Already Free by Bruce Tift

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A deep dive into the interaction between Western therapy and Eastern Buddhism. Bruce Tift explores how we can use the best of each of these practices to dramatically improve our awareness and the quality of our experience.

Key Takeaways

The developmental view is central to the Western psychotherapeutic approach. It’s based on the idea that the experiences we have as children, mostly in our families of origin, have a profound impact on the rest of our lives.

The fruitional or Buddhist view asserts that the state of mind we’re seeking is already present, right now, regardless of circumstance. By contrast to the developmental or Western view, which focuses on releasing old strategies in order to achieve the freedom we seek at some point in the future, the fruitional view takes the position that we’re already free.

Seven stage process for dissolving internal divisions

Awareness — become aware that very powerful habitual patterns run a large part of our lives
Tolerance — begin to trust that having fears are not killing us. We bring them up and sit with them slightly longer than before.
Acceptance — advanced tolerance, we become less panicky when these fears begin to show up.
Kindness — now that you can accept the feeling, you show kindness towards it, recognizing it is simply trying to protect you
Welcoming — you now let the feeling in when it arises without judgement— you recognize it at least impartially as part of your experience being alive
Seeking — you recognize that these uncomfortable feelings prove you are alive. You seek them out to practice your new found ability
Loving — you actively love and cherish your fears.

Concept of Freedom

Freedom is not having the ability to do anything we want. Freedom is comfort living within the confinement of those limitations.

Concept of Immediacy

Immediacy is allowing experience to simply arise without interpretation. No commentary, no discussion, no linking feelings to past events. By doing so, it becomes impossible to maintain a continuous story about who we are. By breaking the continuity of our moment to moment experience, we generate space.

Five Step Process We Undergo to Disconnect from Experience

Refusing to accept our experience as it is — always either in denial of the truth or avoiding any situation that could trigger such a feeling
Refusing to feel our immediate experience physically. Always moving away from any immediate discomfort or vulnerability.
Adding self-referential commentary to every bit of our experience, interpreting everything as somehow tied to the story we have been telling ourselves
We link these moments of commentary and interpretation together in order to form a continuous "self" with familiar narratives
We stabilize a state of chronic struggle, creating the "when..then.." trap of not being satisfied or willing to engage unless a certain criteria is met

Interaction of the fruitional and devleopmental views

Developmental work gets at the root of our emotional survival strategies. By uncovering and becoming more aware of these strategies, we can recognize and learn to sit presently with the feelings they are trying to defend against feeling. Fruitional work creates a baseline of acceptance and understanding from which we can work on real improvements, knowing that if we didn't, things would still be okay. It becomes a choice to improve taken from the foundation of acceptance.

Anxiety and Struggle Overview

Anxiety is an immediate response to a possible threat, which is different from fear. Fear is an immediate response to an immediate threat.
We bind our anxieties to certain events in order to reduce the fundamental openness of our experience. By binding these feelings to a localized issue, we create a sense that the rest of our life ifs free from anxiety.
Because upon solving our binding issue we would still experience anxiety, we subconsciously never solve it. Or if we do, a new problem arises, perpetuating the "if..when" loop
The root of anxiety is our fundamental avoidance of the openness of life. Anxious feelings are a reminder to our egoic selves that we are not fully in control of what is happening. This is extremely uncomfortable. But it is a part of life. Committing to this uncertainty is the real work of fruitional practice.
We have two choices. We can acknowledge the truth of the uncertainty of our experience and feel immediate anxiety, or we can resist the truth of our experience and develop chronic anxiety.
Most everyone chooses the latter and creates an internal struggle — a continued effort to resist force or to free onself from constraints. This struggle allows us to resist reality.
We can relax our struggle by becoming aware of them. Our anxieties are not caused by the things we claim but instead by the uncertainty and openness of life. By probing this uncertainty we can become more comfortable and even welcome it in our experience. Eventually, we become open to all experience and with it develop confidence, open-heartedness

The concept of Embodied Immediacy

Feelings occur at the sensation level of our body. Anxiety leads to a tight chest or upset stomach. Fear leads to hunched posture and fidgeting. We often ignore these sensations or try to suppress them because they are uncomfortable. But, they are not in any way harmful. The ability to sit with them and let them pass through our body is embodied immediacy.
To practice embodied immediacy, any time we feel an avoidant behavior such of reaching for a distracting device, overthinking, complaining, caught in a thought loop, we simply ask "What am I experiencing at the sensation level right now?" or another way "What am I feeling right now that I don't want to feel, and can I commit to feeling this way for the rest of my life?"
This embodied immediacy acts as an anchor from which we can drift to explore our personal experience and interpretations, knowing at any point if it becomes too difficult we can return to the physical sensations that really are not harmful.
The first benefit is a release of trapped energies, things we so often suppress feeling that are trapped in our body for long periods. But the more often we release this trapped energy, the more free we can feel.
The second benefit is a superhero confidence that we can commit to potentially difficult experiences knowing we can return to just our sensations where there is no harm. If the worst thing that can happen before we give a public speech is nervousness, tightness of chest, and shortness of breath, can we sit with that, release it, and then confidently proceed?

