Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  On a subconscious level, we seem to understand this. We sense that we’re identifying with a self that cannot be located. The inevitable consequence is a pervasive and chronic anxiety. Our efforts to feel safe and comfortable are constantly being undermined by the evidence of our actual experiencing. Anxiety, from a spiritual path perspective, can therefore be understood as the accurate perception of the basically open nature of life, as seen from the reference point of egoic process. The egoic process is that aspect of the self that, quite understandably, wants to feel comfortable, happy, safe, secure, and in control. When faced with the reality of how open everything actually is, that part of us basically freaks out.

  From this point of view, we can see that anxiety is actually a necessary part of our path. As we move in the direction of waking up, increasing our tolerance of more and more awareness or open mind, we will inevitably experience anxiety. At some point or another, anybody committed to a spiritual path may find it important to commit to the experience of anxiety as an approximation of an open state of mind. This is not because reality is itself anxiety producing but because the inevitable engagement of a “personal self” with nonpersonal reality will be experienced as a threat to this self—that is, as anxiety.

  When I say “committing to our anxiety,” I mean doing the difficult work—difficult because it goes against both our biology and our cultural conditioning—of training ourselves not to try to escape our anxious feelings. It even means to learn to appreciate them, explore them, feel them, and see for ourselves whether they are as much of a problem as we think they will be. If anxiety is not a problem and if we understand that it’s actually an essential part of our path of waking up, then we might want to practice this attitude of commitment. “I am ready to feel anxious at any second,” we might say to ourselves, “and to work with the energy of anxiety for the rest of my life. I give up my fantasy of a life free of anxiety.”

  The anxiety we feel often seems to be associated with particular circumstances. If my wife is significantly late coming home, or if I have to go to the doctor, or if my daughter is not speaking to me, I will likely feel anxiety. But if I look more closely, I see that each of those situations is forcing me to acknowledge how open my life actually is. Yes, my wife might have gotten into an accident. Yes, I could have undiagnosed cancer. Yes, it could be that I’m a bad father. All of those things are completely possible. There’s no guarantee of happy endings, and we are always aware of that on some deep level. But such circumstances, it turns out, become reminders of the fundamental openness of our lives in general. Underneath the particulars, we’re anxious because these life dramas force us to acknowledge that we don’t actually know what’s going to happen. We have no way of really controlling our circumstances, which, from an egoic point of view, is very uncomfortable.

  If we examine our experience more broadly, we may discover that we can’t actually answer any of the most important questions about our lives. Do we really know who we are? Do we know the meaning of life? Do we know how to have healthy intimacy? Do we know how to parent our children without passing on our unresolved issues? Do we know what happens when we die? Do we even know if we should be doing this type of work or living in this town? Upon investigation, we find that we don’t know anything that’s really important. (A lot of us don’t even know what we want to eat for dinner tonight.) If anxiety is our egoic response to the truth of not knowing—of openness—then we really might want to consider committing to the experience of anxiety, because it’s not going anywhere.

  THE METAPHOR OF BARDO

  I find the Tibetan Buddhist concept of bardo to be a useful metaphor for learning to tolerate the experience of openness and anxiety. From a traditional religious perspective, bardo is a series of experiential realms that consciousness enters after death. Each realm is less open, more solid, and more contractive than the one before it. When awareness can finally tolerate the degree of openness and anxiety of a particular realm, then that’s the realm in which it reincarnates. Its tolerance for openness determines where it will stay; it can’t incarnate into more openness than it can handle.

  Personally, I have no idea what happens when we die; I’m more interested in applying the metaphor of bardo to the way our minds work on a daily basis. We could consider that, moment after moment, we are incarnating into—identifying with—particular states of mind. We’re incarnating into certain attitudes, positions, beliefs, and roles. For example, when working as a therapist, I take on a deep identification with that role. I’ve found that this role actually supports a greater tolerance of open mind than, let’s say, when I’m in conflict with my wife in my role of partner. Even within my role as therapist, I may be captured by a variety of states of mind, depending on my tolerance of anxiety and openness at any given moment. When I recognize the feeling of being captured, I have learned to ask myself, “What more open experience am I refusing to participate in right now?”

  From this point of view, our practice is to gradually learn to metabolize—to contain and process in our embodied experience—more and more anxiety. That way, over time, we can integrate more and more experience of open mind or awareness into our daily life. As we gradually become more and more able to go deeply into our anxiety—rather than be stopped by it—we discover that it’s not a problem. We then have more frequent moments of open awareness. Gradually, we find that the familiar ups and downs of daily life are being held in an environment of openness. And we find that this actually changes the meaning of our familiar experience. We find that “form,” experienced as inseparable from awareness, is not only workable, but may even be blissful.

