Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  As we do this work, we may find that our habitual patterns may actually serve as a reminder to direct our attention to the experience of openness. Complaints give rise to a sense of what could be called “natural perfection.” This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect; it just means that at any given moment, there is no alternative reality. At any given moment, this is it. Reality is what it is. Whether we’re feeling anxious or calm, the moment is perfect in the sense of being complete and whole; nothing is missing. In the next moment, things will change. As we commit to and welcome the experience of anxiety as an approximation of open mind, we begin to see for ourselves whether it’s an accurate signal that our survival is at risk. We become more engaged with and aware of our own embodiment, which is the subject of the next chapter. And as we relax our struggle, our habitual distrust of ourselves and of life starts to give rise to spontaneity and a sense of effortless well-being.

  5

  EMBODIED AWARENESS

  IN THE LAST CHAPTER, we met my client Jerome, who had come to me complaining of a chronic, underlying sense of anxiety. A major theme in our work was to help him develop the ability and willingness to step out of his interpretations and into his immediate experience. Once he could relate to the sensations he was feeling in the present moment, he could find out whether the experience of anxiety was actually harming him, whether he had to continue unconsciously organizing his life around avoiding this experience.

  The same approach is relevant to all of our intense feelings, not just anxiety. We can practice staying embodied with our grief, rage, joy, fear, sexuality, confusion, or depression by bringing our attention out of interpretation and into sensation. When we do this, we are bringing our attention out of our history and into what is most true in the immediate moment. Our conditioned history is what’s waiting for us in our interpretations. For example, historically when Jerome felt a tight, nauseous feeling in his gut, it was a signal of danger. Like most of us, when these sensations arose, he would unconsciously jump out of his embodied vulnerability and into his interpretation. The interpretation that would be waiting for him, given his history, was that he would be attacked if he didn’t immediately soothe, accommodate, and avoid conflict with the other person. It told him he needed to do anything necessary to not feel separate from that other person.

  But as Jerome was willing to stay at the sensation level, he found that none of his sensations were an accurate signal of imminent attack in the present. He may have noticed shallow breathing, a rapid heartbeat, a constricted throat, or a swirly energy in his chest. (Sensations are different for different people, but most of us seem to experience our embodied vulnerability in our torso.) Although disturbing, he found that the sensations he felt were basically neutral in nature. They were an expression of aliveness, and they were not permanent. They were always in motion, always changing. If he could stay out of interpretation, then they had no significance. They didn’t mean anything. They just were this alive, vulnerable, disturbing experience.

  Jerome was learning to hold the developmental view—working with his story, his history, his conditioned patterns of behavior—and the fruitional view, which directs our attention to immediacy. In my work with him, as with all my clients, I focused especially on what it means to practice embodied immediacy. After all, we’re all embodied beings. It’s not possible to not be embodied. All of our experience is embodied experience. The practice of immediacy is not meant to increase our awareness of the body as if it were somehow separate from us; rather, it’s to relax into awareness as being experienced through the body, to allow our conscious minds to surrender into the experience of what it means to be an embodied being, right now.

  I’ve been in many types of therapy over a lot of years, all of which have been valuable in different ways. While some therapies focus on body experience, the traditional Western approach is to talk about emotions and thoughts. I can’t remember any mainstream therapists ever being curious about what sensations I might be experiencing as we explored important issues. But I have also been fortunate enough to have experienced a lot of body work: Rolfing, massage, core energetics, breath work, and other body-based modalities. For me, all of those experiences were useful, but most were separate from awareness practices. What I’ve found over some time is that focusing on bodily sensations can be a powerful practice in both dissolving unnecessary neurotic suffering and in inviting more frequent moments of open awareness. We’re going to investigate that in this chapter.

  EMOTIONS, AFFECTIVE AROUSAL, AND SENSATION

  When researchers attempt to document all the possible emotions human beings can have, they come up with a variety of lists describing many different emotions. However, cross-cultural research suggests that there are probably only six or seven fundamental states of affective arousal, or basic biological feeling responses to life. These states have been described as anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anxiety, and surprise. And even these states of affective arousal seem likely to be strongly influenced by context and culture. The implication is that emotions are strongly interpretive. We experience some form of affective arousal—say, anxiety—and then we interpret it. We might feel a tight stomach, our heart may be beating fast, or our breathing may be shallow. Depending on what the circumstances are, we might interpret those sensations as nervousness (if we’re awaiting medical results, for example) or excitement (if we’re meeting up with a lover). In that way, for every basic state of affective arousal, there may be many different interpretations, with each interpretation resulting in a different emotion. But underneath both lies an even more fundamental layer of experience: raw sensation.

  Our thoughts carry our interpretive history, but our strongly interpretive emotions do as well—often in even more powerful and less obvious ways. When we focus on sensations, though, we’re putting attention on something more basic and more fundamental than emotions and thoughts. Whether we’re talking about evolution or individual human development, it seems accurate that physicality comes first, followed by emotionality, and then the capacity to use thoughts and symbols. From this point of view, sensations are very reliable, very human, and basically impersonal—that is, they aren’t heavily shaped by personal history. Interpretations, on the other hand, are often deeply shaped by our patterned, conditioned history.

