Zen and Some Thoughts on Poetry

            With as busy as I have been, I regret that I have not been able to keep up with reading and writing poetry.  Nonetheless, every now and then I run across something that resonates for one reason or another.  I also tend to write when emotion is at its rawest.  I’m just not in that space right now.  Zen and all of the meditation that I have been engaged in have placed me comfortably in the analytical mode where I need to be to complete this dissertation.  If all goes well, that journey completes itself within the year. I have the distinct feeling that I will be making sense of that journey for some time. Too much has happened, the path has forked, the path disappears, the path resumes.  Robert Frost, presented with two paths that diverged in a yellow wood, chose the one less traveled.  Luxury to choose.  The Taoist in me says that half of the time there is only one path.

            I will stick with this metaphor for now, because I suspect that a lot of the time we are clearing the path.  When I actually started studying Buddhism three or four months ago, I read something about Mahayana Buddhism appealing to psychologists, and Zen appealing to the poets.  This makes more sense to me now, Zen is inextricably tied to the arts and culture of Japan.  It also makes sense to me why Zen appealed to me instinctively.  Poetry is probably closer to the natural state I wish to be, psychology is my profession, and while enjoyable it can be exhausting and unhealthy for me.  I end up analyzing my own mind, and applying mental models that all eventually find their necessary inadequacy and leave me in a recess where I have produced enough existential dread to power my next three years of work.

            Zen also appeals to the Taoist in me.  Zen was birthed out of Taoism, which was a rejection of the formalism of Confucianism.  The art of Japan can be strikingly minimalist, which leads to the perception that Zen is to be associated with the most austere formalism, and while it cannot be disconnected from the activity, Zen occupies the space just beyond. It is knowing the form so thoroughly that one is liberated from it, free to pursue the artless art.  Zen in the Art of Archery illustrates this much better than I can.  Poetry is the language for this space.  It is our best effort to put language to direct experience.  It never captures it, but it can arrive so close that it achieves something that appears universal.  I have no idea if e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton knew anything about Zen, but I see in their art the points where the formalism breaks under the emotional weight of direct experience.

            I was in the library a few weeks ago and happened on a biography of James Dickey, entitled The World as a Lie.  I had been oddly attracted to his work when I ran across some unfamiliar pieces this Spring.  But, this title was now wedded to all that I had been reading about Buddhism.  The world as it is perceived is filled with illusions.  A massive amount of what you are visually perceiving at this given moment, is not accurate, the brain constructs a lot of the periphery based on assumptions—it has no time to see every brick when the point is seeing the wall that you may be about to hit.  Such is life, where our goals, impulses, emotions, and memories all compete for attention.  This is not necessarily a regrettable position, there is beauty and history in all of that.  I sometimes wonder if this a necessary condition for our existence, without mystery, confusion, ambiguity we would have something that probably resembles certainty.  What purpose would we have to living?  Zen rejects this not on the grounds that these things don’t matter, but that they are incomplete and therefore certainty is an illusion, even when we feel certain.  We miss the world for the lie.

            So, back to the journey I have been on for the past 4 years. In March I was convinced that I had a moment of Zen. I had no idea what I was talking about, because I have now studied Zen and I can tell you that I know nothing about it.  It was probably closer to what they call satori, an awakening in perception, an awareness.  If you read anything on Zen you will find countless examples of this experience. It is both fleeting and unmistakable, and it really cannot be captured in words because it is so elusive.  It can be described, but what is the point? I only I have access to it. 

            As best I can describe, I felt time was suspended.  It was not that I could see the future, that is ridiculous, and please slap me if I ever say anything that grandiose.  But, I could feel the future, and the past, perfectly.  There was no distinction to time.  All of the love of my friends and family, every person that came and went through the first 40 years of my life, the joy at the births of my three children, the losses that haunt—all of it was there.  So you do not mistake me, this is not one of those spiritual stories of bliss.  Bliss was there, but there was also dread.  I still have no idea what the significance of this moment is, but it continues to fuel a massive amount of writing, creative and professional.  It was the first time that all of the dissertation ideas fused and my vision for that project presented itself.

            Zen is present in spontaneity and that is why it appeals to poets and artists, but I suspect that it is present in a great many pursuits—Fritjof Capra wrote similarly about this experience in the Tao of Physics.  One of the things that I am most thankful for in this odyssey is that Zen has placed me in such wonderous state of curiosity.  I sit to write creative work and I have no idea where it is going and could care less, because that is the point—its’s fascinating to see where it goes.  I write these blog entries, without much care if they are read or not, just out of curiosity what others see in it.  I am utterly transfixed with my dissertation work out of the pure curiosity of what my investigation may reveal.  To go back to the path metaphor—something tells me that Zen is what lies just beyond the path I’ve been clearing.

