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Shambhala Sun | March 2013
When Ego Meets Non-EgoWestern psychology and Buddhism—together they offer us a complete diagnosis of the human condition. ANDREA MILLER talks to Tara Brach, John Welwood, and Barry Magid, three psychotherapists who are combining them into a powerful path to love and fulfillment. The open sky, the
scent of pine, the smell of sea—summer in Cape Cod felt to Tara Brach
like her true home. As she was growing up, the family’s summerhouse
filled with relatives and friends, and later in her life with spouses
and new children. For her, happiness was the shared haven of the beach,
diving into the waves and somersaulting underwater. But
one day in 2005, two carloads of friends and family had to go to the
beach without her. For twenty years Brach’s health had been mysteriously
and painfully declining. Now she had a diagnosis: an incurable genetic
disease affecting her connective tissue. She could no longer run or bike
or swim or walk on sand. Watching the cars pull out of the driveway,
she cried with grief and loneliness. The ocean would never again be her
refuge. “I
realized that even if it wasn’t right now, eventually I was going to
lose everything,” Brach recalls. “We all are. So how do we find the
inner space of wakefulness and tenderness that’s big enough to hold it
all?”
In
the face of our suffering, many of us turn to quick, numbing
fixes—alcohol or television, overeating or shopping. But these never get
to the root of our discomfort; their effect doesn’t last and ultimately
they may make our problems even worse. In contrast, Buddhism and
Western psychotherapy attempt to provide a comprehensive model of the
mind and to address human suffering at its deepest level. While Buddhism
and Western psychology can conflict or complement each other in myriad
ways, today a growing number of professionals are appreciating the
synergy of the two disciplines. Tara Brach, Barry Magid, and John
Welwood are three prominent figures who believe that together Buddhism
and Western psychotherapy offer a complete package for mental
well-being, clear seeing, and healthy relationships.
When
asked what she views as the essential common ground between Western
psychology and Buddhism, Brach says it’s their understanding that
suffering comes from the parts of our being that are not recognized and
embraced in the light of awareness. “What the two traditions share,” she
says, “is shining a light on the
rejected, unprocessed parts of the psyche.” Brach is a clinical
psychologist, the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of
Washington, D.C., and the author of Radical Acceptance. The inspiration for her new book, True Refuge, was her illness. When
she was mourning the loss of her physical abilities, she became aware
of a profound longing to love life no matter what. “I wanted the
awakened heart,” she says, “which would allow me to embrace this
world—the living world, the dying world, the whole thing.” Brach
calls that kind of acceptance and inner freedom “true refuge.” It’s
true, she writes in her book, “because it does not depend on anything
outside ourselves—a certain situation, a person, a cure, even a
particular mood or emotion.” According
to Brach, true refuge has three gateways: truth, love, and awareness.
“Truth,” explains Brach, “is the understanding or realization that comes
out of being present with the life that’s right here and now. Love is
bringing presence to the domain of the heart, the domain of
relationships, and the realization that arises out of that is
interconnectedness. Then awareness is when we bring presence to the
formless awakeness that is right here. When we discover the refuge of
our own formless being, that’s awareness waking up to itself.” “Truth, love, and awareness” is Brach’s secularized articulation of the three jewels of Buddhism—the teacher, Buddha; the teaching, dharma; and the community, sangha.
She’s opted for this nonreligious language because she feels the search
for true refuge and its three gateways are universal. In the context of
Buddhism, truth is dharma, love is sangha, and awareness is Buddha. But
in Christian terms, claims Brach, “the Father is awareness, the Son is
the living truth of this moment-to-moment experience, and when awareness
and moment-to-moment experience are in relationship, there is love,
which is the Holy Ghost.” To
help us connect more deeply to our own inner life, with each other, and
with the world around us, Brach teaches a technique called RAIN. This
acronym, originally coined by Vipassana teacher Michele McDonald, stands
for: Recognize what is happening;
Allow life to be just as it is
Investigate inner experience with kindness; and rest in the
Natural state of awareness or nonidentification. In
her own life, Brach began regularly implementing RAIN when she realized
how much separation she created between herself and others whenever she
judged, resented, or blamed people or situations, even subtly. To
explain how RAIN is practiced, she offers an example from her own life:
Brach went on holiday with her family and found herself “down on every-
body for all their different neuroses, even the family dog for begging
at the table.” So she put on her parka, headed outside for a walk, and
started with “R,” recognize. Annoyed, irritated, blaming—she recognized
how she was feeling. Moving on to “A,” she allowed those feelings to be
there, without adding more judgment. Then she engaged in “I” and
investigated the tight knot in her chest. “I asked that tight knot what
it believed,” says Brach. “And its views were that nobody was
cooperating with my agenda for having a harmonious time and I was
falling short. It believed that my son is the one who’s not doing
such-and-such and it’s my fault that so-and-so is not getting along.” Brach
breathed into the place that was upset and sent a message of gentleness
and kindness inward. That enabled some space, some tenderness, to open
up inside. Then the “N” of RAIN—resting in the natural state of awareness—was able to unfold effortlessly. Now when she brought to mind the
different members of her family, Brach could still see their neuroses
but no longer felt aversion or judgment. These family members were her
loved ones. RAIN
invites a shift in identity, says Brach. It helps transform an angry,
blaming person into a tender presence that gently holds whatever’s going
on. “That’s the gift of Buddhism,” Brach concludes. “The whole fruit of
our path and practice is to wake up from who we thought we were, which
is usually separate and deficient in some way, and to rest in the
vastness of heart and awareness that is our true nature.”
