The first step to inner development is to find and hold the sense of single, one-point perspective. This is the feeling that we all have that we are really the most important person in the room at any given moment, that no matter what happens the crucial thing is how it will impact me. You know the feeling; it's the same one you have when you are cut off suddenly in traffic or are standing on line at the cash machine while the person in front of you makes one transaction after another. The visceral response is always, "Why are you doing that to me?" Similarly, when someone comes to therapy because they have been spurned by a would-be lover, there is always the feeling of "what is wrong with me?" In Buddhist meditation we seek out that feeling; we bring it into self-awareness rather than let it run our lives. When a person is able to do that successfully, there is often a sense of freedom.
A patient of mine, for example, recounted to me how, when he picked his girlfriend up at the airport recently, he reached out to carry her bag for her after retrieving it from the baggage claim. She took the bag from him and carried it herself. Rather than take her action as a sign of self-sufficiency, he felt immediately rejected, as if she were not glad to see him. Once he learned to make that knee-jerk reaction of his the object of his meditative self-observation, he was freed from his obsessive scrutiny of his girlfriend's mood. He then became more self-reliant, she felt more supported, and both were happier with each other.
As the tendency to view the world self-referentially loses its hold, we begin to appreciate the Einsteinian world in which all realities are relative and all points of view subjective. Then a happiness that has more to do with acceptance than gratification becomes available to us.
One particular meditation technique prepares the mind for the a new, broadened perspective, that of naked--or bare--attention. The technique requires you to attend only to the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the very first time and distinguishing emotional reactions from the core event. So instead of experiencing a spouse's suggestion as criticism or their withdrawal as abandonment, as so often happens within couples, one would be able to simply bear the experience in and of itself, recognizing any concomitant feelings of rejection as separate and of one's own making.
As bare attention is practiced, many of the self concepts or feelings of self we harbor are revealed to be reactions that, on closer inspection, lose their solidity. My patient who overreacted at the airport was astonished at what he discovered upon closely examining his core sense of self. "This is it?" he asked. "This little feeling is determining so many of my actions? Am I really so narcissistic as that?" The answer, for most of us, is a resounding yes. Our sense of self, we soon find, is a house of cards.
A common misbelief people hold about meditation is that, in attacking reactive emotional tendencies, it encourages a stoic acceptance of unhappiness. Yet stoicism is not the goal. The point is not to become impervious but open, able to savor the good with the bad.
We cannot have pleasure without displeasure, and trying to split them off from each other only mires us more deeply in our own dissatisfaction. A recent incident involving an old friend of mine may illustrate the point. After breaking up his 10-year marriage, he sought psychotherapy at a local mental health clinic. His only wish, he told his new therapist in their first meeting, was to feel good again. He implored her to rid him of his unwanted emotions.
His therapist, however, had just left a three-year stint in a Zen community. When my friend approached her with his pain, she urged him to stay with his feelings, no matter how unpleasant. When he complained of anxiety or loneliness she encouraged him only to feel them more intensely. While my friend didn't feel any better, he was intrigued and began to practice meditation.
He describes one pivotal moment. Terribly uncomfortable with the burnings, pressures, and pains of meditation, he remembers watching an itch develop, crest, and disappear without scratching it. In so doing, he says, he realized what his therapist had meant when she counseled him to stay with his emotional state, and from that moment on his depression began to lift.
His feelings began to change only when he dropped the desire to change them. This is a major revelation that is often brought on through the physical pain of meditation, which requires stillness within a demanding posture. My friend's discovery is similar to the sensation cancer patients feel after taking morphine for chronic pain. They say the pain is still there, but it no longer hurts. So the sensation remains, but without the oppressive quality. Likewise, my friend learned to recognize his emotional pain, but was not oppressed by it.
Well-Being
Like many others, my friend was looking for that pervasive feeling of well-being and hoped that meditation (or love, money, success, alcohol, or therapy) would provide it. But well-being, which is not sustainable, is not the same as happiness. Happiness is the ability to take all of the insults of life as a vehicle for awakening--to enter into what the pioneer of stress-reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has called the "full catastrophe" of our lives with an open mind and heart.
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