by Chris Grosso
Tara calls experiences like that false refuges. “When we’re feeling bad about ourselves, we all have a set of strategies on how to feel better, how to impress people or ourselves, or do more, and what happens is that the false refuge locks us into a smaller identity. We still feel like a small, deficient person, but we’re more defended. The hard part is that we generally fix our attention on where we think we’re doing things wrong. We’re always monitoring and noticing where we’re falling short. For any of us who have hurt other people, or find that we’re caught in habits that are hurting ourselves, it’s very hard to forgive and embrace ourselves.”
She explained that we need to step out of thoughts, step out of all the negative self-talk, and just sense what’s within us. What we’ll find is pure and good. “There’s an innate wakefulness right within each of us, a wakeful awareness. There’s a quality of openness. There’s no center or anything that’s solid. There’s a tenderness, a warmth, which intrinsically loves whatever we encounter.” I could get behind that: The more we let go of the bullshit, the more we can move toward who we are—our essence. Once we find that best part of ourselves, we can live from it and reconnect to it in our spiritual practices.
So how do we learn to genuinely heal and forgive ourselves and others?
“When it comes to forgiveness,” Tara said, we need to “look at the evolution of consciousness.” To do this, we need to move from an ego-driven state where we default into judgment of ourselves and others and reach a sense of belonging or connection that she calls “we-ness.” We both agreed that forgiveness is the truest way to get there. Tara told me she often uses the phrase “unreal other.” What it means is that “when we’re in an egoic state, you and I perceive each other as a kind of two-dimensional being that we hope approves of us, or likes us, versus sensing the light and awareness that’s looking through both of our eyes and realizing that it’s both the same. The work is where that’s not happening. Each one of us has somebody or some group of people that we have created into ‘other’ who is in some way bad or wrong.”
This made me think of Martin Buber’s book I and Thou:
The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.2
The places the differences lie are where the work needs to be done. As Tara put it, “Most people have this idea that forgiving is a good idea until they must forgive something, and then it gets hairy. So one of the metaphors that have been most helpful to me when we’re caught in an ‘unreal other’—perhaps a situation where we think this person should be different—is to imagine we’re walking in the woods and we see a little dog by a tree, and we bend over to pet it and it lunges at us. Its fangs are bared, it’s aggressive, so we go from being friendly to being angry. But then we see that one of its legs is caught in a trap, and we shift to feeling pity and maybe even compassion. That’s what it’s like when we’re having a hard time forgiving someone. How in some way there are unmet needs—sorrow, fear, insecurity—that are causing that behavior.”
When Tara works with forgiveness, she clarifies that the first step when we’ve been injured by someone is not to try and forgive them! The first step is to bring self-compassion to the place that feels hurt. If we skip that step, it won’t be real forgiveness. We must acknowledge the hurt, bring kindness toward ourselves, and then find the opening to move through and see that the creature’s leg is caught in that trap. “When we’re lashing out, it’s a lazy way of trying to cover the wounded place.” Tara gave me a new phrase to work with: Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Let’s sit with that for a minute—vengeance is a lazy form of grief.
And it’s bigger than just you and me. Tara put it in the context of the planet so we “don’t make Earth an unreal other.” We need to “recognize that the Earth is our living body and that we sense our compassion to the Earth—that’s carrying forward the teachings. We need to recognize that we have implicit racism and be willing to face it and wake up from it because we can’t be whole on this planet if we have one entire domain of people who aren’t considered part of our being that’s carrying forward the teachings. Each generation needs to bring the teachings alive in a way that’s most relevant to the planet in that time.”
When I teach at rehabs or recovery centers, I’m always inspired by younger people stepping up. Even if it’s not specifically in a spiritual context, they’re showing up and being of service toward one another as humans and learning to be more loving in the world. However, I do speak with many younger people who feel jaded and who are cynical toward the notion of spirituality, something I experienced as well. I think that can be healthy to a certain extent, but we can also go overboard and completely close ourselves off to some people. On one hand, a new tolerance is blossoming in much of our youth—they are rejecting things like racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they are being more adamant and vocal that those things should never be acceptable. They’re expressing more love, more understanding, more compassion toward one another, but many of them are still closed to the idea of spirituality. I believe spirituality, healing, and forgiveness can be very strong foundational blocks upon which the next generation of truth seekers can build a more caring and nurturing world for all beings, starting right now. What would Tara tell the cynics and the naysayers?
“What I would do is ask them, ‘When is it that you feel most fulfilled or gratified, or what is it that you most enjoy or take pleasure in? What do you want?’ I think that inside the jadedness there’s an intelligence, which is not wanting to get carried away on a current of delusion. Just as I honor truth seeking, I honor jadedness. I think it’s also important to ask, ‘Where do you feel most sincere? Where do you feel that you want to unfold the best of yourself? What is most important to you?’ Start with that, because spirituality isn’t something out there. Every one of us has our own version of unfolding into the best that we can be. That’s because we each have a deeper capacity to care, to speak truth, to hear truth, to see truth, and to live from wholeness.”