  Obviously there’s a circular process that happens—thoughts trigger feelings and sensations, which then can trigger more thoughts. And feelings and sensations trigger thoughts, which can then trigger more feelings and sensations. Some forms of Western therapy, such as cognitive behavioral work, tend to focus on thoughts as a point of intervention. But my interest—especially from a fruitional point of view—is to seek out what is most accurate at any given moment. What is most reliable? What can we count on? What can we rely on for support? In my experience, what we can most consistently count on for support in our lives is the truth of our immediate experience. This doesn’t mean that whatever we experience in the moment is “true”—we can have distorted, mistaken perceptions, even hallucinations. It just means that our immediate experience is what’s always available; it’s where we begin.

  By support, I mean the experience that we’re standing on ground that’s really there, that’s not theoretical, and that we can engage with our life without constantly questioning ourselves. We feel a confidence that our experience is reliable, even when different than others’ experiences. Especially in our culture, support is often thought to be synonymous with positive feelings. When I have good feelings, I tend to take that as evidence from life that I’m on the right track, that I can trust myself. If I feel clear and engaged, I feel supported by life. If I feel confused and depressed, I feel shaky and that something’s wrong. If I ask for support from a friend, I usually want him to help me feel more positive. But of course, life isn’t only positive. Given our predisposition for “positivity,” any time we have to deal with negativity, we tend to interpret this as evidence of a problem. We’re understandabl
y not committed to the experience of negativity. Yet, if we continue to go beneath this experience, we may find that much of what we call “negative” is actually interpretive. If we stay at the sensation level, it’s possible we won’t be able to find any problem, nothing inherently negative. We may discover that what we take as negative actually comes from our attitude toward our experience rather than anything innate in that experience. The more we consciously participate in sensation-level experiencing, the more we’re able to commit equally to experiencing both positive and negative feelings.

  In my experience, what we discover when we are able to stay with both positive and negative experience is that life is already supporting us. Actually, we find that it is our willingness to commit to all of our experience, regardless of our preferences, that supports us. It’s very common that we feel that “something’s missing” from our lives. So we search for love or security or enlightenment or whatever. But what’s actually missing is our full participation in our ongoing, immediate experiencing. We are what’s missing. When we are fully engaged in our life, regardless of whether we like or don’t like what’s present, we no longer have the drama of something missing. We will always have limitations; our relative experiencing is a collection of limitations. But our feeling of being supported or not, full or not, is a direct result of our openness to life, and I find that staying with our sensation-level experience gives us immediate evidence that it is workable to be open. We ask if we’re a “glass half empty” or a “glass half full” type of person. Actually, the glass is always completely full, just not of what we think we need or want. The glass is full of water and of air. Our life is full of experiences we like and those we don’t like.

  I want to make clear that we’re not talking about taking sides between sensations and interpretations. Both are very valid. Our lives wouldn’t work very well without interpretations. But in this particular type of work, where we’re interested in the experience of freedom, feeling at peace with and supported by life, learning to keep our hearts open to others, it seems to me that familiarity with and access to our sensations can be very useful. We can then have an experiential dialogue between our immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience and our interpretations of that experience. This allows us to find out for ourselves, at any moment, what’s actually most true right now.

  For example, over the years I’ve heard many clients tell me their interpretive stories of emotions such as loss and abandonment. I’ve heard many claim that they feel abandoned. But no client has been able to point toward an actual sensation of abandonment. In fact, no client has turned up a sensation of guilt or low self-esteem or shame or any of the many difficult human emotions. When I work with clients who have, for example, abandonment issues, I frequently invite them to consider letting themselves feel abandoned. Then I ask, “What are the sensations right now that you’re aware of? What is it like to feel abandoned? Where’s the intensity in your body?” Some people have access to their sensations in this way; some don’t. But if the client does, they will often say something like, “Well, my stomach’s very tight” or “I have this heaviness in my heart” or “I feel flushed in my face” or “My body wants to sort of curl up.” I then encourage them to investigate whether there’s a problem with those sensations. Is it killing them to feel a tight stomach or a heavy heart? Do they think it’s giving them cancer? Do they think they’re becoming dysfunctional or that the world is going to come and attack them? Where’s the evidence that there’s any problem whatsoever in feeling this intensity in their body? Or, even, where’s the abandonment in those sensations? If they stay at the sensation level, without interpretation, where’s the abandonment?

  This line of inquiry doesn’t make the issue of abandonment go away, but it begins an experiential dialogue. If that same abandonment experience gets triggered at a later date, the client may remember—either spontaneously or as part of a deliberate practice—to ask, “What’s beneath this abandonment? What is even truer in this moment than that emotion? Do I have to take this experience as if it’s the whole story, as if it’s a description of reality? Because if it’s the whole story, of course I have to do something about it. I have to get rid of it or work through it or something. But if the emotion is not what’s most true, then I might have to experience it, but maybe I don’t have to make it go away or heal it.”

