by Bruce Tift
Embodied immediacy is not a solution; it’s a way of experiencing or a capacity that we bring to the hard work of challenging and slowly dissolving our variety of strategies for avoiding fully wakeful engagement with ourselves and with life. In my experience, challenging these strategies from a ground of immediate, embodied, noninterpretive confidence can be much more powerful than only challenging these strategies with more current and accurate interpretations.
In my developmental work, I tend to deal with symptoms. We look at specifics, such as guilt or sexual inhibitions or a fear of failure at work. We take the perspective that these specific issues have their origin in historic events and, thus, can be worked through. Often this perspective is very accurate. But in order to get to the heart of all neuroses—the underlying process that gives rise to the variety of neurotic symptoms—it’s helpful to take the fruitional approach. This approach doesn’t concern itself with specifics; instead, it is generic and simple. The fruitional approach is to dissolve neurotic organization by first reembodying, in a conscious and openhearted way, and then bringing this attitude of open confidence into relation with any and all of our experiencing, however intense. It doesn’t matter what specific symptom we are investigating. It doesn’t matter what our history was. We’re just returning to immediate, sensation-level experience, over and over again. Of course, this isn’t the easy route on a moment-by-moment basis. It’s much easier to avoid disturbance and experiential intensity than to embody it. In every moment, neurosis is much easier than sanity. But in the long run, neurosis actually leads to a deterioration in the quality of one’s life.
When we use neurotic avoidant strategies, we may get some momentary relief, but the intensity we’re refusing to relate to doesn’t go away. So we’re not learning how to work with that issue. Instead, we generate a sense that there’s something about us that’s unworkable. Our efforts to escape difficult feelings have their own disturbance, because they’re not based on what’s really true. We then try to avoid those disturbances. We still have the actual intensity we’re avoiding, but now we have an extra layer of unnecessary suffering in addition to that. As a result, we don’t handle our lives very skillfully. So although it’s hard to implement in the moment, over time, sanity actually leads to an improvement in the quality of our lives. It puts us into contact with what’s true so that we can learn how to deal with deep and often difficult issues—even if they don’t go away.
SANITY: A COUNTERINSTINCTUAL PRACTICE
Many of my clients find themselves a little puzzled about why they’re so invested in neurosis. They’re sitting in my office because consciously they want relief from neurotic struggle, after all. Yet when I present practices for reembodying in their vulnerabilities, they quickly get more perspective. Most of us are far more comfortable with neurosis than sanity. Who’s not more comfortable avoiding intense disturbance than participating in it? We’re never going to want to practice sanity, because it’s so difficult. Doing so requires discipline to reembody into sensations that were associated with the survival-level threats we had to deal with as children. We’ve trained ourselves to take the easier, safer-feeling way out. After all, our young strategies were survival strategies, not quality-of-life strategies.
Imagine you’re hiking, and you have the choice to hike down the mountain or to hike up. You might choose to hike upward, because you know the reward will be a better view, but it’s going to require more effort and even pain for you. The easier way would be to walk down. The problem, of course, is that if you continually step down, at the end you’re down! There’s not as much to see, not as much potential. In a similar way, we exhaust our potential by always taking the immediately easy step into neurosis. Even seeing this doesn’t change our experience that in every moment—and we are only living in each moment—it is easier to avoid disturbance than to embrace it. Understanding this, we can then appreciate the view that sanity is actually a counterinstinctual practice. It is not an achievement; rather, it is a practice, never resolved, always requiring more effort in the moment than the practice of neurosis. We can’t wait until we feel safe to practice sanity. We can’t wait until we’re in the mood to practice sanity. It’ll be a long wait.
The work of embodiment, then, requires discipline. It’s not easy to go into our anxiety, our tight stomach, the panicky feelings in our torso, or that tight throat we hate to feel. Most of us need to get a glimpse of what life could look like from the top of the mountain, when we are no longer identified with our neuroses. There has to be an intention. We need to understand the view, to see why it might be to our benefit to do this difficult work. It helps to meet a mature, wakeful person who might be an example of what’s possible or to read a book that inspires us. But for our efforts to be sustainable, we must come to our own understanding of why it makes sense to take on these counter-instinctual practices.
To help my clients develop this understanding and intention, I often ask them to identify one issue in their lives that is especially difficult for them to deal with. Perhaps it’s loneliness or claustrophobia. Perhaps it’s a sense of being unloved or of being smothered. They may choose guilt, overwhelm, or exhaustion—whatever repetitive issue feels most problematic for them.
Once they’ve identified their issue, I suggest, as an emotional exercise, that they accept that they are likely to feel this way for the rest of their lives. Regardless of circumstance, regardless of what does or doesn’t change in their lives, no matter how much work they do on themselves. I might even suggest a mini-dialogue along these lines: “Perhaps I am going to feel this way, off and on, for the rest of my life. I certainly have felt it for a long time, maybe all of my life up until now. There’s no evidence that it’s just going to go away. I’ve been to therapy. I’ve done spiritual practice. Maybe it’s time to actually explore the possibility of having a relationship with this experience that I don’t like? Maybe that would be a new approach, instead of my increasingly sophisticated attempts to make it go away.” Although this exercise may sound depressing, it’s actually an expression of confidence in oneself—in one’s ability to participate consciously in the full range of human experiencing.
