by David Richo
Need without Judgment
It is so hard to express a need without it coming across as a judgment, a censure of the other: “I need more affection” seems to equal “You are not giving affection to me enough.” So the partner reacts by going on the defensive, feeling attacked, judged as inadequate. We can more appropriately express emotional needs this way: “You are good at giving affection and it makes me want more of it. How about doing it together now?” That statement does not pull a trigger.
We can learn to express any need without accusing the other of inadequacy. For instance, we can say, “I need the coriander for this dish,” and our partner hands it to us, a clear transaction. But when we say, “I needed coriander and I asked you to get it on your way home, but you just don’t listen to me,” that is judgment.
Our discussion of the presence of others in this book has been described as an accompaniment and a showing of the five As. Alternatively, our presence with others comes through when we are vulnerable, especially in expressing our needs and wounds. We are present in a relationship when we declare our longings, show the holes in our hearts, open our soul with all its stammering cries for help and caring. We will feel awkward sharing our needs, but only because we have not practiced enough. We feel vulnerable because the other might say no or might promise and not follow through. But our courage in finally and fully telling someone who we are trumps all that. Courage emboldens us so that vulnerability becomes landscape, not earthquake. That landscape is, wonderfully,
the dreamt land
Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.
—Richard Wilbur, “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in Villa Sciarra”
The Good-Natured Shrug
Once we know the personality of a partner, friend, or family member, we come to expect certain behaviors and attitudes. Yet some of these traits still trigger us, and we react with what leads to an argument. We find a stress-reducing resource, however, when we shrug off what they say or do rather than make it a bone of contention. We take their words and behaviors in stride, no longer getting into an argument, no longer making any attempts to fix, change, or control them or show how wrong they are. This is not giving up on them or not listening. It is finally respecting who they are, accepting the givens of their personality. We don’t shrug off abuse—that, we confront. We do shrug off what others do that triggers us. Fewer triggers mean more intimacy. Is this what we are fleeing?
Personal Work
Intimacy is built on doing the personal work on ourselves that makes us more open and present. Personal work promotes and enhances connection. Doing our personal work is not only a way to make life easier in a relationship. It is also a way of showing love for someone because we do what it takes for intimacy to thrive. Our work shows results like these: We are dealing with the wounds of childhood so we don’t transfer them onto our partner. We are acting assertively but not aggressively. We are communicating directly, not passively. We are handling conflicts by addressing, processing, and resolving them each time they arise. We are dealing with daily crises with equanimity rather than taking them out on our partner. Now addressing, processing, and resolving have become not only practices but resources.
On a personal note, I don’t fool myself into thinking I have fully achieved equanimity. Indeed, I notice that I have it only when I am not being triggered. For instance, if I have to deal with red tape while traveling, I can be patient rather than triggered, but that is because nothing happened in childhood having to do with red tape. Is my (or our) ability to have equanimity limited to what has no history?
EIGHT
SPIRITUAL RESOURCES
Contained in this short Life
Are magical extents.
—Emily Dickinson
The spiritual can be described in one word: “more.” This word refers to something transcendent, more than what meets the eye:
We intuit that there is more to living things than what we see, a deeper reality behind appearances.
We feel there is more to us than our ego, a larger life in us than personality and personal history.
We sense that happenings are more than events; they are opportunities for spiritual practice.
We realize that love is more than feeling good about someone; it is an unconditional and enduring connection and commitment.
We find more than connection in an intimate partnership; we find communion.
We move toward more than the goal of self-help in our work on ourselves; we have a sense of service to humanity.
We act with more than fairness; we show generosity.
Thus, a spiritual consciousness sees:
Nature as more than natural things
Our human identity as more than ego
Time as more than duration
Place as more than location
Our destiny as more than our goals
Our love as able to extend to more people than our near and dear
We notice that an avaricious person also seeks more. Likewise, an addict seeks more. Their craving does not seem spiritual. Yet they too are yearning for what will take them beyond the limited. They want the limitless. And that is the transcendent after all. The mistake they make is in the addictive object they choose and the dysfunctional strategy they use to possess it. A program—for example, Alcoholics Anonymous—offering contact with a transcendent higher power is therefore a healthy path to a true recovery and spiritual consciousness.
We read this in the preamble to “The Earth Charter”: “Human development is primarily about being more, not having more.” The “sacred” is the “more” in all that is. That “more” is a spiritual resource. We only see the full reality when we see the sacred in it. When we say yes to the more, we see it in ourselves, others, events, things, places. Everything is sacred. Spiritual life thus means nothing again is ever profane: We have become More, a Yes to the sacred “where all places are.”