Introduction

Freedom is also experienced as inherently satisfying and meaningful, not as a means or condition for some greater good. By contrast, many of our more familiar goals—a good relationship, good health, money, political and social justice, and so on—are usually seen as conditions that will bring about a greater good. “If I just had better health, more money, etc., then I would be happy.”

“Enlightenment is an accident—but meditation makes us accident-prone.”

The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.

The dialogue between Western therapy and the Buddhist view asks, “In what way is our experience of freedom dependent on our life circumstances and how we feel? And in what way is our experience of freedom arising from our unconditional commitment to the truth of our experience, whatever it may be?”

Chapters 1–3 are about what’s called view. Before we take on any practices, it’s important to clarify just what our intentions are and to consider how we might most effectively move toward our goals. Chapters 4–7 are about practices. A practice involves a conscious participation in some activity, usually with an intention to improve our experience in some way.Chapter 8 is about the potential results of these practices. When we commit to certain practices, it’s important to see whether the results we hope for arise.

In all of these discussions, I invite you to consider a fundamental assumption: this book is about how we understand and relate to our experience of reality. It is not about the nature of reality. And so, in all of the discussions to follow, any talk about basic nature, awareness, and so on will be best understood as being about our experience, rather than as making any claim about reality.

Chapter 1: The Developmental View

THE DEVELOPMENTAL VIEW is central to the Western psychotherapeutic approach. It’s based on the idea that the experiences we have as children, mostly in our families of origin, have a profound impact on the rest of our lives.

What we first use for our survival, we later use as a generalized and familiar way of engaging in life. These formulas or strategies are usually very intelligent and appropriate at the time they are created and are of very real benefit to us. As a result, they tend to become habitual and to then persist long after they are needed. Because they are responses to disturbing and even dangerous realities, they’re usually associated with quite a bit of anxiety. We avoid feeling this anxiety by pushing these strategies out of our awareness. They then continue to operate without our conscious participation, potentially for the rest of our lives, unless brought into awareness and challenged once we are adults.

Often in developmental work, the first step is to help clients see that the recurring patterns they’re experiencing are not caused by, or really about, current life circumstances or current relationships. Moreover, these strategies do not arise from pathology or bad intentions. Instead, they represent our young efforts to take the very best care of ourselves possible.

Western therapy is sometimes seen as overly focused on the past, it’s actually about the present. It’s about how most of us are, in a variety of ways, living as if the present were the past. We’re operating as if we’re still young children in our families of origin, especially in the realm of relationships. It’s as if we were given a role in a play, and we got such a good response (and we’ve played the part for so long now) that we’ve actually forgotten we’re playing a role.

If we start to believe that the past is causing our present circumstances, then we’ve positioned ourselves as powerless victims. We can’t actually change the past, but we can subtly create the drama of trying to change what can’t be changed. Talking about the past, without realizing that we’re only talking about our current way of relating to our past, can actually function as an avoidance of being fully present. This unexamined project of freeing oneself from the past can result in an endless self-improvement project—as well as endless therapy.

All of us need to develop appropriate ego functions, or capacities that allow us to deal with the challenges of life—both internal and external. These functions include defending ourselves, discriminating between fantasy and reality, delaying gratification, having a coherent sense of self, and so on.

One of the fundamental ways in which we protect ourselves as infants and children is to do our best to not have to consciously participate in what is most terrifying or overwhelming. We learn to train our attention to ignore what we don’t know how to handle. Out of sight, out of mind. So we divide ourselves into parts that are “safe” to experience and those that are “unsafe.” This defense mechanism is the beginning of what we term neurotic organization, or neurosis.

(What we find unacceptable in ourselves, we often find unacceptable in others.)

As adults, we all seem to want to resolve our neuroses, but we don’t understand that we have an incredible investment in maintaining them.

Clients claim that they want to change their habitual patterns, but when we actually start to investigate what would be required—which is to feel exactly the feelings they have dedicated their life to avoiding—a lot of very mixed feelings come up.

By the time we’re adults, there’s a lot of momentum in place. We’ve had a lifelong investment in not solving the problem of our neurotic suffering. If we were to solve it, to see our lives clearly, we would be at risk of having to deal in a direct way with the truth—which is not always pretty.

PRACTICE INVESTIGATING OUR STRATEGIES

Bring to mind a core vulnerability in your life—something you’ve developed strategies around not feeling. You may have some clarity about what your vulnerabilities are, or you may not. If not, just bring to mind some fear you’re aware of. For example, if you’re afraid of feeling something, that experience must already be there; it must already be a part of your life. First comes a feeling you can’t handle, then come your strategies for not feeling it. Imagine acknowledging that fear from as great a distance as you choose, and just let it be there. No need to understand, heal, process, or make it go away. Just experience being in relationship with that fear. How is it to hold that fear in your awareness? What do you feel in your body? Does it feel familiar or unfamiliar? Now, give yourself permission to ignore that fear. Participate in that experience as well. Where does your mind go? Is it easy or difficult to move away from that fear? Once again, step back into relation with that fear. Feel what that’s like. What do you notice? Is it easier to be with the fear? Harder? Do the same sensations arise in your body this time? You might go back and forth like this several times, doing your best to stay present and embodied while you do so. There is no agenda to resolve anything—just an invitation to be more present with fear.

