Introduction

I recently read an article in Buddhadharma Spring 2009 by Rita Gross, a Buddhist historian, entitled “Why we need to know our Buddhist history”. She argues that when we join a Buddhist group we often have no understanding of how its tradition fits into the history of Buddhism as a whole and how to make sense of the contradictions that are created by the different groups differing versions of Buddhism. She says we can clarify confusions by learning a little Buddhist history. In the world of Buddhist scholarship this includes understanding the social context of the teachings, the people, their culture and the political and economic situation that gave birth to the teachings and also left its mark on them. As a psychotherapist interested in what makes us psychologically tick I would agree that this type of approach is very valuable and for our conversation this evening I want to take it a little further. I want to suggest that Early Buddhism, now represented by its one remaining school, the Theravādins, and all and each of the later Mahāyāna evolutions, were collective responses to deep emotional needs forming in the cultures they emanated from. Or put another way, each evolution of Buddhist thought started out, long before it became identifiable as a movement, philosophy or school, as a shared emotional need growing in the unconscious of the Buddhist communities. At first this need would hardly be recognised and had no name, but then very slowly small indications would become visible until something more formed would appear and finally be known as, for example, “Dharma”, “Mahāyāna Buddhism”, “Vajrayāna Buddhism”, “Pure Land Buddhism” or “Zen Buddhism”. This then is my subject this evening: how each expression of Buddhism was created by and reflects the emotional needs of the community that produce and practice it. So let us now have a look at some of at them.

Early Buddhism - rational analysis

When discussing these ideas with my wife she took against my portraying Early Buddhism as rational. For her this sounded without heart, too intellectual and dry. I can understand this but after trying to find a different word I still come back to rational. For me it captures something of Buddha’s sensible, deal with what is in front of you, approach to human suffering. When researching this talk I reread the introduction to the first book on Buddhism I bought - What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula - and I think he also portrays Buddhism in this way. These are some of the things he says:

“The Buddha was not only a human being; he claimed no inspiration from any god or external power either. He attributed all his realisation, attainments and achievements to human endeavour and human intelligence.”

“Man’s position, according to Buddhism is supreme. Man is his own master, and there is no higher being or power that sits in judgement of his destiny.”

“One is ones own refuge, who else could be a refuge ………. [the Buddha said] be a refuge for oneself, never seek refuge in or from anybody else.”

From this I get a very modern feeling - it is humanistic, liberal, self-reliant, agnostic. This is a system from which any God or gods have been banished.

Rahula comments:

“The freedom of thought allowed by the Buddha is unheard of elsewhere in the history of religions. This freedom is necessary because, according to the Buddha, man’s emancipation depends on his own realisation of the truth, and not on the benevolent grace of a god or any external power as a reward for his obedient good behaviour.”

And he goes on, with examples from the early sūtras, to discuss the necessity of entertaining doubt, being ready to examine the teachings and even the Buddha himself, and also of having religious tolerance. All qualities that today we would recognise as antidotes to religious extremism and sectarianism.

So what was the society like that gave birth to this extraordinary person? What were its emotional needs that found fulfilment in the earliest Buddhist teachings?

From my reading I have built up a picture of early Aryan culture spreading down the Ganges valley from the West to the East. The religion of these people is what is now called Brahmanism which largely revolved around making sacrifices to a large pantheon of gods so to bring good weather, health, fertility and prosperity - all the things small agricultural communities need to survive. We should imagine a world constrained and yet prey to forces external to it which it tries to manage. It is vulnerable with few resources and so takes refuge in a religious mentality that depends on more powerful beings for its protection. Further more this was not a stable society, growing prosperity had created newly disposable wealth which in turn had created new centres of population with new forms of employment - governance and commerce. This urbanisation created a new group of people who had the ability to consider their situation and be dissatisfied with it. This makes sense to me; as each need is satisfied another comes to the surface. Once our bellies are full we can worry about our souls. This in fact happened to this society and a group of spiritual seekers - Samaṇas - appeared, who left the villages and the new towns and went into the still extensive forests to study with gurus and practice meditation. The historical Buddha was one of these just as was the Jains Mahāvirā. The Buddha himself describes these drop outs and the practices and beliefs they followed and what comes through is a society in spiritual expansion pushing at the edge of its religious understanding. As for the Buddha, Siddārtha Gautama, although later Buddhism would elevate his rank to that of a prince, it is more probable that he was the son of a tribal elder living on the edge of Aryan/Brahmanic culture. His willingness to adapt to individual circumstances when making rules for the Sangha, his pragmatism, his common sense and his respect for women, all suggest growing up in a community where these traits already flourished. But it is particularly his strict avoidance of metaphysical speculation that suggests his own teaching has evolved as a counterpoint to Brahmanism and also as an evolution of Brahmanic thinking. The Buddha for the first time uses the notion of karma as we know it - we reap what we sow, personal ethical action has positive consequences. And he also deconstructs the self as an unchanging essence - ātman/Brahman, the big idea in Brahmanism. When we observe our self we see that the senses are not self, the emotions are not self, the thoughts are not self, the actions are not self and consciousness is not self. We are simply an amalgam of ever changing, interconnected parts. He also ducks unanswerable questions and gives answers that skilfully respond to individual situations. He knows about the deep emotional needs in his society that this talk is about. What could be more pragmatic, more psychologically attuned, more metaphysically agnostic, more rational, that this?

Mahāyāna Buddhism - the return of the repressed god.

When I started thinking about Mahāyāna Buddhism the first thing I noticed was a sort of emotional warmth about it, something not immediately easy to define but definitely there. This may be because Mahāyāna Buddhism, as well as reworking and extending the understanding of emptiness, is particularly identified with the ideal of the Bodhisattva and a new cosmology where Buddha becomes a glorified transcendental being. Not a god in Buddhist terms but certainly a manifestation of timeless awakening that may be worshipped by the faithful.

It is very difficult to say when Mahāyāna Buddhism first began because it has no founder  nor location. Some western scholars like to call it a ‘movement ‘ which I understand as something initially nebulous that grows in momentum as its separate identity becomes clear. Such a movement has its seeds in Early Buddhism and when it begins to stir it may have emerged within a number of groups at different locations more or less simultaneously. Bearing this in mind, Mahāyāna Buddhism becomes first visible from about 150 BCE - a hundred and fifty years before the start of our Christian era. Depending on the dating for the Buddha’s death, 480 BCE or more probably around 370 BCE, this would mean a gap of around one hundred years until Aśhoka’s coronation and then more than two hundred and fifty years, or about five generations, before a definable Mahāyāna movement can be seen. These dates are important for what I am going to suggest.

So who were the first Mahāyāna Buddhists? There is a lot of speculation about this. Some western scholars have suggested  that Mahāyāna Buddhism began with members of the Buddhist laity who were discontented with their second rate spiritual status when compared to the monks. It was they who worshipped at stūpas and they who wrote the Mahāyāna sūtras that were equally objects of devotion. In fact both these practices can still be witnessed today amongst Buddhist laity. Any one visiting Buddhist stūpas such as Bodhgaya and Boudnath will see people circumambulating the stūpas as a symbol of the Buddha and in Far Eastern Buddhism particular sūtras and their ritual recitation provide the foundation for different schools.

Against this is the evidence that shows that the Sangha itself was the biggest donor to the creation and maintenance of the stūpas. Also it is far more likely that the authors of the new Mahāyāna sūtras were in fact monks with both the time and education to accomplish their task - but that they were also monks who wanted to write something that included the aspirations and needs of a laity that had gained in both influence and status. The notion of the Bodhisattva does this by moving away from valuing monastic renunciation towards the spectacular task of being a Bodhisattva in the world where one takes responsibility for ending all its woes. Good-by closeted Arhat, hello engaged Bodhisattva.

However, who ever these first clearly identified Mahāyānists may have been, my intention this evening is to go further back in time and look for the sources of Mahāyāna Buddhism much earlier. I believe we can see the emotional need for a more immediately accessible Buddha beginning to appear just a hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha. In this new conception of the Buddha he has not disappeared into the extinction of his parinirvāṇa, he now begins to be a cosmological Buddha who may still be appealed to, Brahmin like, to assist on the path to liberation. Put simply, there was something just too wonderful about the Buddha to let him go entirely, and ideas and beliefs that will eventually return him, begin to happen almost as soon as there are no more monks alive who knew someone who had known him directly. When memory gives up, imagination takes over.

I believe this process first becomes visible during the Buddhist councils held during the reign of King Aśoka - that is around a hundred years plus after the death of the historical Buddha. It is not entirely clear what happened at the second and third councils of Vaiśalī and Pāṭaliputra because accounts differ depending whether we follow a Theravāda or Mahāyāna account. According to non-Theravāda sources the council at Pāṭaliputra was convened to deal with the ‘Five Points of Mahādeva’ which broadly seem to elevate the status of the Buddha by diminishing the spiritual achievement of an Arhat. (If you remember, originally there was no distinction in their quality of awakening). The community divided over this, on one side a group called the Elders (Sthaviravādins) from whom are descended the present day Theravādins - and on the other the Mahāsamghikas - the majority of the Saṇgha who upheld the new changes and whom are more closely associated with the emerging Mahāyāna tendencies. What is particularly important here is the appearance of the Mahāsamghika teaching on the ‘supra-mundane Buddha’ which held that although the Buddha appeared as a man he was in fact a being who had been in a process of becoming a Buddha for aeons. We learn of his miraculous birth, that he merely appears to wash, eat, sit in the shade, take medicine etc. so to conform with the world but in reality he never sleeps, is always in meditation and is omniscient and so on. All of which is very close to the Mahāyāna teaching that at the Buddha’s death he does not actually become extinct - disappearing for ever - but, because of his great compassion, he remains available to us through prayer. What we are seeing here is the actual process of the Buddha’s deification - not as a Buddhist god who suffers impermanence - but as something much more - an uncreated, undying principle of Buddhahood which the historical Buddha is but one Avatar of. Before it was believed that the Buddha at death entered an inexplicable state that defied explanation, except it was clear that he was no longer present. Now with the introduction of the idea of a supra-mundane Buddha comes the notion that the Buddha’s body, while seeming to be that of an ordinary human, also contains the Buddha’s spiritual nature which is his body of truth - his Dharmakāya. From here it is now only a step away to universalise the presence of this body of truth and we have a supra-mundane Buddha who has been present from beginning-less time and who permeates to entire phenomenal universe. The earlier repudiated and vanished Brahman, returned in all but name?

Aśoka died about 232 BCE and from this time alternative conceptions of the Buddhist spiritual path and its goal begin to emerge that will later crystallise as the Mahāyāna. What is perhaps more important though, for us this evening, is that with Aśoka, Buddhism was drawn closer to the state and secular living. It comes in from the forest and becomes more exposed to the theistically orientated spiritual needs of the population who are not cognisant of the Buddhist deconstruction of the illusion of a permanent self. From the same population theistic devotional Hinduism also begins to emerge immediately after the death of Aśoka, as does the growth of early Buddhist sculpture that evolves into representing the Buddha as a solar god by around the first century CE. It seems to me that the majority of the population of largely uneducated farmers, have not really moved on from pre-Buddhist days and, like their ancestors, require a form of spirituality that can provide solace for their hardships. Buddhism initially questioned the assumptions of this simpler faith, but now, as it reaches out and engages more with a faith based Buddhist laity, it has to meet their emotional needs and they want their gods.

Tantric Buddhism - Buddhism under siege

It is not a coincidence that political upheaval, progressively aggressive Islamic incursions and the appearance of Tantrism simultaneously occur. We now take a leap forward in time to the seventh century CE and early Medieval Buddhism. In the preceding centuries, under a series of relatively stable and benign Central Asian and Indian dynasties, Buddhism had become a powerful and influential spiritual force. The great Indian monastic universities such as Nalanda had been built and were functioning, creating Buddhist monks who brought qualities such as stability, compassion and decorum to an all too easily bloody and querulous world. However, this ability was gradually undermined. The Indian political scene began to fracture into small principalities, often not much more than lands held by Mafia like brigands, and from the West came Islam, first as raiding pirates along the coast, and then later, as armies bent on destruction, putting whole cities to death or selling them into slavery. Further more, the militant worship of Śiva, the Hindu principle of destruction, was pushing up from its home in South India, offering to the violent new war lords an icon as violent as themselves that also legitimised their distinctly non-Buddhist values and behaviours. In the face of this combined onslaught Buddhist patronage, necessary for the maintenance of its monasteries, began to decline. First the Buddhist mercantile class and the craft guilds began to suffer in the unstable political and economic climate. Then the kings themselves began to shift their allegiance from Buddhism to the newly vibrant Hindu revival. Within four hundred years Buddhism was largely extinct in the land of its birth.

