True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (15 page)

When Ram Dass suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1997, he had more than four decades of spiritual training to help guide him. One of the American pioneers in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West, he had explored meditation practices from Hindu, Buddhist, Advaita, and other traditions and introduced several generations to meditation and the path of devoted service. Nonetheless, in the hours after his devastating stroke, he lay in a gurney staring at the pipes on the hospital ceiling, feeling utterly helpless and alone. No uplifting thoughts came to rescue him, and he was unable to regard what was happening with mindfulness or self-compassion. In that crucial moment, as he put it bluntly, “I flunked the test.”

I sometimes tell Ram Dass's story to students who worry that they too have “flunked the test.” They have practiced meeting difficulties with RAIN, but then they encounter a situation where the fear or distress or pain is so great that they just cannot arouse mindful presence. They are often left with feelings of deep discouragement and self-doubt, as if the door of refuge had been closed to them.

I start by trying to help them judge themselves less harshly. When we're in an emotional or physical crisis, we are often in trance, gripped by fear and confusion. At such times, our first step toward true refuge—often the only one available to us—is to discover some sense of caring connection with the life around and within us. We need to enter refuge through the gateway of love.

Ram Dass passed through this gateway by calling on Maharajji (Neem Karoli Baba), the Indian guru who had given him his Hindu name, and who had died twenty-four years earlier. In the midst of his physical anguish, powerlessness, and despair, Ram Dass began to pray to Maharajji, who to him had always been a pure emanation of love. As he later wrote, “I talked to my guru's picture and he spoke to me, he was all around me.” That Maharajji should be immediately “there,” as fully available as ever, was to Ram Dass pure grace. At home again in loving presence, he was able to be at peace with the intensity of the moment-to-moment challenge he was facing.

The gateway of love is a felt sense of care and relatedness—with a loved one, with the earth, with a spiritual figure, and ultimately, with awareness itself. Just as a rose needs the encouragement of light, we need love. Otherwise, as poet Hafiz says, “We all remain too frightened.”

The Legacy of Trauma

Dana had been coming to our weekly meditation group for four months when she approached me one evening after class. She told me that she needed more help in dealing with her fear. “Trust doesn't come easy for me,” she said, “but listening to you calms me down … I get the sense that you'd understand, that I'd feel safe working with you.”

Dana did not appear insecure or easily intimidated. A tall, robust African American woman in her late twenties, she had a tough job as a parole officer for a state prison facility. She also had an easy smile and lively eyes, but her words told a different story. “I can be just fine, Tara,” she told me, “and then if I get tripped off … I'm a totally dysfunctional person.” Especially when a strong male got angry with her, she said, she'd get “tongue-tied.” “It's like I'm a scared little girl, a basket case.”

I asked Dana to tell me about some recent times when she'd been tongue-tied with fear. She sat back in her chair, crossed her legs, and began nervously tapping the floor with one foot. When she spoke, it was in a rush of words. “One place it happens is with my boyfriend. He drinks—too much—and sometimes he'll start yelling, accusing me of things that aren't true … like that I'm flirting with other men or talking about him behind his back.” She stopped for a moment and then continued. “When he gets on my case, you know, threatening me,” she said, “my insides just huddle up into a tight little ball, and it's like the real me disappears.” At these times she was unable to think or talk. All she was aware of was the pounding of her heart and a choking feeling in her throat.

Her boyfriend was not the first man to violate her. It soon emerged that Dana had disappeared into that tight ball over and over again, ever since she was eleven years old and her uncle began to molest her. For four years, until he moved out of state, Dana had lived in fear that he would drop by when her mother was at work. After each assault, he would swear her to secrecy and threaten to punish her if she told. He often accused her of “asking for it”—if she had dressed or acted differently, he said, it never would have happened. Even then, a part of her knew this wasn't true, but something else in her believed him. “It still does,” she said. “It's like there's some badness in me that is always waiting to come out.”

Dana was clear about the source of her fears, but that clarity didn't protect her from feeling anxious, guilty, and powerless. The next time I saw her, Dana told me that after our first session, the old terrors of her uncle's threats had resurfaced. Had she betrayed her boyfriend? Would she be punished for “telling”? Now, just sitting down in my office plunged her into an old and familiar spiral of fear. She stopped talking, her face froze, and her eyes became fixed on the floor. I could see that she was trembling and her breathing had become shallow. “Are you disappearing inside?” I asked. She nodded without looking up.

I was fairly sure that Dana was having a post-traumatic stress reaction. She seemed to have tumbled back into the past, as defenseless and endangered as when her uncle was standing over her. In that moment, I knew it was unlikely that Dana could access a sense of mindful presence. The fear contraction was too strong.

I've found that what a person usually needs when fear is intense is to have a sense of what I call “being accompanied”—an experience of another person's caring, accepting presence. If a child is hurt or frightened, showing that we understand and care about her feelings is more important than looking for a Band-Aid or explaining why everything will be all right. The core of vulnerability is feeling alone in one's pain; connection with another person eases fear and increases the sense of safety. However, when a person has been traumatized, it is also important that he or she control the degree of contact. Otherwise, contact itself could be associated with the traumatizing situation.

“Dana” I said gently, “would you like me to sit next to you?” She nodded, and patted the cushion right next to her on the couch. When I moved to her side, I asked her if it was okay for me to sit so close, and she whispered, “Sure … thanks.” I suggested that she make herself as comfortable as possible. Then she could focus on feeling how her body was being supported by the sofa, and how her feet were contacting the floor. When she nodded again, I encouraged her to notice the felt sense of what it was like for us to be sitting together.