Neurosis is not something that happened to us. It’s an unconscious choice we make, moment after moment. It’s what happens when we say, “I would actually prefer not to feel this incredibly difficult, vulnerable, disturbing experience right now, so I’m going to try to go around it. I will distract myself. I’ll be self-aggressive. I’ll get very activated. I’ll get involved with parenting, or with work. I’ll learn to meditate and be calm. I’ll exercise.”

When we approach neurosis not as “wrong” but as our best out-of-date effort to take care of ourselves, then our neuroses actually become more available to work with.

THREE TYPES OF FUNDAMENTAL AGGRESSION

In the Buddhist tradition, the neurotic aggression we maintain toward the parts of ourselves we’ve disowned—our core vulnerabilities—is said to have three forms: positive, negative, and neutral.
In Buddhist language, the “positive” form of aggression is often called passion or attachment. In Western psychological language, we might call it the neurotic feminine,
- The point of any style of aggression is to get out of an experience of disturbance as quickly as possible. The passion, or positive, form of aggression uses the strategy of trying to keep our engagement with life always positive. To maintain this hope, we tend to locate any problems within ourselves, privately, where they won’t disturb our relationships with others.
- People displaying neurotic feminine aggression become very accommodating when faced with a threat. It’s as if they are trying to erase themselves, so as to erase the tension that comes with any conflict.
The more familiar form of aggression is called anger in the Buddhist view or, in Western psychology, the neurotic masculine. This style—which happens to be my primary pattern—is to experience anything that feels threatening as coming from outside ourselves, from others, and then to annihilate that threat. In this case, we attack whatever is causing our disturbance, keeping alive the hope that all disturbance comes from others.
The third form of fundamental aggression is neurotic neutrality, which in Buddhist terms is called ignorance or ignoring.
- In this style, we’re trying to get out of our disturbance by spacing out and not being fully present. We unconsciously generate the experience of feeling confused, stuck, or paralyzed. We don’t keep agreements and have a hard time making decisions. We might even withdraw from the world, spending our time meditating or doing other spiritual practice, with the unexamined goal of rising above our messy human life—being always calm and accommodating everything.
- So unconsciously, they will do everything they can to remain apparently confused or disengaged.

DROPPING ALL COMPLAINT

When I’m working with people, I often suggest a little practice as a homework assignment. For some period of time—a month maybe—I suggest they drop any claim that there’s something wrong.
But when people do experiment with the practice, the results are very interesting. They start to realize that their attitude of complaint—of problem—has been serving a function. It has been allowing them to keep their life at arm’s length. It’s given them an excuse to postpone living their life in the moment.

VIEW, PRACTICE, ACTION

In Buddhism, there’s the idea that practice is best understood within the organizing principles of view, practice, action.

We begin with an understanding, or view, of how things are at present and how we would like them to be.

Whatever view we have—that is, what makes sense to us—suggests the practices that may be helpful.

Action refers to the results that spontaneously arise out of our practices.

We experiment with these approaches and pay attention to any results that arise in our life out of these practices. We then modify our view and our practices in a circular process of becoming more and more effective in moving toward our intentions.

In my experience, the practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counterinstinctual, meaning we don’t want to do them, or they go against our basic evolutionary survival responses.

This is an informal technique I often use in my work. I call it the worst fear technique. It has to do with identifying the specific feelings and experiences that we have organized our life around trying not to feel and then, intentionally, going into exactly those feelings, especially as immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience, with no interpretation at all.

STAGES OF DISSOLVING OUR INTERNAL DIVISIONS

The first stage could be understood as awareness or recognition. We wake up out of our familiar trance states, in which we have been unconsciously taking whatever we experience as if it’s the whole story—whatever’s happening, that’s the way things are. We become aware that very powerful habitual patterns run a large part of our lives.
The second stage could be understood as learning to tolerate our worst fears. We begin to trust that feeling our fears isn’t killing us. We hate the experience and want to get out of it, but as a practice, we hang in there longer and longer. We ask, “What is it that’s driving my habitual patterns? What am I trying to not feel?" But because we don’t want to acknowledge these feelings, these behaviors are expressed unconsciously and indirectly. We have a choice: do we work with the truth of these vulnerabilities, or do we continue to ignore them? Either way, they’re still there.
The third stage could be understood as acceptance. Here, we’re beginning to feel a little less panicky when the core vulnerability comes up.
But at this point, we enter the fourth stage, practicing being kind to our fears. We move toward our disturbance.
After we have stabilized the capacity to be kind toward our disturbance, we practice actually welcoming our disturbance. At this fifth stage, we say, “I want to feel this feeling.
The sixth stage is one of committing completely to the truth of our experience.
The seventh stage—which is very powerful but very difficult, especially at first—is to practice actually loving our worst fears.

As our attention becomes more relaxed and expansive—as we stop being so absorbed with our claim of being problematic—then a very interesting question may arise: what is it that has been aware of this whole process I’ve been going through? This is the focus of the next chapter—the

Chapter 2: The Fruitional View

Another approach—the view of Buddhism—offers tools for how to be with whatever experiences we’re having, regardless of our preferences for or against them. I’ve found that this unconditional approach, which I call “fruitional,” can very quickly invite a sense of freedom and, by extension, a resilient and satisfying state of mind that’s not dependent upon fluctuating circumstances.