When couples come in to see psychotherapist John Welwood, they often begin by complaining, “We’re so different.” “Well,
guess what?” says Welwood. “That’s called relationship.” Both globally
and personally, we tend to feel threatened by difference. Yet it’s
possible to celebrate it and learn from it. Welwood is a longtime Vajrayana Buddhist who is the author of groundbreaking books such as Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships and Toward a Psychology of Awakening.
Like Brach, he believes that humanity’s fundamental problem is that
people are disconnected from their true nature. He adds that while this
is a spiritual articulation, it is also accurate psychologically. He
believes that this disconnection from our true nature happens in
relationship, starting when we are children. Growing
up, we are dependent on parents and other adults who are themselves
disconnected. Through neglect, abuse, or simply lack of attunement, they
transmit disconnection to us. “This is the beginning of relational
wounding,” says Welwood. “The child doesn’t feel fully seen, valued, or
loved for who they are. Now, you could say, ‘Well, it’s an imperfect
world and nobody gets the ideal love,’ and that’s probably true, but not
getting it does leave psychological scarring.” For some people, the
wounds are minor and readily workable; for others, the wounds are deep
and lead to complete dysfunction.
Relational
wounding creates a sense of deficiency inside, which we try to
compensate for by proving that we really are loveable—that we really are
good or strong or smart. Theoretically it is possible to heal these
wounds without the help of a therapist, but practically speaking, says
Welwood, “it’s not realistic—just the same way the spiritual path isn’t
easy to do on your own.” The
healing power of therapy, he asserts, lies largely in the relationship
between the therapist and client. It’s so rare for us to experience
being truly seen and related to by another human being that the
therapeutic relationship “is like stepping into a healing bath,” he
says. “You’re suddenly in an environment where it’s all oriented toward
supporting you, hearing you, being with you, valuing you. Because that’s
so much needed in our body and mind, we soak it up.” But
is therapy’s focus on me and my personal story at odds with the
Buddhist teachings of no-self? Welwood doesn’t think so. Most of us
believe in a false self—the conditioned separate self or ego structure,
which defends itself against threats and is a purely conceptual
construction. When Buddhism says there is no self, that’s what it’s
referring to. But then, says Welwood, there is the true person. Open and
boundless, it grows out of the understanding of no self, yet has the
capacity to lead a full, personal life that’s attuned to relative
reality.
“If
you just live in the realm of no self,” asks Welwood, “then how do you
work with relative situations? The essence of our humanness is
relatedness. If you’re in a human relationship, you’ve got to process
that relationship. You and your partner have got to talk about what you
each like and don’t like, what is hurtful, and what is most important or
meaningful to you. From the point of view of pure being, there’s no
self and no other—there’s just being. But on the level of the person,
you’re different than I am. If we’re going to be able to relate to each
other, we really have to get know each other. That’s part of learning to
be in a relationship.” When
asked why intimate relationships so often press our buttons, Welwood
turns the question around. “What is the button?” he says. “The button is
our relational wounding. If your buttons are pressed, the question is,
what is getting triggered? So instead of focusing on the other person
and what they’re doing to you or not doing for you, focus on what aspect
of the wound is getting touched.” If you understand how things that
happened in the past are feeding your feelings in the present moment,
then you might find the situation to be more workable. Marriage,
in Welwood’s words, can be like a crucible or alchemical container in
which substances are mixed together and transformed. In marriage as a
conscious relationship, the container is the commitment to stay with it
no matter how difficult it is, the willingness “to bring awareness to
whatever is going on, rather than acting out your conditioned patterns
from the past. You take everything, all the challenges in the
relationship, as opportunities to become more fully awake, to become
more fully present, loving, and giving.” The transformation generated
between the two people leads to a deep transformation within each of
them. One
critical ingredient for healthy intimate relationships is a realistic
sense of their limitations: relationships cannot in and of themselves
fill the hole of love created in childhood. In Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships,
Welwood teaches that we need to learn how to be there for ourselves and
recognize that our lives are held in an absolute love. To tap into this
love, he offers this six-step exercise:
(1) Settle into your body. Sitting or lying down, take a few deep breaths. (2)
Turn your attention toward some way in which you feel cut off from love
in your life right now and see how that lack feels in your body. (3)
Without trying to get anything from anybody in particular, open to the
pure energy of your longing to feel more connected. Deeply feel the
energy in this longing. (4)
See if you can feel the longing in your heart center and soften your
crown center, which is at the top and back of your head. (5)
Notice if there is any presence of love available now. Don’t think
about it too hard or fabricate what isn’t there. But if there is some
love or warmth at hand, let it enter you. Give yourself ample time to be
with whatever you’re experiencing and keep in mind that the presence of
absolute love may be very subtle, like being held in a gentle embrace. (6) Instead of holding yourself up, let love be your ground. Allow yourself to melt. Welwood
came up with this practice because of his own needs. Working with it,
he quickly felt profound changes— so much so that he believed he’d never
again need love from people in the same way. “I experienced a new kind
of trust and relaxation in knowing that I could have my own direct
access to perfect love whenever I needed it,” he writes. “My investment
in grievance diminished, along with tendencies to expect others to
provide ideal love.” Yet
this practice did not prove to be a panacea—nothing is—and Welwood
eventually found himself slipping back into old relational expectations.