  From both the developmental and Buddhist views, we’re now left with a dilemma: acknowledging the truth of our experience will often require feeling our immediate anxiety, but resisting the truth of our experience results in chronic anxiety. Either way, we will feel anxiety. Rather than looking more deeply at this disturbing dilemma, our usual unconscious response is to try to avoid either choice. We do so by manifesting symptoms that appear to explain and bind this anxiety. As “symptoms,” we can claim that the cause of our anxiety is an aberration. We acknowledge that there is anxiety, but we resist owning it as a necessary part of life. We can then involve ourselves in the project of seeking relief from these symptoms through a variety of means. But if we were to successfully resolve these problems, we would lose the distractive function they provide. At that point, we might actually have to examine the root cause of our anxiety. We would then be faced with our worst fears. From the developmental perspective, this would mean facing our core emotional vulnerabilities. From the fruitional perspective, we would face raw, immediate experiencing, which provides no support for personal identity. So we have two choices. We can avoid the truth and instead experience the exhausting, but partially unconscious, disturbance of chronic anxiety, or we can commit to the truth and live with the conscious disturbance of emotional vulnerability, with no support for personal identity. Until we train ourselves to rest in the embodied experience of anxiety and disturbance—to find out for ourselves that we are not harmed by it—and to understand that these difficult experiences are completely legitimate and valid parts of life, we will unconsciously look for some way out. We’ll be searching for some resolution or, at least, some reliable distraction.

  POLARIZING DRAMA AS DISTRACTION

  A common response to this dilemma of anxiety is the creation of polarized life dramas—with fear on one side and hope on the other. We represent the disturbing truth of our experiencing as a fear and our wish to have a safe, comfortable, undisturbed life as a hope. When we add the fantasy of resolution to these contradictory, apparently mutually exclusive experiences, our attention is successfully captured. The struggle between these two becomes a distracting drama.

  There is so much anxiety associated with our fear of openness that finding a resolution usually takes on apparently survival-level importance. We really seem to believe that the outcome of this drama will d
etermine our worth as a person or the viability of our lives. Let’s say that I feel unworthy of love. It’s a horrible feeling to have, and it goes way back in my life. I want to collapse or explode in rage whenever I feel this feeling. Naturally, I imagine what it might feel like to be truly loved, and then I begin to behave in ways I hope will give me that feeling. I’m kind and generous; I’m helpful and avoid conflict. This fear of feeling unloved (which I already live with) is countered by the hope that someday I’ll feel loved in the way I want. Then I’ll be able to start living my life. Then I’ll be okay. Until then, there’s a lot at stake. This is a really significant issue: my worth as a person is on the line.

  This polarized drama is fascinating to us, yet it does not resolve anything. I already feel unworthy of love. It’s a historic issue, deeply conditioned, and it’s unlikely I ever will get rid of it. So rather than trying to escape it, another possibility is to experience it—to commit to feeling this very difficult vulnerability, to let myself feel unworthy of love and then see if I’m harmed. But that’s not our instinctual approach. The closer we get to our core vulnerabilities, or to the truth of openness, the more we feel an annihilatory panic. So we unconsciously opt for the experience of polarized drama to avoid having to face the truth of our experience. And in doing so, we create an incredibly resilient and stable psychic structure: struggle.

  THE NATURE OF STRUGGLE

  Having come up with this strategy of struggle, we’ve developed a pretty effective defense against feeling raw, embodied, unexplained anxiety. Struggle can be defined as “a continued effort to resist force or to free oneself from constraints.” The core struggle for most of us is that we want things to be different than they are. We don’t want to feel fear and other intense negative emotions. We don’t want to become sick and die. We don’t want the incomprehensible violence in this world to continue. But negative feelings and difficult circumstances are inseparable from the complex reality we are all expressions of. Neurotic struggle, then, could be understood as “a continued effort to resist reality or to free oneself from its constraints.”

  Imagine finding yourself in prison, unjustly accused, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. How would you relate to such an injustice, to the fact that you’re going to be in prison for the rest of your life? You might struggle against that reality, against the unfairness of it, but that wouldn’t get you out of prison. In fact, it’s possible that you may end up feeling even more claustrophobic and enraged—basically, in hell. The struggle would, however, serve to distract you from the deep grief and powerlessness that you would have to feel if you actually acknowledged the truth of your situation.

  We might say that all of us are, in fact, imprisoned—in the constraints of body, gender, our history, our race, and life circumstances. And most of us distract ourselves from that imprisonment through struggle. That way, we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality. Instead, we can hold on to our fantasies of a life without limitation. So neurotic struggle has a function; it serves a purpose. Until we’re ready to be present, embodied, and kind toward the truth of our experience—which is very disturbing on a certain level—we will have an investment in maintaining neurotic struggle.

  To be most effective, a strategy for resisting reality will have several features. Most basically, it will operate at an unconscious level. After all, if we’re aware of what we’re defending against, it’s not such a great defense. In a more sophisticated way, we can acknowledge our experiencing without actually working with it. For example, I work with many people who in some way or another say, “Yes, I really want to work with that issue. I really want to get to the depth of things.” They are acknowledging that they have core vulnerabilities, and they claim to want to work with them. But often there’s some excuse. “I’m not ready for it yet.” “It’s too scary.” “My life circumstances are too busy; now’s not a good time.” “My partner doesn’t support me doing this work.” The truth of their reality gets mentioned but never really encountered. They claim to be unable rather than unwilling.

