Psychotherapy and Spirituality

 

When the eternal and the human meet, that’s where love is born - not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union. ~Adyashanti

My friend and teacher Toni Packer considered everyday life - relationships and work—and psychological healing, all crucial parts of “the work of this moment,” the work (or play) of awakening.

In her view, meditation was one’s whole life. It wasn’t just about silent retreats and meditating on a cushion. It was also about meditating in action - seeing, as it happens, how we get triggered in relationships of all kinds - at work, at home - how we judge and defend, oppose and assert, how we close down and withdraw, how we manipulate. Meditation was about seeing the anger, the fear, the sorrow, feeling them in the body, feeling into what is underneath them, coming in touch with all of this in an open, non-judgmental way. It was about learning to listen openly to others, especially when we disagree with them, or when they trigger us in some way.

Toni and another teacher of mine, Charlotte Joko Beck, were pioneers in bringing the psychological realm and everyday life (family and work) into Zen practice and emphasizing the koan of everyday life instead of the usual mysterious old koans from the tradition. They were both sometimes criticized for deviating from the “purity” of “real” Zen, but what they both realized was that it’s precisely our psychological patterns, the smog of emotion-thought, what Eckhart Tolle has called the pain-body, that obscures the simplicity of presence and pulls us into confusion and suffering. They were both brilliant at illuminating these patterns. As Toni Packer said of her work:

The essence [of this work] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas - not just individually but collectively - and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves.

The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.

In other words, it’s not either/or - either transcendence or intimacy with everyday life - it’s both/and. They are inseparable, one whole happening. This is why I feel that psychotherapy and spirituality go hand in hand, and why awakening is about our whole life, not just sitting in silence.

Yes, there can be a place for leaving the psychological behind, for recognizing that in the absolute sense, all the differences make no difference, that nothing substantial is actually happening, that this is an inconceivable, dream-like appearance, but doing that prematurely when a great deal of mental confusion and emotional reactivity still prevail can prove unsatisfying and may easily be a form of delusion and spiritual bypassing. In such cases, it’s usually more about belief than deep experiential realization. That belief can provide comfort for a time, but when the shit hits the fan, it tends to crumble. Belief is always shadowed by doubt.

Eckhart Tolle is another teacher who has been brilliant in both opening people to the aware presence that has no center, no boundary, no inside or outside, while also illuminating how the me-system and what he calls the pain-body - habitual egoic patterns - take us over, captivate the attention, and create suffering. Like Toni and Joko Beck, Eckhart understands the need to see and see through the me-system if we are truly to be free.

So awakening isn’t only about transcendence. It’s equally about total intimacy with everyday life and with our humanity. And it’s not just about what happens to us as individuals. It’s also about relationship and about touching and being touched by the whole universe.

In one sense, relationship is all there is, and we are always in relationship—with the air, with space, with the furniture, with other people, with other animals, with the food we eat, with the computer and the phone, with everything we see and hear and touch and taste. We are never not in relationship. This is what the Buddhists call interdependence or interbeing - nothing exists independently of the whole, and nothing can be pulled out of the whole.

But in another sense, there really are no separate things to be in relationship with other separate things. This is what the Buddhists call impermanence, and impermanence is realized to be so thoroughgoing that no "things" ever actually form or persist to even be impermanent. So the ultimate understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence. Impermanence and unicity are one and the same!

Everything is an indivisible, seamless whole. And yet, this seamless unicity is showing up as infinite diversity, in infinitely unique and unrepeatable ways. And unicity is not a "thing," but simply the no-thing-ness that is showing up as multiplicity and diversity. The person we are and the world are not separate. It is one whole indivisible happening.

Joko Beck used to say that the best thing for your Zen practice besides retreats was a job in a busy office or an intimate relationship. Why? Because both of these would push all your buttons. Joko was all for discovering our edge, rather than retreating into comfortable safety. She herself had a job in a busy office while raising her children as a single working mother. That, to her, was Zen.

What about people who live alone or work in solitude? Relationship can be with anything and everything we encounter—the food we’re eating, the dishes we are washing, the trees and flowers, the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, our ostomy bag (if we have one), our chairs and tables. And caring for the world doesn’t necessarily mean being outwardly engaged - it could mean being a solitary, like an Anglican solitary monastic named Maggie Ross.

This is Maggie Ross (from Body and Soul: Ten American Women by Carolyn Coman and Judy Dater, published in 1988) speaking of her vocation as a solitary:

I just live my life. I aim at being non-result-oriented. It's a way of being, and it's a fairly aimless way of being...

Being a solitary means going to the heart of the world's sin and pain... it's a life of exposure... It's a very curious phenomenon that the more solitary you are, the more in touch you are with the world...

Everyone is afraid of solitude because in solitude you meet death. You meet your own illusions, the sham you are, the con artist you are, what you are trying to sell the world...

There is a reality to living out, living through what seems to be total despair, total emptiness, total meaninglessness. But you fall through despair into the hand of God...

It becomes more and more simple. You begin to know that just the fact that you're alive is prayer...

We don’t exist in isolation. Our ancestors and all of human history and the entire evolutionary history of the cosmos are within each of us. Here-Now contains all of time and space. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or reject the jewels of insight that our sacred traditions contain. We can reject the dogma, the fundamentalism, the out-dated ideas, and the parts that don’t work for us, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Toni Packer left the ritual, the hierarchy and the dogmatic aspects of Zen behind when she founded Springwater Center. She wanted to work in an open way, without external authority and final answers, in a place close to the natural world. But at Springwater, we discovered that the desire for an authority to tell us what to do, or the urge to be an authority, or the tendency toward dogmatism and fundamentalism can all be found inside each of us. It turns out that it’s not as simple as just leaving the outward forms behind.

Once again, the awakening journey requires a willingness to see “the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas - not just individually but collectively - and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves.” This ongoing discovery goes hand in hand with opening up to the “spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.” We need both aspects to be truly free, and both are an ongoing, moment-to-moment waking up, not some once-and-for-all accomplishment. There is no end to waking up, no end to this unfolding that we are.

Waking up is a continuing process. No one wakes up once and for all. There is no limit to wakefulness, just as there is no limit to aliveness....The surprise within the surprise of every new discovery is that there is ever more to be discovered. ~Brother David Steindl-Rast

We can’t land in any one-sided view and be truly liberated. This world is both real and unreal. Nothing matters and everything matters. Not one, not two.

And liberation doesn’t mean always feeling happy. Being betrayed by all your friends and nailed to a cross just isn’t a whole lot of fun no matter how much enlightenment there is. But perhaps, with grace, we might come, as Jesus did, to the place of surrender, the place of “Thy will be done,” which is the gateway to resurrection, otherwise known as a new beginning in each and every moment, or more accurately, in this moment, right here, right now.

from the substack of Joan Tillofson, October 16, 2024