In the face of this challenge Buddhism adapted and changed. From within the Buddhist laity and the monasteries the figure of the tantric siddha began to emerge. Buddhism had started out in the forests and had for a long while existed on the edge where forest and cultivated lands met. Monks crossing over each day with their begging bowls, laity going to seek counsel and solace. However these new yogins were like nothing known before. Virtually naked except for ornaments, musical instruments and drinking utensils made from human bone, they clustered in charnel grounds at the edge of society. Breaking all the taboos of both Hindu and Buddhist communities they made sex sacred, offered blood sacrifices and ate and drank all that was filthy and obscene. They were holy shockers! They were also politically astute and, sharing much of the same tantric culture of their Hindu Śaivite cousins, could vie with them in the courts of kings. At first they must have been repellant to the urbane and highly educated monastic hierarchy. We know many siddha’s came from lowly, uneducated backgrounds. Fish sellers, arrow makers, people of low caste. However, by the time Indian Buddhism was all but finished and had escaped over the Himalayas into the safety of Tibet, the mad and scary tantricism had been tamed and institutionalised into the monasteries and its new meditative practices elevated to the most powerful means to achieve enlightenment.

This is a hugely complicated story which we do not have time for but Ronald Davidson, in a fascinating book about the social history of tantrism, demonstrates how Buddhist practitioners - monks and siddhas - took on the imperial culture of their time, mirroring kingship and the exercise of power. Drawing parallels he says that the process of becoming a king and the kingly activities that follow are echoed by the process of becoming a tantric practitioner and living the yogis life. The prince obtains coronation, the practitioner initiation. The prince recognises he is semi-divine holding dominion over surrounding vassel states. The practitioner recognises he is the deity at the centre of the maṇḍala. The prince enters a circle of counsellors, the practitioner a circle of vajra brothers and sisters. The prince is protected by his army, the practitioner by Dharma Guardians. The prince engages in peaceful and aggressive royal acts, the practitioner engages in peaceful and wrathful tantric rituals. Thus at a time when kings were creating a political landscape where each surrounded himself with smaller satellite states, Buddhism developed a new representation of the spiritual landscape as a maṇḍala which had at its centre a principle deity surrounded by secondary deities. These maṇḍalas, the creation of the siddhas and recorded in there new texts - tantras, responded to threats to society and the collective anxieties these threats created. Both siddhas and kings sought control through magical means whether it be over the deluded mind or the socio-economic chaos and together they conspired to use the new magical technology of Tantrism to keep the forces of their mutual destruction at bay. Not for no reason do we see in the Buddhism of this time the inclusion of terrifying wrathful deities from Hinduism. Buddhism was on the back foot and any skilful means was welcome if it would keep it intact just a bit longer. Put simply, when in a corner we fight back.

Pure Land Buddhism - Our Lord and Saviour of Mankind

This last example I feel is particularly clear and for me represents the biggest shift in Buddhism from its inception. It is almost as if a new archetype takes over in the Pure Land Buddhism of China and the Far East that has more in common with Christianity and the devotional cults in Islam and Hinduism. An archetype that makes us a powerless sinner who may only be saved by the grace of a Being of light - Amitābha. Seemingly gone is the notion that we must be our own refuge, now it is too late for that and our salvation is no longer in our own hands.

Buddhism entered China by the silk roads around 50 CE. Here it met a sophisticated literate society of scholar administrators with their own developed systems - Confucianism and Taoism - governing a vast class of peasant farmers. Again this is a long history of ups and downs for Buddhism as it adapts to survive in the economic and political upheavals. In this melting pot Pure Land Buddhism became the most popular form of Buddhism for the labouring laity promising entry to the “Happy Land” heaven of  Sukhāvati for those who only need remember the mantra of Amitābha, the Buddha of Light, minutes before their death. For those powerless to change the grinding and unremitting circumstances of their lives this must have been a powerful message of hope. A message of hope that, in CE 549 - the date the Chinese believed the age of Buddhist decline began - Tao-ch’o, the second patriarch compounded. He declared that we had now entered a time so spiritually degenerate that we could no longer follow the path of the Bodhisattva based on accumulating the six perfections but instead must rely on the easier path of devotion to Amitābha. Now it was Amitābha who would save us from our suffering and not our own, now ineffectual, efforts. Effectively we had become children reliant upon a benevolent parent and no longer an adult responsible for our own salvation. Amitābha, our Lord and Saviour of mankind.

Conclusion

So we have seen in this quick and patchy psychoanalysis of Buddhist social history a process that begins with a movement towards a self-reliance that takes us out of the hands and whims of the early Vedic gods and which then, in a series of steps over the next thousand years, seems to redeposit us, equally as helpless, back in the hands of Buddhist ‘gods’ in all but name. The big human emotions are present throughout, the longing for safety, solace and comfort from someone bigger than ourselves who can protect us from a world of suffering. Also smaller themes emerge - our genius for creative and pragmatic adaptation, our fertile imaginations, our endless thirst for spirituality - even if it is a spirituality that the earliest expression of Buddhism seems to have critiqued negatively. My own feeling is that of wonder and awe. At our best we are amazing beings and if we accept the notion of skilful means then all this ducking and diving to keep the Buddhist vision alive is an entirely legitimate Buddhist pursuit. It demonstrates that at the heart of things the Buddha Nature is always in expression.

And we can take it further still; history is to learn from. If my idea holds water, that all the evolutions of Buddhist thought and practice represent solutions answering collective emotional needs, then we can translate this principle to the present. The question then is what do we collectively yearn for and what sort of Buddhist solution will this yearning be the causes and conditions for? The future Buddhism of the West already lays in our unconscious.

References

Ronald M. Davidson (2002) Indian Esoteric Buddhism, A Social History of the Tantric Movement, Columbia University Press, New York

Walpola Rahula (1967) What the Buddha Taught, Gordon Fraser, Bedford

General Background Reading

Peter Harvey (1990) An Introduction To Buddhism, Teachings, history and practices, Cambridge University Press

Shakyamuni Buddha

Buddhism started almost two and a half thousand years ago and spread throughout the Ganges basin of Northern India. It was started by Gotama,  the son of a chieftain of the Shakya clan which then straddled the border of present day Nepal and India. The earliest accounts of Gotama’s life portray him as a ‘drop out’ in search of spiritual truth. After studying asceticism and meditation with several different Gurus he finally discovered  his own means to enlightenment and became the ‘fully awakened one” - the Shakyamuni Buddha. Later Buddhism develops this largely historical account into a solar myth. The Buddha becomes a prince who leaves his kingdom to show all sentient beings a path from suffering to liberation. Furthermore, this historical Buddha is but one of many buddhas who are all manifestations of a timeless transcendental Buddha, the principle of Awakening. As such there have been buddhas in the deep past and there are buddhas still to come. The name of the next and immanent is the Maitreya Buddha.

Buddhism Today

Buddhism spread from India throughout South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Far East. During this journey it has expressed itself through a variety of schools, some of which no longer exist. Today we find in Sri Lanka, and much of South East Asia, the Theravada school, the ‘School of the Elders’, which is closest to the earliest Buddhism. To the North and in the Far East is found Mahayana Buddhism, the ‘Greater Vehicle’, a later development that in its turn gave birth to further variations, amongst which is Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism, which is most closely associated with Tibet. Today, in the West where all forms flourish, it is unfashionable to think in terms of what was the original and ‘true’ Buddhism. Instead (we may believe) all forms of Buddhism are equally valid expressions of a shared impulse adapted to local time and place.

How things are - the three marks of existence and Buddha Nature

Buddhism, in its simplest forms is phenomenological - it stays close to experience. It observes that the entire universe, and we as part of it, have “the three marks of existence”. Firstly everything is impermanent, nothing lasts. Secondly, because of this we too do not last, there is nothing about us, no self or essence, that is eternal and unchanging. And lastly, because of this undeniable quality of transience, any one who attempts to found their happiness on the belief that things are unchanging is bound to experience suffering. The three marks of existence: transience, no self and suffering.

Some forms of later Buddhism came to put how things really are more positively. Our underlying, fundamental and true nature, not the transient personality, but our ‘Buddha Nature’, is already perfect and is only obscured by our ignorance of it. This luminous and  compassionate nature is identical with the fundamental nature of the entire universe. Indeed the whole universe is nothing but an expression of it.

The illness, diagnosis, cure and the medicine - the Four Noble Truths

At the very start of his teaching career the Buddha taught his understanding of how we may move from suffering to spiritual awakening. He presented it rather like a doctor who is confronted with a complaint that he diagnoses, recognises the cure for and then treats. This is called the ‘Four Noble Truths’. The noble truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, the ending of suffering and the eight-fold path leading to the ending of suffering. Buddhism perceives physical and emotional life as ultimately unsatisfactory and the source of a variety of sufferings. It is the source of suffering because we are driven by desires that may never be completely fulfilled. The cure for this is to be no longer driven and alternatively to rest in our awakened nature. The medicine to realise this is the Buddhist path. Later Buddhism developed the details of this analysis but in its essentials it remains unchanged. Human life is as it is and will always require a means to live it well.

Buddhist scriptures
The heart motivation behind all Buddhist writing is to bring the three root passions, greed, hatred and ignorance to an end. At the earliest strata of Buddhism there are three collections of writings, called the Tripitaka: The Vinaya, rules conditioning the living of a monastic life that supports the Buddhist path. The Sutras, stories of the Buddha and his students meeting other people and talking about the path. The Abidharma, all the teachings contained in these conversations condensed and abstracted into a theory of how everything arises and dissolves. This last steers the path between believing things have something timelessly real about them, eternalism, and the opposite, that they do not exist at all, annihilationism. Later Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism continued to produce its own scriptures called Sutras and Tantras. The latter are ascribed, not to the historical Buddha, but the transcendental principle of Buddha-hood and were received, not aurally, but as visionary revelations.

Buddhist practice - refuge and the eightfold path
In nearly all schools of Buddhism this begins with our taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The teacher, his teaching and the community who practice the teaching. It then continues with greater or lesser explicit reference to the eight-fold path which may be divided into three sections: 1. Conduct, consisting of generosity and not harming others through our speech, actions or livelihood. 2. Meditation, achieved through developing effort, concentration and mindfulness. This is also frequently referred to as developing the meditation practices of concentration and insight. 3. Wisdom, the fruit of the first two.  In the Theravada tradition this is understood as the profound experiential knowledge of the three marks of existence that leads to awakening and liberation from suffering. In the Mahayana it is the path of the Bodhisattva who generates compassion and recognises shunyata, the basic emptiness of all phenomena. In the Vajrayana traditions, broadly speaking, it is the recognition of the true nature of the mind, our always, already awakened Buddha Nature, spacious, intrinsically aware and limitlessly compassionate.

The fruit - the end of the path
Different Buddhist traditions envisage this slightly differently. The Theravada holds the ideal of the Arahat - becoming spiritually enlightened and passing away into Nirvana beyond any further rebirths and consequent suffering. The Mahayana holds an ideal of the Bodhisattva - pausing at the last step of this journey and lingering in the world, over countless lifetimes, until such a time that ones actions have enabled all sentient beings to reach enlightenment. The Vajrayana shares in the motivation of the Bodhisattva but portrays it expressed through the persona of the Siddha - a tantric ‘magician’ who lives and teaches a more radical and efficacious teaching outside of conventional mores and the consensus reality.

Nigel Wellings  January 2009

Introduction

I would like to start today by thinking about something that touches us all - the issue of suffering and how we can find a meaningful way to understand it and find healing. The sixth century Buddhist saint, Shantideva gives us a prayer for this aspiration that many today still find powerful.