A BASIC BUDDHIST VIEW

Basic to all Buddhist views, though, is an assertion that our sense of being an independently existing—and therefore alienated—self is the central source of unnecessary suffering and confusion.
The fruitional or Buddhist view asserts that the state of mind we’re seeking is already present, right now, regardless of circumstance. By contrast to the developmental or Western view, which focuses on releasing old strategies in order to achieve the freedom we seek at some point in the future, the fruitional view takes the position that we’re already free.

Ground, Path, Fruition

This ground, path, fruition model is useful in helping us explore the hypothesis that everything we need in order to have a good state of mind is already present, right now.
So you might say that the ground is our present-moment experience without awareness. The fruition is that very same experience with awareness. The path creates the conditions for this shift of perception to arise. We meditate, we do different spiritual and psychological practices, we study, and we think about things.

At first, our perception of reality has an opaqueness or solidity to it. We have a sense that the world is reflecting back something about our “self.” We unconsciously relate to almost everything in terms of how it might affect us—as positive, negative, or neutral. This constant self-referral feeds an ongoing drama about how we’re doing, whether we’ll get what we want, whether we’re safe, and so on.

From a Buddhist view, awareness is always present, even if we can’t grasp it completely. It’s nothing we achieve or create or attain—it’s always there. Awareness is said to be what is most fundamental to our experiencing, a nonconceptual knowing. We will never find anything more basic, more intimate, in every moment of our engagement with life

WHAT IS FREEDOM?

When we can have as ideal a life as possible, one that is perfectly free of limitations, when we can do whatever we want whenever we want, then—we think—we’ll be free.
Upon further examination, however, we find that this absence of limitations can only go so far. As embodied beings, we are always living a life of limitations. We have our bodies and their relative levels of health. We have our physical needs to sleep and eat. We are all aging and heading toward death. We have to deal with our physical and social environments. We have to deal with other people. For every capacity we have, there are thousands of things we can’t do. We’re never going to be without limitations.
We may begin to feel more relaxed, present, and confident, and we may gradually start to dissolve our self-absorption. When we’re struggling with life, trying to accomplish and avoid things in order to feel free, our attention tends to become very self-referential.

The content of our lives will sometimes be positive, sometimes negative. From the Buddhist point of view, freedom arises from a profound disidentification with any content—good or bad. When our circumstances and experiences are held in the context of open awareness, we are not captured or identified with them. We are no longer “inside” the content; rather, we are “witnessing” it within the context of awareness.

The work, from a fruitional point of view, is to gradually dissolve the apparent split between the content of our experience and the environment of awareness, whereas the work of the developmental view is to gradually dissolve the apparent split between the conscious and the unconscious.

IMMEDIACY AND THE CONTINUITY OF SELF

We create this continuous state of mind by linking moments of experience together as if they were related to one another.
The practice of immediacy allows our experience to simply arise, without interpretation. We create an environment of space or openness—no commentary, no discussion. The result is that it becomes harder and harder for us to maintain a continuous story about who we are.
This is how the mind works as well. We have a single experience, then another, then another—but they happen so fast, we start to believe that each of these moments is connected to the next. Like the dominoes, our thoughts actually do resemble a single, unified cascade. It appears that each moment of experience is necessarily connected to the next.
I then take the dominoes and set them up again—in the same pattern, same organization—but I place them several inches apart. When I knock over the first domino, it just falls on the floor; it doesn’t reach the next domino. It happens in space. At that moment, it’s clear that what appeared to be a linkage or causation between the dominoes was actually just a lack of space. The dominoes were simply close enough together that they touched one another.

IMMEDIACY AND PREFERENCE

Consider the possibility that our emotions are sort of like the weather. The weather happens. We have to deal with it, because it affects us, but it’s not about us.

When we discover the confidence that whatever we are experiencing is workable, as it is, we engage from choice. When we feel we must first improve our experience in order for it to be acceptable, however, we engage from compulsivity.

As the slogan goes, “What we resist, persists.” The result is that we then seem to have an ongoing chronic condition to work with.

So, as we move toward immediacy—toward considering that all of our experience will take care of itself, that we don’t have to make ourselves a project, that nothing is missing, that we might as well commit to working with things as we experience them—we find less and less material to support our familiar dramas. These familiar dramas, like those we talked about in the previous chapter, are very understandable, given our history.

I will be honest: this process is usually anxiety provoking. We find that we have very contradictory feelings about dissolving our chronic patterns, even if we believe they are causing us suffering. Most people, it turns out, are actually heavily invested in their problems.

UNCONDITIONAL PRACTICES

My suggestion is that if you have this interest, then consider what I would call unconditional practices. Three such practices that I have found very helpful are those of unconditional immediacy, unconditional embodiment, and unconditional kindness.
We’ve already talked about the practice of unconditional immediacy. It has to do with going deeper and deeper, more and more precisely into an investigation of what is most true in this moment.
The practice of unconditional embodiment is a very big topic. So big, in fact, that I devote all of chapter 5 to it! At this point, however, I simply say that the more we can bring our attention to immediate, sensation-level experience, the more difficult it is to be captured by our interpretations.
We’ve talked a bit about unconditional kindness already. Unconditional actually means unconditional. We practice kindness toward everything that arises in our awareness—good, bad, or otherwise. Whether we like it, don’t like it, or feel neutral about it, we still approach it with kindness and even love.

