by Bruce Tift
But that’s not where the practice ends. If it’s of interest, we can return to whatever emotion or thought seemed to trigger the disturbance in the first place. But now, rather than using our often-problematic interpretations or concepts as our ground, we can investigate the difficult emotion or thought from the confidence of being grounded in our immediate, embodied, non-interpreted sensations. Attempting to understand and work with our sense of shame, for example, is a different experience when we have discovered that there is no objectively existing shame.
I recently saw a client named Jennifer. Jennifer was in her early thirties. She had been married for just a few years when she had an affair with a coworker while on a business trip. Although she had admitted everything to her partner and he had forgiven her, a sense of trust had been lost between them. She reported feeling a great deal of shame about the incident and the damage it had caused her marriage. Rather than try to help Jennifer get relief from her experience of shame, I invited her to go as deeply as possible into her actual immediate experience of this difficult emotion. To make this investigation, I invited her to stay at the level of sensation and report what she was feeling. She said she felt a heavy emptiness in the space where her heart should be, as well as a churning in her lower belly. I asked her whether, with no interpretations, she could locate a sensation she would call “shame.” She paused and felt her body, but said she couldn’t pinpoint which one of those sensations was the sensation of shame. This is, of course, because there is no such sensation—I’ve never found one, anyway. Her use of the concept “shame” was an interpretation pulled from her conditioned history to explain the physical sensations she did not want to feel. By turning her attention back toward her immediate, embodied awareness, however, she was able to see that shame was a label she was adding herself. And by staying in relation with these disturbing sensations, Jennifer was able to determine for herself that they were not harming or damaging her in any way. In other words, it was workable to feel these sensations that she was interpreting, without evidence, as shame.
Of course, staying at the level of sensation doesn’t make shame go away. We are always thinking and interpreting, and it’s intelligent to do so. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of feeling our embodied immediacy? The point, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, is choice. Jennifer could, if she wanted to, choose to explore her experience of shame at having an affair. But if she then found herself starting to get captured by her story of shame—taking it too seriously—she now had a ground she could return to of immediate, sensation-level experience. She could explore her experience of being a bad person; she could explore her experience of being a completely workable person; she could explore the complex experience of having both feelings about herself.
I gave Jennifer a practice to work with throughout her week. First, she would notice whenever her shame came up—whenever she started thinking, “Oh God, I was such a fool. I made such a mistake. I hurt my partner so much. I’m bad, and I deserve punishment.” She could then ask herself, “What am I feeling right now, in this moment, that I don’t want to feel?” She could then practice directing her attention to her sensation-level experience, with no interpretations at all. After checking to make sure there was no harm happening, she could then practice opening her heart to her disturbance. Over and over, Jennifer’s discovery was that the sensations were not actually shame. They were a tight stomach and an aching heart, but they were not shame. And these sensations carried no evidence at all about her worth as a person. In fact, as Jennifer was able to practice kindness to her own vulnerability, she discovered a much more complex emotional experience. She found grief and fear and anger, as well as shame. She realized that she was using the formula of shame as an unconscious way to avoid the disturbing reality of having complex and contradictory feelings. This, in turn, helped her see this as a reenactment of her childhood strategy of needing to blame herself for real but overwhelming relationship experiences with her parents.
This practice shows us how to step out of our identification with our interpretations and step into our immediate experience. There we find out for ourselves—so it’s not somebody else’s theory—what’s most true. Since we’re only living in the present moment, that’s probably where we’re going to find what’s most true—especially when dealing with intense emotions.
For Jennifer, it was most true that her stomach was tight and her heart hurt. It wasn’t as true that there was shame. This practice can be applied to any emotional experience—be it guilt, abandonment, selfishness, low self-esteem, or what have you. The fact that these emotional interpretations are not what are most true doesn’t make them go away. It’s actually very helpful to explore our conditioned history in order to recognize our recurring patterns of experience and to realize how powerful the momentum of these familiar dramas can be. By doing so, we become increasingly able to expect familiar issues to be activated, not take them to be caused by current circumstances, and to develop a repertoire of skillful means to use with them. But I find that an ability to stay present and embodied with our vulnerabilities supports this investigation of our historic issues. Discovering that we can participate in our fears, and even bring kindness to them, allows us to go deeper into them, and often new understanding arises out of this new confidence.
By taking part in this practice, we gradually build confidence that our worst disturbances, our greatest fears, our most vulnerable issues are in fact completely workable. There’s no inherent problem about any of those experiences, even though they are disturbing. From that ground of workability, we find that we can proceed much more quickly on exploring our issues than we do when we try to explore those issues from only the interpretation level. This is especially true when we’re experiencing some type of emotional reactivity. Our interpretations in those cases are usually a disguised emotional process and expressions of our young survival strategies.
