Already Free
Page 13
I have used selective aspects of my work with Vance to illustrate the process of challenging the ways in which we construct the experience of disconnection. He and I also, of course, worked with family-of-origin issues, other core vulnerabilities, the question of whether it was healthy for him to remain in his current job, how to cultivate healthy boundaries and conflict skills, and so on.
It may be helpful to summarize the ways in which we practice and generate the experience of disconnection. Creating the sense of being a divided self builds on each successive level. The antidotal practices with which we might deconstruct this drama are used from the bottom up in Table 3.1.
WHY ALTERNATE BETWEEN DEVELOPMENTAL AND FRUITIONAL WORK?
As I’ve said, in my work, I alternate back and forth between developmental work, such as exploring family-of-origin issues, gender training, and the impact of various life experiences, and fruitional practices, such as embodied immediacy, noninterpretive experiencing, and unconditional kindness. In a Western way, I look at our capacity to set boundaries, communicate what we want, have constructive conflict skills, have a more realistic sense of self, and learn to listen. All of these developmental practices are very valuable in increasing our tolerance of experiential intensity. As long as we are still trying to take care of ourselves with the strategies we created as children, we tend to continue a child’s basically defensive attitude toward intense experience. As we update these strategies and base them on current reality, however, we relate to difficult experience from our current adult capacities.
When we work only developmentally, though, it’s very common to focus so much on our history that we end up believing that some wound or unresolved issue in our past is somehow causing our current difficulties. We might then unconsciously postpone being fully engaged with our lives until we have resolved that issue. But how can something in the past cause something now? Perhaps what we call a “wound” is actually a refusal to stay fully present and embodied with very disturbing feelings that are only arising in this moment.
TABLE 3.1
The Five Levels of Disconnection and Their Antidotes
While Western therapy can result in an endless project of improving our experience, there are those clients—especially spiritual practitioners—who try to do only fruitional work. In that case, the problem can become something we call “spiritual bypassing.” This is where we learn to dissolve any sense of disturbance into spaciousness and immediacy. In this moment, there is no problem, and so actual dysfunctional patterns of behavior can be dismissed as “a story about our experience.” This may bring immediate relief, but it often means we are not engaging with some very real, very messy aspects of the human experience. We may “wake up,” so to speak, but that doesn’t mean we suddenly become skillful. Just because we have woken up does not mean we suddenly know how to speak Swahili and play the piano. Neither do we suddenly know how to have satisfying human relationships or how to handle our conditioned history. If we experience some degree of wakefulness but then go off to live in a cave alone, we are less likely to get captured by everyday problems. But if we want to live in society—if we’re going to be a parent, a partner, a teacher, or somebody trying to be of benefit to others—it’s very important to do the developmental work to process our “characterological” issues. Because even though we might not feel identified with those issues anymore, the people we relate to may still be profoundly affected by our unresolved reenactment behaviors.
So, for those of us who want to wake up for the benefit of both ourselves and others, it’s important to remember that part of being of benefit is to clean up our own act. We work with the patterns of our conditioned history, so that we are not causing undue harm to those around us.
We could say that each of these two views addresses half the story very well and the other half not so well. Together, they can be used in a very powerful, complementary way. Developmental work supports our fruitional path: reducing drama, taking better care of ourselves, and acting as an adult help us relax our chronically contracted attention and feel more able to investigate our immediate experiencing. Fruitional practices support our developmental work: dissolving our sense of being a divided, problematic self helps us feel less identified with and invested in our familiar survival strategies and more able to tolerate the anxiety that’s inseparable from challenging them. But even more powerfully, we can use these possibly contradictory-appearing ways of understanding as an opportunity to stay in that open space between. We can investigate the disturbing territory we find between this version of reality and that version of reality, which we find whenever we try to grasp what’s most true in our experience. We may find that we can best accommodate all of our experiencing when we’re not identified with any of it.
THE GRAVITATIONAL SHIFT
As I mentioned earlier, at a certain point in the journey, we may experience a shift in our experiential center of gravity. On one side of this shift, we still have a certain amount of struggle, which is appropriate. We have to make an effort because our default position continues to be that very confusing, painful experience of being a problematic, divided self. So we actually do need to work on that. On the other side of this gravitational shift, however, our baseline, default position is to be open toward, relaxed about, accepting of, and at home with the truth of our experience—whatever it happens to be, whether we like it or not. In discussing this shift, Carl Jung used the metaphor of leaning back in a chair. If you’re leaning back and you relax your effort, up to a certain point, the chair will return to where it was. It will fall back to its original position. But if you continue leaning back and cross the center of gravity, then a relaxation of effort will result in the chair falling over backward. The leaning is the same all the way through; nothing about the process changes. But at a certain point, the display becomes really different—almost the opposite.