May I know happiness and the roots of happiness
May I be free of suffering and the roots of suffering

May all being know happiness and the roots of happiness
May all beings be free of suffering and the roots of suffering

Suffering

Psychotherapy and Buddhism both start from the point of suffering.

Each of us first becomes conscious of our suffering in different ways.

Soon after I started my first analysis I painted a triptych of three selves that I had become particularly aware of. The first I painted naturalistically - an image of myself as others saw me - a young man at that time. The second I painted in reds, oranges and browns. A devilish man with little horns and a wicked glint in his eyes. A self I knew quite well. However the last was unfamiliar and very painful to admit. In dull blues and greys a third man emerged, small, crushed and very sad. He was the pain I had only just realised was inside of me. An image of my own unacknowledged suffering.

This should not have been a surprise. Two and a half thousand years ago the Buddha tells a story about a woman who has just lost her child coming to him for solace. He asks her to collect a mustard seed from each of the houses in her village that have not experienced a bereavement and then return to him. When she returns she arrives empty handed. The Buddha, an expert on suffering, knew that her experience was universal - not one of us escapes the suffering of loss.

As counsellors and psychotherapists we too have people who bring their suffering to us in the hope that we can find a way to help them be with it. If I think about my own clinical practice I have those who bring the experiences of:

• being valueless
• being invisible and being lost within an imaginal world
• being with an absence of feeling being expected to be clever
• being with abusive alcoholic and violent parents
• being with self destructive unexpressed rage
• being the renegade child
• being the victim of long term sexual abuse
• being made always wrong and humiliated
• being crushed being mummies girl and daddies failure
• being abandoned being terrified of emotional vulnerability
• being stiff upper lipped
• being ignored, emotionally undernourished and shamed
• being the survivor of a family decimated by illness
• being in fear of fathers unpredictable depressions
• being special
• being annihilated by ones own goodness

The Buddha before he became enlightened, as the Prince Siddartha, also had his wake up experience when he first became conscious of suffering. Discovering his pleasures were only distractions he went out onto the streets and saw illness, old age and something now mostly hid from us - death. This deeply shocked him - if this happened to other people it would surely happen to him also. He too could know insecurity, being sick, being infirmed and dying.

The Buddha’s response was to go towards the experience and try to understand it by examining exactly where suffering came from. He identified suffering arising from four sources. The first is the biological aspects of being alive: birth, aging, sickness and death. The second is the emotional pain that comes from the ups and downs of life - emotional experience that can be on a scale between uncomfortable to deeply traumatising. The third is about desire - the truth that we can not control getting what we want or don’t want. And the last reaches down into the roots of suffering and sees that in a constantly changing and shifting world any grasping at anything will always bring dissatisfaction, loss and frustration.

The Buddha took these observations and spoke of different types of suffering. The first he called the suffering of suffering. By this he meant the obvious suffering that arises from the many sources of suffering that our lives provide. The biological and psychological sources we have just listed. The second he called the suffering of change. The experience of life as a sequence of separations. Separations that are often welcomed and valued but which when they come unbidden can be unbearably painful and distressing. The last he called the suffering of conditioned existence. This one is both the most profound and also easily missed. Freud may have put his finger on it when he said that the ego is the seat of anxiety. That there is something just about being a person that creates a deep uneasiness and uncertainty. We could also see this as the suffering that arises from not knowing who we are.

The Buddha’s word which we translate here as suffering is dukkha. However, as we have seen dukkha covers a broad range of unhappy emotional experiences. These range from an all pervasive unsatisfactoriness about everything, the feeling that nothing is quite right even if it is superficially OK, to experiences of deep despair, emotional anguish, to the rubbing uneasiness that there is something more, an unanswered spiritual hunger. This last can also build into yet another category of suffering, the awareness of the suffering of others.

This makes me think of C. G. Jung who said that he had found that in a long analysis the suffering of the broader world came to replace the suffering of the individual. That after we had gone through our own pain, the pain of the world and how to be with that moved to the fore front. Pema Chodron, a wonderfully compassionate American Buddhist nun says much the same thing. That as we open our hearts we begin to feel the pain of the world around us. A pain which if anything is more difficult than our own because it seems there is nothing we can do to really help it.

I think many of us will have felt this - it is hard not to when we have daily news updates on the unimaginable suffering others feel around us. Even as I write this I am aware that a ten hour flight arriving in Burma would put me amongst people who have experienced grandparents, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins, friends, children and tiny babies all being swept away and killed in their tens of thousands. Millions of people all simultaneously violently bereaved, family, home, occupation all suddenly destroyed. Did I read on the internet that their plight was now like a thousand people all marooned on an island in the sea with only one bottle of water amongst them? And likewise South West China and its earth quakes with over 80,000 dead. I find myself having the horrible fantasy of what it must be like to be partially crushed within a collapsed building knowing there is no hope of escape. In the face of such suffering I observe myself escaping defensively into anger and outrage at the lack of care I feel others express, finding in this, my own suffering, a defensive refuge from the suffering of others.

The Buddha as health professional

Some of us may find all this talk on suffering a source of suffering itself. That it is frightening and depressing to focus on what hurts us and others.

The Buddha was also criticised for this. His answer to this criticism - and we as counsellors and psychotherapists may borrow it - was to describe three types of doctors. The first is a reckless optimist. Called to the patient he declares there is nothing wrong. The second is a defeated pessimist. Called to the patient he says the patient is indeed ill but there is nothing that may be done. The third is a realist. Called to the patient he sees there is a problem but he also can see its cause, knows it cure and the medicine it will take to bring the cure about.

This cause, cure and medicine is what we shall next look at. Do not despair, there is hope!

The cause

The Buddha’s diagnosis for the cause of suffering is what he calls ‘craving’ - tanha.

Craving here means the experience of being driven by demanding desires and instincts which are always striving for gratification but which, on achieving gratification, need it again. We can never be lastingly satisfied. This causes suffering in three ways: Firstly lasting fulfillment is frustrated by a transitory world. Secondly craving causes us to commit actions and inhabit belief systems that simply perpetuate our own and others suffering. And lastly craving leads to conflicts within us, with others, and between groups. It is the source of all wars.

In his first teaching the Buddha identified three different types of craving. The craving for sensual pleasures. The craving for existence. The craving for nonexistence.

The first, craving for sensual pleasures, is clear - particularly when displayed as some form of addiction. Then its nature is fully revealed - a nightmarish compulsion that recreates itself without hope of full or lasting satisfaction. Thinking about this I am reminded of Freud’s rather bleak belief that there is something inside of each of us that he called the ‘it’, that is an insatiable appetite that simply wants what it wants. An unreflective mouth that gobbles everything up yet never knows enough. That experience of wandering around our house wanting something without knowing what. Turning on the TV when there is nothing on, looking in the fridge when it is empty.

The second and third, craving existence and nonexistence, represent existential crises which psychoanalysis has come to recognise as narcissism - a pandemic psychological disorder in our western world. Narcissism is the hurt we feel when we don’t know who we are.

The beautiful young man Narcissus lends his name to the disorder. In the Greek myth the nymph Echo dies from the grief of unrequited love because Narcissus can not love anyone but himself. The god Nemesis, as a punishment for this, causes Narcissus to fall in love with his own beautiful image reflected in a pool. At the waters edge, captivated by his own face he remains trapped until he too pines away and dies.

The wound of narcissism is a loveless, cold and barren place that constantly demands others and the world around us to reconfirm that we are of value and worth. But underneath what may be a highly successful mask in the world and a striving, pleasing persona is a desperately impoverished sense of self that feels depressed, worthless and inferior. It craves existence while real affection and attachment to another is alien and absent. Acknowledging the real emotions behind the mask is extraordinarily painful because it feels shameful and vulnerable, two emotions that the rather grandiose persona of the narcissistic wound can not tolerate.

Carl had been interested in spirituality since his early teens. He had read many books about meditation and transpersonal psychology. He also took lots of hallucinogenic drugs and believed that the states of non ordinary consciousness he had read about he had experientially achieved. Now, inhabiting what he believed to be an exalted state, he tried to join a spiritual group under the guidance of a teacher. This experience however brought some problems. Firstly his relationships with the other students was made difficult by his need for them to recognise his spiritual superiority, cloaked in a persona of caring and seeming detachment.

Several of the younger women within the group had been seduced by this and then had been badly hurt by his inability to appropriately meet their emotional needs. Secondly his relationship with the teacher was marred by a deep ambivalence on his part. Initially he had listened attentively, keen to be seen as a central and important student, but once the teacher actually recognised his presence and began to invite him into a student teacher relationship he immediately drew back feeling angry and defensive. Carl was incapable of the relationship that the spiritual teaching demanded. While he wanted the teacher to acknowledge his spiritual insights, stolen through drugs, he was not prepared to actually undergo any real initiation that entailed a surrender of his narcissistic self.

Carl’s story closely mirrors the Narcissus myth. Driven by a mixture of perfectionism and escapism health draws him into searching for relationship with something other and greater than himself. However he does not have the ability to love - he can neither give nor surrender and so without the necessary reflecting of himself within the eyes of another ends up as he always has been, alone. His legitimate psychological needs for the existence of a healthy, robust ego is sabotaged by his narcissistic craving for acknowledgment of his empty grandiose persona. While his repressed inferiority draws him into acts of self destruction, acts craving nonexistence from fear of the naked vulnerability of intimacy with another, with himself.

Ultimately the issue of narcissism is one of identity. The story offers one last twist that strangely links its insight to that of the Buddha. The reflection that Narcissus becomes mesmerized by is actually nothing but an illusion. While it appears that Narcissus looks at himself there is really no one there. This strangely mirrors Buddhism’s position which suggests that behind all our experiences there is no experiencer, no person who is having the experience. All there is is the experience itself and part of it is the feeling of a continuing self that it happens to.

Buddhism links this absence of an enduring self to its understanding of shunyata, the emptiness or absence of an enduring and separate self discovered under close analysis. The insight meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says that one way of understanding emptiness is to think of it as an absence of self-centeredness. This reveals a deeper understanding of narcissism. Narcissism is more than believing the universe revolves around us. Rather it is the mistaken belief that there is enduring self around which the universe revolves. The craving for existence and nonexistence creates suffering because it grasps for a control that is impossible to achieve by a self that on close analysis dissolves. A fearful contraction that can not let go and with confidence and trust.

Observation confirms the value of this insight. All of us experiences flow states - listening to music, arts, sports - without having to be aware of our sense of self while engaged in them. And actually when we stop grasping fearfully things become more spacious, less anxious, more related and accepting.

The Cure

What are our images of “cure” in psychotherapy?

Freud offers ‘ordinary unhappiness’ instead of neurotic unhappiness. Something more manageable and less unrelated to the consensus reality.

Jung offers ‘individuation’, an image of psychological wholeness which includes all those parts of the self repressed. A kind of superman who has a life full of meaning.

Object Relations therapists value object relations - the ability to become related to another, to love and be loved.

Humanistic psychotherapy wants us to realise our human potential. To express a full spectrum of emotional experience.

Buddhism imagines something more which it calls nirvana, the irreversible burning away of craving which brings all suffering to an end forever.

My own feeling on this is that the goals different modalities of psychotherapy and counselling offer are all ideal states. Complex narratives that easily obscure where we actually are and who we actually are. Do any of us really ever learn how to express our self fully, love sanely, become whole, let alone become enlightened? In practice are we all not more muddily, subscribing to an ideal which, while we may not ever realise it, never make it experientially real, none the less acts as a valuable light on a horizon we may never reach?

Buddhism is certainly also prone to such idealism. What could be more idealistic than the goal to bring all suffering to an end forever? But it also has another face, a more close the ground one that simply invites us to stay with ‘what simply is’, consciously, mindfully. Not to rush on along the path wishing to be what we are not. Seeing in such rushing a subtle form of self abuse. A non-acceptance of who we are, a narcissistic grasping at being more. That the rushing, grasping relationship to ideals, to narratives - including Buddhist ones - is in itself a source of suffering.