“Yes” is the only place on earth where all places are.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”
WHEN THE TIME HAS COME
It must have lain hidden in my soul, though I knew nothing of it, and it rose suddenly to my memory when it was needed.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Peasant Marey”
There is a gratifyingly positive trigger experience that happens to us every once in a while. It is a sudden “Aha!” or an awakening. It can be a realization, a letting go, a shift, a life-changing moment, a lifting of a weight off our shoulders, a sudden clarity, a feeling of everything coming together to make perfect sense, the moment the penny drops. There will be an event or word or experience that touches it off. It will seem to be a cause of the great awakening. But, actually, it is a launching pad, a catalyst. This awakening is not objective, from outside, but subjective, something happening in us, an example of a spiritual inner resource.
This positive trigger experience is an example of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence of catalyst and inner timing. Synchronicity is a spiritual experience because it happens as a grace; it is not something we cause. We can only be ready. Some word or event ignites a fire of awareness or of release. Zen stories often tell of a special moment in which someone was suddenly enlightened—for instance, this story of a simple monk in a monastery in Japan. His daily task for years was to sweep the small stones in the garden so that they were evenly spread out. One day while he was sweeping, a single stone hit the wall with a ping. When he heard the ping, he was fully enlightened. The day of awakening had come. The ping was the triggering catalyst. The two events happening at once is the trigger-synchronicity. The catalyst is an instance of grace, the gift dimension of life.
We find another example in the 1959 French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, where the main character, deeply depressed, is living in a cellar, immobilized by g
rief. One day, children are playing with marbles on the ground above her. A marble rolls in through the window onto the floor. She picks it up and holds it in the palm of her hand. When she feels the warmth of the child’s hand that had been holding the marble, her depression lifts. The marble did not cause the change; it was a graced moment coinciding with the time for her release.
In one other example, a mother hears again and again that it is not her fault that her daughter is a drug addict. But it makes no impression. Then one day she hears it yet again and she suddenly, physically, feels a weight lifting up off her shoulders. The words were the same but until then the timing had not been right for the click of reception.
What is timing? It is a readiness. It can’t be manufactured, hurried, or postponed. There is an inner timing to most interior events. Grief is an example. We have to shed a very specific number of tears before we can let it go.
We notice that life offers us two options: (1) We can make conscious choices or (2) things happen to us beyond our control. In every example of a timing-trigger the catalyst is “things happening,” not the conscious result of our manipulations. Sometimes the timing is right for willpower, taking the bull by the horns, as Theseus did with the Minotaur. Sometimes the timing is right for willingness, as when he waited for Ariadne to show him the way out of the labyrinth. Our intention is journey; our strategy takes discerning what is ready to happen.
To discern what fits comes as a grace, the mysterious gift moment from a power beyond our ego. It is as if there is something, we know not what, that is always at work to make us more than we are yet. It is as if the universe knows our timing to the exact moment and is patiently planning its advent. It is as if we are not alone. When I come to trust this, I let go of believing that only that will come to pass that I make happen. I come to trust a power beyond my control. When that same power is an inner resource, we are spiritual. We see this in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.”
This stunningly wise quotation also reminds us that our healing and personal integration are not all about effort. We can trust grace, the gift dimension of life, “an unsuspected inner resource” contributing to how we progress on our journey. In this book, I propose building inner resources to handle triggers. I do not mean to repeat the old public-school belief that it is all up to us: we can “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” we are “captains of our destiny,” we are “the little engine that could.” That is a limited and limiting cultural bias. It is based on a rugged individualism that overlooks our central evolutionary inclination: to connect and collaborate on the path to progress. Trusting that our challenge in handling triggers includes the support of others and of grace, we do all we can, and we rely on others in our support group. We do all we can, and we trust a power beyond our ego in whatever way we construe it. Then we are not alone, the scariest fantasy the mind ever conjured—and the least accurate.
NEUROPLASTICITY AND SPIRITUALITY
The brain is like a factory in which each department works cooperatively with all the others. For instance, the prefrontal cortex helps with thinking, decision-making, planning for the future, setting intention, and regulating thought, feeling, and behavior. The hippocampus processes and encodes our memories. The brain stem controls heart rate, breathing, and other autonomic functions. The communication from department to department happens by electrochemical sharing of information along neural pathways. The neural pathways become ingrained when they are used over and over. Thus, our habits are durable, but our new ways of acting do not lock in as easily. Using the metaphor of a factory, the familiar routine operations are done easily—but new projects take more time for the workers to perform.