As I prepare to read some of my work this week, I will offer some of the poetry that resonated over the last year:

The Waking,

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling, what is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the ground, I shall walk softly there

And learn by going where I have to go

Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Great nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady, I should know

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

I am not sure I can add much analysis to what is plainly said here, but this has often been on my mind in those moments where I am subjecting myself to the verbal abuse that comes with not working on dissertation.  It says to me screw it, you’re onto something, have faith in yourself and the process, it will unfold on its own.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another  
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

There was debate in my writing group about whether Wright earned the last line.  What I can tell you, is that it spoke to me. All of what is present to him in this moment is elemental.  There was a moment in the past few months that I had the distinct feeling in those last lines—that I have wasted the last forty years of life.  There was way to much of me governed by externals—worry about offending others (people who truly know me, know that this can be nearly compulsive), worry about the next steps, worry that I was being misunderstood.  So little of that matters.

(From) The Strength of Fields, by James Dickey

The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                         My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

     It sounds like prayer to me.  I hope I have lived up to me efforts to be kind.  I can tell you that about a month ago I was raving like a lunatic about how my dissertation, and life, and Zen and how this is all interconnected and I could not stop writing about it, Sonia said—“well it sounds like purpose.”

  

      And this, I ran across a few days ago.  It was unfamiliar to me, and I see so much that is universal.  We are born into suffering, there is sorrow, there is regret, and yet it is worth refusing this—to live, and to tell.  The tell can be a thousand different things, a thousand gestures of kindness, finding one’s voice through art in spite of life’s thousands of torments.   

      

   I go back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds   

   I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

   I see my father strolling out

    under the ochre sandstone arch, the 

    red tiles glinting like bent

   plates of blood behind his head, 

   I see my mother with a few light books at her hip

   standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

   the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, 

   its sword-tips aglow in the May air,

   they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

   they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

   innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

   I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

   don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

   he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

   you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

   you are going to do bad things to children,

   you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

   you are going to want to die. I want to go

   up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

   her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

   her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

   his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

   his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

   but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

   take them up like the male and female   

   paper dolls and bang them together   

   at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

   strike sparks from them, I say 

   Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

   Laura said to me a few weeks ago, “wherever you are going to, I’m glad you’re writing it all out.”  I suppose that’s what this is—the telling about it.

Did you know Chatham has a Labyrinth? (Also, essay in which I solve a Zen koan)

Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?—Zen koan

I started walking the labyrinth a few weeks ago.  There was something I had read in a Daniel Pink book about labyrinths and their meditative quality. Dena and I had Indian food that day and with nothing else to do, I mentioned that Chatham has a labyrinth, maybe we should go find it.  I had been studying Buddhism for several weeks.  My mind was still a mess.  We found the labyrinth, it was named after someone I don’t know.  I know nothing about her story.  Some of the rocks were out of place, and in other spaces it seemed a bit overgrown, untended.

Weeks ago my Buddhist readings took me to the study of Zen.  At it’s core Zen has a simple philosophy about words, whether written or spoken, they are entirely inadequate for our experience.  I suppose this is the purpose of labyrinth.  Dena asked no questions.  We just walked. Does there even have to be purpose?

Three weeks ago, I attended a Quaker service, right before writing group.  I had a few hours to kill, and so I returned to the labyrinth.  When I was younger I assumed that the term was synonymous with maze.  It’s not, the entrance and exit are one in the same.  And its as if you are compelled to walk to the center, just because.  Why else would you be here? There is no big secret. So if you are wondering what it is at the center of the labyrinth I will share with you. 

A pile of dogshit.

 

Three weeks ago, I walked the labyrinth and fortunately looking down, I noticed a pile of dogshit.  After a few moments this became incredibly funny to me.  I planned to write something all Zen about it—how we journey, and journey, and seek answers to mysteries, and sometimes the revelation is that everything is still just still a pile of shit.  I intended to write about this, and I cannot remember why I did not.

So the following week I returned to the labyrinth and wound my walk to the center space, and I looked for the pile of dogshit, only to find that someone had stepped in it.  And now this is ten times funnier to me.  There is a tension in Zen between discipline and spontaneity.  By restraining myself from even writing about this, I write something infinitely more fascinating several weeks later.  And this leads to so many better questions:  who was this dog? Was he with an owner? Did the owner instruct him to take a shit in the center of the labyrinth, or did this dog intuit that this was just a quiet and perfect place to take a shit?  They say animals have a sense of magnetic north.

