True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (16 page)

For Dana, as for others who have experienced the anguish of trauma, the crucial question is, “What will make it safe enough to come home—to this body, to life, to presence?”

Taking Refuge in Love

At our next session, Dana told me that the worst part of the sexual abuse was wanting someone to help her, but being too scared to ask. “I would rehearse telling my mother,” she said, “and then have nightmares about my uncle finding out and kidnapping and strangling me.”

While our last meeting had “tripped off” that old terror, Dana realized that she had recovered more quickly than usual. “When you sat next to me on the couch, it started to fade. There was something about you caring about me and just being there … I knew I was safe in that moment, I was okay.” She paused for a few moments and then asked a key question: “But what can I do when I'm on my own?”

In the process of healing, there is often a natural movement or progression. First we take comfort in the physical presence of others, and then we discover within ourselves a pathway to safety and love. This is an important and delicate sequence. The traumatized self is fragile and needs an external resource. Yet because the original traumatic wounding often occurs in a relationship, relationships may have become associated with danger. For this reason, a caring and secure relationship is an essential part of the healing work.

In many shamanistic cultures, it is believed that when a person is traumatized, the soul leaves the body as a way of protecting itself from intolerable pain. In a ceremony called “soul retrieval,” the traumatized person is held in the love and safety of community as the soul is invited to return. We can translate this to many other healing relationships, where the care of a therapist, friend, support group, or teacher initially provides the safety to reconnect with some degree of presence and well-being.

But as Dana's question implies, the deepest healing allows us to feel loved and safe in any situation, including when we're on our own. Through meditation, our outer refuge—the presence of a caring other—can become a bridge to discovering a trustworthy inner refuge, the love and care sourced in our own being.

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha taught his followers a lovingkindness meditation to ward off fear. Each year, before the rainy season in India, hundreds of monks would gather around the Buddha for spiritual teachings and instructions. They would then go off to find a suitable location for a three-month “rain retreat,” a period of intensive practice. One year, as the story goes, the monks found an idyllic forest grove with majestic trees and a clean spring of cool water—the perfect place to meditate day and night. They didn't realize, however, that the forest was inhabited by tree deities who felt dispossessed when the monks moved in. The infuriated spirits created terrifying illusions of monsters, ghosts, and demons, filled the groves with dreadful shrieks and moans, and produced a sickening stench. The monks soon became pale and shaky, unable to maintain any concentration or inner balance. Encouraged, the tree deities became even more aggressive, until the monks fled back to the Buddha's encampment.

Much to their dismay, however, the Buddha insisted that they return to the haunted grove. But before they left, he taught them verses of universal love to recite and reflect on, and promised that this would carry them beyond fear to spiritual liberation. As the monks neared the forest, they immersed themselves in this meditation, sending currents of unconditional lovingkindness first to themselves and then outward, to all beings everywhere. The hearts of the tree spirits became so infused with goodwill that they materialized in human form, offered the monks food and water, and invited them to stay. For the remainder of the monks' retreat, the tree-spirits basked in the aura of their loving presence and in return, kept the grove free of noise and distractions. And as the story also tells us, each one of the monks attained the pinnacle of spiritual realization.

Like the monks, we suffer whenever we dispossess the energies of shame or hurt, anger or fear. When any part of our inner life is unseen, unfelt, pushed away, or rejected, we feel alone and afraid. And like the tree spirits, these dispossessed energies will haunt us and keep us fear-bound until we meet them with a caring presence. As the Buddha taught, there are two expressions of love that naturally heal and free us. The Pali word for lovingkindness,
metta,
means unconditional friendliness, warmth, love, or care, and the Pali word for compassion,
karuna,
means to “feel with,” to bear suffering with an active sympathy. In his wisdom the Buddha realized that by purposefully awakening lovingkindness and compassion, we invite the alienated hurts and fears into consciousness, and free ourselves into a wholeness of being.

Today, researchers are discovering what happens in the brains of meditators when their attention is focused on these two expressions of love. Sophisticated brain scans show that the left frontal cortex, a part of the brain that is deactivated during trauma, lights up during lovingkindness and compassion meditations. This brain activity correlates strongly with subjective feelings of happiness, openness, and peace.

When I teach meditations for the heart, I often ask my students to visualize being held by a loved one and/or to offer gentle self-touch as part of the practice. Research shows that a twenty-second hug stimulates production of oxytocin, the hormone associated with feelings of love, connectedness, and safety. Yet we don't need to receive a physical hug to enjoy this benefit: Either imagining a hug, or feeling our own touch—on our cheek, on our chest—also releases oxytocin. Whether through visualization, words, or touch, meditations on love can shift brain activity in a way that arouses positive emotions and reduces traumatic reactivity.

This is why my next goal in working with Dana was to help her access feelings of love and safety on her own. She had already learned a traditional version of the lovingkindness meditation in my class, but now we would personalize it, identifying the particular images and words that would allow her to feel held in love.

“Who,” I asked, “helps you find a warm feeling of being safe inside?” Dana's eyes lit up. “That's easy. Marin, my friend, or my little sister Serena. I trust both of them, they've totally got my back. And I feel safe … with you.” She said this a little shyly and I smiled, letting her know that I felt honored to be counted in.

I suggested she picture what I called “her allies” right here in the room, imagining that she was surrounded by the three of us. Closing her eyes, Dana concentrated for a few moments and then said softly, “Okay, I see each of you. You and Marin are on either side … each of you is holding one of my arms … and my sister's right behind me.”