Neuroplasticity is the power of the brain to change itself, both structurally and operatively, by way of a new focus and alternative habits. We can, in effect, change our negative—self-defeating, dysfunctional—patterns into positive ones, those that serve our life goals. New linkages can be installed in our brain. Neuroplasticity makes change and development possible. It allows us to reverse ingrained habits that do not serve us. We can create new patterns of thought and behavior that help us adapt more effectively to our varying inner landscapes and our pressuring world.
We can also make spiritual progress through neuroplasticity. By engaging in repeated spiritually focused affirmations and morally aware actions, we can help our brain rewire itself so those affirmations and actions become positive habits—that is, virtues. The new pathways, however, do not appear simply by repeating certain thoughts or actions. We bring a highly alert attentiveness to the process. Meditation as focused attention helps us get there. The brain, however, like the work force in a factory, can be easily distracted. It is up to us to manage it by keeping it on track. Indeed, there is a danger that once a new thought or skill becomes second nature, we are less likely to mine for new possibilities. Change does not occur on autopilot—only habit does. So, second nature, less attentiveness, means fewer chances for laying down new pathways in the brain.
We also now know that an entirely mental experience can make for new neural connections. An athlete picturing herself diving in new ways is changing her brain, and then her body, for new dives. We can mirror ourselves through our imagination. William James in his “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals” recommended to them: “Put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old.”
The neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, in How God Changes Your Brain, demonstrates through his research that meditation increases blood flow to the anterior cingulate. The anterior cingulate is the part of the brain that links our primitive amygdala with our prefrontal cortex. This is the region of the brain that holds our ability to show caring, empathy, social consciousness. It likewise fosters intuition and helps us regulate our emotions and our reactions to triggers. Dr. Newberg has shown that meditation can firm and fortify the anterior cingulate and reduce the influence of the primitive amygdala. We are then more likely to act in accord with our spiritual values. Indeed, spirituality is not about how good we feel, how close to the divine, how sublime our thoughts. It is about becoming as loving—as connected—as we were born to be. In Buddhist terms spirituality is a daily focused practice of loving-kindness toward ourselves and all beings. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche reminds us in Smile at Fear: “The practice of meditation is not so much about the hypothetical attainment of enlightenment. It is about leading a good life.” Even more, Newberg states that there is “a coevolution of spirituality and consciousness, engaging circuits that allow us to envision a benevolent, interconnecting relationship between the universe, God, and ourselves.”
The limbic system regulates our emotions. What is the connection between stressful dramatic emotions and negative thoughts? The physician Daniel Amen—the author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life—has used the imaging technique known as SPECT (single photon emission computed topography) to show that when the limbic system is in a highly stressed state we automatically see the world through a negative lens. When the limbic area is calm, however, we are more likely to find ourselves in a positive frame of mind—a feeling captured in Psalm 23, which makes a connection between “still waters” and “fear no evil.”
PRACTICES THAT INCREASE OUR SPIRITUAL RESOURCES
Accessing Our Inner Goodness
Our most prized spiritual resource is inner goodness. Chögyam Trungpa wrote in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior: “Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused and contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation.” Our basic goodness makes love possible. How ironic that what is the best in us we often cover up, doubt, forget, or fear. In The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Father Zossima advises adopt
ing a spiritual path—resource—when we meet up with hate or evil: “Always choose gentle love.” I have kept those words on my desktop for many years. I see them every day many times. I believe they offer me a sublime spiritual path. But I also fully realize I will need to keep this recommendation right here in front of me all my life. There is a dark side of me that will choose aggression automatically at times, triggered or not. In moments of stress I will forget the advice that means so much to me in calm moments. My practice, my work, my calling is to remember “gentle love” and act on it. I thereby access a moment of inner goodness. And it has to be acceptable to me that I do this only “more and more,” as “every time” may never happen.
Richard Rohr, in “The Trap of Perfectionism,” wrote, “The real victory for me was when I was able to recognize my profound inner experience of goodness as the core and foundation of all reality…. It is always a kind of crucifixion and surrender of the idea of goodness for which I long—instead of the actual goodness that is given.” Thus, we can indeed let go of our restrictive definition of goodness and widen its meaning. It transcends our moral formulations; it is the essence of all reality. Goodness is in everything irrespective of our notions of “good” and “bad.” This is a deeply spiritual realization because it takes us from an ego definition based on limitation to the limitless universal.