Chapter 3: A Dialogue Between the Developmental and Fruitional Views

The developmental approach helps clients develop a range of skillful means and insights they can use to improve their life and experiences. The sense of division addressed is the one between the conscious and the unconscious. The fruitional approach has more to do with returning, over and over and over, to whatever we are experiencing in the immediate moment and asking ourselves whether it’s really a problem at all. The sense of division addressed is that between our fascination with the drama of our “self” and the always-present environment of open awareness, which provides no support for a “self.”

The developmental approach could be understood as a gradual approach, while the fruitional approach could be seen as a sudden approach.

The developmental approach is about becoming: we’re always looking for ways to improve our experience. How can we live to our full potential? The fruitional approach is about being—accepting and relaxing into being at peace with the immediate moment.

The first step is that of acceptance—becoming willing to accept the way things are. This represents the fruitional approach; we stay present with reality as it is. From that ground of acceptance, we can then ask how we might improve our situation or experience, which is the second step.

Five Ways We Disconnect from Experience

The first and most basic level of disconnection is an attitude of fundamental aggression toward the truth of our experience. This attitude is one of refusing to accept our immediate, direct, noninterpretive experiencing as it is.
The second level of disconnection is a dissociative relationship to our immediate embodied experiencing. Fundamental aggression is an attitude. We begin to put that attitude into practice through an ongoing dissociation from the obvious truth that we are embodied, impermanent, vulnerable beings.
As a third level, we add a continuous stream of self-referential commentary to whatever we may be experiencing. As discussed in the previous chapter, we have an experience, and then, in a fraction of a second, we make up a story about how that experience has to do with our “self.”
As a fourth level of disconnection, we link moments of experience to one another, creating an impression of continuity as the domino analogy suggested.
As a fifth and final level, we stabilize a state of chronic struggle by maintaining the claim that there’s something really important that has to be fixed about “us” or about life.

The antidotal discipline is that of embodied immediacy, returning over and over again to our embodied, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. This is not an achievement but a practice we might commit to for the rest of our lives. Because we are only living in each present moment, we may find the most reliable sense of being supported by life in the truth of our experiencing, and not so much in our preferences or theories.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we take on some new belief system of “There are no problems;” rather, we can practice discriminating between our actual immediate experience and our interpretations about this experience and find for ourselves which is most true.

Together, they can be used in a very powerful, complementary way. Developmental work supports our fruitional path: reducing drama, taking better care of ourselves, and acting as an adult help us relax our chronically contracted attention and feel more able to investigate our immediate experiencing. Fruitional practices support our developmental work: dissolving our sense of being a divided, problematic self helps us feel less identified with and invested in our familiar survival strategies and more able to tolerate the anxiety that’s inseparable from challenging them.

Chapter 4: Experiencing Anxiety and Struggle

Anxiety is an immediate response to a possible threat, which is different from fear. Fear is an immediate response to an immediate threat.

What has become clear through Western developmental work is that most of us learn to organize our survival strategies around the avoidance of certain feelings, thoughts, and sensations—especially those associated with intense levels of anxiety.

This is what happens to all of us when we divide ourselves against feeling certain emotions or sensations. We’re walking forward through life as if things were settled and taken care of, but secretly massive amounts of our awareness, intelligence, discipline, and creativity are going toward making sure we never have to be aware of our disturbance.

BINDING OUR ANXIETY TO A SPECIFIC ISSUE

Anna Freud coined the term signal anxiety to refer to the function played by anxiety in preparing us to defend against inner threats. She saw this kind of anxiety as a signal that previously unconscious material was threatening to be experienced consciously. Similarly, we can understand anxiety as a signal that there is something we’ve been pushing away that needs to be integrated.

Chronic anxiety is the result of our ritualized refusal to stay fully embodied with our present experience.

Binding anxiety arises when we identify our anxiety as caused by a particular issue. We tell ourselves a story about a particular threat, which binds our anxiety to that localized issue.

When we investigate the experience of anxiety, the Western approach takes the experience itself as its starting point. What triggered the anxiety? How can we work with it? How can we make it go away? How can we improve our circumstances so we don’t have to feel so anxious and divided? As discussed, a Buddhist approach suggests that how we relate to the experience of anxiety is even more important than the details of that experience.

Anxiety, from a spiritual path perspective, can therefore be understood as the accurate perception of the basically open nature of life, as seen from the reference point of egoic process. The egoic process is that aspect of the self that, quite understandably, wants to feel comfortable, happy, safe, secure, and in control. When faced with the reality of how open everything actually is, that part of us basically freaks out.

From both the developmental and Buddhist views, we’re now left with a dilemma: acknowledging the truth of our experience will often require feeling our immediate anxiety, but resisting the truth of our experience results in chronic anxiety. Either way, we will feel anxiety.

We do so by manifesting symptoms that appear to explain and bind this anxiety. As “symptoms,” we can claim that the cause of our anxiety is an aberration. We acknowledge that there is anxiety, but we resist owning it as a necessary part of life.