PRACTICE
Tara Brach’s RAIN
Anyone familiar with Tara’s teachings has probably heard about RAIN (an acronym coined by Vipassana teacher Michele McDonald). It’s one of her signature practices, and it has a powerful resonance for both beginning and seasoned meditators. It can take us to that place of living with wholeness as we enhance our ability to care, hear truth, speak truth, and see truth. It’s especially useful when working with our habits and addictions because it’s a practice that allows us to redirect and regulate our experiences. It’s a great one, too, because if you get stuck or lost, there’s the acronym to keep you on track:
R: Recognize what is happening.
A: Allow life to be just as it is.
I: Investigate inner experience with kindness.
N: Nonidentification.
It may seem trivial, but I most recently used RAIN meditation to help me get through losing an apartment I was excited about moving into. Here’s what the process looked like:
R: I checked out the apartment, and it looked great. Then I went back and did thirty minutes’ worth of paperwork, only to find out at the very end of the process that my shit credit could stand in the way of me getting it. It was upsetting because I was feeling good about finally finding the perfect place to live after moving back to Connecticut, once again a single man not sure if I’d ever find “the one.” I didn’t want to get wasted or anything over this, but I recognized that it bummed me the fuck out and that I’m a person for whom things as seemingly minor as not getting the apartment I wanted could, under the right circumstances, trigger a relapse.
A: Instead of fighting my feelings of sadness and disappointment, I allowed them to be just as they were. I observed my mindset and the disappointment I felt, and simply let it be there as it was happening. I also reminded myself to be grateful because
today I was at least in a healthy enough place (mentally, physically, spiritually, and financially) that I could look at this incredible apartment. I wasn’t sick or hungover or caught in some mental/emotional space of self-loathing. In the words of Ice Cube, “It was a good day.”
I: I began to investigate the energies located predominantly in my stomach and shoulders and saw that they, just like any other positive or negative feelings, were temporary energies hanging out in my body for a bit. The “with kindness” part is tricky because I’m so prone to beating myself up, but I kept recalling impermanence in relation to the investigation step and eventually felt ready to move on to N.
N: Through nonidentification, I gradually realized that my issue with disappointment over potentially not getting the apartment was symbolic of infinite moments in life: Some situations bring us what we want, while others do not. I could let go and accept that, without being cliché about it. If this is meant to be, it will be, and if not, I’ll find another place. It’s not the end of the world, and it certainly wasn’t worth enduring with Narcan or a urinary catheter.
When it comes to N—nonidentification—sometimes Tara will simply say, “It’s okay, sweetheart,” or repeat Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s message, “Darling, I care about this suffering,” or the words of Hawaiian Ho’oponopono teacher Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len: “I’m sorry. And I love you.”3 I, too, appreciate the teaching of Ho’oponopono and found myself reciting his words as I drove home, my head hanging a little lower than usual from disappointment, but not as low as it’s been because of the mess of addiction I’ve lived through. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” But that’s just me. You use the phrase that comforts you and brings you to a place of nonidentification with the fucked-up things you’re struggling with.
As Tara reminded me, “The key moment is to notice what happens after we do the steps of RAIN. Just like after a gentle rainfall, the flowers can bloom. Just sense who you are when you’re no longer the thing inside the thoughts and beliefs and feelings of a bad self. If you’re no longer believing that anything is wrong with you, who are you? Rest in that spacious, tender awareness, your larger sense of being. When you’re ready, take a few more full breaths and open your eyes . . . and here we are again.”
2
THE PRIMARY PROBLEM
CONVERSATION WITH GABOR MATÉ
I first learned about Gabor Maté through his groundbreaking book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which explores his work with addicted individuals living on Vancouver’s skid row, as well as being an exceptionally comprehensive delineation of just what the hell addiction is, its causes, its effects, and so, so, so much more. Aside from that, Dr. Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author, highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development.
I’d heard that Gabor believes addiction is not the problem but rather a person’s attempt to solve a problem in his or her life. I reached out to him because I wondered, among other things, how he would define addiction and what his perspective was on people using addiction to solve their life problems.
When I posed my questions, he answered them with a question: “You’re very open about your own addictive history. What did you get from it?”
While I was thinking about my answer, Gabor gave me his definition of addiction:
Any behavior—substance-related or not—that a person craves, finds temporary pleasure or relief in, and suffers negative consequences as a result of, but can’t give up despite those negative consequences.
Check, check, and check. His definition summed up the experiences I (and countless others I’ve met) have had with drugs and alcohol—and I could add food and many other substances in here, too, for good measure.