If you are wondering the pile of dogshit is still there this week.  It’s appearing more weathered.  I will be sad to see it go, completely.  It was there at the center of the labyrinth at the perfect time.  One of the early methods in Zen Buddhism was called direct pointing.  No point in naming the moon, because words and labels will be inadequate to capture everything the moon is. 

If you want to join me some day, walking the labyrinth I will be kind enough to directly point where not to step. But, I won’t tell you not to step in it. I might be robbing you of something worth discovering.

Building the Resilient Brain

Building the Resilient Brain

So, the resilience literature turned out to be way more complicated than I anticipated.  The resilience literature comprises one of the many streams of research in Positive Psychology, and one of the most fruitful because it covers such a broad range of human behavior.  It lends itself better to study than some of the other positive psychology constructs like spirituality and flow--which remain challenging to conceptualize and evaluate.  Yet, because it crosses such a broad range of psychological literature, along with an extensive history, it has become a nightmare for me to sort all of this.

Just writing this entry will help me enormously.  In the past few years the literature on resilience has begun to sort itself into separate dimensions for personal resilience and employee resilience.  This is an academic distinction, you really do not want to wade through this, unless that is your thing.  It is my thing with regard to school.  There are days where i regret choosing Psychological Capital as my thing.  But, those of you who know me, know that I also really like therapy and I miss it terribly.  One of the most painful aspects of this odyssey through doctoral work has been that i left the field of direct practice (for the most part).  There are days where it occurs to me that I may have entirely deviated from the path I was supposed to follow. I continuously encounter things that would have made me ten times better as a therapist. I have no way of applying them. 

Tonight, Kanishka asks me “why blog, about it?”   Because, I have no idea where I am going with any of this, and I want to document it and trace if back if necessary.  I see everything more clearly than I ever have before.  I don’t know what I will come back to, but the writing helps me refine the ideas.  Also, some people find the information helpful, and that helps me to sleep at night when I ponder whether I made erroneously career choices.  Also, it helps me to fulfill a small piece of what is missing from my soul since I am unable to practice counseling.  Also, KK, I thought you and other people might comment and argue with me and therefore make me know my material better…

So, the article referenced below was fascinating.  It has applicability to the workplace, but its relevance is universal and worth sharing.  It has a bunch of information that will be practical if you are a counselor, or a human being who has suffered.  In other words, all of us.  I was lucky to have had training in CBT and DBT, along with the professional experience to apply these interventions.  They work and one of the fortunate qualities of these therapies is that they are not difficult to grasp conceptually.  The challenge is recognizing how and when to apply them appropriately.  I was intrigued by this article specifically because well over a decade has passed since my training.  Neuroscience is now validating why some of these interventions are effective.

Tabibnia and Radecki (2018) surveyed the resilience literature for specific intervention strategies that were known to increase neuroplasticity.  It should come as no surprise that stress in both acute and chronic forms has a significant impact on neuroanatomy.  This has consequences for both physical and mental health.  The chronic activation of systems designed to respond to fear, reinforce pathways long after a dangerous situation has resolved, impairing memory and learning in the process.  Fortunately, there is now compelling evidence that these conditions can be reversed by removal of the stressor.  That said, I want to caution that “removal” of the stressor is complicated; i wish the authors had used a different term.  There are several strategies to remove a stressor, but some are way more effective than others.  Avoidance, is a prime example and it will be covered below.  It has its place, but it is nowhere near as effective as acceptance and transformation.

The authors identify 15 resilience interventions that are supported by empirical data, 3 behavioral pathways and 2 cognitive pathways.

Behavioral Pathways

Reducing Fear and Stress Responses

1. Exposure and Reconsolidation: the best method for extinguishing fear is systematic exposure to the feared stimulus in a setting that is safe.  This allows for new pathways to be formed between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which ultimately facilitates reconsolidation--the movement of memory from short to long term storage.
2. Active Avoidance:  This is an effective strategy in certain contexts, and should be distinguished from passive avoidance (which is bad).  Active avoidance reminds me of the DBT skill Distract.  It is the doing something instead of nothing technique, and this can be incredibly important in stages where the stress is acute. (over reliance has a downside e.g frequent hand washing during flu season is good, excessive hand washing is a maladaptive compulsion)
3. Controlling the stressor: self-efficacy--set tasks where control is possible--e.g in the workplace--if you fear your boss, initiate a short neutral conversation with the expectation that this is the only thing you set out to accomplish. Repeat. Often. It leads to mastery.  Mastery produces feelings of control.
4. Stress Inoculation: Approach stress proactively. Extend the above technique to other areas.  Exposure to manageable stress is healthy, it helps in application of the skill set and reduces anxiety. Performance improves as a result. Performance improvement makes one feel more prepared for the next challenge. You are inoculating against stress.

