By allowing yourself the space to be as you are, you
discover a self-existing sanity that lies deeper than thought or
feeling. For many of us this may be the hardest path of all—opening
our hearts to ourselves.”
Freud once admitted in a letter to Jung that
“psychoanalysis is essentially a cure through love.” Yet
while many psychotherapists might privately agree that love has
some kind of role in the healing process, the word “love” is
curiously absent from most of the therapeutic literature. The
same is true for the word “heart.” Not only is this term
missing from the psychological literature, the tone of the
literature itself also lacks heart.
My interest in the place of heart in psychotherapy
developed out of my experience with meditation. Although Western
thought often defines mind in terms of reason, and heart in
terms of feeling, in Buddhism heart and mind can both be
referred to by the same term (chitta in Sanskrit). Indeed, when
Tibetan Buddhists refer to mind, they often point to their chest.
Mind in this sense is not thinking mind, but rather big mind—a
direct knowing of reality that is basically open and friendly
toward what is. Centuries of meditators have found this openness
to be the central feature of human consciousness.
Heart and Basic Goodness
Heart, then, is a direct presence that allows a complete
attunement with reality. In this sense, it has nothing to do
with sentimentality. Heart is the capacity to touch and be
touched, to reach out and let in.
Our language expresses this twofold activity of the heart,
which is like a swinging door that opens in both directions. We
say, “My heart went out to him,” or “I took her into my
heart.” Like the physical organ with its systole and diastole,
the heart-mind involves both receptive letting in, or letting be,
and active going out to meet, or being-with. In their different
ways, both psychological and spiritual work remove the barriers
to these two movements of the heart, like oiling the door so
that it can open freely in both directions.
What shuts down the heart more than anything is not
letting ourselves have our own experience, but instead judging
it, criticizing it, or trying to make it different from what it
is. We often imagine there is something wrong with us if we feel
angry, needy and dependent, lonely, confused, sad, or scared. We
place conditions on ourselves and our experience: “If I feel
like this, there must be something wrong with me… I can only
accept myself if my experience conforms to my standard of how I
should be.”
Psychological work, when practiced in a larger spiritual
context, can help people discover that it is possible to be
unconditional with themselves—to welcome their experience and
hold it with understanding and compassion, whether or not they
like it at any given moment. What initially makes this possible
is the therapist’s capacity to show unconditional warmth,
concern and friendliness toward the client’s experience, no
matter what the client is going through. Most people in our
culture did not receive this kind of unconditional acceptance in
their childhood. So they internalized the conditions their
parents or society placed on them: “You are an acceptable
human being only if you measure up to our standards.” And
because they continue to place these same conditions on
themselves, they remain alienated from themselves.
The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetan teachers have
spoken of their great surprise and shock at discovering just how
much self-hatred Westerners carry around inside them. Such an
intense degree of self-blame is not found in traditional
Buddhist cultures, where there is an understanding that the
heart-mind, also known as buddhanature, is unconditionally open,
compassionate, and wholesome. Since we are all embryonic buddhas,
why would anyone want to hate themselves?
Chögyam Trungpa described the essence of our nature in
terms of basic goodness. In using this term, he did not mean
that people are only morally good—which would be naive,
considering all the evil that humans perpetrate in this world.
Rather, basic goodness refers to our primordial nature, which is
unconditionally wholesome because it is intrinsically attuned to
reality.
This primordial kind of goodness goes beyond conventional
notions of good and bad. It lies much deeper than conditioned
personality and behavior, which are always a mix of positive and
negative tendencies. From this perspective, all the evil and
destructive behavior that goes on in our world is the result of
people failing to recognize the fundamental wholesomeness of
their essential nature.
Meditation,
Psychotherapy and Unconditional Friendliness
While studying Rogerian therapy in graduate school, I
used to be intrigued, intimidated and puzzled by Carl Rogers’
term “unconditional positive regard.” Although it sounded
appealing as an ideal therapeutic stance, I found it hard to put
into practice. First of all, there was no specific training for
it. And since Western psychology had not provided me with any
understanding of heart, or the intrinsic goodness underlying
psychopathology, I was unclear just where unconditional positive
regard should be directed. It was only in turning to the
meditative traditions that I came to appreciate the
unconditional goodness at the core of being human, and this in
turn helped me understand the possibility of unconditional love
and its role in the healing process.
The Buddhist counterpart of unconditional positive regard
is loving-kindness (maitri in Sanskrit, metta in Pali).
Loving-kindness is unconditional friendliness—a quality of
allowing and welcoming human beings and their experience. Yet
before I could genuinely express this kind of acceptance toward
others, I first had to discover what it meant for myself.
Meditation is what allowed me to do this.
Meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness through
teaching you how to just be—without doing anything, without
holding onto anything, and without trying to think good thoughts,
get rid of bad thoughts, or achieve a pure state of mind. This
is a radical practice. There is nothing else like it. Normally
we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone
with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become
nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we
should be doing or feeling. We start putting conditions on
ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures
up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so
painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from
being with ourselves.
