Wake Up Now (23 page)

In Hinduism and Buddhism, these persistent root patterns (called
samskaras
, Sanskrit for “impressions”) consist of the imprints left on the mind by experiences (in both this life
and past lives) that color future experiences, behaviors, and states of mind. From the perspective of Western psychology, which has paid particular attention to their evolution, these root patterns (called object relations, or complexes) develop over the lifespan as the result of repeated experiences that reinforce the same distorted point of view. Considered the focus of long-term depth psychotherapy, they’re so tenacious precisely because ongoing life experiences provide convincing evidence for their validity. These patterns range from a tendency to fixate and obsess about certain life issues, especially those that appear to be survival-related, to entire subpersonalities and split-off parts of the psyche that have their own autonomy, like separate selves.

After moving into a cave high in the Himalayas and setting up his meditation cushion, the renowned Tibetan yogi Milarepa discovered that the cave was inhabited by a company of noisy, mischievous demons. At first, he tried to subdue them, but they just became more boisterous. (Unlike Dogen, apparently, he didn’t have the option of dancing on their heads.) Realizing that his approach was both violent and futile, he decided to send the demons love and compassion instead—at which point, half of them departed. Loosening his grip even further, he surrendered to hosting the remaining demons indefinitely, instead of trying to get rid of them, and he invited them to stay as long as they liked. All but one particularly mean and ferocious demon left. Finally, Milarepa gave up every attempt to control his situation, and with utmost love and compassion, he placed his head in the
demon’s mouth as an offering. The demon vanished and never returned.

Like Milarepa, most of us tend to struggle with challenging emotional patterns at first, trying to change, improve, or eliminate them through a variety of self-help techniques. Next we may turn to meditation in a concerted attempt to generate enough peace of mind, insight, and compassion to drive the patterns away through the power of our spiritual practice. Once we awaken, we may keep applying the spacious, open, unconditioned awareness of our essential nature to these patterns in the hope that they’ll dissipate in the light of our wakefulness. Many of the patterns do release in response to these tactics, but the most resistant and ferocious ones require our complete surrender and acceptance before they let go of their hold over us.

In the months and years that follow awakening, many people experience a flood of difficult or upsetting emotions, including some they never knew existed. They may feel rage or terror or other feelings with an unfamiliar intensity, or find themselves overwhelmed with sadness or grief for long-ago losses they thought they had forgotten. The loss of a separate sense of self, a solid self-image, appears to lift the lid that has hidden from view all the qualities and feelings that were considered uncomfortable or unacceptable. In Western psychology, this lid is known as the “repression barrier,” and the early stages of embodiment often involve facing and ultimately
embracing this previously repressed material. During this phase, which can be both daunting and disconcerting, students often complain that awakening has left them feeling worse rather than better.

Eventually, through the process of embodiment described in the first part of this chapter, most of these emotions are welcomed and embraced, and there’s an ongoing ease in facing whatever else arises and letting it be, without resistance or struggle. But the core patterns, the deeper roots, tend to persist, often because they exist not beneath the level of conscious awareness, as repressed emotions do, but in a separate domain, like little selves whose emptiness has not yet been revealed. One particularly clear and awakened friend of mine experienced herself as the limitless vastness of being and seemed to live in constant joy—until she was suddenly ambushed by the return of old fears. Eventually, she began recovering memories of being molested by her father, along with the inner sense of a separate part of herself that was still terrified and alone.

From a Western psychological perspective, these separate parts are often the result of dissociation, the splitting of the self into parts, rather than the repression of certain aspects of the self into the unconscious. At some particularly stressful point in a person’s life history, a part of the self walls itself off to protect itself from what it perceives to be a life-threatening situation. This maneuver may help the psyche survive an abusive or otherwise traumatic childhood, but later the splits may prove difficult to acknowledge and heal.

Because these parts don’t simply rise to awareness once the self-image has shattered, they remain hidden from view and may need to be actively invited and approached. Otherwise, they continue to engage in emotional hijacking, putting forth intense emotions—seemingly from nowhere—that lead to unexpected bouts of contraction and reactivity. Sometimes these parts exert their influence primarily through mysterious physical problems such as chronic pain, digestive problems, or autoimmune disorders. People dealing with these unacknowledged parts may feel quite awakened, spacious, and free in most of their being most of the time but have pockets of dissociation and fixation that have never seen the light and are still seething with unexpressed emotion. Buddhist psychologist Edward Podvoll called these dissociated parts “islands of insanity,” where we may run aground from time to time as we sail through the ocean of the Self.

Breathe and Reflect

Spend some time considering the ways in which emotional hijacking occurs in your own life. How do your actions not quite live up to your level of spiritual understanding? What kinds of circumstances are particularly disturbing for you? How do you deal with your demons, those sudden, unexpected outbursts of contraction and pain?