  THE MEDICAL EXCEPTION

  In the practice of embodied awareness, we are asking ourselves, “Is it killing me to feel this disturbance?” In Western culture, for those of us with fortunate circumstances, 99 percent of the time it’s not. But we should remain open to the possibility that it might be. If the sensation is one of persistent pain that might be associated with a medical issue, we should go to a doctor. We shouldn’t just say, “Well, this pain is just because I’m being aggressive to my vulnerability,” and then die of a ruptured appendix!

  Similarly, it’s important to recognize and work with the well-researched relationship between stress and our health. Many serious physical conditions have an important emotional component. Embodied immediacy is not a spiritualized, reductionist approach. Rather, it’s an invitation to hold a more complex understanding in which both in-the-moment and over-time experience is appreciated.

  In the developmental approach, we’re usually placing our experience in the context of past, present, and future. If we’re trying to understand how our parents’ divorce left us with the vulnerability of always feeling abandoned, we may not need to know what our tight stomach feels like. But if we’re approaching our experience from a fruitional point of view, our practice is to return—over and over and over again—to embodied immediacy. Our practice is to cut interpretations and see what’s most true in the moment. If we’re not paying attention to our sensations, we will probably be captured by our historic dramas. They are fascinating. They’re very convincing in their appearance. But for those of us dealing with abandonment issues, a fruitional approach—not instead of the developmental approach, but in addition to it—is to question what’s happening right now. “What does it feel like to feel abandoned?” I often go through the same sort of questions with clients: “Is it killing you? Is it harming you? Where’s the evidence of abandonment in your sensations? You have this heavy heart. You have this feeling of yearning. Your throat is tight. Where in any of those sensations is any evidence about your worth as a person?”

  If clients are willing and able to investigate in that way, they often come to the same conclusions. “I don’t like those sensations. I wish I didn’t have them. But I actually can’t find any evidence of harm.” At that point, I often encourage people to perhaps say out loud, just to see what it feels like, “I give myself permission to feel like an abandoned person, off and on, for the rest of my life.” It sucks to feel abandoned; none of us likes it. But so what? Now that they know it’s not harmful—and that they are, possibly, stuck with it—can they actually commit to having this experience?

  These core vulnerabilities are embedded at very, very deep levels. But if we’re willing to commit to this experience—because we have investigated it ourselves and have found no evidence of harm—then maybe we can get on with our lives, instead of putting them on hold until we no longer feel abandoned. At this point, we commit to our core vulnerabilities as being inconvenient but valid parts of our life, not problems to solve before we can have a life.

  DISEMBODIMENT AS A REQUIREMENT FOR NEUROSIS

  As we’ve seen, both the experience of neurosis (in the developmental approach) and the experience of being an alienated, significant self (in the fruitional approach) seem to arise from and depend upon a sense of a basic split. From the Western point of view, this split is a disconnection from our deeper vulnerabilities. From the Buddhist point of view, it’s a disconnection from our always-present awareness. If we return to the idea that neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity—and if we understand that intensity is always experienced in the body—it makes sense that
to avoid experiential intensity, we have to leave our bodies. We have to dissociate from our immediate, embodied experience, because that’s where the intensity is found. And where do we go? We can escape into activity, into numbness, into a variety of distractions. But most reliably, we go into interpretive states—our stories and dramas. Those dramas have their own type of intensity, but it’s a familiar intensity. In fact, upon investigation, it turns out that all of our myriad stories are basically the same drama played over and over again. If we were to watch a scary movie over and over, it might still be scary on some level, but we would know deep down that we could handle it. We would know the beginning, the middle, and the end; even though it might feel scary, it’s not a new threat.

  Most of us recycle our basic dramas continually as a way to distract our attention from our immediate embodied experience, which is fresh, unpredictable, not contained in a formula, and which can thus feel genuinely threatening. In fact, as it turns out, disembodiment is a requirement of neurosis. Neurosis itself is an avoidance strategy, and it’s very difficult to sustain any avoidance strategy if we’re aware of what we’re avoiding. Such a strategy wouldn’t serve its function! So we must disembody in order to maintain our neurotic struggle. To say that disembodiment is a requirement of neurosis is not to imply that simply being aware of embodied experiencing is enough to dissolve neurotic organization. I’ve worked with a number of clients who have had training, perhaps as an athlete or as a dancer or as part of a spiritual practice, and who are able to tune into sensation-level experience and still maintain their neurotic strategies. Embodied immediacy is a capacity, a ground, from which we then can investigate our vulnerabilities, our conditioned patterns. We first bring ourselves out of our identification with our interpretations. Then we discover for ourselves if our disturbance is harmful. Then we explore a relationship with our fears and our pain. Then we practice unconditional kindness to these difficult experiences. These practices tend to cultivate a deep confidence in our ability to work with whatever we may find in each moment, whether positive or negative. We then have the choice of intentionally investigating what we have organized our lives around avoiding, usually for decades.