In meditation practice, you work directly with your
confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect
of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without
trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way,
or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space
to be as you are—letting whatever arises arise, without
fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence—this is
perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat
yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your
experience.
As you simplify in this way, you start to feel your very
presence as wholesome in and of itself. You don’t have to
prove that you are good. You discover a self-existing sanity
that lies deeper than all thought or feeling. You appreciate the
beauty of just being awake, responsive, and open to life.
Appreciating this basic, underlying sense of goodness is the
birth of maitri—unconditional friendliness toward yourself.
The discovery of basic goodness can be likened to
clarifying muddy water—an ancient metaphor from the Taoist and
Buddhist traditions. Water is naturally pure and clear, though
its turbulence may stir up mud from below. Our awareness is like
that, essentially clear and open, but muddied with the
turbulence of conflicting thoughts and emotions. If we want to
clarify the water, what else is there to do but let the water
sit?
Usually we want to put our hands in the water and do
something with the dirt—struggle with it, try to change it,
fix it, sanitize it—but this only stirs up more mud: “Maybe
I can get rid of my sadness by thinking positive thoughts.”
But then the sadness sinks deeper and hardens into depression.
“Maybe I’ll get my anger out, show people how I feel.” But
this only spreads the dirt around. The water of awareness
regains its clarity through seeing the muddiness for what it
is—recognizing the turbulence of thought and feeling as noise
or static, rather than as who we really are. When we stop
reacting to it, which only stirs it up all the more, the mud can
settle.
This core discovery enabled me to extend this same kind
of unconditional friendliness toward my clients. When I first
started practicing therapy and found myself disliking certain
clients or certain things about them, I felt guilty or
hypocritical. But eventually I came to understand this in a new
way. Unconditional love or loving-kindness did not mean that I
always had to like my clients, any more than I liked all the
twists and turns of my own scheming mind. Rather, it meant
providing an accommodating space in which their knots could
begin to unravel.
It was a great relief to realize that I did not have to
unconditionally love or accept that which is conditioned—another’s
personality. Rather, unconditional friendliness is a natural
response to that which is itself unconditional—the basic
goodness and open heart in others, beneath all their defenses,
rationalizations, and pretenses. Unconditional love is not a
sentiment, but a willingness to be open. It is not a love of
personality, but the love of being, grounded in the recognition
of the unconditional goodness of the human heart.
Fortunately, unconditional friendliness does not mean
having to like what is going on. Instead, it means allowing
whatever is there to be there as it is, and inviting it to
reveal itself more fully. In trying to help clients develop
unconditional friendliness toward a difficult feeling, I often
say, “You don’t have to like it. You can just let it be
there, and make a place for your dislike of it as well.”
Similarly, letting myself have my whole range of response and
feeling toward my clients allows me to be more present with them.
The more maitri I have for myself, by letting myself be, the
more I can be with others and let them be themselves.
This of course holds true for all relationships. For
instance, it is only when we can let our fear be, and hold it in
a friendly space, that we can be present with our loved ones in
their fear, or when they are doing something that stirs up our
fear. We only react to others with blame and rejection when
their experience mirrors or provokes some feeling in ourselves
that we cannot relate to in a friendly way. In this way,
developing loving-kindness toward the whole range of our own
experience naturally allows us to have loving-kindness toward
others.
The health of living organisms is maintained through the
free-flowing circulation of energy. We see this in the endless
cycles and flow of water, the cradle of life, which purifies
itself through circulating, rising from the oceans, falling on
the mountains, and rushing in clear streams back to the sea.
Similarly, the circulation of blood in the body brings new life
in the form of oxygen to the cells, while allowing the removal
of toxins from the body. Any interference with circulation is
the beginning of disease.
Similarly, when loving-kindness does not circulate
throughout our system, blockages and armoring build up and we
get sick, psychologically or physically. If we fail to recognize
the basic goodness contained within all our experiences,
self-doubt blooms like algae in water, clogging up the natural
flow of self-love that keeps us healthy. But if we can extend
unconditional friendliness toward our own or another’s whole
range of experience and very being, this begins to penetrate the
clouds of self-judgment, so our life energy can circulate freely
again.
This understanding allowed me to approach psychotherapy
in a new way. I found that if I could connect with the basic
goodness in those I worked with—the underlying, often hidden
longing and will to be who they are and meet life fully—not
just as an ideal or as positive thinking, but as a living
reality, then I could start to forge an alliance with the
essential core of health within them. I could help them meet and
go through whatever they were experiencing—as frightening or
horrifying as it might seem—just as I myself had done on the
meditative cushion. Orienting myself toward the basic goodness
hidden beneath their conflicts and struggles, I could contact
the deeper aliveness circulating within them and between the two
of us in the present moment. This made possible a
heart-connection that promoted real change.
