A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  Rather, the invitation is to allow the ego to take its proper place as one voice, one figure, one reality tunnel among many in the rich landscape of psyche. A critically important one, but not the only one. To give it a seat at the table but allow it to be relativized so that it can find its proper place and make its unique contribution while not usurping full control. The goal, then, would be to facilitate engagement, dialogue, dance, and play between the ego and the other images, figures, and orienting worlds of perception that make up the landscape of the soul.

  Self and No Self

  Teachings on “no self” remain some of the most misunderstood and potentially confusing in contemporary spirituality, especially for those struggling with some form of narcissistic wounding, a fragile sense of identity, or developmental trauma of any kind (i.e., many of us). Even for those not struggling with overt trauma, neglect, violence, or abuse, the imbalanced and ungrounded denial of subjectivity and narrative implied in the misunderstanding of these teachings can lead to unnecessary suffering. The meaning and radical implications of these teachings—the experiential revelation of the flexible, relative, constructed nature of the self—are bandied about in catchphrases outside the context of the depth and complexity in which they arose. As a result, they can often become unwitting tools for the reenactment of early environments of shame, unworthiness, and self-aggression.

  It’s important to remember that teachings on the relativity of self were historically provided within a meditative context, often during long retreat, within a community of practitioners who had dedicated their lives to spiritual realization. Additionally, they were given at a particular time along one’s journey, after certain basic achievements and maturity were realized, ethical as well as meditative. In Buddhist tradition, for example, it wasn’t until some basic grounding in the Hinayana (stabilization in working with one’s mind) that the Mahayana teachings on shunyata (the nonsubstantiality of self and phenomena) were given. It is said in the sutras (the teachings of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni) that many in attendance on Vulture Peak Mountain when the Buddha first gave these teachings, passed out, lost consciousness, or even stopped breathing because of their earth-shattering implications. Whether we take this literally or imaginatively, the point is that historically, teachings on no self have been considered advanced, deserving serious consideration before their application.

  To extract these refined discoveries from the environments and contexts in which they were given presents a host of risks, as we see play out in the contemporary spiritual world. To present them to those with little experience, or who might have a variety of contraindications, is not usually the most skillful or compassionate approach. As I’ve discussed, it is quite natural at times to make use of even the most subtle teachings to confirm egoic organization, all the while believing we’re transcending it. Catchphrases such as, “It’s all an illusion, drop your sense of separation and return to the present moment,” “There’s no ‘you’ there to have trauma,” “Who is the one that would be traumatized?,” and similar misattunements tend to encourage spiritual bypassing because they generate confusion, retraumatization, and additional kinds of suffering. It is one thing to learn the language of no self and nonduality; it is another to embody the subtleties of the experiential realization and allow the ramifications of that to filter down in the relative vehicles of the body, feelings, relationships, emotions, money, family, and sexuality. We’ve all seen the tragic consequences of half-baked proclamations of “total” enlightenment, “full” nondual realization, “permanent” awakening, and so on, in fallen gurus and leaders of spiritual communities who get tangled up in scandals of all kinds.

  For those with histories of denying their own subjectivity—or having it abused, neglected, or dismissed by way of disorganized attachment, narcissistic injury, and empathic failure of all kinds—teachings on no self can feel all too familiar: “Oh, I get it, I really am nobody! I really don’t exist after all. It’s true that I’m not worthy of existing. Even the gurus have confirmed it. I knew it!” Rather than leading to increasing freedom, compassion, and flexibility, these teachings—if understood and practiced in immature and disembodied ways—unconsciously become another vehicle by which to replay templates of early wounding. In this way, the liberating implications go unrealized and are unable to filter into the lives of practitioners.

  Shaming or making wrong our interest in the stories we tell about who we are and how we’ve come to make sense of our subjective experience—popular in some modern forms of “awakening,” “enlightenment,” and self-realization—have a way of creating and entrenching a profound shadow. Like any effective shadow, it usually remains hidden outside awareness because we have an unconscious investment in not seeing into the depths. For truly seeing the contents of the shadow has a way of bringing down the egoic house of cards as well as the constructed states of enlightenment that, although of course in part genuine and authentic, are often filled with holes not all that pleasant to confront. To step into this territory has a way of liquefying the enlightened ego and is profoundly humbling.

