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.