Similarly, we could imagine climbing a steep mountain. We have to apply a lot of effort, or struggle, to climb up that mountain. If we relax our effort, we might metaphorically slide back down to where we began. Once we’ve reached the peak, however, and are heading down the other side, our work isn’t to struggle anymore. Now it’s to cooperate with gravity; it’s to relax. We come down the hill by relaxing and letting gravity and our bodies cooperate. In a similar way, as we shift from experiencing ourselves as divided and problematic, to experiencing ourselves as already fully present and workable, there is a dramatic dissolution in the sense of struggle and of unnecessary suffering. We cooperate with ourselves; we find ourselves to be our own best friend, regardless of what’s arising. As we cooperate with ourselves, we cooperate with life, and strangely enough, we begin to experience that life is cooperating with us.
PRACTICEFEELING THE SUPPORT THAT’S ALREADY PRESENT
This short, guided meditation can be helpful for cultivating the sense of psychic shift that we have been talking about. If you have time, I recommend that you record yourself reading the script out loud and then play it back. Alternatively, you could ask a friend to read it to you. Be sure to pause after each line break so you can experience the meditation.
Sit down and relax. Make sure you feel comfortable. Wherever you’re sitting, put attention on what you can feel in your body. Notice the weight of your body as you begin the meditation.
Feel the seat, the chair, the cushion, or the floor that you’re sitting on. Feel how it is supporting you.
You don’t have to do anything to deserve that support. All you have to do is feel it. Feel your body as it is resting on the earth. What is it like to have that support—support that you don’t have to earn or purchase? You don’t have to perch on your chair. The chair will support you.
Become aware of your breath. Feel that your breathing is supporting you. It doesn’t matter if you’re neurotic or sane, a good person or a bad person, happy or sad. Your breath is supporting you, regardless. It may not last forever, but for right now, your breath is supporting you.
Your body is supporting you. Remember all of the incredibly complex systems that come together to form your body. Your skeleton . . . your muscles . . . your mind. Your body is supporting you; you don’t have to do anything to deserve support from your body.
The planet is supporting you. There’s a workable range of temperature . . . the atmospheric gases are in just the right proportions. Gravity is working well . . . the seasons are working. You don’t have to do anything to deserve any of that support. It’s already present. Relax into the reality that you’re already being supported. Perhaps not perfectly, but adequately.
You could imagine that even this crazy society is supporting you. There’s food in the grocery store and gas at the pumps . . . people generally follow the law . . . the streets are paved . . . and the electricity works. It’s not perfect, but even society is supporting you in its own way. You don’t have to deserve it. Society is still going to be operating.
Allow yourself to feel that sense of support. It’s always present. You don’t have to do anything to deserve it or create it.
See what it would be like to relax into a state of well-being in this moment. Rest in the unconditional experience of well-being and support. You don’t have to do anything to make it happen. All you need to do is relax into the way things already are.
We don’t have to do anything to deserve this ongoing sense of well-being, of relaxation, of unconditional support from life. We don’t have to fix our life circumstances. We don’t have to improve ourselves. We don’t have to heal anything from our history at all. This sense of well-being is always present—we just have to remember to discipline our attention. It has to occur to us to look for it. It has to be a priority, actually. Interestingly, as we explore this practice, we may find resistance. Despite our claim of wanting relief from our suffering, we may discover an almost addictive investment in the entertainment of our familiar struggles and dramas. But if we care to, we can train ourselves to step into this state of well-being, relaxation, and support at any moment. And it’s my experience that, if we do this more and more frequently, the experiential shift we have discussed is likely to begin to arise. We will actually start to have a sense of confidence that a good state of mind—a state of unconditional well-being—is always available. We don’t have to resolve our neuroses or take care of our financial situation or settle our relationship or be in good health. Nothing is required. We don’t have to do anything at all except look for it, because it’s always there.
4
EXPERIENCING ANXIETY AND STRUGGLE
JEROME WAS A LAWYER in his late forties. He arrived at my office in a shirt and tie, on his lunch break from his job as a junior partner at a local firm. Despite his well-put-together appearance, he had come to see me because he felt unsuccessful at work and in relationships with women. Upon further discussion, he reported that he was not as assertive as he wanted to be, and he was feeling a lack of aliveness and effectiveness in his life as a whole. He found it hard to be himself when he was dating women, and at work he tended to placate or please. He worked more hours than his colleagues, doing what he could to avoid conflict. But the results were leaving him unsatisfied and frustrated.
I asked Jerome to imagine what it would be like to assert himself more effectively in any of these parts of his life—to stick up for himself in a conflict at the office or to disagree with a woman he was dating. He laughed nervously and said that even the thought made him feel uncomfortable. So I dug a little deeper and asked him what he would have to feel if he were to say “no” to a colleague.
Rather than answering the question, Jerome started rationalizing his passive approach. He started talking about the potential consequences of initiating conflict—how he didn’t want people to be mad at him, didn’t want to hurt their feelings, hated being yelled at, and just wanted people to get along with each other. I invited Jerome back to the present moment and asked him again what he was feeling in his immediate experience. Once he put his attention on his body, he was able to say that he was feeling tightness in his stomach, a little nausea, and a generalized nervousness. A couple of times he returned to his concerns about the consequences of conflict, and each time he was surprised when I pointed out that he had left his immediate experience yet again. He wasn’t even aware of his own impulse to dissociate from his immediate experience of disturbing sensations and to jump into interpretation. Each time, I guided him back to the present moment.