So we have two choices. We can avoid the truth and instead experience the exhausting, but partially unconscious, disturbance of chronic anxiety, or we can commit to the truth and live with the conscious disturbance of emotional vulnerability, with no support for personal identity.

POLARIZING DRAMA AS DISTRACTION

The closer we get to our core vulnerabilities, or to the truth of openness, the more we feel an annihilatory panic. So we unconsciously opt for the experience of polarized drama to avoid having to face the truth of our experience. And in doing so, we create an incredibly resilient and stable psychic structure: struggle.

THE NATURE OF STRUGGLE

Struggle can be defined as “a continued effort to resist force or to free oneself from constraints.”

Neurotic struggle, then, could be understood as “a continued effort to resist reality or to free oneself from its constraints.”

Avoiding reality, we then feel alienated and disconnected, which starts the cycle all over again. In this way, struggle is an incredibly complex and effective way to pretend to ourselves that we’re dealing with our lives without really doing so. It allows us to believe we’re trying to solve our problems, while simultaneously guaranteeing that no change will really take place.

THE THREE LEVELS OF STRUGGLE

Struggle operates on three distinct levels: content, process, and basic.

This progression could also be understood as a movement from disowning energies, to owning energies, to experiencing energies without either owning or disowning.

Struggle at the Level of Content

The content level of struggle focuses on specific fears and disturbances.
In a Buddhist view, the content level of struggle can be seen as us working with a story about what we’re trying to possess, avoid, or ignore.

Struggle at the Level of Process

The basic intention is to make conscious that which has been unconscious or, on a subtler level, to cultivate a more open and receptive attitude toward what we don’t want to experience. In most cases, therapy at this level is focused on an exploration of what got repressed when we were young and, more importantly, how this is still being repressed today.
Acceptance of self becomes the focus, more than fixing the self. And because we are not so invested in solving an endless display of content-level problems, we are now able to investigate patterns of experiencing.
Buddhist practices at this level are basically generic, not issue-specific. I relate to whatever arises with awareness, embodied immediacy, and unconditional kindness, cultivating a resilient relationship with all experiencing. My efforts are to improve the quality of engagement, regardless of content.
In both views—Western and Buddhist—there’s an increasing sense of confidence at this level. But there still remains an identification with our conscious experiencing as “I” and with other persons and certain aspects of ourselves experienced as “not I.” This generates an ongoing sense of tension and anxiety, which we continue to avoid with dramas of struggle about relationship. We continue a subtle investment in the project of improvement.

Struggle at the Basic Level

The basic level of struggle concerns the way in which we’re unconsciously using the unending display of our experience as a distraction from the nature of open mind.
It’s at this basic level where the fruitional view really begins, focusing on the question of how the relative experience of form and limitation is related to the absolute experience of open mind and freedom. Buddhist practices are really an invitation to drop our fascination with what we are experiencing and attend to the already existing awareness of our experience.

Chapter 5: Embodied Awareness

There are probably only six or seven fundamental states of affective arousal, or basic biological feeling responses to life. These states have been described as anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anxiety, and surprise.

We may discover that what we take as negative actually comes from our attitude toward our experience rather than anything innate in that experience. The more we consciously participate in sensation-level experiencing, the more we’re able to commit equally to experiencing both positive and negative feelings.

DISEMBODIMENT AS A REQUIREMENT FOR NEUROSIS

In fact, as it turns out, disembodiment is a requirement of neurosis. Neurosis itself is an avoidance strategy, and it’s very difficult to sustain any avoidance strategy if we’re aware of what we’re avoiding. Such a strategy wouldn’t serve its function! So we must disembody in order to maintain our neurotic struggle.

SANITY: A COUNTERINSTINCTUAL PRACTICE

We’re never going to want to practice sanity, because it’s so difficult. Doing so requires discipline to reembody into sensations that were associated with the survival-level threats we had to deal with as children. We’ve trained ourselves to take the easier, safer-feeling way out. After all, our young strategies were survival strategies, not quality-of-life strategies.

The work of embodiment, then, requires discipline. It’s not easy to go into our anxiety, our tight stomach, the panicky feelings in our torso, or that tight throat we hate to feel. Most of us need to get a glimpse of what life could look like from the top of the mountain, when we are no longer identified with our neuroses.

PRACTICE GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FEEL YOUR FEAR

If you would like to try this practice, decide which feeling you’re going to work with. Ideally, you will choose an underlying issue that you really don’t like to feel—something like abandonment, shame, low self-worth, dependency, guilt, anger, or anxiety. Once you’ve decided on your issue, take a moment to settle in. If you’re sitting down, feel the weight of your body in the chair. Then begin to pay attention to your breath, feeling both the inhale and the exhale. Once you’re present, start dialoguing with yourself. Say out loud, “I give myself permission to feel [this feeling that you really don’t like to feel] off and on for the rest of my life.” Accept this feeling as if it were already a legitimate part of who you are. As you invite this feeling, try to bring your attention out of any interpretation into whatever raw sensation is happening. For example, many people find that the torso is the location where they feel emotional intensity. Check it out and see if there’s any agitation there. Perhaps you feel numb from the neck down; perhaps there is some sense of tingling in your hands, or aching or fullness or lightness somewhere in your body. Perhaps the experience permeates your whole body. Or maybe you don’t have any awareness of sensations except behind your eyes. It doesn’t really matter what you discover. The point is to be willing to direct your attention toward your experience at the level of sensation. Next, ask yourself whether this sensation you’re feeling is actually a threat in any way. Are you going to die from feeling a ball of pressure in your stomach or a hollowed-out chest or a heavy heart? Is the burning sensation in your solar plexus actually dangerous? Will the tension in your belly or your throat actually constrict you enough to kill you? If you find that experiencing these sensations is not harmful, even if they are disturbing, then experiment with a commitment to having a relationship with these sensations, perhaps for the rest of your life. What feelings arise when you think of this? What sensations? The point of this exercise is to see for yourself whether it is, in fact, a problem to feel the sensations you’ve organized your life around not feeling.