If Jennifer had previously developed the capacity just to stay open to her experience of shame—to experience it as just that, an experience—she might have discovered that underneath her interpretation was a feeling of raw and intense aliveness. Not many of us have this capacity, however. Almost all of us unconsciously relate to interpretive emotions, such as shame and guilt and abandonment, in a self-referential way. It’s as if these energies reflect our worth as people. This drama of self-worth seems so important that usually our inquiry stops here. We believe this issue must be resolved, which prevents any deeper investigation. This self-referential or self-defining aspect is hallucinatory, actually; it’s not at all true. But it’s the experience that most of us have. It’s by staying with our often intense underlying sensations, devoid of interpretation, that we begin to recognize these seemingly very personal emotions as impersonal energies with interpretations attached. At that point, we begin to experience a new level of freedom: the ability to be with whatever disturbance might arise, even our worst nightmare, with commitment and kindness.
EXPERIENCING THE BODY AS A CRUCIBLE
As we stay embodied—as we gain more confidence and clarity and become more willing to experience very intense states—we find that transformative change is possible. Not only is embodied immediacy helpful in the moment, but this practice also may help us gain more access to awareness and clarity over time. I like to think of the symbol of the crucible from the Middle Ages. On the surface, alchemical transformation was about changing ordinary material into gold. Yet for some people, alchemy was also about something much deeper. It was about the spiritual path of transmuting confusion into wisdom, neurosis into sanity.
Symbolically, you would put the ore into a container called a crucible. Then you’d really crank up the heat. The material in the crucible would become so hot that the impurities would begin to separate from the pure essence—the gold. Following this metaphor, we might consider that transformative change requires learning to use our own body as a crucible. A good crucible has a certain set of properties. It can wit
hstand a lot of heat without melting; it is strong enough not to break; and it must not chemically interact with what’s in it. In a similar way, the more we can learn to hold and experience intense energy in our bodies, the more likely we are to invite transformative change. Yet for obvious reasons, most of us take intensity as a threat. In our culture, the two basic choices for working with intensity are repression or discharge. When repressing our experience, we push it out of our conscious awareness, ignore it, retreat to our thinking, and pretend it’s not happening. When discharging, we process our disturbance by talking it out with a therapist or friend, exercising, or yelling and screaming. The basic intention is the same: to get the disturbance out of our bodies, out of our awareness.
In this way, becoming a crucible—inviting transformative change—is counterinstinctual. Rather than repressing or discharging, we investigate the possibility of feeling flooded with intensity and doing absolutely nothing about it. With practice, we discover that we don’t have to push it away; we don’t have to release it. Instead, we can train ourselves to tolerate very, very intense sensation. As a result, we develop the freedom and confidence to stay present and engaged in any situation, because we know we’ll be able to work with whatever comes up.
As we stay more continually present and engaged, we see more clearly. “What is a problem, and what is not? Do I have to respond to this situation? What might be to my and others’ benefit here? What is the sane aspect of my experience, and what is the neurotic aspect?” On a subtler level, more and more frequent moments of conscious participation and awareness allow us to reduce our reliance on formulas and dramas for the sense of continuity. We also may find that our discipline of embodied immediacy gives rise to an increasingly powerful sense of “presence,” a sense of engagement, confidence, and equanimity.
Several years ago I went through a period when I was frequently waking up in the middle of the night with intense panic. I tried different strategies to get rid of it or to go back to sleep. Then it occurred to me that maybe I just needed to lie there and feel the panic. I allowed this really, really disturbing experience to happen. I remember it felt like molten iron flowing through my body. But even though it was intensely disturbing, I discovered that it didn’t harm me. The more attentive I was, the more the panic seemed to have a life of its own. I never understood it—I didn’t even try. I just let it be there and stayed present to it. After a while, it didn’t happen anymore.
The attitude of being willing to feel flooded with intensity at any moment actually gives rise to a very strong confidence—confidence in our capacity to be present and engaged and to keep our hearts open. I’ve found the practice to be very valuable, both personally and with my clients.
EXPERIENCE AND THE “SELF”
Alan Watts, who described himself as a spiritual entertainer, had a very interesting way of talking about embodied experiencing. His approach was that our experiencing actually is our self. It’s not that there’s a self that’s experiencing things; the experience is everything. To explain this view, he gave some everyday examples. We can say “It’s hot today” or “It’s nighttime” or “It’s snowing.” As if there is an “it” that’s hot or an “it” that’s snowing. Obviously there’s not an “it” that’s snowing; there just happens to be snow. In a similar way, we may say “I’m happy” or “I’m sad.” But perhaps there’s no “I” that is happy or sad. Perhaps there’s just the experience of happiness and sadness happening. Dōgen, a thirteenth-century Zen master, said, “Mindfulness of the body is the body’s mindfulness.” He was, I believe, pointing to the same understanding. There’s no “I” being mindful of our body; there’s only our embodied experiencing happening.