  A good strategy for resisting reality will also be vague enough to be used in a variety of circumstances. If getting the promotion I want could prove my worth as a person, I’d lose my drama if I got that promotion. But if my worth requires that I get the love I want, then there’s no end to that project. There will always be some qualification or disappointment available.

  Another feature will be that this strategy for resisting reality is self-perpetuating, meaning it has its own life. We don’t have to keep attending to it once it’s set in place. This is the elegance of struggle. We have an unconscious investment in making sure it continues, because we need to maintain its avoidant functions. So we refuse to acknowledge reality, which gives us some immediate relief. But disconnecting from what’s true creates the ongoing experience of alienation and feeling problematic. This, in turn, generates chronic anxiety, which provides a continuing sense of imminent threat. That threat activates our distrust of ourselves and of life, which then justifies the need to avoid reality. Avoiding reality, we then feel alienated and disconnected, which starts the cycle all over again. In this way, struggle is an incredibly complex and effective way to pretend to ourselves that we’re dealing with our lives without really doing so. It allows us to believe we’re trying to solve our problems, while simultaneously guaranteeing that no change will really take place.

  THE THREE LEVELS OF STRUGGLE

  Struggle operates on three distinct levels: content, process, and basic. The three levels work simultaneously, though they seem to have a sequence to them. If we are committed to the path of waking up, our energetic investment tends to progress from content, to process, to basic. This progression could also be understood as a movement from disowning energies, to owning energies, to experiencing energies without either owning or disowning.

  Struggle at the Level of Content

  The content level of struggle focuses on specific fears and disturbances. It’s about improving the story of one’s life by eliminating the problems that seem to threaten us, even while unconsciously maintaining these problems as distractions from deeper realities and vulnerabilities. From a therapeutic view, this level addresses “preneurotic” experiencing, or how we handled our lives before we achieved the capacity of a reliable repressive or dissociative function—before we stabilized our neurotic strategies. For most people, that achievement takes place around four, five, or six years old. Before this achievement, we, as young children, are really at the mercy of whatever inner, relational, or environmental circumstances may arise. We are like a leaf on the wind, a cork in the ocean, always in danger of feeling overwhelmed by influences over which we have no control. But with neurotic organization, we create reliable ways in which to limit the degree of intensity with which we have to deal. Most of us have adequate levels of neurotic defenses, but the content level of struggle addresses all of the disturbance that continues to arise, despite our best efforts to not be aware of what we don’t want to feel.

  When young, we develop our basic strategies. For example, we might train ourselves to not be aware of our anger and boundaries and learn to cue off others’ needs. Or we may disconnect from our grief and dependency and learn to act as if we’re self-sufficient. As adults, we use denial, distraction, stress management, exercise, meditation, or any number of other methods to try to soothe our anxiety. Most of us unconsciously spend much of our time and energy using these strategies in an effort to create life circumstances that will feel safe, supportive, and positive and that won’t provoke anxiety. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of this approach of eliminating problems is that the more successful we are at cocreating life circumstances that seem to guarantee safety, the more likely it is we will start to feel stagnant or deadened. We’re no longer engaged with the spontaneity and unpredictability of things, and often we no longer feel fully alive. It’s like living i
n a gated community. It’s comfortable, but something’s missing. What we often end up doing, then, is “hiring” a partner who is the representation of the “other”—of whatever it is we are trying to repress. The benefit is that we feel more aliveness; it gives us some relief from this safe little world we’ve created. But the flip side is that this person appears to be a threat to our safety and comfort, so we end up with a very complicated, ambivalent relationship toward that person. Or we might do some extreme sport as a way to feel alive, perhaps even in an addictive way, not realizing that the very intensity of our sport can make the rest of our life appear even more dead.

  In a Buddhist view, the content level of struggle can be seen as us working with a story about what we’re trying to possess, avoid, or ignore. Each of these options represents one of the three styles of fundamental aggression discussed in chapter 1. In the beginning foundational practices of Buddhism, there is a strong focus on removing oneself from problematic circumstances. We may leave our social life, even our family, and go to a monastery. We may make use of many rules, called precepts, which support our cultivation of a calm, stable state of mind. Many beginning practices emphasize positive behavior and training ourselves to replace negative thoughts and feelings with those that are positive. At this stage, the content of our experience is what we attend to and try to change.

  What’s in common at this level for both a therapeutic and a Buddhist approach is an often-unexamined attitude that our state of mind is mostly determined by inner and outer circumstances, which we are unable to resist. And so it makes sense that to improve our state of mind, we must improve those circumstances. In both of these views, we’re still trying to manipulate our lives so we feel safe and secure. At this stage, the goal of relating directly to open awareness is seen as a possible future achievement. For now, or so the story goes, one’s sense of self is too problematic. This content level is characterized by a continuing struggle to eliminate problems and heal wounds, dissolve obstacles, and feel good about ourselves. This struggle is accepted without examination. “Of course,” we think, “that’s what it’s all about. My whole life is about trying to feel good and avoid feeling bad.” We’re still focused on our life circumstances as the cause of our difficulty and anxiety. When things are going well, we feel okay; when they are going badly, we feel anxious. It’s a little bit like being a child at the mercy of a parent’s mood.