Already Free
Page 2
Since this shift, my baseline has been an experience of open awareness, freedom, and well-being. Coming from this new basic ground, it makes sense to be kind to oneself, to everyone. I no longer have to approach this as a practice; it simply takes place spontaneously. I still get captured by historically conditioned issues at times and disturbing emotions continue to arise, but they happen less and less frequently and are difficult to take too seriously. This shift has been so powerful for me that, especially as a therapist, I’m endlessly interested in how I might invite others to experience a similar change. How can we investigate our experience in a way that ends our constant postponement of experiencing freedom? How can we cut to the chase and see what’s true, right now, in the present moment? How can we discover whether there’s actually a problem in our self or in life?
My experience is that waking up seems to happen along a continuum. It’s usually not some sudden, black-and-white change. I have found that my own conditioned history hasn’t stopped displaying itself. I still have my personality style, my core vulnerabilities that I don’t like to feel. But I don’t seem to be adding the drama anymore. I don’t really mind that I still have to work with my familiar patterns, my confusion, and my messiness as a human being. In fact, it’s actually very interesting. In the environment of freedom, it turns out that there’s no problem with being fully human. There is no goal of transcendence or of invulnerability in the fruitional view. We’re not trying to rise above our humanness. In fact, in this environment, it’s completely the opposite. The intention is to go so deeply into our confusion, our panic, our joy, our rage, our boredom, and our fear that we find out for ourselves that there’s no essential nature to any of these experiences, as vivid as they may be. This discovery not only strengthens our confidence in the workability of being another confused human, but it also gives rise to a spontaneous sense of compassion for, and interest in, others. We see that others not only have real pain in their lives, but that they, too, are creating unnecessary suffering on top of it. We realize we’re all in the same boat. We begin to ask how we can help ourselves in order to better help others. Are we ready to stop pretending to not be fully present and engaged at every moment? To stop waiting for some future enlightenment, or for our past wounds to heal, before we’re fully committed to, and available to, life? We find that pain is a valid part of life, but that it’s completely workable. It is difficult to have pain, but it’s not a problem.
My training in the Western, or developmental, view was, of course, congruent with Western culture. As I mentioned earlier, in the West, we believe that a better quality of life comes from improving our sense of self and our life circumstances. Obviously, much of this approach is very accurate; it’s true that better health, financial security, political freedoms, and positive feelings about ourselves are all wonderful qualities. In our culture, we associate many of these positive experiences with a state of freedom. Yet this means that our experience of freedom depends on a combination of external circumstances and how we feel—neither of which we have full control over. Because of this, there’s a certain tentative quality to any freedom we might achieve using this approach. At any moment, our circumstances, both inner and outer, could change for the worse, and our sense of freedom could be diminished or lost once again.
In a less familiar way, the Buddhist, or fruitional, view asserts that freedom lies in how we relate to our experience—whatever that experience is, whether we like it or don’t like it. So it’s not about whether we feel depressed or happy; rather, it’s about our willingness and ability to participate fully in any and all of our feelings. The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.
As different as these two views are, together they offer a powerful path to move from a sense of suffering to a sense of freedom. We want to be free. We want to feel whole. We want to feel at peace. The dialogue between Western therapy and the Buddhist view asks, “In what way is our experience of freedom dependent on our life circumstances and how we feel? And in what way is our experience of freedom arising from our unconditional commitment to the truth of our experience, whatever it may be?” Throughout this book, we’ll go back and forth between these two views. Both have their value. Both have their limitations. The purpose of this book is to welcome a dialogue between them, making use of the gifts both have to offer as we begin to experience ourselves as being more wakeful, more free.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the core of Western psychology, which I call the developmental view. This view is the idea that we can improve our life circumstances and our sense of self by changing our historically conditioned behavioral patterns or strategies. It is called the “developmental” view because it postulates that what we experience as young children has a profound impact on the way we engage with life and take care of ourselves as adults. Chapter 2 covers the fruitional view, which arises from the Buddhist idea that our basic nature—freedom—is available right here, right now. If we can shift our perspective on whatever is happening, we’ll find that all the qualities of our own basic nature are already present. Chapter 3 explores the dialogue between the developmental view and the fruitional view from the perspective of my own clinical practice. For example, we can more effectively challenge patterns of experiencing that no longer serve us when we understand the healthy function they played when we were young. And finding that it’s completely workable to show up in each moment, without relying on a familiar drama, gives us an alternative to that drama—a ground from which to challenge our historic patterns.
