Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  REGULATING INTENSITY—A FIRST STEP

  One of the possibilities I offer my clients is that they may not be required to participate in experiences that trigger their core vulnerabilities. Perhaps we have the right, and maybe even the responsibility, to not take part in activating situations in which we do not yet have the capacity to retain our adult abilities. By becoming more and more familiar with our triggers, we may be able to notice them before they gain too much momentum. At that point, we can remove ourselves from the interaction for a time to avoid getting more deeply drawn into our reactivity. Of course, sometimes there is no choice—if you’re a single parent, for example, you legitimately may not be able to remove yourself from a child who is pushing all of your buttons. Other skills are called for there. But in many other circumstances, we have a choice. For example, when her partner gets aggressive, Marcie could say—in her own words—“I notice I’m getting triggered, and I’m about to shut down. I love you and want to stay engaged, but I need to take a few minutes for myself. I will come find you in about half an hour, once I feel able to reengage.”

  As we become more familiar with what the triggering experience feels like in the body and find that intense feelings are perhaps never harmful in themselves, gradually we can learn to stay more engaged. By becoming more able to be intimate with ourselves, we are able to be more intimate with our partners, our children, and our world. We are actually always fully intimate with life. But because life is disturbing, we usually pretend to be disconnected in various ways as an unconscious strategy for regulating intensity. Part of our work in therapy is to learn how to give ourselves permission to regulate our intensity in conscious adult ways, rather than to do so using unconscious, out-of-date strategies. By taking responsibility for regulating our own levels of intensity, it becomes safer to explore that intensity. And, as we gradually increase our tolerance of experiential intensity, we will be able to stay more consciously connected to life itself and everything it brings.

  FROM THE FRUITIONAL VIEW

  Rather than looking for ways to improve our relationship with our circumstances—such as learning techniques for a more adult relationship with our neurotic strategies—the fruitional view is about coming back to what’s happening in the immediate moment. We become curious about our real-time experience, asking ourselves if there’s any evidence that there’s actually a threat we must escape from.

  Marcie told me she felt like she was “going to be annihilated” when her partner yelled at her, and clearly it actually felt that way to her. Taking the fruitional approach, I invited her to recall a time when her partner had raised his voice and she had felt this panic. I encouraged her not to go into any story about the experience—about why it was so unfair of him since she never yelled and about how she is so reasonable and he’s not. Instead, I suggested that she stay in the immediacy of her own experience and use her intuitive intelligence to investigate whether there was really a problem. Is there any damage? Is it killing her to feel this panic? Is she becoming dysfunctional? Does she think it’s actually making her sick? These are all legitimate questions, and there’s no right answer. But I find that when we are willing to stay embodied in our immediate experience of intensity, most of us discover that no harm is actually happening to us.

  This technique works even if someone is having a dissociative response. For example, Marcie at first reported resistance to feeling her vulnerability. At that point, I invited her to stay embodied with her experience of resistance. That was her immediate experience; there was no requirement for her to break through and feel her vulnerability. Sometimes clients can’t get out of their thoughts, and that’s fine too. I have them just experience what that’s like, without getting too fascinated by the content of those thoughts. I ask, “What does it feel like to be caught in your head that way? Is that a problem?”

  In other words, from the fruitional approach, we’re always returning to immediacy. We’re always checking out our experience and contrasting it with our familiar claim that there’s something problematic about that immediate experience—and, in a larger sense, about us.

  THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

  The developmental approach could be understood as a gradual approach, while the fruitional approach could be seen as a sudden approach. Within Buddhism, these two approaches actually represent two different traditions. Some schools advocate for a gradual approach to enlightenment, and others focus on a more sudden experience of enlightenment. Perhaps these are different ways to view the same process. It’s like an apple growing on a tree. At some point, the apple is going to fall—a sudden occurrence. But of course it has been ripening there for months, so it could be thought of as a gradual approach as well.

  We could also use the language of being and becoming to describe these views. The developmental approach is about becoming: we’re always looking for ways to improve our experience. How can we live to our full potential? The fruitional approach is about being—accepting and relaxing into being at peace with the immediate moment. Living to our full potential in this moment means participating fully right now, regardless of what’s happening. Both approaches are, of course, legitimate, but they don’t work without each other. If, on the one hand, we’re always “becoming,” without learning how to be, then we’re always postponing our commitment to experiencing the present. We tell ourselves that we’ll fully participate once we’ve acquired our preferred conditions. But such conditions, of course, are a moving target. We’re never going to feel like we’ve “arrived,” that there’s nothing left that needs improvement. In our culture, this is a pervasive source of confusion and suffering. It seems like all of us are trying to generate a particular set of life circumstances—or, on a subtler level, a better state of mind—so that we can finally accept ourselves. We think that if only we acquire this or that set of conditions, then we’ll be able to be fully present. But if our unconscious attitude is to always look to the future for acceptance, then of course that time will never come.