“What's that feel like, Dana?” Without much hesitation she responded. “It's like being in a warm bath!”

“Good,” I said. “Now let yourself just soak that warmth in, feel how deep it can go … how it can relax the places inside that most need it.” I paused and then asked, “As you let in the warmth of your allies' presence, what words might be most comforting to hear and remember?”

Dana was very still and then she nodded. “It's that I'm safe, that I'm loved … that's my prayer: May I feel safe, may I feel loved.”

I waited a few moments, and then said, “Dana, if you contract inside and get huddled up in fear, just imagine each of us here, around you again. Feel the warmth surrounding you and let those words, your prayer, comfort you … let the meaning, the feeling of being safe and loved, sink into you.
Let your body have the felt sense of being loved
. You can practice that now if you'd like.”

Dana settled back in her chair and her breathing became easier and deeper. She rolled her head in circles a few times to loosen her neck and then was quite still. When she looked up at me again, she smiled and her eyes were clear. “This reminds me that it's
possible
to relax. It's like there's a net around me and I can't fall too far. I feel better than I've felt in a long time.”

Before Dana left, I encouraged her to practice calling on her allies at some point each day, during a time of low stress. “Experiment with what helps you feel our presence, our company” I suggested. “You might whisper our names, visualize our faces, feel our touch supporting you … whatever connects you with this sense of ease. Then remember your prayer for safety and love … and let it fill you.”

The Need for New Resources

Discovering a way to contact positive emotions and in particular a sense of care and relative safety is a key element in healing trauma. Recent research has shown that it is the common denominator of all effective trauma therapies. In order to achieve freedom from intense emotions like terror or shame,
the felt sense of that pain needs to be reexperienced within an enlarged, enriched context
. By this I mean that some additional resource like love, safety, or strength needs to be present for the repeating pattern of emotional pain to transform.

This approach also draws on a basic insight of modern learning theory. For new learning to occur, the new information needs to be combined with a known experience. For Dana, this meant experiencing her old fears of punishment while someone—in this case, me—was there who might help her feel safe in the present moment.

Therapies or meditative strategies that do not provide this added resource of care can easily be retraumatizing, because reexperiencing the fear and helplessness of the traumatic event without new resources confirms one's felt identity as an endangered, powerless self. In contrast, developing an inner refuge where we feel loved and safe enables us to reduce the intensity of traumatic fear when it arises. When we are able to contact an inner refuge through our internally generated words, images, or self-touch, our biochemistry shifts. Our fight-flight-freeze reactivity no longer overwhelms potentially adaptive responses, and the mind becomes more spacious and receptive. New associations, new inner resources, new ways of coping and understanding begin to emerge spontaneously. The most basic outcome is a growing sense of self-trust—we know that we have within us whatever is needed to be present with our life.

Cultivating an Inner Refuge

You can begin to develop a reliable inner refuge on your own by drawing on whatever in your past experience has helped you to feel a sense of connectedness and an increased sense of safety.
This reflection is best done when you are not in the grip of fear
. Once you have tuned in to these existing pathways to refuge, you can deliberately use the power of attention to make these states of mind more readily available.

When I work with students and clients to develop an inner refuge of safety and love, I often start with the following questions.

Like Dana, some people immediately identify an individual—a family member or friend, healer or teacher—whose presence creates the feeling of “at home.” For others, home is a spiritual community, a twelve-step group, or a circle of intimate friends. Sometimes the feeling of belonging is strongest with a person who has died, as for Ram Dass with Maharajji, or with a person you revere but may never have met, such as the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. Many people feel drawn to an archetypal figure like the Buddha or Jesus, Kwan-yin (the bodhisattva of compassion), the Virgin Mary, or some other expression of the divine mother. I've also known a good number of people who feel comfort and belonging when they call to mind their dog or cat. I assure students that no one figure is more spiritual or elevated or pure than another as a focus. All that matters is choosing a source of safe and loving feelings.

Some people find a sense of sanctuary in the natural world, while others feel more oriented and secure when they're surrounded by the noise and vibrancy of a big city. Your safe space may be a church or temple, your office, or a crowded sports stadium. Some people feel most at home curled up with a book in bed—others when they're working on a laptop at a busy coffee shop. Certain activities may offer a sense of ease or flow, from playing Ping-Pong to cleaning out a closet to listening to music. Even if you almost never feel truly relaxed and secure, you can build on any setting or situation where you are closest to feeling at home.

One client I worked with thrived on solitary walks in the woods, so I asked him to visualize a spot that was special for him, where a sun-dappled stream swirled around rocks, and then to tell me what he could see, smell, hear, and feel. We revisited the stream together several times, and gradually, as he deepened his attention, he discovered a smooth flowing sensation in his chest that was linked with this place. Then whenever he felt overwhelmed by depression or anxiety, he would summon his sacred space, put his hand on his chest, and breathe in a sense of aliveness, flow, and ease.

Sometimes what arises is a memory of a particularly meaningful experience—an artistic or professional endeavor, a service offered, an athletic feat—that was a source of personal gratification or accomplishment. Whatever the experience, it's important to explore how it deepens our trust of ourselves.

One man I worked with recalled how he'd joined a picket line to protest the discriminatory hiring policies of his corporation. When he got in touch with the felt sense of integrity and courage that he remembered from that time, he felt a steady, bright vibrancy radiating from his heart, filling his entire chest and overflowing into the world around him. “Something very real in me had come forward,” he told me.