So, pleasure, craving, relief, negative consequences, inability to let it go . . . What does our addictive relationship to these substances give us? For many—myself very much included—it provides a sense of relief from self-loathing, depression, and dissatisfaction with the world (among other things). It’s a way for us to get release from our emotional pain and just drop the fuck out of our heads for a while. As I looked back on my own life, I saw that addiction was everything to me, a means of making it through the day.
Gabor was just getting started. He echoed my internal dialogue, noting that everyone wants relief from pain. And he was right. Who doesn’t?
“What you were after was a perfectly normal human aspiration. Your problem was the emotional pain, and the addiction came along as an attempt at a solution. Addiction is never the primary problem. It creates problems—that’s why we talk about it so much—but it’s not the primary problem. The primary problem is: Why are we in such emotional pain? What happened?”
Gabor went on to present addiction in a way I’d never quite heard before, taking it out of the context of disease and willpower and putting it into a Buddhist framework—the realm of suffering. Addiction “has to do with how you suffered at a time in your life when you couldn’t avoid the suffering—and that means childhood. It doesn’t matter what form addiction takes—sex, gambling, drugs, alcohol, shopping, or eating—it’s always an attempt (in one way or another) to compensate for or escape from intense suffering in childhood. When I say ‘intense suffering,’ I don’t necessarily mean terrible things, but a child who suffers ends up having more pain than they can handle—hence the escape into addiction. In other words, the addiction is an attempt to solve a problem.”
I found his perspective so interesting and sensible. Several years ago, I’d done an internship in substance abuse counseling at a rehab facility in Connecticut. I noticed the biggest common factor among many of the patients was an obvious childhood trauma or traumas—like sexual or physical abuse or a lack of love and affection. In my case, when I looked back at my own childhood, in comparison to many of these patients, growing up for me was not so bad. I hadn’t endured a trauma that you could label atrocious.
As I started talking about this, Gabor stopped me. He believes that this kind of comparative thinking is what prevents people from understanding their own life experience and addiction. He asked me not to compare myself to others but to tell him one thing about my childhood that made me unhappy.
This was hard for me to answer. The first things that came to mind were from when I was a teenager. I was never bullied as a kid or sexually harmed. My parents didn’t abuse alcohol or each other. They argued, of course, but not any more than what I believe happened in most households (shit—there I go comparing again), and neither of them suffered from a major or minor mental illness. I had a hard time tapping into my own experience. I was kind of stuck. It took some digging, but Gabor helped me realize that when I became a teenager, I pretty much stopped talking to my parents—or anyone—about my feelings because I felt like my ideas and experiences were so outside the norm that I didn’t want anyone sending me to a shrink. In retrospect, my ideas and experiences weren’t that crazy, but in the rural community where I grew up, anything slightly different was very much frowned upon. I’d traded a childhood of athletics and listening to pop music for teenage years playing in punk/hardcore bands, watching David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino films, and reading books by William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, all of which served to fuel my experience of feeling separate from others, apart from a few friends who were also interested in this weirdo shit. That disconnection was a scary and very lonely experience, even though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, but it still didn’t seem like that big of a deal—I mean, don’t all adolescents isolate to some degree?
Then Gabor asked a question that helped me shift my perspective and begin to see what he was getting at: “If a six-year-old said to you, ‘When I’m sad and lonely, I have nobody to talk to,’ would you say to them, ‘Oh, come on, it’s not so bad. Think of the kids who are being beaten or sexually abused or starved.’ Is that what you would say to a child?”
Of c
ourse not!
“That’s what you’re saying to yourself. When you say ‘Not like others’ or ‘It’s not so bad,’ you’re simply dismissing your own experience—it’s a disconnection from yourself.” He explained that I survived my childhood through disconnection, which is the basis of trauma. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines trauma as “a psychological or emotional stress or blow that may produce disordered feelings or behavior,” and that disorder is what Gabor was getting at.
“That’s what happens in trauma—as soon as you start comparing your experience with anybody else’s, and as soon as you say it wasn’t as bad, that’s a sign of the disconnect. And that’s the problem you’re trying to solve through your addiction. You were trying to resolve your pain—that you had nobody to talk to.”
Holy shit!
I began to understand that it wasn’t that I didn’t have anybody to talk to—my loving parents were there, after all—but that when it came to my emotions, I didn’t know how to talk to my parents or to anyone else. And I know I’m not unique in this. How many of us felt awkward in communicating, in expressing ourselves—not just with family but also with friends, teachers, coaches, religious authorities, and so on. In our formative years, we desperately want approval and to fit in. We want to find our place in the world and to be liked and loved, and this is what matters most. In a way, it’s our full-time job as adolescents.