In contrast it values something plainer and simpler. It’s cure consists of being able to stay with our experience fully, without needing the protection of defensive closure. This is not the same as Freud’s ordinary unhappiness because it is the source of happiness. It is not Jung’s individuation - the creation of individual meaning is much less important here than the finding of a genuinely kind quality of awareness. And it is not just about human love or emotional expression in any ordinary sense because while it values these qualities it also mindfully discriminates their often hidden and obscure motivations.

The Buddha’s cure, though a narrative itself, is something that begins where we are, with who we are, in the emotions we have. It is the ability to be with our self without fear and to dissolve the grasping of our narcissism so that we dare to experience our sameness with the world around us. That we are all changing, that we all suffer when we protectively contract around the idea of who we are and that inside of each of us is a limitless expanse of compassionate well being - our Buddha Nature. Knowing this, directly, nakedly, right here and now is Buddha’s cure. A cure psychotherapy can comfortably share in.

The Medicine

Buddha’s medicine which effects this cure comes in three parts: an ethical relationship with our self and the world, meditation and the cultivation of wisdom. In my experience as a psychotherapist while it may be necessary to be wary of spiritual ideals - particularly when they threaten to invade the consulting room - we need not fear the medicine as its therapeutic qualities are immediately apparent and are widely applicable within and without an explicitly Buddhist context. Let’s look at each of them.

Ethics.

Buddhist ethics are governed by the belief that all our thoughts and actions have repercussions and therefore it is important to create good causes and this is best done by wishing to do good and actively avoiding doing harm. From this comes two central values: unconditional friendliness and compassion. Maitri and karuna. Winnicott says something similar when he speaks of the ‘facilitating environment’ - we flourish in an atmosphere of kindness and generosity and we may exemplify and encourage this in our psychotherapeutic practice.

Imogen was menopausal. Each night she awoke overheated and bombarded with self critical thoughts which left her shattered and with no sense of her very real qualities and talents. At times her thinking was plainly paranoid and quite unrelated to reality. However she was also a practitioner of mindfulness and she found that frequently her practice - done in the early morning hours next to her sleeping husband - enabled her to disidentify with what she recognised as the internalised voice of her viciously critical father and find a place of rest. Although this was difficult to achieve and not always possible, it gradually became clear that this period in her life represented an initiatory threshold and that Imogen was meeting her own destructive self each night when she descended towards sleep. Her ability to allow herself to stay with and experience the fullness of her nocturnal struggles was the fruit of her mindfulness and the care and kindness she brought to the struggle - not making herself wrong or bad for having it - was the expression of the unconditional friendliness and compassion she could - mostly - extend to herself.

Imogen’s story in principle I have come across again and again. It seems that a common component in much of the suffering that comes into the consulting room is self criticism and loathing. A young woman arrives and tells me of a life time of depression, loneliness and self recrimination. Why does she blame herself? She blames herself for having her depressive moods and thoughts. It is not enough to be bleak and leaden she is wrong and stupid as well. She says to her self “You are a fuck wit, a looser.” The Buddhist notion of unconditional friendliness, maitri, fiercely challenges this. It asks we bring an intelligent kindness to our woundedness because only once a wound is accepted can the process of healing begin. Further more, as the contemplative psychotherapist John Welwood points out, a psychotherapy that is always pushing for change is in itself subtly abusive if it is colluding with the abusive inner voice of the patient that says to be loved I must be different.

As Henry James said: “There are three important things in the world. The first is kindness. The second is kindness. And the third is kindness.”

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is to be consciously aware of what is happening inside of us and around us from moment to moment. This conscious awareness stays close to the sensory facts of the situation and tries not to become distracted by thoughts about what we are aware of. If I choose to focus my mindfulness on the sounds around me I just hear the sounds and come back from thinking about the wind and how much damage its blowing is doing to my garden. If I choose my breath I just stay with the sensations within each breath, intentionally adding nothing more and when I do, non-judgementally returning to the breath. If I choose my emotions - a common choice in psychotherapy - I just stay with the felt sense of the emotion located within my body - I don’t immediately go off into the history of the emotion nor speculation where it might lead.

In mindfulness based psychotherapy kindness and curiosity are central. Mindfulness does not observe with a cold eye dispassionately but more with a gentle interest. What ever it finds is Ok, what is important is the awareness. This mindful position is always the position of the therapist and, when appropriate, also the position of the one who sits in the opposite chair. Nina Coltart, a psychoanalyst and Buddhist describes her experience of this:

“As regards my own practice, and how Buddhism has affected my clinical work with patients, one of the earliest things I noticed was the deepening of attention. I’d written a paper on attention in my first book, where I refer to “bare attention,” which is a very Buddhist phrase. Bare attention has a sort of purity about it. It’s not a cluttered concept. It’s that you simply become better, as any good analyst knows, at concentrating more and more directly, more purely, on what’s going on in a session. You come to concentrate more and more fully on this person who is with you, here and now, and on what it is they experience with you: to the point that many sessions become similar to meditations. When this happens, I usually don’t say very much, but am very, very closely attending to the patient, with my thought processes in suspension, moving toward what Bion called “O”: a state which I see as being “unthought-out,” involving a quality of intuitive apperception of another person’s evolving truth”.

To this I would add that I have found the work of Eugene Gendlin and his technique of Focusing invaluable. It provides a bridge between the reflective work of psychotherapy and the being present with what arises as it arises - the experience of being mindful. Focusing invites us to be present with our emotional experience in our body, the felt sense. To find words, phrases or images that express the felt sense and remain attentive to any changes without attachment to change. Making paramount the ability to ‘stay with’ rather than descend into long stories ‘about’ what is felt.

Ted described his life long fear of depression. He had realised that whenever he had a leaden feeling in his guts and limbs and a sense of hopelessness and not caring, he would jump up immediately and engage himself in an activity. When he started practicing mindfulness he became aware of this defensive maneuver and instead decided to simply remain mindfully present with the basic feeling. Quite a brave thing to do given his aversion to this particular fear. Doing this it became plain to him that the basic feeling, leaden guts and legs, feelings of hopelessness and lethargy, generated secondary emotions of fear and alarm, causing him to do anything but stay with his actual experience. In time his ability to reverse this process grew. Initially he began to consciously notice the depression and his defensive avoidance of it when it occurred. Then gradually he was able to stay present with the feelings and allow himself to have them without any desire to articulate them, change them or understand them in any way. Just leaving what was, as it was, a sensation and a feeling, and remaining present with it until it finally passed of its own accord.

Staying with rather than stories about.

Wisdom.

Talking about wisdom in psychotherapy is difficult. I observe in my self a shying away, a fear that I may get too inflated and fall into the fascism of ideals, of unhelpful narratives, that we spoke of earlier.

However in Buddhism wisdom is equated with knowing how things really are, not just how they appear, and the way to do this is - again - simply being present with what is happening with out adding any of our own ‘stuff’ to the experience. The act of mindfulness already described. Something that some forms of psychotherapy are beginning to recognise as extremely valuable.

Where Buddhism and psychotherapy do not meet is on how deep this process can go. At its worst psychotherapy is often satisfied with a general understanding of how wounded patterns of being happened, somehow trusting that once we have a rational view of our neurosis that will be enough. In my experience such knowledge is never enough, it has no ability to actually be conscious of the thoughts and emotions that arise out of the patterns of hurt, complexes, as they occur and therefor is all too prone to either further acting out or repression. Personally I neither believe in nor trust those who think they have had a full analysis and now know what is theirs and what is their patients. My observation of myself and others over twenty years of clinical practice is that our identification with our wounding is very deep, perhaps so deep it colours the whole personality, and therefor we are always acting out of it one way or another.

The Buddhist take on this is to see the personality and all its woundedness as a narrative, a story of who we are, that we tell our self all the time. A story we defend when any threat to it comes near. Most psychotherapists and counsellors will recognise a particularly obvious manifestation of this in the patients or clients that steadfastly cling to their material, actively resisting change. Their fear is probably of the unknown that would emerge if they were to let go. However it is the Buddhist belief that we are all doing this all the time - its just that most of us do it less obviously.

Thus in a mindfulness based psychotherapy the narrative is less important than an awareness of how the narrative is used. The belief that being with our experience openly is more important than knowing how we became so closed. Of course to be human is to spin our own tale and the meaning that comes from this is an important element in keeping happy and sane. However the narrative can be and is frequently used defensively - a closed story about who we are, what we like and don’t like and how far we can travel. Becoming aware of our narrative, not just its content, its story lines, but also how we use it to defend our self against the fullness of our experience is central to the work.

As the Lotus Sutra says:

“The Great Way is not for those who pick and choose.”

We could say as a contemplative psychotherapist: Psychological health happens when we mindfully open, within an atmosphere of kindness, to the fullness of our being. Just staying present with what immediately is and not so hung up on the story.

Nigel Wellings July 2009

Chapter One
On personal stories and waking up

“We do not possess an ego. We are possessed by the idea that there is one”
Wei Wu Wei.

Around twenty five years ago, had you been at the vast neolithic stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire, you would have seen a small group of people padding across the wet grass and vaguely looking at the stones. If you looked more closely you would have also seen that one of the group is oriental looking, a man in his early forties, and all those around him have an expectant quality about them. The man is a Tibetan Lama, his name is Namkhai Norbu Rimpoche, and the people are his students, myself amongst them, who have brought him to what for them is a sacred site. The reason the students are expectant is because they believe that Avebury is a great temple and that despite its ruined appearance huge energies constellate here. We hope Norbu Rinpoche will also recognise this and perhaps give us a deeper insight using the yogic powers we imagine he possesses. However he just seems to be walking about and not saying very much. He does look cold. It is a bit disappointing.

Norbu Rinpoche seemed to revive in a tea shop in near by Marlborough, where he began an impromptu teaching that I no longer remember. However what has stayed with me is another, less obvious teaching, that came from the events of that day. I now realise that we were trying to build a bridge between our own Western spirituality and his Buddhism. A bridge that was neither fully articulated on our part nor probably of any interest to him. I now wonder what he might have been thinking and feeling as we walked him around? My new fantasy is that he was fully present with what ever was going on. That he was not interested in the meaning of the site and why it was special to us, but rather he was entirely attentive to his experience as it arose in each successive moment. Put simply he was just being mindful.

I chose this story because it revolves around a question that has engaged me for over thirty years, how can very different psychological and spiritual cultures come together to help us live our lives more fully? Or more specifically, how may we legitimately combine Western psychological work with a Buddhist path of spiritual awakening? On that damp and grey Autumn day all sorts of spiritual traditions were present within the people gathered there. Within the European students existed a very rich but unsystematic feeling for the magic of the sacred site within a mystical landscape and in some unexplained way a feeling of needing to find a spiritual home to journey towards. In Norbu Rinpoche, I would guess, existed something simpler and clearer. The ability to be present with the thoughts, emotions and sensations that he witnessed coming and going within him during his probably uncomfortable and confusing forced excursion. We were inhabiting a belief that we were separate from something spiritual, something we yearned for. He was inhabiting a knowledge that the very concept of spiritual can make a separation between us and the immediacy of where we presently are. The only place outside of our imaginations where we can ever actually be.

During the subsequent years I returned to these questions and invariably came away confused and with more questions than answers. I suspect that for a long time I hid in the easy route and said to myself and others that Western psychology and Buddhism were so different that there was little use in trying to find a meeting point. The first values everything about us that makes us unique and individual and the second sees these self same traits as no more that a temporary golden cage. However it simply became impossible to ignore the fact that despite all the differences these two disciplines that investigate our human nature and condition, that care about our suffering, also have much in common and each can enrich the understanding of the other.

Suffering
This investigation begins with the experience and recognition of suffering. What we have found in our selves and those we have worked with is the immensity of our stored grief. In our workshops on initiations that life has given us there is often celebration, happiness and humour but there is also frequently so much pain it is difficult to bear. I am reminded of another time when a huge group of men had gathered together to mourn the losses in their lives. We had been sent off alone to reflect and see if there was anything we were carrying that it was time to let go of. A relationship, a marriage, a parent, a child, our youth, an idea of who we were. Finally we came together, late at night under a full moon. A fire had been lit and slowly, singing an agonisingly beautiful grieving chant, we moved towards the flames. Into these flames we were each going to relinquish parts of our out worn lives that were once life itself. As those at the front began to feel the enormity of what they were doing their feeling was communicated to us still at the back. Some began to weep, a few sob. We all continued to move forward, struggling to continue to sing, now supporting each other, literally, shoulder to shoulder, hands on backs. Without this it would have been unbearable. Our hearts were breaking, breaking open.