I asked, “What sensations do you feel in your body as you imagine leaving your job at five o’clock and not taking work home for the weekend?” I was not, of course, suggesting that he actually leave the office at five o’clock; we were not discussing behavioral changes at this point. I was simply using a hypothetical situation to see what energies or feelings might arise if he were to face a situation he had been avoiding.
It didn’t take long to discover that the feelings and sensations he had been avoiding at work were the same feelings and sensations he was avoiding in his relationships and in other unsatisfying areas of his life. They were sensations of anxiety—tightness in the chest, a faster heartbeat, a sense of nausea, a feeling of suffocation, and so on. These same feelings would come up whether he imagined conflict with potential partners, setting boundaries at work, speaking honestly with his parents, or disagreeing with a friend. It turned out that his behavior in each of these situations was crafted to avoid the very vulnerable, very disturbing experience we call “anxiety.”
ANXIETY AS A NATURAL RESPONSE
For most of us, anxiety is an incredibly difficult experience to work with. It seems we have a collective societal fantasy that we’re not supposed to feel anxious. Often we will relate to our experience of anxiety as evidence that there must be something wrong with us or our lives. We don’t feel comfortable when we’re anxious, and other people don’t feel comfortable around us. Anxiety feels like a problem that needs to be fixed.
But in my experience, anxiety is a completely legitimate and valid, if not pleasant, aspect of being human. Each of us has to learn to work with anxiety skillfully because it is part of our everyday experience. I know that I feel anxious every day. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t paying attention as I was driving and I swerved out of my lane, or maybe I find myself wondering if our kids are okay. I might be anxious about some conflict with my wife or nervous about paying a bill. I may feel anxious with no obvious explanation. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who doesn’t experience anxiety as an ongoing part of life. So anxiety is not a choice; the choice is how we relate to it. Do we attack this disturbing experience with fundamental aggression—trying not to feel it, making it wrong, or distracting ourselves? Or do we approach anxiety with an attitude of commitment to, and acceptance of, this disturbing experience? Because anxiety is real; it’s us. It’s not some alien feeling happening to us. A life without anxiety is not an option.
A NOTE ABOUT ANXIETY
For the purposes of this chapter, I’ll be talking about what could be called “emotional” or “existential” anxiety. I’m not talking about the kind of anxiety that results from brain chemistry imbalances, hormones, or other medical problems. These biologically based experiences of anxiety usually need biologically based interventions: regulating sleep, experimenting with diet, making sure we exercise, possibly even medication. These interventions are all very appropriate. But here we’ll be talking about the type of anxiety that we all live with—anxiety that doesn’t seem to be caused by a neurological or hormonal problem. The anxiety of everyday human experience.
When we’re feeling anxious, generally we sense that there’s some sort of impending threat. Intense physical sensations arise, which energize us and focus our attention on the search for danger. There is often a sense of imminent catastrophe, which is interesting because often we can’t even name what it is we’re anxious about. Anxiety is an immediate response to a possible threat, which is different from fear. Fear is an immediate response to an immediate threat. For example, if we
’re hiking in the forest and suddenly hear a loud noise, we’ll likely feel some fear. If we’re hiking and we feel anxious, on the other hand, it’s because there’s a possibility of danger—we’re worried about what could happen, rather than what is happening. In this way, anxiety serves almost like a preparation for our survival response. It’s getting us ready for the possibility of danger.
Both fear and anxiety are at the center of our biology. These basic survival responses have certainly been around much longer than we as humans have been on the planet. Our species probably wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have fear and anxiety. If our ancestors had felt only peaceful and happy, sunning themselves on a rock all day, some wild animal probably would have eaten them up. The threat response is a necessary part of the evolutionary process. Perhaps for the same evolutionary reasons, anxiety seems to be very contagious. For example, if a single bird in a flock gets startled, in a fraction of a second, the whole flock will take off. The same goes for a herd of deer or a family of prairie dogs. Interestingly, it’s not that different among humans. Most of us have had the experience of becoming anxious simply because someone we care about is feeling that way. If a loved one feels angry, jealous, or confused, we usually don’t feel the same feeling. For some reason, we can keep more distance, probably because these feelings are not a signal of an imminent threat to our survival. But the anxiety response is deeply embedded in our makeup, which makes it very contagious and very difficult to work with.
It’s difficult to work with anxiety because we seem to be biologically wired to avoid it if at all possible or to escape from whatever is triggering it. If anxiety were a signal of real imminent danger, this would of course be an intelligent response. We would want to get away from the danger as quickly as possible. But as modern humans, we experience life beyond the biological level of physical survival. We’re having emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual experiences, too. And when there is disturbance on any of these levels, we seem to respond in a fraction of a second to the possibility of a threat, as if it were a biological signal. Evolutionarily, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And because we don’t take the time to examine this anxiety in detail, we react as if our literal, physical survival were at risk. What has become clear through Western developmental work is that most of us learn to organize our survival strategies around the avoidance of certain feelings, thoughts, and sensations—especially those associated with intense levels of anxiety.