In chapter 4, we turn our attention to the experience of anxiety and struggle. Although anxiety is a very disturbing experience, it’s actually a natural part of being human. It’s also central to how we generate unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others. Anxiety is explored as a physical and an emotional experience, as well as a signal of how intensely open our minds and our lives actually are. Chapter 5 is about embodied awareness. Most of us tend to take our thoughts and ideas as actual descriptions of reality, which is not accurate and is rarely helpful. Embodied awareness provides direct access to the unique and inherently workable nature of our noninterpretive experiencing. As we train ourselves to stay in our immediate experience, it’s helpful to have an ongoing dialogue between our ideas and our immediate, embodied experiencing.
Chapters 6 and 7 are about relationships. I find relationships incredibly provocative. It’s extremely difficult to pretend that we have our lives together when we’re in an intimate relationship. In chapter 6, we discuss how all of our normal experiencing is relational and how this guarantees an irresolvable tension. This discussion will be the basis for examining what are called codependent dynamics. In chapter 7, we explore a view of four evolving stages of relationship, each of which is an expression of our increasing tolerance of open mind and of intimacy. Chapter 8 discusses what it means to have a good state of mind that is independent of our history, of current circumstances, and of how we feel at any moment. Increasing our conscious participation in our always-present open awareness is seen as central to this capacity. By increasing this participation, we discover an unconditional confidence and freedom, which become the ground from which we engage with ourselves, with others, and with life.
Chapters 1–3 are about what’s called view. Before we take on any practices, it’s important to clarify just what our intentions are and to consider how we might most effectively move toward our goals. The views explored in this book arise from the intention to understand our incredibly complex human experience in ways that relieve unnecessary suffering and that invite more freedom. These discussions are sometimes abstract and may at points feel difficult to fully grasp. But the more practical considerations that follow would be hard to understand without first exploring
these views; the fruitional approach, in particular, is not familiar in our culture. When we are introduced to any new theory, we usually begin with an intellectual understanding, which can then gradually become a view that is integrated with our experiencing.
Chapters 4–7 are about practices. A practice involves a conscious participation in some activity, usually with an intention to improve our experience in some way. When a practice is difficult, we often think of it as a discipline. A discipline is hard to sustain without a view, which helps us understand how it might be to our benefit to make such an effort. In these chapters, we explore how the two basic views being presented in this book might be applied to real-life issues, especially several very basic themes continually dealt with in therapy.
Chapter 8 is about the potential results of these practices. When we commit to certain practices, it’s important to see whether the results we hope for arise. If so, then we will be motivated to continue our efforts. If not, then we should reexamine our views and our practices. What might we expect our experience to be if we were to commit to experimenting with the ideas and disciplines presented in chapters 1–7?
In all of these discussions, I invite you to consider a fundamental assumption: this book is about how we understand and relate to our experience of reality. It is not about the nature of reality. As an example, the experience of awareness is said to be impossible to really define. Approximations are sometimes used—we talk about awareness as being “unborn,” “unending,” and “without limitation.” Without examination, we might assume that awareness has an objective existence with these somehow infinite qualities. I find it more useful, however, to take these descriptions as being about our experience of awareness—“it feels like this,” “it seems like this,” “this is a way to talk about this experience.” Similarly, we could think of the First Noble Truth in Buddhism—the truth of suffering—as if it were a description of reality: that is, reality is suffering. But I think it’s more helpful to understand this idea as being about our experiencing: we experience life as suffering because of how we relate to reality, not because reality itself is inherently a problem. There is a similar possibility in therapy. We might think that we’re relating to our actual history, rather than relating to our current experience or recollection of our history. And so, in all of the discussions to follow, any talk about basic nature, awareness, and so on will be best understood as being about our experience, rather than as making any claim about reality.
It’s said that the Buddha was asked about what happens when we die, whether other beings exist in other realms, and questions about the nature of reality. The Buddha responded:
If a man has been shot with an arrow and the doctor is called, does that doctor ask him who shot the arrow, what his motives were, what he was wearing, and so on? No. The doctor’s job is to remove the arrow and help the patient heal. My teachings are about the relief from unnecessary suffering. I teach about liberation, not about the nature of reality.
Following this example, and as an expression of these teachings, this book is offered with the hope that it might be of some help in accessing our already-present open awareness. With greater conscious participation in awareness comes a greater ability to reduce unnecessary suffering and to increase our experience of freedom.
Throughout the book, I’ll take the point of view that our experience of our basic nature is already that of freedom. I’ll discuss some of the reasons we may not consciously experience this liberation and some of the ways we might invite the experience of freedom into our everyday awareness. My hope is that the chapters that follow will be useful, provocative, and practical for you—whether you happen to be a clinician working with clients or someone who’s simply interested in Buddhism, therapy, or the dialogue between the two. Or perhaps you are someone who is seeking freedom in your own life, like my client Darren—whose story we’ll continue in the next chapter. Whatever brings you to this book, I hope you will continually check out the ideas I’m presenting to see if they are, in fact, relevant and useful to you. Since direct experience has been so central to my own life and work, I invite you to test any theories you find in the pages that follow in the fire of your own experience.