THE PRACTICE OF EMBODIMENT

A simple, practical way to approach embodied immediacy is to notice any moment that we’re aware of our own avoidant behavior. Common avoidant behaviors include obsessive thinking, emotional reactivity, feeling too busy, running a story about how somebody’s not treating us well, feeling complaint or resentment, or any of our familiar dramas. Anytime we notice such behaviors, we could ask ourselves, “I wonder what I’m experiencing in my body at the sensation level right this second?”

PRACTICING EMBODIMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF ANXIETY

If you’d like to take the concept of embodied experiencing into an even more intense experience, consider our discussion about anxiety in chapter 4. Anxiety is difficult, pervasive, and connected with survival-level response. How can we truly learn to work with anxiety without first training ourselves to stay embodied at all times? Even though it is very valuable to practice reembodiment with our historically conditioned issues, it may be even more valuable to do this very difficult practice of staying embodied with our moment-by-moment experience of anxiety. As discussed, anxiety from a therapeutic view is usually seen as a signal of deeper, not fully conscious vulnerabilities pushing into our awareness. By escaping from our anxiety when this occurs, we tend to perpetuate the assumption that these core issues are indeed unworkable and a threat. By doing so, we perpetuate our young conditioned beliefs and strategies, unconsciously continuing our experience of being a powerless child. Imagine you’re a parent whose child believes there’s a monster in the closet and who is ritualizing their life to avoid being torn to shreds. The child really believes that she is avoiding the closet because there’s a monster inside. You can see that, actually, your child is convinced there’s a monster because she is avoiding the closet. Your job as a parent is to help your child find a way to open the closet and see what’s true, however scary this might be. By training ourselves to remain present with our anxiety, we have the opportunity to discover that it’s our avoidance of our core vulnerabilities that gives them the appearance of being a threat; there is nothing inherently harmful in these vulnerabilities themselves. We begin to live as adults, basing our lives on what is currently true, rather than as if we were children, basing our lives on what used to be true. The price tag: a commitment to anxiety as a valid, workable part of one’s adult life. From a Buddhist view, anxiety is a direct perception of the already-open, vast nature of life, of our own minds, but through the filter of egoic process. Escaping from anxiety is escaping from open mind and into some version of self-absorption. Staying embodied with anxiety trains us to gradually tolerate the experience of openness, to find that the sense of a personal self basically serves as a defense against the initial anxiety of experiencing open, nonpersonal awareness. The price tag: a commitment to anxiety as long as there is egoic process.

THE CONFIDENCE OF IMMEDIACY

When we stay embodied, on the other hand, we start to develop unconditional confidence. This is the confidence of knowing that, whatever happens, we’ll be willing to work with it. Not as a theory, but because we know from experiential evidence that we’re going to be present with whatever may arise. We’re actually working with our situation, our sensations, and our lives—moment after moment after moment. As a result, we start to develop a continuity of awareness.
Without a commitment to remaining embodied, we tend to apply our particular style of fundamental aggression to any experience that feels too intense. We try to fix it, collapse, or pretend it’s not happening. Or in biological terms, we go into fight, flight, or freeze responses. Perhaps in a social situation, someone tells a joke at my expense. A rush of embarrassment arises; I feel hot, exposed. Without discipline, I might respond by attacking the person speaking. I might want to say something self-deprecating. I might reach for a drink or just feel confused. With discipline, however, I might allow myself to feel my intense discomfort, be curious about it, not go into any story about it, and watch while the intensity peaks and then dissolves all by itself. When we can train ourselves to let our intense experience have a life of its own, we discover that there’s no such thing as a permanent feeling. It’s actually when we try to avoid our feelings that we tend to “solidify” them and make them appear significant.

So far we’ve covered several steps or suggestions for exploring a relationship with our immediate, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. To summarize, first, either as a formal practice or in response to some disturbance, we recognize an impulse to escape from some feeling, thought, or interaction. We then direct our attention out of our usual stories about what’s happening to our immediate, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. Because we often find some degree of anxiety or panic, we investigate our automatic assumption that there is some threat. Is there actually any evidence of harm, damage, or problem in our sensations? Is there any evidence about our worth as a person or the viability of our life? Can we even find such apparently real emotions as shame, abandonment, or guilt? When we find no actual problem in what’s most true in our immediate experience, we gradually develop a trust that it’s safe and workable to stay in relation with this experience.