I was inspired in this approach by the example of the
bodhisattvas in Buddhism, who, in their commitment to help all
sentient beings, join compassion with the discriminating wisdom
that sees through people’s suffering to the embryonic buddha
within. For me, seeing the buddha in others is not a way of
denying or minimizing their suffering or conflicts. Rather, in
the words of Robert Thurman, “A bodhisattva sees
simultaneously how a being is free from suffering, as well as
seeing it with its suffering, and that gives the bodhisattva
great compassion that is truly effective.”
When bodhisattvas engender this kind of all-seeing
compassion, according to the Vimalakirti Sutra, they “generate
the love that is truly a refuge for all living beings; the love
that is peaceful because free of grasping; the love that is not
feverish, because free of passions; the love that accords with
reality because it contains equanimity; the love that has no
presumption because it has eliminated attachment and aversion;
the love that is nondual because it is involved neither with the
external nor the internal; the love that is imperturbable
because totally ultimate.”
Honoring
Our Experience
The poignant truth about human suffering is that all our
neurotic, self-destructive patterns are twisted forms of basic
goodness, which lies hidden within them.
For example, a little girl with an alcoholic father sees
his unhappiness, and wants to make him happy so that she could
experience unconditional love—the love of being—flowing
between them. Unfortunately, out of her desire to please him,
she also winds up bending herself out of shape, disregarding her
own needs and blaming herself for failing to make him happy. As
a result, she ends up with a harsh inner critic and repeatedly
reenacts a neurotic victim role with the men in her life.
Although her fixation on trying to please is misguided, it
originally arose out of a spark of generosity and caring for her
father.
Just as muddy water contains clear water within it when
the dirt settles out, all our negative tendencies reveal a spark
of basic goodness and intelligence at their core, which is
usually obscured by our habitual tendencies. Within our anger,
for instance, there may be an arrowlike straightforwardness that
can be a real gift when communicated without attack or blame.
Our passivity may contain a capacity for acceptance and letting
things be. And our self-hatred often contains a desire to
destroy those elements of our personality that oppress us and
prevent us from being fully ourselves. Since every negative or
self-defeating behavior is but a distorted form of our larger
intelligence, we don’t have to struggle against this dirt that
muddies the water of our being.
With this understanding, work with our psychological
blockages becomes like aikido, the martial art that involves
flowing with the attack, rather than against it. By recognizing
the deeper, positive urge hidden within our ego strategies, we
no longer have to treat them as an enemy. After all, the
strategies of the ego are all ways of trying to be. They were
the best we could do as a child. And they’re not all that bad,
considering that they were dreamed up by the mind of a child.
Realizing that we did the best we could under the circumstances,
and seeing ego as an imitation of the real thing—an attempt to
be ourselves in a world that did not recognize, welcome or
support our being—helps us have more understanding and
compassion for ourselves.
Our ego itself is testimony to the force of love. It
developed as a way to keep going in the face of perceived
threats to our existence, primarily lack of love. In the places
where love was missing, we built ego defenses. So every time we
enact one of our defensive behaviors, we are also implicitly
paying homage to love as the most important thing.
As a therapist, meditation was my aikido teacher. As I
sat on the meditation cushion with a whole range of
“pathological” mind-states passing through my awareness, I
began to see depression, paranoia, obsession and addiction as
nothing more than the changing weather of the mind. These
mind-states did not belong to me in particular or mean anything
about who I was. Recognizing this helped me relax with the whole
spectrum of my experience and meet it more inquisitively.
This helped me relax with my clients’ mind-states as
well. In working with someone’s terror, I could honor it as
the intense experience it was, without letting it unsettle me. I
also took it as an opportunity to meet and work with my own fear
once again. Or if I was helping someone explore an empty, lonely
place inside, this gave me a chance to check in with that part
of myself as well.
It became clear that there was only one mind, though it
may appear in many guises. While this might sound strange and
mystical, I mean it in a very practical sense: The client’s
awareness and mine are two ends of one continuum when we are
working together. Fear is essentially fear, self-doubt is
self-doubt, blocked desire is blocked desire—though these may
take on a variety of forms and meanings for different
individuals. Realizing that I shared one awareness with the
people I worked with allowed me to keep my heart open instead of
retreating into a position of clinical distance.
Whenever two people meet and connect, they share the same
presence of awareness, and there is no way to divide it neatly
into “your awareness” and “my awareness.” This basic
fact—that other people’s experience resonates in and through
us, whether we like it or not—is why other people can grate on
our nerves and “drive us crazy.” Yet this “interbeing”
is also what allows us to feel genuine empathy for what someone
else is going through. Before we can truly embody this vast
space of empathy and compassion for others, where we can totally
let them be who they are, we must first be on friendly terms
with our own raw and tender feelings. For many of us this may be
the hardest path of all—opening our hearts to ourselves.
JOHN WELWOOD, Ph.D.,
is a psychotherapist in San Francisco, associate editor of the
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and author of seven books,
including Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening. This
article has been adapted for the Shambhala Sun from his new book,
Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and
the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation, published in
April by Shambhala Publications. © 2000 by John Welwood. |