The Buddha’s word for suffering was dukkha which translates in different ways. Its simplest meaning is just discomfort, pain and suffering but when the Buddha uses it it gains a deeper existential meaning which includes experiences of imperfection, impermanence, emptiness and instability. Because of this it can also mean “all pervasive unsatisfactoryness” as in the feeling that nothing is ever quite right, that if only this or that were different it would be perfect. And finally it can also be translated as “anguish”. The Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor does just this because for him the word anguish captures the very personal, deep hurt that often visits our lives. Within the experience of suffering the Buddha discovered three discrete parts. The first he called the suffering of suffering and by this meant acute experiences of physical and mental anguish. The suffering of getting older, of being ill and finally death itself and the suffering of driven desires, painful emotions, bereavement, grief and distress. The second he described as the suffering of change, the experience of life as a continuous process of separations that feels fine if we want to separate but is often unbearable when we do not. And finally the third, the suffering that simply seems to be intrinsic to being a person. An ever present subliminal suffering that perhaps Freud implicitly recognised when he described the “ego as the true seat of anxiety”. We could also describe this as the suffering of not knowing who we truly are.

There is a story about a woman who came to the Buddha to find a cure for her grief for a lost child. She could not accept that the child had gone. Apparently he asked her to go to every house in the village and collect a grain of rice from any home that had not suffered a bereavement. She came back with none. This story suggests that the Buddha was an expert on suffering knowing it was both universal and unavoidable, that it is part of the fabric of life, running right through everything like the warp of a cloth. This description may seem too extreme for many of us. We rebel when we remember all the times we have felt happiness and love. The times we were amused and entertained. Were we suffering then? This has caused some people to mistakenly think of Buddhism as a life denying philosophy but it answers this with the story of three doctors. The first over estimates the seriousness of an illness and believes nothing may be done to save the patient. The second under estimates the illness and declares all is well. The third recognises the illness and treats it appropriately and the patient is cured. Buddhism sees itself as the third doctor. The first is a life denying pessimist, the second a dangerous optimist and the third a simple realist. This doctor knows that not one of us lives a life untouched by suffering, a fact that demands addressing.

Hero, image of consciousness
I imagine people all over the world for thousands of years sitting around their fires, with the night at their backs, telling stories. These stories are made from their shared experience and speak of their understanding of the suffering that life typically contains and how the hero in each of us responds to it. Joseph Campbell, an internationally recognised authority on mythology, has gathered many of these tales and by charting the journey of hero through each of its stages has enabled us to understand where we are in our own lives. Like our ancestors around the fire, this helps us to know and name experiences that seem initially confusing, painful and overwhelming.

Hero’s journey always follows the same initiatory pattern; some form of leaving what is familiar, a descent into an unknown and often frightening place and finally return to a new life. In fairy stories, myths, dramas and religious and secular literature, many hero’s, women, children and men, are described making this perilous trip where no two journeys are entirely alike as are no two descriptions of what they find on arrival nor the gifts they bear on their return. This movement for us can happen in thousands of ways and may range in importance from the very simple, (facing a small anxiety successfully), to life shattering, (an unexpected and possibly unwanted change), to life transforming, (a personal insight or spiritual awakening). Often it is brought about by the stage of life we are in when it usually marks a threshold between one phase and the next. Childhood to adolescence, parenthood, middle age and death. At other times it comes to us from outside, an unexpected illness, a bereavement or change in life circumstances. And finally it may also represent profound psychological and spiritual transformations. The making and dissolving of a separate sense of self.

Here it is very important to remember that Campbell’s use of the word “hero” does not refer to males alone. Rather, hero represents more inclusively consciousness becoming conscious of itself and this then naturally applies to both men and women equally. Further more, from Campbell’s perspective, examples of brutish, phallic and power corrupted hero’s, often portrayed as hero’s on the way to transformation, are merely representatives of consciousness caught within primitive and limited identifications. The hero we know here is not just a brute with a club but, once transformed, a divine person. As such hero is us, all of us, in all of our guises and moods. And the movement of the hero through life, sometimes thrusting, sometimes spiralling and meandering, is a movement that we all make, each in our own way.

The story of Inanna
One perfect example of the hero’s rites of passage is found in the Sumerian myths concerning Inanna. Sumer was once where Southern Iraq is now and was made up of thriving city states. Over four thousand years ago, from this highly sophisticated urban and farming culture, a cradle of civilisation, emerged a pantheon of divine beings including Inanna, goddess of heaven and earth. Inanna’s story was found scattered amongst the desert sands on hundreds of baked clay fragments marked with curious chiselled cuneiform writing. These fragments have been pieced together by scholars and writers over many years and we now have poems that describe her adolescence, her marriage and her transformation as a mature woman. One such is the story of The Huluppu Tree, the original tree of knowledge and life, in which starts her love affair with the Sheppard Dumuzi who finally becomes her husband. These narratives, particularly The Descent of Inanna, which describes her transformative passing through the underworld, her death and rebirth, are uncannily modern in their content and still remain pertinent, demonstrating clearly that we have all been struggling with the same issues of death and renewal since the earliest times.

As this book progresses we will see how Inanna’s initiatory descent into the underworld perfectly illustrates the hero’s journey, the journey of psychological maturation and beyond. In her story she receives the call, dies, passes through a transitional phase, is reborn and finally returns. In doing this she gives us an insight into her journey, the journey of every hero, so that each of us, during our own journeys, might know the way better.

The Soul’s Journey
The psychologist, C. G. Jung, was also influenced by the image of the hero which he found in many of his own dreams and those of his patients. He called the initiatory journey of the hero the path of individuation and suggested that the purpose of our life is to tread this path consciously. He also noted that the path of individuation, the heroic unfolding of consciousness, always contained three interweaving aspects that run as a thread through out each stage of every initiation. The first is a sense of journey, the second is relationship to other and finally the third is making or discovering of meaning. Whatever our personal beliefs these three archetypal concerns always inform and guide us. They are what make us human and enable us to create the story of our life. They make soul and describe the transformation of spirit.

Journey
In front of me sits a person I have never met before whom we will call Eve. She has come to meet with me to discuss whether she should have psychotherapy, whether what I have to offer might help her feel better. She is nervous and so am I. I feel almost overwhelmed, as I always do at these initial meetings, by the enormity of the expectation and the task before us. She thinks I can guide her but I know that the only guide of any worth we will together find within her. In the language of myth we are poised at the edge of her descent into her own underworld of fears and new experiences. If she decides to come after today this may mean that she has decided to answer the call, accompanied by me, from herself to be herself more fully. But she may not, nothing is certain.

C.G. Jung described the experience of following what beckons us as integral to the path or process of individuation. In some ways this begins the moment we are born because everything within us immediately strives to find a way into the world that awaits us. However there is also another level to this that is more than our instinctual drive to survive. Later within our life events may conspire to bring us to an awareness that though we are small in the universe we may also connect to something vastly other. These types of experience make us more than simply an individual, the type of distinct personality that Western culture values so much, they demand that we open and connect with a broader and deeper life force that not only passes through us but every one else as well. Each of us has our own name for this. For some it may be loosely defined, perhaps just life or love, for others it will be felt as a personal God, Jewish, Christian or Muslim and for others still it will be formless, our true Self, our Buddha or awakened nature, ultimately ineffable. However we feel and conceive of this ground of being for some psychotherapists and all spiritual disciplines it is a shared truth that the unfolding of our connection to something greater than our self is the essential element necessary for any profound healing.

The experience of our journey arrives in many different ways but it inevitably involves meeting new experiences along the way that change us. Several years later I am continuing to meet with Eve and together we reflect upon the story of her journey. We talk about and feel the things that have formed her. Together we have discovered within her a child torn by warring parents, a teenager awkward and self conscious, mocked by an envious mother, a young adult sexually and socially liberated and finally an intelligent and creative woman obscured by self doubt and criticism. Each of these parts of the lost self has introduced its self into consciousness via a dream. Demanding attention they have drawn us into the pain at the time of their making and by staying with this pain we have both mourned the loss of that which could not be prevented and simultaneously reconnected to life possibilities that were discarded earlier along the way. Out of this comes sadness but no longer depression and where there was a creative wasteland now there are the first shoots of new growth. Her experience of the journey has been initiated by a return to places of emotional arrest. She has moved forward into the memories of her past and from these continued.

Relationship
Relationship to others and to our self represents a fundamental and defining human quality. For all of us the ability to relate is in built and is the means by which we come into knowledge of our self and our place in the world. From the perspective of Western psychology nothing is more important. As infants in our mothering persons arms we immediately begin to communicate with different sounds, gestures and movements which demand appropriate responses. Gradually this preverbal language acquires words and we begin to speak and with this our world opens out and blossoms. Now very little is closed to us if we have the interest and if these interests are not blocked by external circumstance. If our experience of relationship in infancy and childhood has been good enough, giving at least some sense of emotional nourishment, trust, healthy dependency and safety, then as adults this will be translated into relationship with our partners and, if we have them, our own children. However relating to our outer world is often not enough and it is the journey of hero that leads us deeper into a relationship with our self. This relationship is in many ways the most difficult because many of us are afraid of our own experience, that is we are afraid of who we are. Turning to look into the mirror of consciousness takes enormous courage because we seldom like what we first see. Whether this be on a personal level where we meet personality traits that we wish we did not have or on a transpersonal level where letting go of our story of who we are is not as easy as first imagined.

For Eve, held within the therapeutic relationship with me, it becomes possible to slowly and carefully begin a deeper relationship with herself. Places of terror become less so, experiences of an alien and alienated self become more familiar. Jung called these aspects of the lost and unknown self the shadow because, obscured by the light of consciousness, they were hidden away in the dark. Initially often frightening or repugnant these toad like, monstrous parts of our self, once kissed with acceptance become new, redeemed resources. The shamed child, thoughtlessly ridiculed by the parent and now denied by the adult is found to be a fount of fun, curiosity and imagination. The father dominated woman who deferred to the husband, thereby remaining a child, takes up her authority and walks. Eve’s sense of self expands. Gradually she discovers parts of herself that are deeply feminine and differentiates parts of her self that have been defensively strident and aggressive from the positive masculine qualities of structuring and directing the way her life will go next. She meets the inner woman and man, which Jung called feminine soul and masculine spirit, anima and animus. In this way her relationship to herself becomes, while not necessarily or always more fun, more complex, more multifaceted and more rewarding.

Her identity that she has always thought of as “Eve” remains the same but not the same. She is subtly changed by the exchange between her conscious idea of herself and the flow of images and feelings that emerge from her unconscious life, particularly her dreams. This relationship between the known and the unknown has been spoken of in different ways. Jung envisaged it as a dialogue between the ego and the archetypal self and thought this the goal of our lives. From his perspective, it is this innate, preexistent self that is the initiator of all of hero¹s descents while at the same time being the fruit, the prize, the knowledge, that all the descents finally come to claim. More poetically still James Hillman, an archetypal psychologist, says that we have a Daimon who calls back to us through our lives from our death. It knows what we may become and it creates for us the life circumstances that will bring this potential to fruition. And finally, the mystical psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, offers us the letter O to represent the realness of every thing that he experiences as paradoxically inaccessible and yet everywhere. A universal ground of being that is ever present and from which the whole universe is repeatedly born in each moment. An experience of being, of O, uniting everything in what Buddhism calls “One Taste”.

Meaning
This leads finally to meaning. Whether we believe that the universe itself has within it an intrinsic meaning, one that it is for us to find, or that it is we who bring meaning to chaos, either way finding meaning is essential. None of us can flourish without meaning and however painful our circumstances, as long as we can find some meaning within them, they remain possible to bear and work with. Once meaning is lost alienation, depression and despair occur and life becomes unsustainable. We know that this can happen to us both as individuals and collectively as communities. In the same way that a community when it feels defeated and dispossessed turns back upon itself destructively, taking false refuge in substance abuse and deadening distractions, so do we similarly self destruct when we feel our life is going nowhere and are overcome by a terrible emptiness.

