupid to do things differently: Well, maybe you are. On the other hand, if you're paying a therapist a fair sum of money to work on them every week, and managing to make it to your sessions, you are clearly not any of the first three. Maybe there's more going on than meets the eye.

Personally, I am blown away by the under-diagnosis of trauma in individuals, families, communities. I see its effects everywhere, in depression, anxiety, ADD/ADHD, addictions, loneliness, anger, relational problems. So often people are unaware of the cause of their pain. They may not even have a story, or they brush it off with "It was a long time ago, doesn't really bother me."

Trauma's web spreads far beyond the standard diagnostic criteria of PTSD to touch every one of us, as individuals, families, communities. The symptoms weave themselves into our very identity. It can take a lot of patient work to disentangle the effects of early trauma from who we are. We're living in a good time, though. Recent research is revealing exactly how trauma engraves itself on the nervous system, as well as the ways in which mindfulness and a focus on embodied experience can undo its effects.

Here's an interesting article on the neurobiological effects of trauma and the effectiveness of a body-oriented psychotherapeutic approach.

Remember to Remember

A long time ago I read a poem called "remember to remember." Remember to pull yourself out of blurred awareness to focus on the lovely fresh precision of that which is in front of you right now, was its message. Remember yourself into the present moment. I have forgotten the author and much of the poem itself, but the phrase, and the idea, have stuck with me.

Remembering to remember is a key point of meditation training. In practice, we repeatedly bring our awareness back to the focal point, whether it's an image, a sensation, an intention such as bodhicitta, or simply awareness itself, in the case of Dzogchen. Practicing this kind of remembering daily on the cushion, year in and year out, builds an inner structure; the capacity to wake up out of the trance, to realise we are dreaming and refocus on reality, unvarnished by expectations, hopes and fears. This is not the only purpose of meditation, of course -- but the simple reflexive action of coming back to awareness is no small thing. Meditation is the intentional application of this skill, the flexing of this muscle, over and over and over again. Over time it begins to develop a life of its own. We automatically remember to remember.

What does this have to do with therapy? Quite often we come across an understanding that needs to be integrated into life, not just talked about for 20 minutes. Say it's the matter of how Joe (a fictional composite) really wants to show up in a situation, vs. how he reflexively does. Take for example the dreaded holiday visit with the family (you'd be amazed at how much angst the holidays cause!). He says he's usually shut down and reactive, but he would like to be relaxed, aware, and grounded.

In a session we might explore the two possibilities. In one option -- let's call it the status quo -- he notices he feels frozen, numb, shut down. His arms are braced for impact. His breath stops, his shoulders hunch. He's terribly anxious, anticipating some horrible reaction.

In the other, Joe feels fluid and free, standing tall, with his feet solidly on the ground, clearheaded and clearsighted, relaxed in the chest and shoulders.

Each of these states of being are parts of him. Each needs to be explored and understood, with an open and relaxed awareness that doesn't get stuck in either configuration. What's most important is to fully understand, from the inside, the experience of each state of being, so that Joe can recognise the stuck place more easily the next time it arises -- and perhaps have more choice in how long he dwells in it. Maybe he'll even have more freedom in moving to a different experience.

If Joe practices meditation -- or maybe just has an innate orientation towards awareness -- he's got a headstart in this process. Remembering to remember helps us along the way, by allowing us to press the reset button whenever we get stuck.