Physical Health

1. Sleep: 7-8 hrs is the ideal amount of sleep for the brain health
2. Exercise: aerobic exercise--affects hippocampal cell production, regulates stress
3. Diet restriction--calorie reduction by 20%, intermittent fasting diet (5:2) have been linked to BDNF production

Connecting Socially

1. Social connectedness and support--(positive social connections, particularly close friendships with deep meaning, as opposed to large network of casual friends)
2. Gratitude: (gratitude comes up almost everywhere  in the positive psychology literature--expressing to self or others. I can share that when I was going through my divorce there were days that I had to sit and list every last positive thing in my life to break the despair thinking.  There are times when I have been effusive with praise and expression of gratitude to others.  It is because at the core I recognize that none of what I have achieved or done is my own doing)

Cognitive Pathways

Emotion Regulation

1. Emotional disclosure--verbalizing one’s emotions privately or to others moves activity out of the limbic system.  
2. Affect labeling--this is referenced in DBT, we were often encouraged to tell patients to put a label on the experience--”I feel…”  After reading Why Buddhism is True, and practicing mindfulness meditation, I have modified my thinking.  Part of the Buddhist philosophy is that identifying to closely with the ego increases suffering.  I made considerable progress, by reformulating to “sadness is occuring in me” or “I am present to sadness.”
3. Cognitive reappraisal--see the end of my post on optimism (this is the same)

Cognitive Training

1. Cognitive bias modification--we all are prone to the negativity bias--the brain is wired to attend more to negative situations as a protective mechanism.  The world is neutral, however if it is filled with stress, our evaluation will shift to default negative. It takes work to reorient the mind to more positive evaluation (this is why the gratitude letter helps, along with the positive social connections)
2. Mindfulness training--yes it’s everywhere, yes it’s getting obnoxious.  Yes, it’s scientifically proven--you are shifting your brain out of what is called the default node network (that is the uncomfortable autopilot place full of rumination where you end up with no idea how you got there).  Mindfulness does not have to be practiced purely with meditation.  It is about being present to the moment.  If you are doing the dishes, mindfully do the dishes.  If you are mindfully running, mindfully run.  Don’t run and balance the checkbook.  The idea is to get away from all of the multitasking. There is no problem with doing multiple tasks throughout the day, but give each one 100% attention.  This is the mistake we all make.  We end up doing 3 things at 33%.
3. Cognitive therapy--it’s very helpful, but i also believe it has limits.  I have long recognized that there were points where people needed something closer to coaching.  This is because the skills need to be practiced, and applied repeatedly, and to novel situations. The insight that our thinking highly influences our behavior is usually grasped early in therapy. From that point is practice, and self-correction.

Those are the 15.  These are all interventions that have found validation in the neuroscience literature for neuroplasticity.  One additional note, if you are going to practice these there are three mindsets that are helpful in facilitating:

1. Positive expectations--spend time in the hope and optimism mindset, this stuff works.
2. Growth mindset--recognize that this is a capacity and like any capacity it can be developed.  Carol Dweck has all kinds of research on this.
3. Self-affirmation--for God’s sake give yourself credit.  There is nothing wrong with spending time with pride and meditating on times where you achieved success, as long as one does not slip into ego-intoxication. If you feel awesome do something with it to make things better for someone else. You will feel even more awesome. Nobody likes the person who runs around thinking and telling everyone how awesome they are. And accept that it is ok, when you feel awesome, spend a few minutes there. If you are like me, something is coming soon to steal it away and bring us back to reality.

Notes on the Symbolic Self

Notes on the Symbolic Self

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” –Joan Didion

      The symbolic self has been proposed as an evolutionary adaptation unique to the human species.  Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that symbolic self-awareness likely emerged from previous and less sophisticated self-referential capacities including subjective self-awareness and objective self-awareness.  It follows then that mere subjective self-awareness leads a self-concept—a feature shared throughout the animal kingdom.  Objective self-awareness is observed higher level organisms including some primates, allowing for an objectified self.  Human self-awareness is an achievement of a highly sophisticate self-referential system that can be conceived of and communicate in symbolic form.  Sidikes and Skowronski distinguish its key features:

1.       Form an abstract cognitive representation through language

2.       Communicate this symbolic self to other organisms and negotiate content with others to establish personal and social relationships

3.       Set social and achievement goals that prompted by the symbolic self far into the future

4.       Perform goal guided behavior

5.       Evaluate the outcome of these goals and whether behavior have fulfilled relevant goals

6.       Link behavioral outcomes to feelings toward the symbolic self (pride—achievement, embarrassment over failure)

7.       Defend the symbolic self against events and ideas through several strategies, such as avoidance of negative feedback, derogation of negative evaluators, rejection of negative feedback, and self-deception.