Eve’s life, when we finally came to the point of completing our work together, did contain a meaning. The wounds to her sense of self, received at various points during her life, together spoke of not only of the hurt she had experienced but also of the direction she must tread. It was as if her Daimon was telling her that she must consciously choose at every step to throw off the self sabotaging attacks, the vicious critical voices, if she is to become strong in the expression of her qualities and talents. As is frequently the case, the complexity of Eve’s life became progressively simpler within the distillation of our work together. Several key themes emerged; the need to feel slowly and deeply with out hiding in a semblance of not caring. The need to take seriously creativity and not destroy it with perfectionism. The need to let others see her vulnerability. In all these the wound became the medicine, alerting us to places that demanded a hearing. This had become the myth of her life, the informing narrative that returned to repeatedly, never completed, gave her life an entirely unique shape and purpose. And finally, her growing reflective ability, using her feelings, had yielded the first tiny intimations of the spacious quality of consciousness beyond her personal story, intimations that she had only happened upon by chance previously.

This way of working described above reflects the richness of soul work. The willingness to embrace fully the life of the world around us and also the life of the psyche that reveals itself in the patterns of our life as well as our dreams, fantasies and the imagination. It requires the sensitive use of courage, application, honesty and also humour lest we become too important for our own good. It is a way of working with suffering that was brought into focus by the Romantic thinkers and poets of the nineteenth century who found in their suffering a path, already prefigured in Christianity and Judaism, that lead to a life of personal discovery and surrender to something greater. Their reaction to the perceived soulless uniformity and brutality of the industrial revolution and the overly rational thought of their age caused them to search for a way of being that honoured creativity and individuality. Suffering, approached in this way suggests that if when we suffer we can eventually understand this experience as an initiatory journey, that leads us into a deeper relationship with our self and others, then our suffering will be redeemed through meaning.

Building a bridge from West to East
Some years ago I came across the work of the psychotherapist and writer John Welwood who had spotted the connection and similarity between his own style of psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation. He recognised that our Western psychology uses reflection as its primary tool while Buddhist mindfulness meditation uses presence and that these two ways of knowing could be placed within a continuum in which we move from one to the other.

This continuum inevitably begins with our own personal story and the pain and conflict this story sometimes contains. Initially this story needs simply to be told and heard. Often it has never been heard before and cries out for a hearing. However after a while it also becomes apparent that our story is not entirely set in stone and that as we revolve around it we begin to see other perspectives that were not previously visible. Then the truth begins to dawn that our story is a narrative about our life, with us in the star role, in a perpetual process of rewriting. We literally create, at both conscious and unconscious levels, a feeling, an image, of who we are and the life that we inhabit. In fact we are continually creating our self. This understanding is accepted by Western psychology and Buddhism equally. Both recognise that that which we call “my self” is constructed out of our situation and maintained over a life time. However where they differ is that while we in the West value the creation of a self, supported by its narrative, Buddhism goes a step further and says that it is this same self that we must finally go beyond. Making a synthesis of these two views creates a continuum of psychological and spiritual development that moves between the pre-self of early infancy, the established self in adulthood and then finally, a dissolution of the belief in the solidity and centrality of the story of our created self. Like an in breath and an out breath, contraction and release, the expansion and dissolution of the story of who we are. Welwood, aware of this continuum of development, describes how we may ideally move through it, not just during a whole life time, but repeatedly as part of our psychological/spiritual work.

Asleep
To understand this continuum unfolding fully it helps to exam ourselves in detail. If we look at how we are, most of us will find that we spend a large amount of our time, if not concentrating on a specific task, absorbed in day dreaming and automatic emotional reactions to internal and external events that touch us in some way. This day dreaming seems to be something we automatically do and consists of semiconscious, emotionally laden thoughts revolving around issues either in our past or future. Also on automatic is our emotional reactivity, the immediate responses and reactions to likes and dislikes, goods and bads, rights and wrongs. What is absent in this is that reflective part of consciousness that steps back and knows that “this is the experience I am having now”. This automatic, non-reflective way of being is our usual way of being. It requires no effort to simply go through our lives dreaming and then reacting to what ever comes along. Someone annoys me I get angry, someone makes me happy I laugh, someone threatens me I get scared, someone is hurt I comfort them. In many ways this is a good thing. Its advantage is its immediacy and if our childhood experiences of emotional interactions have been good enough then our fantasy world will be basically benign and our spontaneous reactions will be appropriate. We will be able to feel another’s pain and be gladdened by their happiness.

However to spontaneously react without reflection has its problems because many of our reactive emotions are unnecessarily self protective and are driven by fear. Just about all the great ills of our planet can be understood in this simple way. A person or a group of people see another or others as a threat that must be destroyed if they themselves are to survive. Once this belief gets a hold war begins, either the wars of our group with other groups or the war within our self where we suppress experience that is felt as a threat. Again, some of this defensiveness is useful. In the same way that the group does need to protect itself from a legitimate threat so do we as an individual need to defend our self against inner experiences that threaten to overwhelm us. Experiences of rage or loss or disorientation that are just too big. Yet if we are to keep our hearts and minds open it will be necessary to separate the times when we do not need to defend our self from those when we do. This requires that we are able to reflect upon our experience and know the unconscious forces that drive us.

Waking
The ability to reflect upon our experience is the first step to waking up. Psychological work and Buddhist teachings both ask us to look at our self and dare to see what we find. In psychotherapy what we generally discover beneath the surface is all the experience that we could not bear to feel because it was so painful. Very early feelings of fear, alienation, exposure and abandonment. Shame, humiliation, insecurity and inferiority. It is hardly surprising that we have hidden these away. In mindfulness meditation we find the same thing. The American Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön says of this that we imagine meditation is going to make us peaceful and then when the churning pond that is our mind settles what we find is that we can see right to the bottom and it is full of rubbish that people have thrown in. To stop this rubbish controlling us we need to become reflective. To be able to think and feel about our emotions. To be able to gain some distance which allows us some choices. To cease being driven by our reactive fears.

Waking using our thought
This reflective ability can be developed at several different levels. The first is when we consider something at a distance and are more able to clearly think. This ability is probably one of the defining characteristics of being human. No other creature is capable of standing back from its emotions and thoughts to the extent that we are. Being able to stop and ask do I really feel this? Is this truly what I think? This is an invaluable quality that enables us to draw back from acts of unconscious, pre-reflective violence and ignorance, either against others or internally, against our self. However our ability to be rational carries the disadvantage that we can be so rational and overly reflective that this in itself becomes a unnecessary protection against consciously experiencing our emotions. When this happens we need to move a little closer towards our emotions and use our ability to feel reflectively in addition to thinking reflectively.

Waking using our feeling
When we use our feeling reflectively we need the help of our body. In our normal way of speaking we use the words emotion and feeling interchangeably. However here I want to give them separate meanings so I can say that we feel our emotions. That is, feeling is a way to know about our emotions in the same way thinking is. Therefore when I ask myself what do I feel right now I can use my feeling, helped by locating it in my body, to recognise what my emotional experience is. Feeling inside I might find feelings of constriction and know from these that I am anxious or alternatively I may find expansive or fluttery feelings and know I am happy and excited. This type of reflection is very accurate because it takes its reference from our emotions directly and is in the present. While thoughtful reflection has the one drawback that it can become bogged down in a mountain of unnecessary detail, using our feeling, experienced through our body, using the “felt sense”, is immediate, truthful and to the point.

Reflecting upon our self using the tools of thoughtful consideration and feeling leads us deeply into an understanding and relationship with who we are and our personal narrative. In psychological work this is the goal. We discover places where we have never dared to enter the world, to inhabit our bodies, and parts of our self that were disavowed so that we might survive. We also discover that there are potentials within us that previously were hidden. The ability to love more fully, to engage in creativity, to withdraw in nourishing retreat. To be angry in a clean healthy way. However we also may find intimations that there is actually something beyond our narrative and it is this final possibility that Buddhism is concerned with and which represents the final stage of the continuum of consciousness.

Awake - Mindfulness
The means to discover this is by becoming what Buddhism calls mindful which is to be attentive to our experience, moment after moment, while letting go of any desire to change it in any way. An essentially simple activity but surprisingly difficult to do for more than a short period of time. As we have seen, thinking and feeling about our emotional experience allows us to build a relationship to our self and this relationship enables us to make our narrative more conscious and so allows us a choice over where we need to continue protecting our self and where we can afford to relax and let go. However if we take this a step further and become mindful we can begin to see that our sole identification with the narrative, our idea of who we are and our continuous attempt to protect and maintain it, is an unnecessary limitation that brings its own suffering. This move from reflection to the presence of mindfulness develops our ability to remain simply present with our narrative without identifying and becoming embedded within it. Effectively, by developing presence, the key quality of mindfulness, we become the attentive witness, in each successive moment, of the contents of our awareness. We begin to draw back from identifying with the emotions, feelings and thoughts that previously we had thought to be all we were. The experience of this can at first be quite surprising. It is as if we have been talking continuously all our life and then suddenly we stop. Previously we have only known our self through the continuous sound of our own voice and then we discover another experience which is not just different words but a huge deep silence which is the source of all sound. A silence that allows space for vivid experience of what is going on inside and outside of us when not obscured by our own chatter. An experience of a wholly different order. If we can then shift our identity from talking to being the talker, from the mass of sounds to the place they emerge from, we can begin to get a sense of who we most profoundly are. Knowing this we begin to awake and what ever our experience, however good or bad, we are no longer afraid to have it.

Underneath the Spreading Bodhi Tree
When I was in my early twenties and living in Bath, my girlfriend and I received a visit from a friend fresh from his Buddhist studies in India. When he arrived we went out to a favourite cafe and over tea I received my first lesson on the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha’s profound teaching on our human condition. I can still vividly remember this many years later. In the busy every-day-ness of the cafe he spoke a truth that simply cut through everything less real then itself. “All life is suffering. The cause of suffering is attachment. The ending of suffering is liberation. Liberation is achieved through the noble eightfold path.” These bald statements seemed to bear down upon me like the beats of a drum, each one tearing away pretence and leaving me simultaneously vulnerable and real. Like liturgy, I found them impossible to resist; my life did contain much unhappiness, I did feel driven by emotional forces beyond my control, I could see that peace could be achieved if I could find a different way to be with this and finally I was heartened by the belief that someone else had found a way, where I could also walk, to make this real.

The historical Buddha, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, was born approximately two and a half thousand years ago in a small Himalayan kingdom in present day Nepal. Since that time his teachings have spread from India to Sri Lanka, most of the countries of South East Asia as well as China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea and Japan. In all of these migrations Buddhism has changed with its assimilation into each new culture. Now, as it makes its latest journey into the West, it is continuing to change as it encounters our culture which has become rich in psychological understanding. Whilst the religious trappings of Buddhism, the magical and mythical beliefs accrued from various Asian countries, may here falter, what remains unchanging is the essential Buddhist concern that we live a life in which we, in each moment, try to be as fully awake as possible. Nearly all Buddhist traditions can be said to agree on this central point and each offer ways that enable us to achieve being mindfully present with our experience of life and free of fear and the suffering fear brings.

Seen as such Buddhism is more a psychology than a religion. It invites us to make an experiment to discover who we most truly are. Its method is to employ the discipline of observing our own mind so that we may gain an immediate and non conceptual insight into its real nature. This path traditionally is seen as comprising three elements, the first concerns both discipline and ethics and creates a foundation of compassion and simplicity upon which the experiment may flourish. The second is meditation itself, the practice of mindfulness, which begins with the observation of our mind when we rest it for a extended period upon our breath. And finally the third is the discriminating awareness that this generates bringing into being the wisdom of knowing the true nature of mind. The clear seeing into the habitual and destructive patterns of our personal stories and beneath this to our basic clarity, spaciousness and generosity. Our Buddha nature.