Awareness is an inherent aspect of our embodied experiencing. The concept of a “self” who’s separate from that experience is a story or drama, an artifact of conceptual thinking, language, and culture, with as much reality as the “it” that snows. Awareness is inseparable from experience, and this awareness turns out to be nonpersonal. The more we can stay embodied at the sensation level, the less evidence we find to support our fascination with this drama of personal identity.
From the fruitional view, open awareness is—already and always—the ground of our experience. It doesn’t really matter if our experience is clear or confused; awareness is always there. In my experience, we tend to have greater access to this experience of openness when we attend to raw body experience rather than to mental experience. Sensation is less distractive, less personal, and less fascinating. It’s more straightforward—cleaner, in a certain way. This is why my work with clients involves a constant alternation. We work with the developmental view, exploring our interpretive, conditioned experience, because that’s the vivid display of our lives. Yet over and over again, we return to the fruitional practice of embodied immediacy. At the level of sensation, there’s no interpretation. There’s an immediate aliveness, an immediate reality that is trustworthy in a way that no interpretation ever could be.
If you were to take just one thing from this discussion, my hope is you’d feel a curiosity, a willingness to experiment with the fruitional practice of embodiment; that you’d investigate for yourself whether going through all your history, all your story, is truly necessary to dissolve neurotic organization. Perhaps instead, you can cut right to the root of what gives rise to and sustains your sense of basic split through the practice of reembodiment. For just as dissociation is a requirement for neurosis, so reembodiment is an antidote.
There is no place that’s more fertile or useful to begin practicing this principle than in the crucible of intimate relationship. Much of my practice is devoted to helping individuals and couples navigate the extremely difficult experience of relating to others, especially intimate partners. For this reason, in the next two chapters, we’ll continue exploring the intersection between the developmental and fruitional views within the provocative, irresolvable arena of relationship.
6
ALL RELATIVE EXPERIENCE IS RELATIONAL
I’VE WORKED WITH RELATIONSHIPS a lot, both personally and professionally. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I see about half individual clients and half couples. I think the reason I’m so drawn to and interested in this work is because my own experience of relationship has been so difficult, rich, and provocative. I don’t think there’s any likelihood that relationship will ever resolve into a nice, settled experience for me. It’s incredibly alive and therefore disturbing—apparently for both me and my clients.
My wife and I met in the Masters of Buddhist and Western Psychology program at Naropa University in 1977. We got married two years later; we’ve been together quite a while. I think it’s accurate to say that I have experienced being disturbed in this relationship every day of the nearly four decades we’ve been together. (She assures me that it’s been the same for her.) There she is, just being herself, and I’ll have a sudden surge of irritation, impatience, anger, or critical feelings. If I look beneath that initial feeling, I usually find feelings of sadness and grief. Just by being herself, my wife is almost guaranteed to touch some sore spot of mine. She’s not causing that sore spot. By her proximity, she pushes against my tender spots, my vulnerabilities. Of course, every day, I also have feelings of comfort, appreciation, and affection. But those aren’t the feelings that most of us find hard to work with.
As I’ve said before, my style tends to be one of wanting to feel more in control, competent, self-sufficient, and independent. Anytime somebody who’s important to me is not behaving in my preferred style, it’s very activating. Just through a process of resonance, we feel what those close to us are feeling. When these are feelings that we are trying to disown, it’s disturbing. I find that it’s difficult to have the feelings I’ve spent most of my life trying to not feel—dependency, loss of control, and so on—get triggered every day.
Recently I had the opportunity to work with just this type of feeling. My wife and I have twin daughters w
ho are currently in college. One weekend when they were home from school, one of our daughters was so upset with her mother that she was refusing to speak to her. This is naturally a very disturbing experience for a mother—to have her daughter refusing to communicate. I kept telling my wife to let it go, that this type of behavior is typical for nineteen-year-old girls and was not a reflection of her capacity as a mother. But she was feeling incredibly hurt and upset. The degree to which my wife was affected by our daughter’s silence was very disturbing to me because it revealed her dependency. The longer the silent treatment went on, the more activated my wife got—and the more irritated I became. I wanted her to take a more objective view and behave more independently, as I would have done in the same situation. The fact that my feelings of irritation were being triggered directs my awareness toward exactly what it is I have to work on. If I want to free myself of my own conditioned history and be able to show up confidently in the present moment—choosing my life as an adult rather than reenacting my childhood—I must learn how to be with feelings of dependency.
For many years I tried to resolve or eliminate my relational disturbance. At some point, however, I decided to change tactics. Basically, I was exhausted from my project of creating the life I thought I deserved—a life without disturbance. It just wasn’t working. I decided to commit to what I was already feeling but didn’t like; to investigate and see for myself whether the disturbance triggered in me by my relationship was actually the problem I was claiming it to be. This approach is, of course, very resonant with my Buddhist training. In the Tibetan Vajrayana lineage, everything is welcomed as valid. We don’t dismiss any experience. I’ve found this inclusive approach to be very useful both in my own marriage and when I’m working with clients.