1
THE DEVELOPMENTAL VIEW
THE DEVELOPMENTAL VIEW is central to the Western psychotherapeutic approach. It’s based on the idea that the experiences we have as children, mostly in our families of origin, have a profound impact on the rest of our lives. In response to difficult experiences, we create strategies or behavioral patterns to help us deal with what we experience as threats to our emotional, and sometimes even physical, survival. What we first use for our survival, we later use as a generalized and familiar way of engaging in life. These formulas or strategies are usually very intelligent and appropriate at the time they are created and are of very real benefit to us. As a result, they tend to become habitual and to then persist long after they are needed. Because they are responses to disturbing and even dangerous realities, they’re usually associated with quite a bit of anxiety. We avoid feeling this anxiety by pushing these strategies out of our awareness. They then continue to operate without our conscious participation, potentially for the rest of our lives, unless brought into awareness and challenged once we are adults.
USING OUT-OF-DATE STRATEGIES
To illustrate such strategies and their impact, let’s return to Darren—the client we met in the introduction. As I mentioned, Darren came to me because he couldn’t find lasting satisfaction in his work, relationships, or spiritual practice. He knew he was the common denominator in each situation, but he was beginning to feel a type of despair about his seeming inability to engage with depth and commitment in these significant parts of his life.
It didn’t take long to discover that this was a life-long theme. Growing up, Darren felt like no matter what he did, it was never enough. He had painful memories of coming home with a 98 on his test and his father asking why didn’t he get a 100. In sports, his parents would ask why he wasn’t on the starting team, and his mother criticized the friends he chose as if they were not acceptable.
Darren was quick to explain that he felt loved by his parents and felt they had provided well for him. He believed they were on his side and wished the best for him. There was no physical abuse and no alcoholism in the family. In fact, it was extremely difficult for Darren to say anything critical about his parents. When I started to investigate the possibility that he had felt shamed or humiliated by his parents, Darren was quite defensive and did not want anything negative to be said about them.
And yet, his hope to be approved of, appreciated, and acknowledged was never met. He developed a belief that approval was not going to occur, despite his best efforts. He had done his best to be a “good boy,” to please his parents, to be who they wanted him to be, but it hadn’t gotten him the acknowledgment he so desired.
Like many children, it seemed that Darren ended up believing he was the problem—that there was something fundamentally inadequate or unworthy about him. As is often the case, he developed an unconscious survival strategy to cope with this continual lack of approval. Instead of being himself—which wasn’t working—he tried to be positive, cooperative, dependable, and reliable all the time. While this reduced the painful and scary friction he felt with his parents, he paid a price. First, he hadn’t learned how to be honest with himself or others. Second, he was not allowing himself to feel his own anger and aggression, both of which are a natural part of the human experience.
Almost all of us develop strategies like Darren’s to survive and protect ourselves as children. But as we grow older, these same developmental strategies can hold us back from experiencing ourselves in an honest and spontaneous way. In this case, Darren created a strategy of never getting his hopes up, never wanting to put himself completely on the line, because he “knew” he would fail. No matter how hard he worked, his efforts would never be acknowledged as good enough by his parents. Rather than seeing
his parents’ expectations as unreasonable—and likely driven by their own unconscious developmental strategies—he took the blame. He agreed with them that he was not good enough. And rather than risk losing the love that he did genuinely receive from them, he kept his anger and disappointment at their impossible-to-satisfy expectations to himself—even placing these taboo feelings out of conscious awareness.
As an adult, Darren would often transfer the unconscious anger he felt toward his parents onto his intimate partners, subtly blaming them for his own lack of commitment. Often a partner would try to support him in his struggles around work, becoming invested in his success. When he did not follow through—when he bailed from the job or lost interest in the project—he would subtly communicate that his partner had not been adequately supportive. Or he would make relationship agreements that he would not keep, and his partner would end up feeling unsupported or abandoned—like she couldn’t count on Darren. Either way, Darren’s drama that relationships must involve a lack of support would be perpetuated. As a result, the relationship would end, and Darren would once again be left wondering what had happened. The repetition of this pattern of relating—which Darren was cocreating, but which was still out of his awareness—provided him with continuing evidence that his young strategy—of never getting his hopes up and never expecting his needs to be met—was still necessary and justified.