Repression and acting out However this basic clarity, spaciousness and generosity is obscured in many of us by contracted emotions and thoughts seated in our fears and generated by our pain. (The different states of suffering described above.) This leads all of us to emotionally defend ourselves in two basic ways. We can either unconsciously deny painful emotions and thoughts so that we do not feel them. That is to cut off or repress them. Or, we can be so immersed in them that we lose all sense of who we are. While this may not sound like a way to defend our self strangely it is because when we are entirely identified with our emotions and thoughts it is as if they possess us and there is no longer an “I” who is in relationship with them. This is to identify with and act out of the emotions and thoughts. All of us frequently have both of these types of defensive experience, although each of us will favour one over the other. We know we are being repressive of our experience when we simply do not feel anything or when we need to fill ourselves with distractions so to keep the experience of our self at bay. Likewise we know we are acting out when we feel driven by emotions that take us over and compel us to act in ways that later we will find incomprehensible and alien.

Susan tells me that she is having a lot of trouble with her boss at work. She knows she is feeling something disturbing but she is not exactly sure what. Talking, it becomes clear she is feeling angry but is also ashamed of this emotion because she believes she should feel differently. Anger is an emotion that was not allowed in her childhood home and now as an adult she is inexperienced in its conscious expression and so fearing it must repress it.

Lawrence is also angry but suffers none of the inhibitions of Susan. He believes his girlfriends absence for the evening, while she visits friends, is a direct rejection of him. When she returns he has drunk far too much and greets her with a sulky and malicious silence. He has no understanding of his need to punish her for her imagined abandonment and simply acts out his rage and hurt without conscious reflection.

A third option for both Susan and Lawrence, and also for all of us who suffer in the same way with anger and other emotions, is to begin to allow ourselves to feel our experience fully without either hiding away in repression nor being compelled to abandon our self in acting out. The essential method to help us be fully aware of what we are feeling, thinking and doing in each consecutive moment, as we have already said, is called mindfulness which means to be present, to be aware, to be conscious, to be paying attention. By bringing us into a direct and immediate relationship with our experience, from the position of a disidentified witness, it allows us to feel fully what ever our experience is, and no longer habitually rely on the self protective and limiting closures of repression and acting out.

Craving, aversion and ignorance Once we start doing this we begin to gain an insight into the powerful forces that govern us. Looking into the now stilling waters of the mind we see three principle motivations in all our habitual patterns that drive our personal story. In Tibetan Buddhism these motivations are represented in a picture called the “Wheel of Life” which is a circular image of life from cradle to the grave and all the attendant psychological states, the heavens and hells of experience, that we can inhabit along the way. In the centre of this picture the three core motivations are represented by a pig, a snake and a chicken chasing each others tails in a seemingly endless dance. These three creatures represent the “three poisons” which are craving, aversion and ignorance (the last we may also think of as denial). And it is these three poisons that chain us to endless suffering.

This may be understood on two levels. On the first level craving speaks of all those situations in our life where we feel driven by desires and addictions. Aversion speaks of a spectrum of emotional experiences ranging between violence, rage and hatred to irritation, rejection and refusal. And finally denial speaks of the desire to not engage, to go to sleep and to avoid. In each of these it is clear how the poison becomes a motivating force within the mind, even in a very subtle way. Life is simply full of situations and experiences that we want or do not want or which feel so overwhelming that we simply cut off. Unconsciously reacting in this way not only does not guarantee any lasting happiness it can also enmesh us further and more deeply into a web of discontent and misery. Both Susan and Lawrence in their respective ways are poisoned by their needs to push away or hang onto what they are feeling, denying out of fear emotions of rage and vulnerability that they are too afraid to feel consciously.

On a deeper level it is also possible to see that the three poisons, these three core reactions, permeate great passages of our lives and are not simply types of painful or difficult emotion. We can see that each of us is driven by the compulsion to reaffirm our sense of who we are by craving self affirming experiences and that we also are equally driven by an aversion to experiences that threaten our sense of self. This is not just the instinct for self preservation that scans our environment for sources of physical and emotional danger. But more minutely, the attraction and rejection of every experience on the basis that some conform with our narrative and so support our sense of identity while others do not and so threaten it. This need to maintain the narrative is a reflection of the three poisons at the most profound level. It points to an all pervading anxiety that is seldom noticed but is always just beneath the surface of consciousness. Failure to notice this is the third poison, ignorance itself. We only have to suffer the forced change to something like where we live, what we wear and eat, or loss of those who speak the same language, to immediately feel our sense of identity threatened. Essentially, our hard won sense of self is a very fragile thing that is perpetually in peril from change and our need to defend it, contrary to what we feel, is merely to drink more deeply from the poisoned cup. Again Susan and Lawrence, at the deepest level are not only afraid of their own unrecognised emotional experiences but further more cling to their narratives of being a nice girl and a hard done by little boy. These narratives, however difficult or painful, are all the identity they have got and until they recognise something else within themselves they will be compelled to cling to their conflicted identity.

Transmutation However, contrary to expectation, the way to be with experiences of craving, aversion and denial is to realise that they in themselves are the path. Within our European Alchemical tradition is the paradoxical understanding that that which is least valued becomes the source of that which is most precious. In this way lead becomes gold and poison becomes the elixir of life. All the painful, difficult, messy, guilt laden and embarrassing emotions become the priceless means to open to ourselves more fully because it is they that we first find ourselves being mindfully present with. This is to embrace the Buddhist third option. Instead of hiding from our own emotions within a shell of denial, we can try to allow ourselves to simply remain present with our experience consciously, just as it is, a little longer and feel it more fully.

Jack tells me that he has just split up with his girlfriend. He is very anxious about the hole this will now make in his life. He has previously suffered clinical depression and is frightened of experiencing it again. We talk about how he might handle this new loss and he says his options are doing a lot more running and generally keeping himself busy or simply falling into a period of being utterly miserable. I suggest a third option. Could he allow himself to have the feelings of loss while neither giving in to the desire to distract himself nor falling into and identifying with them. Jack is intrigued by this and is highly motivated because he already knows that his two automatic reactions, repression and acting out, have not served him well in the past. He can only run so much before the thoughts and feelings catch up with him and he can only become subsumed in depression for a short time before it becomes unbearable and he seeks recourse in antidepressant medication. To find the third way he will need to feel and be present with his loss, his sorrow and his fear.

If Jack can do this he will have become able to turn his attention from his personal story line, his narrative, and refocus on the bare facts of his actual experience as it presents itself in each consecutive moment. He will become mindful. This is not to deny that working within the narrative has many advantages and rewards. Doing so Jack may well see that this new loss replicates an established pattern in his life that leads to new understandings about his past and possibilities for his future. He may find the loss breaks open his heart and softens him, increasing his sensitivity and compassion. All of this slow and tender reflective thinking and feeling will enrich and deepen his soul work and is as precious as it is unusual in our brutally defended age. From this hurt may emerge a greater ability to relate and from this unfolding journey, this rite of passage, new meaning will certainly be found. However if he is to open further, beyond his changing story line, it will be necessary to redirect his attention to his awareness of emotional experience in the moment that he feels it. Instead of contracting and closing he is invited to open, relax and feel. To stay with what he finds without thinking about it or trying to work out what it means. To not immediately try to understand it and weave it into his story. This just leaves the emotions as they are; hot and swimmy, clenching and churning, cold and hard. None are particularly good or bad, better or worse, wanted or unwanted. All are here for a period and then without effort from us, gone.

Many of our Jungian and analytic colleagues remain unfamiliar with the term “transpersonal psychotherapy” and enquire what it means when they first hear it. My own fantasy is that, to the outsider, it can sound quite provocative as its seems a nonsense that anything as profoundly personal as psychotherapy could have an interest with that which is concerned with what is beyond the personal. Similarly, many transpersonal psychotherapists find it difficult to imagine how soul healing can really arise from a psychoanalytical perspective and view this way of working with suspicion. So here I would like to review Transpersonal Psychology’s history and say something of my own contemplative/analytic approach.

As we know the term is a relatively recent one and first appears in the work of William James, at the turn of the nineteenth century, where he speaks of “Trans-personal, as when my object is also your object;” thereby defining it as a category of shared or collective experience, which by definition, can no longer be personal alone. A little later, in 1917, C.G.Jung wrote the text that finally emerged retitled in the English translation as “The Psychology of the Unconscious” in which we find the chapter heading, “The Personal and Collective (or Transpersonal) Unconscious”. Here the term is used synonymously with the words “collective” and “impersonal”. Although these first usages have now been further differentiated, James and Jung have left a profound mark on transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy in that it continues to be concerned with both the scientific enquiry into non-ordinary states of consciousness and also how the spiritual dimension of the individuals life is not only non-reducible to a species of psychopathology but also that it may well be essential for the deepest healing.

However it was not until the heady and revolutionary days of the 1960’s that transpersonal psychology finally emerged as a discrete discipline from the discussions of a group of mainly young psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists who collectively had come to believe that the relatively new Humanistic psychology, along with those already established, was failing to recognise, investigate and value various states of consciousness that America at that time was becoming generally more aware of. States of consciousness generated not only spontaneously but also inducible through various natural and drug initiated methods. Amongst this group are the principle names of Antony Sutich, founding editor of the Journal of Humanistic psychology, (Who was so disabled he contributed while laying on his back and looking into a mirror). Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalan Institute, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof and Viktor Frankl. Indeed it was these last three who finally came up with the tag “Transpersonal Psychology” after rejecting other formulations and also named Transpersonal Psychology the “fourth force” to distinguish it from the three principle psychologies (psychoanalysis, behaviourism and humanistic) that it had grown from. All this activity finally manifested itself in 1969, when along with Woodstock and the first man on the moon, the first Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was published.

Perhaps unfortunately the enthusiasm of these early Hippy days has passed and Transpersonal Psychology has matured and acquired some gravitas. In England, as well as the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology, there are other transpersonally orientated training organisations within the UKCP, a Transpersonal Psychology Section in the BPS and John Moores University offers Transpersonal Psychology up to Doctorial level. Early criticisms have been answered, principally that it fails to recognise fully the implications of the shadow side of human nature and that its scientific methodology is flawed. Also, Transpersonal Psychology has broadly come to acknowledge that there are “transpersonalists”, who are distinct from transpersonal psychologists and psychotherapists, that have brought the discipline into deserved disrepute by their often naive and deluded beliefs that would turn transpersonal psychology into a new age religion. However there also continues a healthy internal debate that guarantees a plurality of tested views beneath a single roof.

My own acquaintance came relatively recently when I joined Elizabeth McCormick to help administer the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology immediately after it had become an accrediting organisation within the UKCP. From a background of analytical psychotherapy and then the classical school of Jungian psychology, I initially, (and wrongly), thought that transpersonal psychology was a heart felt but less academically demanding form of the latter. That the Jungian and the transpersonal perspectives are connected has already been touched upon in that Jung could describe the archetypal dimension of the person as transpersonal. Further more Jung’s influence is found in a developmental model that includes higher levels of consciousness beyond simply becoming a mature adult and which continues throughout life. Also that each individual has the potential for greater consciousness and this is realised by a process of dialogue with the unconscious that can not be grasped by rational reduction alone. And finally, Jung’s passionate engagement with the wisdom traditions of other cultures, which he came to value and be influenced by, has been passed on and is seen today not only in Transpersonal Psychology but also right across contemporary culture generally. In practice the classical Jungian methods have also been incorporated into transpersonal psychotherapy, so along with the reflective therapeutic dialogue are the techniques of active imagination, (sometimes extended into guided visualisations), and all forms of creative expression.

Speaking of guided visualisations; here there must be a, (brief and inadequate), word on Roberto Assagioli, Italian Psychiatrist and one of the members of the initial group of transpersonal psychotherapists and also a big influence on the majority of CTP’s history. Though he and Jung shared many ideas, his methods differ in that he does not share the same fear of unduly influencing the unconscious psyche. Consequently he happily developed many specific imaginal techniques for both investigating what is consciously unknown and as means to transform what is developmentally arrested and these continue to be used in many transpersonal psychotherapists practices. Sadly, much of this seems baroque and even dangerous to many Jungians and certainly is plain odd from an analytical perspective and so this school of transpersonal psychology, now very popular and known as Psychosynthesis, can be marginalised and dismissed by more orthodox and conventional practitioners. However transpersonal psychology is a broad church and while the important and beneficial influence of Analytical Psychology and Psychosynthesis is significant, particularly in England, in America, psychoanalysis and Buddhism have also been amongst its primary inspirations.