  On the fruitional side, the focus is on being—on surrender, acceptance, and immediacy. But this is only part of the story. Over any collection of moments, a stream of experiencing takes place. Upon investigation, this stream of experiencing seems to have an evolutionary quality. Our universe, evidence suggests, actually is an evolutionary process. So while at any moment there is being, over time, there is always becoming. You can’t have one without the other. If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship. Just like the concepts of “high” and “low”—neither of which would exist without the other—being and becoming codefine each other. They’re relational. The Buddhist point of view is that all experiencing is relational. Our world appears to be made up of independently existing things and phenomena, as well as of independently existing selves observing and interacting with these things. Upon investigation, though, we may find that everything we experience depends on many complex conditions; that the more precise we are in our attention, the less evidence we find of anything having some permanent objective existence. In practice, the fruitional view simply returns over and over again to the present moment—to “being.” What we find there turns out to be pretty much the same thing, pretty much all of the time. We might feel anxious, we might feel activated, we might feel sort of sad—but after a while, we realize that all these things are simply our human nature. Our humanness is all we are going to find in our immediate experience. From the point of view of development, or “becoming,” we’re always interested in evolving our endless stream of immediate moments into a better experience. So we look for different ways to improve ourselves and our circumstances, which is also very important.

  If we combine these two apparently irresolvable but actually cocreative views into one
image, they might start to look like a spiral staircase. The fruitional view would be the circular aspect: we’re always revisiting the same issues over and over again. In practice, we say, “Well, I’ll probably work with this sadness, this loneliness, this feeling of abandonment until I die. I’m going to keep coming across it again and again, so I might as well develop a relationship with it. I’m going to practice feeling it, to see if it’s actually a problem.” The developmental view would be represented by a line, taking us from here to there. We’re trying to improve our lives, to create upward momentum. “I understand where my abandonment feelings originated, and I’m going to stop trying to have relationships with unavailable partners.” Combined, the circular motion and the line start to represent an ascending spiral. The vertical axes are our deeply embedded issues, which we keep having to deal with. But we can intersect these basic themes at increasing levels of maturation. We’re walking in a circular pattern, but things are evolving simultaneously. We continue to encounter our core vulnerabilities, but hopefully at greater and greater levels of awareness and skillfulness.

  FIGURE 3.1SPIRAL STAIRCASE

  HOLDING CONTRADICTORY ENERGIES SIMULTANEOUSLY

  So how might we apply these apparently contradicting approaches in our everyday lives? When I work with clients, I often invite them to consider a two-step sequence. The first step is that of acceptance—becoming willing to accept the way things are. This represents the fruitional approach; we stay present with reality as it is. From that ground of acceptance, we can then ask how we might improve our situation or experience, which is the second step. Marcie was interested in this experiment, so I asked her, “How would it be to accept your partner and your relationship as if they are the way they are—as if they’re never going to get any better?” I wasn’t actually suggesting that would be the case. Who knows what will happen in the future? Her partner could leave her, or he could die, or they could get married and have kids. We just don’t know. Instead, the point of the question was to direct her awareness to what it would feel like if no improvement were on the horizon. I was deliberately inviting an experience of claustrophobia—taking away any little exit that would allow Marcie to avoid committing to her immediate experience.

  Some clients actually respond with relief to such an idea—“Gosh, I’m exhausted from always trying to make things better.” But Marcie, like a lot of my clients, responded with a type of panic. “I can’t accept the way things are,” she told me. “His behavior isn’t okay. Our relationship isn’t as good as it needs to be.” In the discussion that followed, however, it became clear that she was really saying, “I am choosing to be with him, I haven’t chosen to end the relationship, but I have a complaint. So I’m not going to be fully engaged until things change. Until then, I’m here in the relationship, but I’m not really here.”

  “Here but not really here” describes a lot of us in our relationship with life, in general. We could all ask ourselves, “What would it be like if this is it, if life never gets any better than it is at this moment?” Again, the point of the question is to watch our emotional response. What would it be like to be completely committed to this present reality? Because, in fact, that’s all there is to experience right now, even if it doesn’t match up to our preferred conditions.