Through this type of mini-dialogue, we are giving up the child’s wish for a safe, protected, happy life—an infantilized life—and committing to an adult life. We’re committing to a willingness to experience and work with whatever is true, whether we like it or not. And very frequently, when clients are willing to stay engaged and embodied with their worst fears for a few moments, they are surprised to find some relief, even humor, in finally acknowledging experientially what they have been trying to not feel for much of their lives. They get a glimpse of what it might be like to not experience themselves as problematic.
PRACTICEGIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FEEL YOUR FEAR
If you would like to try this practice, decide which feeling you’re going to work with. Ideally, you will choose an underlying issue that you really don’t like to feel—something like abandonment, shame, low self-worth, dependency, guilt, anger, or anxiety.
Once you’ve decided on your issue, take a moment to settle in. If you’re sitting down, feel the weight of your body in the chair. Then begin to pay attention to your breath, feeling both the inhale and the exhale. Once you’re present, start dialoguing with yourself.
Say out loud, “I give myself permission to feel [this feeling that you really don’t like to feel] off and on for the rest of my life.” Accept this feeling as if it were already a legitimate part of who you are. As you invite this feeling, try to bring your attention out of any interpretation into whatever raw sensation is happening. For example, many people find that the torso is the location where they feel emotional intensity. Check it out and see if there’s any agitation there. Perhaps you feel numb from the neck down; perhaps there is some sense of tingling in your hands, or aching or fullness or lightness somewhere in your body. Perhaps the experience permeates your whole body. Or maybe you don’t have any awarene
ss of sensations except behind your eyes. It doesn’t really matter what you discover. The point is to be willing to direct your attention toward your experience at the level of sensation.
Next, ask yourself whether this sensation you’re feeling is actually a threat in any way. Are you going to die from feeling a ball of pressure in your stomach or a hollowed-out chest or a heavy heart? Is the burning sensation in your solar plexus actually dangerous? Will the tension in your belly or your throat actually constrict you enough to kill you?
If you find that experiencing these sensations is not harmful, even if they are disturbing, then experiment with a commitment to having a relationship with these sensations, perhaps for the rest of your life. What feelings arise when you think of this? What sensations?
The point of this exercise is to see for yourself whether it is, in fact, a problem to feel the sensations you’ve organized your life around not feeling.
THE PRACTICE OF EMBODIMENT
As I’ve mentioned, one of the experiences I have historically dissociated from is that of dependency. If I were to do this exercise as I present it to my clients, I would invite in the experience of dependency. What does it feel like on a sensation level to be a dependent person? Immediately, I notice a sense of grief—a sadness that seems to be located in my chest. There’s also a sense of collapse, as if part of my body wants to fall apart, along with a little tightness in my stomach.
My next question is, “So what? Do any of these sensations harm me? If I stay at the level of sensation, applying no interpretation at all, is there any evidence about my worth as a person? About my being worthy of love or not?” The answer is, I don’t find any. Right there, in that moment, I suddenly have an immediate confidence around feeling dependent. I don’t like to feel that way, and I probably won’t change my style of self-sufficiency. But suddenly it’s not so much of a threat. It doesn’t really matter if I feel dependent or independent. Along with that clarity seems to come a certain type of relief.
If you find this practice of interest, you might consider building it into your daily life in some way. It might just be thirty seconds in the morning or at night before you go to bed. It’s not a big time commitment, but in my experience, it can be very powerful. Over time, we can gradually bring into direct relationship our historic claim that it’s really dangerous and bad to feel a certain way with the immediate experience that there’s no evidence of threat or harm. That experiential investigation has to be done thousands of times, of course; we have to do it over and over. We are dissolving the tendency to accept, without investigation, that it’s a threat to feel dependent or guilty or alone. At the same time, we’re developing an embodied confidence that says, “So what? I’m ready to feel that way at any second. I’ve done this thousands of times now, and it hasn’t harmed me yet.”
I often suggest that my clients take this practice of embodied immediacy into their daily lives, ideally finding some structure to remind themselves to practice. I’m of the opinion that practicing in small moments throughout the day is probably more effective than doing a concentrated hour of practice, even though both seem to be helpful. If someone can practice immediacy once a day, great! But like most things, the more we practice, the better we get. So if we can remember to do the practice twenty times a day, things will probably move along quite a bit faster than if we remember to do it once a week.