For me this is presently the most exciting area. Perhaps as a Jungian I simply overdosed on unadulterated meaning and individuation. To find a Transpersonal/Buddhist/contemplative influenced psychology that was intellectually and clinically legitimate, that emphasised life as meaning free rather than meaningful and which valued being present with our experience in the moment as well as excavations of the past and the possibilities of the future, was a find. In this area of Transpersonal Psychology the big voice in theory is Ken Wilber, (whom I will name but not attempt to summarise), and amongst the many clinicians I would like to mention are Jack Engler, a psychiatrist from Harvard and mindfulness meditation teacher, Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and “Buddhist” psychotherapist who has written extensively for The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and finally, John Welwood, initially an existential psychotherapist, the present Editor of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and a writer.

Both Engler and Epstein first intrigued me because they had emerged from the supposedly atheistic Freudian world and yet found no conflict between their analytic work and a transpersonal perspective. This is because, unlike Jung’s Analytical Psychology, their basic object relations position had no pretensions to be a spiritual path and so when this theory met Buddhism, their primary “transpersonal” influence, they simply found that Buddhism augmented and continued where their psychological theory ended. Mark Epstein actually identifies Freud, rather than James or Jung, as the Grandfather of Transpersonal Psychology because, despite his misreading of spirituality, he none the less made a lifelong pursuit of its significance and meaning thus making it a legitimate area of study and research.

Epstein explores areas where he feels Freud has deeply influenced European and American transpersonal psychology. He suggests that Freud’s theoretical contribution that the frustration of the pleasure principle causes suffering and this, acting as the engine of sublimation, causes the emergence of the reality principle, echoes the Buddha’s first three Noble Truths. That all life is suffering, that the cause of this suffering is attachment and that the ending of attachment is the release from suffering. Another area concerns Freud’s practical advice to would be analysts to develop “evenly suspended” attention. This ability to suspend judgement and attend to all the patients utterances equally, to both Epstein and Engler, seems like an intimation of the enormously important and quintessential Buddhist meditative discipline of bare attention or mindfulness. (Or what Ken Wilber calls the “transpersonal witness”). Mindfulness is the ability to be totally present in each successive moment with our experience, just as it is, without judgement or any desire to change it. (Though this is not to renege on the responsibility to act in the world when appropriate). Training to do this usually starts with watching the breath and extends to mindfulness of our entire body, feelings and finally consciousness itself. Transpersonal Psychology recognises that in doing this we achieve a way of being with the whole of our experience without the need to either repress unacceptable elements nor identify with and act out parts that would consume us. I have called this, to emphasise its difference from a defensive schizoid transcendence, intimate engagement and Engler says it is exactly this type of attention in the patient that makes, (although here I am not convinced ), free association possible.

However Epstein can not entirely construe Freud into a proto-Buddhist and Freud’s contribution to the understanding of transpersonal experiences, particularly mystical ones, is lamentable. From his correspondence with his friend, the French poet Romain Rolland, Freud was introduced to the now famous ineffable oceanic feeling that Rolland described as, “a sense of eternity, of feeling something limitless, unbounded”, perhaps a dissolving of the subject/object division of experience? Freud was fascinated by this and reasoned that since this type of unbounded state only occurred in our mothers arms then this was like a state of regression into primary narcissism and thus in several jumps had managed, perhaps while not intending to, to pathologise in the minds of later analysts what for many cultures had for thousands of years been the pinnacle of human psychological development. Freud’s problem was that he could find nothing like it within his own experience and this was hardly surprising since Rolland was a follower of the Hindu guru Ramakrishna and had achieved his experience as a result of his assiduous meditation practice - something Freud had not done.

Following on from here Engler finds links between object relations theory and Buddhism. He notes that they both share a similar understanding of the generation of the experience of “self”. (As in “myself”). That the self arises from a process of synthesis and adaption between the inner life and the outer world and the identity that is created seems to have the qualities of continuity and independence. However where objects relations theory simply observes this and values its outcome, Buddhism adds to this that this self under strict investigation reveals no innate quality of “self hood” and its experience of continuity of identity is thus revealed as false. Further more, while object relations theory identifies two principle areas of psychopathology, either the failure to develop object relations or the struggle of an established self against repressed material, Buddhism posits a more fundamental third, which; is the defence of a belief in the concrete reality of the very self that object relations identifies as desirable. Engler therefore asks, could it not be that these two really form a continuity? That the self concept that we first must bring into being has within it a potential for its own conscious and intentioned surrendering of boundaries and final dissolution? From this is born Englers well known sound bite: “First you have to be a somebody before you can be a nobody”.

From both these psychotherapists I take away a new appreciation of my work. In as much as I can allow myself to sit with my patients and allow their material to touch me within an attitude of bare attention, an attitude of both intimate engagement yet not identification, then so will they also begin to find the ability to neither push away experience out of fear nor be consumed by experiences that damage them. However, perhaps constitutionally, perhaps because of my own experience of analysis, I can find this a little too passive at times and this brings me to the work of John Welwood.

John Welwood started his professional life as a research student of Eugene Gendlin, an American psychologist. Briefly, Gendlin discovered that those who really are helped by psychotherapy have an innate ability to be aware of and take reference from what he called a “felt sense”, a combination of feeling (or emotion) and a body sensation. When asked how they were or what they felt, this group, instead of answering with predigested ideas, would pause and answer from the immediacy of their experience, informed by their body, and when this was allowed to be felt fully a “felt shift” possibly would occur. That is, a release of energy felt both emotionally and physically. Further more Gendlin discovered that this sensibility could be taught and thus the method of “focusing” was born. Welwood, again a practicing Buddhist, realised over time that this phenomenological method had some similarities to mindfulness meditation, in that it stayed with what is in each successive moment; this he called being “experience near”. By taking focusing and refining its method he came to distinguish two categories of felt shift, the horizontal and vertical. The first group seemed to pertain to personal experience while the second had a transpersonal element in that rather then giving access to a deeper understanding of ones personal situation, they opened out into a moment of unintentioned being. Thus Welwood had found a way to connect psychotherapy to the spiritual practice of mindfulness using the bridge of focusing. In practice this means more often than not following the usual process of a reflective dialogue in which the therapist helps the patient to come to an understanding of their situation, frequently drawing on the felt sense within their body. But also sometimes, perhaps only fleetingly and superficially, to have a small transpersonal experience of bare attention where consciousness is not solely identified with the contents of the personal self alone. An experience he describes as profoundly healing.

For me again this was all very satisfying. Welwood not only recognises the profoundest importance of a psychotherapy that enables the patient, rather than struggling to change their experience, to remain mindfully present with it, just as it is, knowing this to be the deeper healing. He also offers a specific means that enables the patient to do this so that both people in the therapeutic relationship are equally involved in the generation of the transpersonal witness. Together then, Epstein, Engler and Welwood, none coming from the more familiar Jungian tradition, all demonstrate a truly transpersonal psychotherapy that is also analytic in its origins. One that takes the personal self and deeply enquires into the nature of its being by developing the ability to be mindfully present both personally and transpersonally.

In this chapter I would like to introduce how the principles and method of mindfulness meditation may be usefully wedded to the practice of psycho/physical therapy, particularly through the perspectives of Hakomi therapy, Transpersonal Psychology and the work of Bob Moore, as I have understood it, through his principle exponant in England, Hilmar Schonauer.

Hakomi therapy was developed by Ron Kurtz in America during the nineteen seventies and eighties drawing on the neoFreudian work of Reich and Alexander Lowen and the humanistic movement. As such it values being in our bodies, in the present moment with awareness of our experience as it is. Kurtz himself said he simply looked around and took the best. Transpersonal Psychology also grew from Humanistic Psychology, formally arriving in America as The Journal Of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969. Its central belief is that healing at its most profound includes a depth relationship to that within us that is beyond the usual frame of our individual personalities. As a perspective it can be grafted onto various root stock and presently there are psychotherapists who combine psychoanalytic, existential, humanistic and also Jungian basic positions with a transpersonal perspective. In England, at the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology, C.G. Jung has been foremost and this is perhaps no surprise since Ken Wilber has named Jung’s analytical psychology as the most viable transpersonal psychology of the twentieth century. Transpersonal Psychology, particularly in America, has also been influenced by Buddhist psychology and this is mainly represented by the emphasis placed upon the practice of mindfulness, which, as with Hakomi, involves being consciously present with our experience in each successive moment. Bob Moore’s work, taught by Hilmar Schonauer in London, remains, for me, difficult to define, even after over fourteen years of study. Bob Moore from his intuitive and visionary abilities developed a system of energy transforming exercises or meditations that heal the person by opening blockages and making energetic connections. This work incorporates very specific descriptions of the psychophysical energetic structures of the person, sometimes collectively called the “subtle body”, that are easily misunderstood since many terms are shared with other systems. Quite simply, I have found what is conceptually opaque becomes transparent experientially with practice. Unfortunately for me this has left a knowing with few words.

Psychotherapy, healing the soul.

I start from the belief that psychotherapy, literally, the healing of soul, arises from self acceptance. This is not something passive. It is not about giving up and saying, “Well that’s who I am and I can do nothing about it.” To the contrary it has a dynamic open quality to it. This is an acceptance of self as we find ourselves right now in this present moment. Whether we are happy or sad, calm or confused, mad or sane, it leaves this experience as it is with out any desire to change it in any way. What is distinctive is that this self acceptance is self aware. In both Hakomi and Transpersonal Psychology this ability to remain present with our sensations and feelings as they are, consciously, is linked to the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness, the ability to be consciously present in each successive moment with whatever is happening within us and outside of us, is found in a number of spiritual practices from different traditions but it is most explicit in the teachings of Buddhism, the teaching on “being awake”. Transpersonally orientated psychotherapists have called this by various names; John Welwood speaks of it as “unconditional presence” (Welwood, 2000), Mark Epstein as “bare attention” (Epstein, 1995), Wilber as “the transpersonal witness” (Wilber, 1975) while Kurtz, honouring it as one of the five principles of Hakomi therapy stays with the term “mindfulness” (Kurtz, 1970). In all cases what is being encouraged is the development of a state of choiceless awareness that is not driven by fears arising out of unconscious traumatic experiences. It is called unconditional presence because we try to be present with our experience: body, feelings and mind, unconditioned by the emotions that surround them. It is called bare attention because our attention is bare of the secondary reactions that cloak the vivid immediacy of experience. It is called the transpersonal witness because it avoids the usual personal and defensive reactions of repression or identifying and acting out. It does this by assuming a transpersonal position of being fully in touch with experience while not identified with it; thus we have our experience but it does not have us. Larry Rosenberg, a mindfulness teacher, describes this as the ability to be intimate. (Rosenberg, 1998). He observes that most of us are unable to perceive and be with either ourselves nor the external world without clothing ourselves or it with emotionally laden value judgments. Thus attraction leads to the need to possess, so to continue the pleasure, while aversion leads to finding a way to remove that which offends. Either way the internal emotionally reactive “noise” is so loud that the simple act of communion, of being nakedly present, cannot happen.

Continuous mindfulness of course is an ideal. In reality any genuine experience of this is initially fleeting and will almost always be the fruit of some form of formal mindfulness meditation practice or, even more transitory, perhaps a moments “unintentioned being” within a therapy session. However the modest act of remaining present or “staying with” our experience without being driven to change it can start small and simple with a moment to pause and breathe. This takes us to a knowing of ourselves that is not only beyond the needs and wishes of others but also of ourselves as we have come to imagine ourselves to be. In that moment it heals the splits between the body, feelings and mind so that our separation from our self is progressively closed. This is important. If we understand the basic dis-ease as being divided persons who spend our lives suffering from being separated from life by our own fears, then healing, at its most profound, will be found in the state of non dual consciousness that is no longer divided. Psychoanalysis has frequently mistakenly depicted this as a regressive desire to return to the symbiotic union with mother, thereby confusing the prepersonal mind of the infant with the transpersonal mind of the fully awakened state. A mistake Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy”. (Wilber, 1998). However those who have actually experienced it, tell us that to the contrary, this state, while empty of self, is full of clarity, wisdom and compassion. This is not transcendence as much as intimate engagement.