By taking part in this practice, we gradually build confidence that our worst disturbances, our greatest fears, our most vulnerable issues are in fact completely workable. There’s no inherent problem about any of those experiences, even though they are disturbing. From that ground of workability, we find that we can proceed much more quickly on exploring our issues than we do when we try to explore those issues from only the interpretation level. This is especially true when we’re experiencing some type of emotional reactivity. Our interpretations in those cases are usually a disguised emotional process and expressions of our young survival strategies.

A good crucible has a certain set of properties. It can withstand a lot of heat without melting; it is strong enough not to break; and it must not chemically interact with what’s in it. In a similar way, the more we can learn to hold and experience intense energy in our bodies, the more likely we are to invite transformative change. Yet for obvious reasons, most of us take intensity as a threat. In our culture, the two basic choices for working with intensity are repression or discharge. When repressing our experience, we push it out of our conscious awareness, ignore it, retreat to our thinking, and pretend it’s not happening. When discharging, we process our disturbance by talking it out with a therapist or friend, exercising, or yelling and screaming. The basic intention is the same: to get the disturbance out of our bodies, out of our awareness.

Chapter 8: A Good State of Mind, Regardless of Circumstance

WHERE WE BEGIN: GROUND

In this book, we have been exploring two basic strategies for having the most positive experience of our lives. The first approach is to try to generate as many positive conditions as we can: stay healthy, be attractive to others and have a good relationship, eat tasty food, have enough money, protect our children, travel, try to have upbeat emotions and ways to understand life, work on self-improvement, and so on. These are all very intelligent efforts, and, when successful, these positive conditions will usually result in positive experiences. This approach, of course, is the basic position taken by our culture.

The second strategy we’ve explored for having a more positive life experience is to cultivate an open attitude toward all conditions, without exception, whether those conditions are positive or negative. From this point of view, all conscious experiencing happens through our state of mind.

A GOOD STATE OF MIND

what is a good state of mind? Although impossible to really pin down, it could be understood as a mind trained into an attitude of unconditional appreciation.
This appreciation is supported by our various practices of immediacy. By returning over and over to what’s most true in this moment—to our embodied experiencing with no interpretations and to openheartedness toward whatever we find—we discover for ourselves whether it’s workable to be present and engaged.

HOW WE PROGRESS: PATH

Of the three forms of fundamental aggression toward reality—attachment, anger, and ignorance—Vajrayana Buddhism focuses on ignoring as the most basic cause of unnecessary suffering. The capacity to ignore seems to be an inherent ability we have as humans. Just as we have an innate ability to learn to use language, think about the future, and have empathy, we seem to have an innate ability to ignore that which is disturbing.

SOME THEMES THAT MAY ARISE ALONG THE PATH

Acceptance and Improvement

When I invite a person I’m working with to experiment with an unconditional commitment to some difficult feeling or thought, a frequent response is, “But I don’t want to be like that. I want to live to my fullest potential. If I really accept these feelings, maybe I won’t be motivated to change.”
In doing the work of therapy and in spiritual path work, I have found it usually most helpful to approach this issue as a two-step sequence. I usually begin with acceptance, as my clinical work is usually addressing the more basic issues beneath the presenting problems. Also, because we are only living in each present moment, it’s helpful to learn how to engage in and be committed to our immediate experiencing, rather than waiting for our preferred version of reality to arise before engaging fully. After identifying what experience clients may be already having but trying to escape from, I’ll invite them in a variety of ways to stay embodied with that energy, to imagine living with it off and on for the rest of their lives, to commit to this difficult feeling as a valid part of their life, to practice bringing unconditional kindness to it, and so on. After this initial step, we then might explore what it would mean to try to improve this experience from the already-explored ground of acceptance.

Not Knowing and Living with Confidence

They don’t know, and there’s no way of having certainty about this important decision. But rather than accepting and experiencing this uncertainty, they generate a fantasy of struggle or confusion that keeps alive the hope that there is some correct answer.
As we become familiar with the disturbance associated with this basically open experiencing, we find that our anxiety is not an accurate signal of some imminent harm and that our confidence actually increases as we engage with each moment from the “ground” of not knowing.

Authenticity

As we are able to cultivate a conscious and kind experience of these difficult feelings, we - will probably feel less internally conflicted and therefore less reactive and more able to engage with others with a greater sense of really being ourselves, of authenticity.

Not Self-Acceptance, but an Accepting Self

Self-acceptance is a project of the divided self. It’s really like a dog chasing its tail, trying to catch itself. The only way we can maintain this drama is by pretending that the self to be accepted is somehow different from the self that is accepting.
Even though these experiences continue to appear to be distinct and separate, the pervasiveness of awareness becomes the more compelling reality, erasing any sense of essential difference. Self-acceptance has become a nonissue.

THE FRUITION: A GOOD STATE OF MIND, REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE

An early indication will be a lessening of complaint, struggle, self-doubt, defensiveness, and emotional reactivity. We are captured by our usual dramas less often, don’t take them quite so seriously, and recover from them faster.
We act more in accord with our intentions and with less inner struggle. We may find ourselves pausing at random moments with the sense of deep appreciation and gratitude, for no specific reason. A generalized sense of well-being and contentment may become a familiar presence. And we may find an increasing frequency of moments in which whatever is being experienced is arising in an environment of freedom and open awareness.