True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (10 page)

The conditioning to pull away from pain is part of our survival equipment. When we have experienced deep emotional wounding or physical or emotional trauma, dissociation from raw sensations and acute fear is a powerful self-protective reflex. Yet until the trauma is felt and processed, these painful energies continue to be held in our tissue and nervous system. Because they express themselves as recurrent physical or emotional pain, we develop ongoing strategies to avoid what we're feeling—tensing or numbing the body, generating distracting thoughts, engaging in addictive behaviors, acting aggressively. Focusing attention on the body can begin to undo these protective strategies and open us to intense and often disruptive energies. While ultimately this “undoing” is an essential part of healing, we may become overwhelmed and possibly retraumatized if our mindfulness is not stable or strong enough.

Most people live with emotional wounding, and many, with some degree of trauma. As Jane put it, there is “stuff buried inside.” How do we know when it is safe to connect with these long-avoided feelings? Some students fear that if they intentionally open to what is inside them, they will fall apart and become emotionally paralyzed or dysfunctional. They wonder what style of meditation is right for them.

These critical questions deserve careful attention. While there is no clear formula, I've found that mindfulness of the body requires a sufficient sense of safety and stability—in other words, some initial sense of refuge. I often recommend seeking the guidance of a qualified teacher or therapist attuned to mindfulness and to healing trauma. If someone is feeling shaky and vulnerable, he or she might feel safe enough practicing with a group of fellow meditators, and/or knowing that a mindfulness teacher, therapist, or trusted friend is available to provide support as needed. As Jane and I started working together, I could tell by her willingness to explore her experience that she felt a reasonable sense of trust in my support. One powerful aspect of the refuge of love is what I call “being accompanied.” The presence of another person who cares for our well-being can become a kind of healing “container” for our intense internal energies. (I will explore this refuge more fully in chapter 9.)

Our sense of safety and stability also grows as we cultivate our own inner resources—the meditative skills that settle the mind, calm the body, and steady the attention. Here we are taking refuge in truth, in practices that ready us for a full, embodied presence. For instance, I began working with Jane by asking her to connect with pleasant or neutral feelings in her body. Strengthening this skill would help her relax her mind and give her a sense of her body as a potentially safe place. We also worked on developing the use of her anchor (the breath) as a reliable and comforting home base; she needed to know she could calm herself if something felt like too much. As I suggested, this same anchor could then support her—be “good company”—as she moved toward presence with more difficult emotions.

I recently counseled a young man who had served in Iraq and was suffering from post-traumatic stress. When he first came to me, paying attention to any part of his body other than his feet triggered terror. We worked together to build two resource anchors: the sensations in his feet—which helped to ground him—and a mantra, or set of sacred words, that reminded him of the protection of a loving universal spirit. For many months, his primary practice was to reflect on his mantra, repeating it inwardly over and over again, and to feel his feet on the ground. After about six months, when he was feeling more grounded and protected, he gradually began to include the sensations in the rest of his body in his awareness. He called this his “journey back to being alive and whole.”

One woman at a weeklong retreat I led was suffering from what she called a “stranglehold” of anxiety. She learned to work with it by intentionally contacting and then moving away from intense sensations. She would imagine she was stepping into the river of her fears, and she'd let herself open to the clutching and squeezing and soreness that lived inside her. Then she would visualize stepping out of the river and sitting on the bank. There she would take some moments to intentionally awaken her senses—open her eyes, look around—including in her awareness the sounds outside the room, the sense of air and space around her, the feeling of her breath, the support of the chair beneath her. By widening her attention she could remain aware of the grip of anxiety, but without feeling so overwhelmed. In a single sitting she might do several rounds of stepping into the river to contact her fears directly, and then stepping out to rest on the calm and spacious bank. Gradually she discovered that the energies that seemed so fearsome were, as Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa puts it, “workable.”

Some of the same questions about working with emotional pain also come up with physical pain. Students want to know if they should stop meditating when their pain is intense and distracting. “Why would I want to feel that migraine?” they ask. “Why would I choose to attend to that queasiness, that stomachache?” “What should I do if my body's pain feels like too much?”

Sometimes the notion of pain itself is a setup for assuming the experience is bad or too much. When I teach about being with pain, I encourage students to investigate the dance of sensations they have labeled as “pain.” Under the solid concept of pain is a changing constellation of experience—burning, pinpricks, twisting, pressing, soreness, stabbing. Simply bringing interest to how these sensations move and unfold, how they become more or less intense, can make the experience less personal, and will enlarge your sense of presence.

I often recommend widening the attention before contacting unpleasant sensations. Pain can narrow our focus so much that we lose contact with what else is present. At these times it's helpful to scan the body for neutral and pleasant sensations, and to rest in those areas for a while. Then experiment with moving back and forth between the neutral/pleasant sensations and the unpleasant ones. Alternately, as I advised Jane, you might stay in contact with a neutral/pleasant anchor like the breath as you investigate the difficult spots.

You can also widen the attention by attuning to the space around unpleasant sensations, or simply to the space around your body, and then move back and forth from there. Rather than a small self who is tensed against pain, you will gradually open to a more spacious awareness that can be present with the difficult sensations without reacting or recoiling.

Yet there are times when attempting contact with any pain has diminishing or negative returns. If you are reacting with agitation or distress, it is usually best to take a break. Switch to a concentrative practice with a pleasant or neutral anchor—such as resting in the breath, listing to the sounds around you, or reciting a mantra. When you feel more equanimity, then you might bring a soft attention back to the stronger sensations. Alternatively, you might end your sitting for now, and instead, with mindfulness, seek whatever remedy—medication, stretching, a hot shower, a cup of tea—provides relief.