A simple, practical way to approach embodied immediacy is to notice any moment that we’re aware of our own avoidant behavior. Common avoidant behaviors include obsessive thinking, emotional reactivity, feeling too busy, running a story about how somebody’s not treating us well, feeling complaint or resentment, or any of our familiar dramas. Anytime we notice such behaviors, we could ask ourselves, “I wonder what I’m experiencing in my body at the sensation level right this second?” When we are in a familiar avoidant energy, there is almost always a more vulnerable, sensation-based experience that we’re trying not to feel at the same time. Why not just train ourselves to use our disturbance as a signal to wake up and pay attention? To be curious and ask, “What am I feeling right now that I don’t want to feel? And is it a problem?” Just stay at the sensation level—no interpretation. We’re not trying to heal it or even understand it.
Our normal way of operating is to relate to our embodied sensation from the perspective of our interpretations. We feel something, and then we immediately—and usually unconsciously—categorize and define it in relationship to our conditioned history. I may say something harsh to someone, and my stomach tightens. Depending on my history, I may interpret that response as, “I’ve been mean, and they won’t like me. I should apologize profusely” or “I’m just defending myself from their attack, and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem” or “I’m feeling upset, but I don’t know what just happened. I should just leave.” The point of staying embodied at the level of sensation is to establish some confidence in the workability, intelligence, and aliveness of our immediate, embodied, nonconceptual experiencing. From that ground, we then explore and relate to our concepts and interpretations—and therefore to others—in a fresher, more present way.
It’s important to say again that interpretations are in no way wrong or a problem. Concepts are very important. We need to be able to think conceptually in order to live more than biological lives. To recognize patterns, to plan for the future, to imagine possibilities—all require thinking. This book you are reading is using ideas as a way to suggest the value of noninterpretive experiencing. To me, the point is to move more and more in the direction of choice—spontaneous, immediate choice between our concepts and our embodied immediacy. That way, we can decide in the present moment, “Do I want to use interpretations right now, or do I want to stay in and use immediate, nonconceptual experience?”
Different situations call for different skillful means, but most of us are way out of balance on the side of taking interpretations too seriously. While perhaps less-literate societies would do well to take on a corrective practice of applying more interpretation to their experience, we in the Western world might want to do the corrective practice of embodied immediacy so that we actually experience more choice in our day-to-day lives.
PRACTICING EMBODIMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF ANXIETY
If you’d like to take the concept of embodied experiencing into an even more intense experience, consider our discussion about anxiety in chapter 4. Anxiety is difficult, pervasive, and connected with survival-level response. How can we truly learn to work with anxiety without first training ourselves to stay embodied at all times? Even though it is very valuable to practice reembodiment with our historically conditioned issues, it may be even more valuable to do this very difficult practice of staying embodied with our moment-by-moment experience of anxiety. As discussed, anxiety from a therapeutic view is usually seen as a signal of deeper, not fully conscious vulnerabilities pushing into our awareness. By escaping from our anxiety when this occurs, we tend to perpetuate the assumption that these core issues are indeed unworkable and a threat. By doing so, we perpetuate our young conditioned beliefs and strategies, unconsciously continuing our experience of being a powerless child.
Imagine you’re a parent whose child believes there’s a monster in the closet and who is ritualizing their life to avoid being torn to shreds. The child really believes that she is avoiding the closet because there’s a monster inside. You can see that, actually, your child is convinced there’s a monster because she is avoiding the closet. Your job as a parent is to help your child find a way to open the closet and see what’s true, however scary this might be.
By training ourselves to remain present with our anxiety, we have the opportunity to discover that it’s our avoidance of our core vulnerabilities that gives them the appearance of being a threat; there is nothing inherently harmful in these vulnerabilities themselves. We begin to live as adults, basing our lives on what is currently true, rather than as if we were children, basing our lives on what used to b
e true. The price tag: a commitment to anxiety as a valid, workable part of one’s adult life. From a Buddhist view, anxiety is a direct perception of the already-open, vast nature of life, of our own minds, but through the filter of egoic process. Escaping from anxiety is escaping from open mind and into some version of self-absorption. Staying embodied with anxiety trains us to gradually tolerate the experience of openness, to find that the sense of a personal self basically serves as a defense against the initial anxiety of experiencing open, nonpersonal awareness. The price tag: a commitment to anxiety as long as there is egoic process.
REEMBODIMENT AND TRAUMATIC ORGANIZATION
One specific—and potentially problematic—version of this embodiment work has to do with traumatic organization. Trauma can be understood as our response to intensity that overwhelms our system’s capacities for processing and integration. Because this experience is not integrated, it tends to be compartmentalized and largely unconscious. I try my best to be aware of the potential for trauma in my clients. Yet trauma seems to be very encapsulated. It’s almost like an energetic cyst in the emotional system, and there’s often not a lot of warning when you’re getting close to it. Neurotic organization, on the other hand, is very integrated and pervasive. Within a couple minutes of working with a new client, I usually have a pretty intuitive sense of their avoidant style. But often I don’t see the traumatic organization until it actually gets triggered.