  Self, Ego, and Spiritual Practice

  To engage certain psychological, emotional, and meditative practices, a certain degree of ego strength is usually required; otherwise, the practice can be unconsciously used in service of a more dissociative function. Remember, we can make use of any teaching as a tool of illumination or one of avoidance. If we do not have a relative degree of stability in our sense of self, some techniques can further fragmentation rather than facilitate greater wisdom, compassion, and clear seeing. With certain meditation practices—for example, in which we dissolve everything into open awareness, return to the Self, rest fully in the present moment, and no longer identify with the passing display of experience—we must carefully discern whether we are in actuality engaging in avoidance, dissociation, and repression. It is not always easy to tell the difference because both transformative and avoidant functions can be served simultaneously. This sort of discernment is not often taught either in psychological or spiritual circles but is critical and goes a long way in supporting an integral realization and an expression in the world that include the body, emotions, sexuality, family, money, and relationships. Even if we achieve profound illumination, that awakened consciousness isn’t going to do much good if it can only be expressed through a “broken relative vehicle.”2

  We cannot assume that one particular way of meditation or inquiry is going to be the most effective for everyone, though this is a position some practitioners take, whether consciously or otherwise. “Just do this one thing, this one way, and it will solve all your problems. It’s all you need.” Even if the teaching does not say this overtly, it often implies as much. But this view does not honor the uniqueness of the human person and can lead, as many have discovered, to further suffering and struggle.

  It is important not to confuse healthy development of the self—including emotional and relational maturity as well as the capacity to articulate an integrated self-narrative—with “being lost in the ego” and the attendant shame and misunderstanding resulting from that confusion. This area of inquiry is fraught with lack of discernment and misunderstanding, especially in the context of those approaches unaware or even dismissive of the critical role of psychological, emotional, somatic, and shadow work on any integral path of spiritual realization. Complicated further by conflicting meanings of the terms “self” and “ego,” the whole enterprise can get a bit tangled. In short, it is essential that we work simultaneously on the development and maturation of a securely functioning psychological self along with an exploration of those more transpersonal dimensions of human experience. In other words, we should not dismiss, pathologize, or shame the genuine wish to improve our sense of self, life circumstances, experiences in relationship, and so forth, while at the same time open ourselves to bands of the spectrum not oriented in self-improvement but in the realization of the nature of the self and reality.

  C
onfusing the healthy development and maturation of self with “getting caught in the ego” can generate a tremendous amount of unnecessary pain because we become lost in disembodied spiritual jargon and half-baked ideas that imply that developmental needs, narrative, subjectivity, and the reality of relational trauma are “all in the mind,” “only a function of the ego,” and so forth. That conflation can also lead to the misattuned ideation that we must not be doing the practices right or advancing on our spiritual path if difficult emotions “still” arise.

  Even popular and wise-sounding spiritual aphorisms such as “fear is the opposite of love” can set up a war inside us because they (even if unintentionally) pathologize human emotions and prevent us from mining the wisdom found within even our most challenging feeling states. From this perspective, even the natural wave-like appearance of “fear” is not an enemy with which we must do battle in some spiritual war against love but an aspect of psyche that has come with information, an ally in our journey into the depths, if we will only slow down and turn toward it. It is the rejection of fear and the abandonment of the fearful one within that can generate so much suffering and struggle, not just fear itself, an organic function of any human nervous system. Upon investigation, we might discover no suffering inherent in a temporary wave of fear but only in the war we’ve waged with it and in the habitual conclusions we’ve come to about what it is, what it needs, and what it wants.

  Honoring the Most Skillful Medicine

  It is important that we bring as much discernment as possible to the way we engage with teachings such as “no self” to ensure we are not reenacting early environments of empathic failure, narcissism, and trauma or furthering pathways of dissociation. And it’s prudent to discover if these teachings are the best medicine for a particular person (including ourselves) struggling in a particular way at a certain time. It is unkind to foist the view of no self onto a person when it is contraindicated, when they do not have resonance with it, or when they do not have the developmental capacity to embody its radical implications.

  Of course, let us also stay open to and honor the ways such teachings can be helpful and supportive in loosening our identification with suffering-laden organizations of limiting beliefs, painful emotions, and unhealthy behavior. It is important to remember that we might never know in some absolute way whether there “is” or “isn’t” a self, which would require us to take some sort of metaphysical position. We can know for sure, though, that for most of us the most phenomenologically accurate description is that we have a sense of self. For most of us, there does seem to be a self, and this felt sense needs to be respected.

  In working with meditators, yogis, and seekers over the years—and in my own inquiry, analysis, and supervision—I have seen the ways that “transcendent” teachings can be used to serve a liberating realization. These teachings, especially if practiced in an embodied, integrated context, can be an incredible force in reducing suffering and in revealing freedom always, already here. However, in other situations this is not the case, and certain teachings unintentionally further dissociation and unconscious defense against emotional and developmental wounding of all kinds, propping up old circuitry of unworthiness, shame, and self-hatred. This is something I have discovered not only in my work with others but more importantly in the pain of my own experience. As one form of spiritual bypassing, teachings on no self are particularly prone to serving a dissociative function. The larger the potential for transformative awareness, the larger the potential shadow.