It did, however, leave him with the genuine knowledge that something
else was possible. “This served as a polestar,” he concludes, “in
guiding me toward seeing what I still need to work on to free myself
further.” When
people ask Barry Magid what the difference is between psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy, he wryly asserts that psychoanalysis doesn’t help
anyone. “This
dovetails with the idea of no gain in Zen,” says Magid, who is a
psychoanalyst, a psychiatrist, and the founder of The Ordinary Mind
Zendo in New York. “Psychotherapies in a broad sense can be thought of
as problem-solving techniques and are very useful as such. In contrast,
Zen is not a technique and is not a means to an end. Zen may literally
be the only use- less thing we do, and this uselessness is actually the
essence of Zen being a religious practice. We experience the moment,
our- selves, and life itself exclusively for its own sake, and this is
the basis of reverence.” Zen is an expression of who we are. Likewise,
psychoanalysis—the classical technique developed by Freud—is an
open-ended process in which we stay with our experience without any idea
where it’s going to lead. This is the opposite of self-help or
self-improvement. Yet paradoxically, it’s profoundly transformative.
Once we really give up trying to change, real change can occur. According
to Magid, both Zen and psychoanalysis stir up feelings—good and bad—and
offer a stable container in which to face them. on the analysis side,
the container is the analyst-client relationship. In the zendo, the
container is the structure, the set- ting, and the sitting. Zen students
literally sit still with whatever comes up, whether it’s physical or
emotional. Both disciplines, in essence, are about staying with a bigger
range of experience than we usually want to tolerate; they just do it
in two different contexts. In
Magid’s opinion, “No matter what anyone says, the reason we come to
Buddhist practice is that at some level we’re doing it to get rid of an
aspect of the self we don’t want to deal with. We might say our aim is
to become wiser and more compassionate, but usually what we really want
is to get rid of our anxiety, our vulnerability, our anger, and those
aspects of sexuality that are troublesome. Practice then becomes a way
of having one part of ourselves fighting another—one part is trying to
throw another part overboard in the name of selflessness.” When
people practice meditation in this way, says Magid, “something about
them ends up feeling dead. They feel like they’ve practiced for a long
time, but have failed because they’ve never been able to get rid
of...fill in the blank.” Yet practice isn’t intended to get rid of
anything. Practice should be a way to let everything stay just as it is. In his book Ordinary Mind,
Magid says practicing zazen for the purpose of affecting change is like
exercising because you think you’re overweight. If your motivation is
to squelch an aspect of yourself that repels you and to actualize an
image of yourself that you desire, then you will have to exert continual
effort. Yet if you practice or exercise because you feel that doing so
is a natural part of the day and because somehow it makes you feel “more
like yourself,” then no gaining idea will be necessary to motivate you. As
Magid sees it, neuroscience has been used to fuel the idea that
meditation is a means to an end, and he finds this worrisome. “If we
think that what we want is to be in a particular brain state, then
meditation becomes a means to get into that state, and we start asking
if meditation is indeed the most efficient means,” he says. “Maybe we
start to wonder if we couldn’t just bypass a lot of that really boring
sitting by taking the right pill. And now we’re down a road of thinking
that what we’re trying to do is get into a particular subjective state
and stay there. But in meditation—and in analysis—we’re trying to learn
to not prefer, to not cling to any one state. Similarly, happiness or
enlightenment is not something that takes place in our brains. Happiness
and enlightenment are functions of a whole person living a whole life.” Yet
in the face of depression and anxiety, Magid does not eschew
medication. The real issue “is what someone needs in order to sit still
and stay with their own experience. If someone is obsessively ruminating
or chronically anxious, that blocks any other kind of experience.” So
the use of Prozac or another medication may allow some people to
experience states of mind beyond the ones they’re stuck in. “I think
people are often worried about not being able to do it all on their own
or being dependent on medication,” Magid adds. “But nobody’s doing
anything on their own. There’s no such thing as autonomy. To enable us
to practice, we all rely on the group, the teacher, the tradition—all
sorts of things. If for some people medication is what enables them to
practice, I have no problem with it.” Charlotte
Beck, Magid’s late teacher, received the Japanese name “Joko” from her
Zen teacher, Maezumi Roshi, yet she did not continue the practice of
giving students Buddhist names. Magid, however, has adopted the
tradition—with a twist. In a ceremony, he gives his students not a
special, foreign name, but rather their real name. The one they already
use every day. This is his reminder that practice and ordinary life are
one and the same.
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