  That’s not the end of the story, of course. If we want to improve our situation, to evolve our circumstances, we should go for it. We should definitely give it a try. But if we try to improve ourselves without first accepting our circumstances, the effort may feel very serious. It may feel like our lives—or, like Marcie, our emotional well-being—hang in the balance. If, on the other hand, we’ve already accepted things as they are, then any efforts at improvement can be understood as being about practical issues or perhaps even be experienced as play. We’re doing it for enjoyment. We’re doing it because we choose to, not because we have to. We’ve already accepted that our lives are the way they are, so there’s nothing at stake here. Our life circumstances are fundamentally workable just as they are.

  Let’s say you live in a home with a basically sound structure. There’s running water and heat, and the roof doesn’t leak. It may not be a palace, and the yard may not be as beautiful as the neighbor’s, but it’s adequate. You have a bed, a bathroom, and a kitchen—the basic setup. You don’t really need anything more. Can you imagine living here just as it is for the rest of your life? If so, any improvements you might make—remodeling the kitchen, adding a sunroom, doing some landscaping—would be for pleasure and increased functionality, rather than out of necessity. These changes are not a requirement; nobody’s well-being is at stake. You’ve already accepted that the house is complete just the way it is. But for the pleasure of it, you’d like to know what it would be like to have a nicer kitchen and a prettier yard. So you save up some money, and you hire the right people, and you make some improvements for fun, for satisfaction.

  Of course, this idea applies to our own personal work as well. Imagine that you could really be committed to who you are in this present moment, without qualifications. Any work you might choose to do—be it therapy, spiritual work, yoga, what have you—would basically be for practical reasons, for a sense of satisfaction. It’s not necessary. It’s just a choice. Down the road, you might extend your motivation, seeing that doing your personal work would benefit others as well. But that’s not the initial motivation. In fact, most of us are trying our best to take care of ourselves, which is the appropriate place to start, in my experience. But either way, any improvements you make to your own state of mind are a sort of added bonus. They are not necessary, because your life is workable just as it is, right now.

  Developmental and fruitional . . . becoming and being. The apparent contradiction between these two energies points us toward a larger question: how can we hold contradictory energies simultaneously, with no fantasy of resolution? That’s a question I often ask my clients in terms of their actual emotional work. Take, for example, the question of whether we actually want to wake up. If you’re reading this book, you probably have the idea that you want to experience more freedom. But you’re considering the idea that you are already and always free. So why don’t you experience more freedom? Some people blame themselves or society. Some identify themselves as seekers, putting wakefulness into the future. Some feel frustrated. But perhaps it’s simpler than all that—maybe we all have deeply contradictory feelings about waking up. Maybe we have already intuited that the experience of open awareness provides absolutely no support for personal identity, no security, no rewards, no recognition. That doesn’t sound so good. We may have, legitimately, deeply contradictory feelings. We want more freedom, but we also want security. But perhaps this is not a problem to be resolved. Paradoxically, we may find an actual experience of greater freedom when we hold both of these human concerns at once, with no fantasy of resolution. If we try to identify with “freedom” and make our wish for “security” wrong, we just push our security needs out of awareness, where they will be enacted unconsciously, perhaps as an experience of feeling stuck on our path. What would our experience be if we gave ourselves permission to feel that we want to be free and that we don’t want to be free, with no resolution, ever? For an experience of freedom to be always present, it can’t take sides. It has to be a freedom that includes feeling stuck, that includes any and all experiencing. As humans, our minds seem to work dualistically, always dividing reality into this and that, good and bad, self and other. Dualistic experience is not the problem; taking this experience seriously and trying to resolve it is. The unconditional acceptance of our human experience as we find it to be is at the heart of the fruitional approach.

  Upon deeper investigation of such contradictions, we find that our “sense of self”—our awareness—turns out to be somewhere in the middle. We’re actually unable to say that we feel only this way or that way. We can’t identify with either side of our feelings, because both are true. Very organically, we end up in an irresolvabl
e middle ground. Buddhism is sometimes referred to as the middle way or the middle path. That doesn’t mean we take half of this and half of that and end up in a homogenized compromise; instead, it means we hold the totality of both at the same time. We develop the capacity not to take refuge in any one position. As a result, we end up in this open middle ground where there’s no support for personal identity and no objective confirmation that we’re ever doing anything the “right way.” Obviously, from an egoic point of view, this can be quite disturbing, especially at first. But the benefit is that we are able to just show up without a preconceived formula about how to live our lives. We begin to experience the reality that every moment is fresh. It’s open. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and we don’t know the right way to do this or that. We can’t even come up with a resolved feeling about things that are important, like whether we should stay in a particular relationship. We always have contradictory feelings. Learning to hold contradictory energies can be a very powerful support to a fruitional view. And in fact, on a subtler level, holding both the developmental and the fruitional views, without taking sides, is itself congruent with a fruitional approach, which finds “not knowing” at the heart of all relative experiencing.