From the perspective of brain research, these deeply rooted patterns or dissociated parts are hardwired into the “old brain,” particularly the amygdala, which processes and stores memories associated with emotional events. Instinctive
or emotional reactions that originate in the old brain often bypass the information and wisdom that the “new brain,” or neocortex, has accumulated over a lifetime of experience and thought. As a result, you can live in the timeless spiritual dimension of being from your neocortex, which is the seat of “higher consciousness,” but still be fearful about your future survival or enraged about unresolved past traumas in your old-brain emotional centers.

Whatever metaphor you choose, psychological or neurological, the message is still the same: despite powerful awakening experiences, you may still have profound internal splits that perpetuate division and conflict at a psychological level and lead to actions that are out of harmony or integrity with the nondual reality to which you’ve awakened. Until every split has fully healed and you experience no separation between outside and inside, self and other—and one part of yourself and another—your realization hasn’t completely embodied.

My Advaita teacher Jean Klein, who was trained as a medical doctor, used to say that the key to healing was to “invade the unhealthy part with the healthy part”—in other words, infuse the unawakened, unhealed parts of the being with the spaciousness and love of consciousness, or true nature. At retreats, he would have us focus on the parts of our body that felt healthy and light and imagine them penetrating the parts that felt constricted and dense. Such deliberate techniques are often necessary for deepening the process of
embodiment to the split-off parts of the being. In the words of Adyashanti, we need to “close the gap.”

One way to close the gap is to invite a part to express itself fully by giving voice to its feelings and concerns while you not only listen empathically, but also allow yourself to experience what this part must be experiencing from the inside. (Psychological techniques that employ this approach include voice dialogue, inner-child work, and ego-state psychology.) Here again, compassionate awareness and a genuine willingness to enter the reality of the dissociated part—that is, a willingness to put your head in the demon’s mouth—is the key to healing the split. Another approach is to abide as the spacious wakefulness of your true nature and imagine breathing in the suffering of the contracted, unhealed part and breathing out peace, love, and ease of being. (This variation on the Tibetan practice of
tonglen
is described more fully at the end of this chapter.) Still another approach is the therapeutic technique known as somatic experiencing, which invites participants to gradually heal the “trauma vortex” (the split-off part or core of fixated energy) by accessing the positive, nourishing inner resources of the “healing vortex” and gently “pendulating” between the two. Finally, there’s the modality called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which uses bilateral (left-right) stimulation to fully process and digest unresolved traumas and the splits they create.

As it turns out, many of these healing techniques require the active involvement of a helping professional. Because the painful inner splits generally occurred as the
result of traumatic or unwholesome relationships, they tend to be healed most successfully in the context of another relationship—one that’s loving rather than abusive, reparative rather than damaging. The nondual spiritual traditions almost exclusively emphasize individual practice and realization and fail to recognize the importance of healing relationships. But increasingly, these traditions are appreciating the value of the relational model encouraged by Western psychology.

However you work to heal the split, it’s important to remember that the challenging reactive patterns and core stories have nothing to do with who you really are, which is pure, unconditioned consciousness or wakefulness. Your true nature is undisturbed and indestructible; no experience can ever stain or damage it, and it never stops being who you are, no matter how much you suffer.

By all means, face and embrace the troublesome samskaras and take responsibility for their impact on your life, but don’t mistake them for who you are or blame or judge yourself as inadequate because you still have them, even though you’ve awakened. Self-judgment is just another of ego’s little ploys to reestablish its power. Who knows where these samskaras come from? Genetics? Past lives? Astrological influences? Family constellations? And who knows whether they will ever fully release their hold, no matter how many awakenings you have or how earnestly you aspire to embody? Wherever they originate and however they evolve, remember that they’re not personal (as if anything could be); they’re just karmic bundles you’re handed in this
lifetime in a most impersonal way and asked to carry and ultimately unwrap.

In the end, embodiment is always both endless and instantaneous. From the absolute perspective, every moment and situation is the perfect embodiment or manifestation of the Divine. Nothing is ever amiss and everything is as it should be, because this timeless moment is all there is. At the same time, until you actually experience everything and every situation as your very own self and act accordingly, you’re still engaged in the ongoing process of embodying. Here again, you encounter the paradox of the gateless gate, but at a deeper level: you’re already inherently embodied, but until your every action reflects the realization of divine perfection, you haven’t fully actualized this embodiment. As the sacred symbol of the cross implies, the timeless vertical dimension (pure being, innate perfection) and the horizontal dimension (endless evolution and becoming) meet right here in the eternal Now.

Your account of the misguided roshi who
had received so many Dharma transmissions makes
me wonder about the legitimacy of traditional
lineages. Is there any point in perpetuating the
institution of gurus and roshis and the spiritual
hierarchies that support them?

I prefer the notion of the “spiritual friend” (a translation of the Buddhist term
kalyana mitra
), someone who helps guide
you on your journey but doesn’t participate in spiritual hierarchies or pretend to be someone or something you’re not. Personally, I feel deep gratitude for the teachers I’ve had, especially those who awakened out of traditional frameworks and taught in original and unconventional ways. Not only did their freedom from limitation galvanize my own realization, but they were so accessible, so undefended—defining characteristics of truly awakened human beings.