Being present with difficulty is not an endurance test. It is not yet another domain where you need to prove that you can succeed. Sometimes you simply need to prepare the ground and find ways to feel more safe and stable. Sometimes in the face of great pain, you might stay present for just thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes. All that matters is how you are
relating
to pain. Refuge is always waiting for you; it is here in the moments that you regard what is happening with a kind and gentle presence.

Recognizing Unlived Life

Two days after Jane and I first met, she sent me a note to say that she was getting the knack of feeling both pleasant and unpleasant sensations in her body. Then, late the following afternoon, she and I met again privately. Eyes red from crying, Jane told me what had happened earlier that day. “I was thinking about my mother, who died a couple of years ago. We'd always had a distant, uneasy relationship—she was a single mom, also a college professor, who was immersed in her work and glad to have me out of the house—so I didn't really grieve her death. While I was meditating I could feel that numb heaviness of the blanket. It was like the blanket was between me and her, me and everything. As you'd said, I just let that numbness and heaviness be there, trying to feel how it was in my body. My throat got very tight and I started swallowing repeatedly. Then a memory took over … something painful I had totally forgotten.

“I must have been about seven. I had golden hair that flowed down to my waist. I loved my hair. After school I'd wrap myself in fancy scarves and dance around and feel like I was a beautiful princess. Then one afternoon my mom told me we were going to the hairdresser, that my hair was a nuisance. I knew that word, ‘nuisance.' It meant pestering her for a puppy at a pet store, or getting a new dress dirty because I'd played in it, or trying to get her attention while she was grading papers. Being a nuisance often led to closed doors and being alone. This time I pleaded, I promised to keep my hair in a ponytail, I cried and cried, but she just dragged me to the car and told me it was time to grow up.

“The hairdresser could see how upset I was, but she just laughed at me. ‘You'll be cooler in the summer' she said, and then went ahead and chopped off my long locks.” Jane's hand instinctively rose toward her head, as if feeling for the phantom hair that was no longer there. “Sitting there at the beauty parlor, something in me knew that I didn't matter. What I was feeling didn't matter. I was invisible, no one cared.” Jane stopped abruptly, her mouth pressed tight, hands now both in her lap and clenched in fists. Then, in a defeated voice she said, “That's probably when a part of me stopped living.”

Jane's voice was barely audible when she started talking again. “You know, Tara, I've become just like her. Joyless. A hardworking, uptight, dried-out woman. She shut down after Dad left, ignored her hurts and needs … and mine.” Jane was quiet for a moment, as if letting herself take in what she had just said out loud. Then she continued: “Well, I've shut down too. Now I know what I'm most afraid of. It's of dying like her, without having lived.”

Carl Jung wrote, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived life of the parents.” The outer domain of our unlived life includes all the places where we've held back from pursuing and manifesting our potential—in education and career, in relationships and creativity. But it is the inner domain of our unlived life that sets this suffering in motion. Here we find the raw sensations, the longings and hurts, the passions and fears that we have not allowed ourselves to feel. When we pull away from the energetic basis of our experience, we turn away from the truth of what is. We make a terrible bargain. When we separate from the felt sense of our pain, we also separate from the visceral experience of love that allows for true intimacy with others. We cut ourselves off from the sensory aliveness that connects us with the natural world. When there is unlived life, we can't take good care of ourselves, our children, or our world.

The feelings you are trying to ignore are like a screaming child who has been sent to her room. You can put in earplugs and barricade yourself in at the farthest end of the house, but the body and the unconscious mind don't forget. Maybe you feel tension or guilt. Maybe, like Jane, you are baffled by intimacy or haunted by a sense of meaninglessness. Maybe you fixate on all the things you need to get done. You can't live in a spontaneous way because your body and mind are still reacting to the presence of your distressed child. Everything you do to ignore her, including becoming numb, only strengthens your link with her. Your very sense of who you are—your identity—is fused with the experience of pushing away a central part of your life or running from it.

In shutting down the passion, hurt, and pain she had experienced as a young girl whose precious hair was butchered, Jane had locked herself into a numb and anxious fragment of who she was. Yet something in her was calling her to live more fully. By beginning to contact her body's experience, by touching the ground, she was opening the door to what she had been running from.

Coming Alive Through the Body

After Jane named her fear of dying without having lived, she dropped into silence. I asked her if she would like to bring the presence of RAIN to what was going on inside her, and she nodded in agreement. “Okay,” I said gently, “start by letting yourself sense that fear and where it is living in your body.” She gestured to the middle of her chest, and then, as before, she placed her hand there. “You might investigate by noticing what it feels like, from the inside,” I suggested.

Jane sat still for a few moments. Then, after deepening her breath, she responded: “It's like a claw that's pulling and tearing at my heart.” I reminded her to let those sensations be there, and to allow them to express themselves however they wanted. She was breathing deeply, letting the breath help her stay with the experience of her body. “The tearing is pulling me open, there's lots of heat … Now it's this huge screaming blowing apart everything … It's my voice, screaming at my mother.”

“Jane, if there are words, and you want to, it's fine to say them out loud.”

Eyes squeezed tight, at first she seemed to be fighting back the words. Then they burst out: “I
hate
you for cutting my hair. How could you do that to me? How could you?” Jane's voice broke, and then she put her face in her hands, weeping. “You just wanted me out of the way so I wouldn't bother you. You didn't love me … you couldn't love me.”

Jane cried deeply for several minutes, hugging herself and rocking. I encouraged her to take all the time she needed to feel what was in her heart, and if she wanted, to name what was happening. “There's a hurt that's stabbing,” she whispered as she continued to hold herself. Then, a minute or two later, she spoke in a softer, more tender voice, emphasizing each word: “Now deep … aching … sadness.” When the sobs subsided, we sat together in silence. After drinking some water, she looked up at me. For the first time, her eyes held mine in intimate contact.