  My invitation is to flood our relationship with these teachings with as much nuance, sensitivity, compassion, and insight as we can so that we may tap into the ways they can truly support a mature, comprehensive realization while simultaneously realizing that they can also be a quick trapdoor into the unconscious shadow. I hope that we can each find unique ways to compassionately confront and assimilate the contents of the unconscious, for if we do not do so, we will inevitably continue to reenact the templates of early emotional and psychic wounding and create additional suffering for ourselves and others.

  Although our engagement with spiritual ideas, beliefs, and practices has so much to offer in our lives—including profound support for meeting our experience with new levels of curiosity, awareness, spaciousness, and compassion—as always we must remain vigilant to the ways we can use our relationship with spirituality to keep us out of difficult states of experience such as confusion, contradiction, complexity, and pain of all kinds. Like any other emotionally significant activity in our lives, we can use our connection with spirituality to come closer to ourselves or defensively as a way to avoid ourselves, others, and our own trauma and pain—to shield us from a raw, direct, naked relationship with life. Inevitably, at times we will engage with spirituality from the foundation of the latter, which in many ways is so natural, so human. We need not shame, judge, or attack ourselves when we notice that we are doing this but rather use this discovery as a doorway into greater awareness, depth, and compassion, never forgetting how much an authentic journey of awakening asks of us.

  Increasing awareness of the ways we engage spiritual beliefs, teachings, and practices to distance ourselves from pain and unwanted aspects of experience is essential if our goal is to befriend ourselves at the deepest levels, the ultimate invitation of this book. By doing so, we further the overall aspiration of opening to the radical possibility that even our most challenging experiences contain guidance and wisdom, and these experiences are, in fact, allies on the path of transformation and healing.

  A Map Written Inside You

  It’s important to remember that spirituality is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, in which one method or technique is the right medicine for each of us, in all situations. A whole spectrum of valid human experience must be tended to through multiple perspectives. Forcing ourselves (or another) to adopt a certain practice (teaching, teacher) when there is no psychic resonance to that approach, or it is contraindicated within one’s immediate experience, or it doesn’t address one’s unique location on the developmental spectrum might be seen as an act of aggression or, in some cases, even violence.

  As just one example that comes up frequently in those populations where there is an intersection of interest in psychotherapy and spiritual practice, with certain forms of trauma, awareness-based meditation isn’t always the right remedy. Where there has been profound early empathic failure (resulting in insecure or disorganized attachment and traumatic rupture), “resting in open awareness” can easily overwhelm and retraumatize a sensitive nervous system and psychic organization.

  This is not to say there is something “wrong” with awareness-based practices but only to suggest they are not the most skillful or compassionate in all situations. A prescription of “more meditation” in some cases might not be kind or effective; however, unfortunately, this is often the advice those struggling receive from (well-intentioned) meditation teachers without experience in this area. As a therapist who has worked with many meditators over the years, I have met with more than a few suffering individuals who became further entrenched in embedded traumatic organization from trying to meditate more or harder or longer, not to mention the shame and sense of failure they felt when their meditation practice was not able to overcome their trauma. Just to be clear, I’m a huge proponent of meditation and mindfulness-based inquiry for most of those with whom I work and speak. Again, I am not asserting that these practices are not helpful, wise, and liberating—they are. I’m also not saying that these practices, especially if modified a bit, cannot be helpful to those struggling with trauma. They can. In recent years, a heartening effort has been made to adapt meditative practices for those who might find traditional approaches not sensitive enough to their particular situation. The invitation here isn’t into some rigid advocacy of positions but into flexibility, perspective, kindness, and skillful means.

  At times, structure- or resource-building is most needed—supportive work to repair a fragile sen
se of self, traumatized nervous system, or tragic disorganized attachment. At other times, uncovering or depth work illuminating and integrating shadow and unconscious process, along with reclaiming experiential responsibility for that which had to be disowned at an earlier time, is most needed.

  Sometimes a transpersonal way of exploration could be most indicated, one not oriented in working through our biographical history per se, whether it be by way of psychic, subtle, causal, or nondual pathways.3 We might tend to this territory of the spectrum by way of active imagination, dreamwork, breath or subtle energy practice, shamanic journeying, certain forms of visualization of imaginal figures, or a particular type of yoga or meditation. As always, the invitation is into discernment and nonhomogenization.

  The point here is that if you do not resonate with a particular way of working, or if it is not helping you or even harming you, trust yourself and the wisdom and integrity of your own body and psyche. Honor your experience. Slow down and revision. It is fine to experiment, of course, but there is nothing wrong with you if a particular method is contraindicated at a certain time in your life. It doesn’t mean you’ve “failed,” don’t have enough faith, are incredibly “unspiritual,” or have succumbed to a “low vibration.” It means you are alive and listening, sensing, and longing to care for yourself in a new way.

  Spirituality is unique to each human heart, nervous system, and soul. There is a map written inside you in a language that only you can decipher. A preprogrammed, secondhand discovery will never do. You’re just too majestic for that.