Over the next few minutes, I checked in several times, letting her know I was there with her and asking her if she was okay. She nodded and remained silent, but gradually she stopped trembling and her breathing became deeper and more regular. When I asked again how she was doing, she turned her head enough to catch my eye and gave me a small smile. “I'm settling down, Tara. It's better now.” I could tell by the way she was engaging—with her eyes and smile—that she no longer felt so trapped inside her fear.

I returned to my chair facing her so we could talk about what had happened. “I don't know what's wrong with me,” she began. “I should be able to get it together on my own, but when I get stuck like that, it's embarrassing. I just feel so broken. “ Dana realized that she had been traumatized, and yet she still considered her “episodes,” as she called them, to be a sign of weakness and cowardice. Worse, they were evidence that she was spiritually bereft. As she put it, “I have no spiritual center, it's just darkness there … no soul.”

One of the most painful and lasting legacies of trauma is self-blame. Students and clients often tell me that they feel broken, flawed, like “damaged goods.” They may understand the impact of trauma rationally, but they still feel self-revulsion and shame when they feel or act out of control. Their underlying belief seems to be that no matter how awful our experience, we should be able to subdue its terror, quiet our catastrophic thinking, and avoid false refuges like addictive behavior or withdrawing from intimacy. In other words, the self, no matter how distressed, should always be in control.

Inevitably, the small self “flunks the test.” When we're inside the trance of a separate, traumatized self, we are trapped in a loop of suffering: our brains and bodies continuously regenerate the physiology of fear, reinforcing our sense of danger and powerlessness. The healing of trauma, and of the shame that surrounds trauma, requires waking from the trance of separation. Dana needed to discover that she could take refuge in belonging even while the raw feelings of trauma were arising. Our close, personal contact during those disturbing moments in my office was an important first step.

Understanding Trauma

Trauma is the experience of extreme stress—physical or psychological—that overwhelms our normal capacities to process and cope. When we're in a traumatized state, we are gripped by primitive survival strategies, and cut off from our own inner wisdom and from the potential resources of the world around us. Our entire reality is confined to the self-sense of being isolated, helpless, and afraid. This profound state of disconnection is the core characteristic of trauma, and to some degree, of all difficult emotions.

I've worked with many people whose lives have been painfully imprinted by trauma, yet who have not recognized trauma as the cause of their struggles. They are so familiar with their own personal history that they discount the impact of the violence they have endured. Others, like Dana, have recognized the trauma, yet feel ashamed and undeserving of compassion. It can help to know just how pervasive trauma is: For example, somewhere between seventy-five million and one hundred million Americans have experienced sexual or physical abuse during childhood. The conservative American Medical Association estimates that more than 30 percent of all married women, as well as 30 percent of pregnant women, have been beaten by their spouses, often repeatedly. Less recognized sources of trauma include difficulties in our own process of being born, undergoing surgery, or the sudden loss of a loved one. Millions more endure trauma during wars or natural disasters. When the people I work with can acknowledge that they too have suffered from trauma, they begin to regard their own lives with a deeper and more sympathetic attention.

Not all trauma unfolds into the chronic condition called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to clinician and writer Peter Levine, trauma generates the suffering of PTSD if the strong biological energies it provokes cannot be successfully processed or resolved. When we are threatened, fear mobilizes us toward some action—fight or flight—that will protect us from danger. In traumatic situations, some people are able to escape from the danger, strike back, help others to safety, or find a strong ally to protect them in the future. The sense of being endangered is mitigated, the survival energies are discharged. But if there is no way to mobilize a response, as was the case for Dana when she was repeatedly raped by her uncle, the backup reaction is to freeze. In this state, the thwarted fear-based energies of fight/flight remain trapped in the body, and the mind cuts off or dissociates from the felt sense of their raw intensity. This dissociation, which may be experienced as numbness or a feeling of being “unreal,” is a core feature of PTSD.

These frozen traumatic memories may be evoked at any time. When a similar or associated situation arises, the unprocessed, temporarily dissociated energies of terror, rage, or helplessness are rearoused. We experience the distress of wanting to flee or fight all over again, as if it were happening in the present. For Dana, “telling on” her boyfriend in a therapy session with me set off the stored terror of her uncle's threats to punish her if she “told.”

My clients and students are sometimes stunned to realize how many of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have become organized around managing the intensity of their past trauma. Together, we explore how often they feel endangered, how often their energies are mobilized for flight or fight, and how these energies express or discharge themselves in a wide range of symptoms: In addition to dissociation and flashbacks, symptoms can include panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, depression, mental obsession, rage and/or addictive behaviors, and incapacity for sexual intimacy. Dana suffered debilitating fear (“disappearing into a tight ball”), but she would also at times lash out in anger, overeat, and smoke cigarettes. Like other false refuges, the symptomatic behaviors of trauma can temporarily dilute the raw pain of fear, but they prevent us from moving toward the safety and love that bring authentic healing. They also reconfirm our sense of being weak, out of control, and flawed.

People with post-traumatic stress often swing between being fully possessed by an emotion to being dissociated from the felt sense in the body. Caught in a constricting trance, they are ungrounded, cut off from key dimensions of their being. They may lose access to critical cognitive capacities, become unable to recall times when they have coped successfully, and seem blind to potential resources in the larger world. There is disconnection from their loving bonds with others. And finally, there is the loss of the sense of presence, and with that, a distancing from the very source of spirit. This was what Dana was referring to when she told me she had no spiritual center, no soul.