       I won’t go into all of the literature that this was drawn from, nor can I address the massive amounts of literature that have focused on number 7 over the past three decades.  1 and 2 seem like no brainers. 3-6 are fruitful areas of study, noteworthy because they are exceedingly complex and therefore prone to behavioral outcomes at odds with goals.  Human beings are routinely bad at judgment and evaluation of performance in pursuit of stated goals.  When we are bad at performance we tend to look for ways to change the rules of the game, or decide that the goal was not really what we desired.  Why? Because pride feels better than embarrassment.  There is certainly a protective advantage to number 7 that contributes to self-esteem.  The optimism piece that I posted previously illustrates how to evaluate and modify negative thinking patterns.  We are prone to those, especially in the face of repeated obstacles. Unfortunately, the conditions under which we currently live seem to present obstacle after obstacle.

      The mind evolved from a set of constraints that is very different than today, and this is particularly important to remember.  As noted above, it appears that evolution has provided this unique capacity of symbolic self-awareness that contributed greatly to the establishment of human societies.  But, what now that we have human societies, and what questions should we ask about awareness?  Cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists continue to poke holes in our notions of what we believe we are aware.  When we talk of evolutionary adaptation there is a tendency to think of it as an unmitigated success.  We risk the naturalistic fallacy.  Success as species does not entail that everything about the species is advantageous. This was best articulated in by college Biology professor—natural selection’s chief motive is reproduction and yet we have the scrotum, half of the species reproductive capacity is housed outside of the human body, which makes you question whether thousands of years of humor was the goal.

     This is also why you should laugh at anyone who makes social Darwinist arguments.  Natural selection explains the flourishing of our society in a competitive environment, not treating the less fortunate and poor as subhuman, lazy, or lacking whatever virtue you can conceive to explain your own success.  But, hey at least natural selection equipped you with the cognitive mechanisms to rationalize, otherwise you would subsist in a constant state of despair over the actual conditions of the world.

     This is particularly important for the present circumstances we face. If you look at number seven you can see the conditions of almost any outgroup that has taken on a type of cultish devotion: avoidance of negative feedback, derogation of negative evaluators, rejection of negative feedback, and self-deception.  And here you have the recipe for cognitive dissonance.  I am increasingly convinced that trauma and anxiety, both individual and community, drive these conditions.  It would make sense that protective evolutionary mechanisms would become salient in the most stressful conditions.  It would make sense that a community that has been traumatized would move toward inclinations for self-protection. And if you extrapolate further you have the conditions for tribalism that have beset our culture. 

     The problem—none of them are adequate enough to be perfectly true.  In the case of trauma it is true that the event is over, even if your brain responds otherwise.  In the community it may be true that the economy does not work, crime is pervasive, etc—but this is not true everywhere and all the time. (the notes on optimism—permanent, personal, pervasive are antecedents for helplessness).  It is very difficult for someone to recognize this when their lived experience tells them otherwise.  It takes a certain flexibility in thinking to transcend this.  The symbolic self is the mechanism through which we make meaning of the world.  It is far from perfect.  If it was, none of us would make mistakes.

The purpose of the past writings, and the ones that will follow are to serve as a template for a map out of suffering.  For the purpose of consistency and because it is an essential point, I will reiterate that this worked for me.  I have no idea if it will work for you.  You will have to find your own map.  What I can share is that years of experience in counseling, my academic work in the past three to four years, personal experiences, and the level of support that I have received from others have allowed me to be self-reflective enough to intuit, apply, and note what worked and what did not. 

     One of the other great insights that neuroscience has revealed in the past decade is just how much of the memory is a creative process.  As it turns, there is a creative process that takes place when we retrieve memory.  Cognitive psychologists have recognized that this one of the distinguishing traits of human beings.  It is not that we are alone in the animal kingdom with the capacity for creative problem solving, but we are in the extent to which we can use this capacity to manipulate our environment to suit our purposes.  The symbolic self allows us to do this on such a remarkable scale that it would almost certainly position our species for evolutionary success. 

      A second and equally important achievement in cognitive and evolutionary psychology was the recognition of the modularity of the mind.  (This is extensively reviewed in Why Buddhism is True) This might be a bit dated, I am not super fond of the term, and neither is the author.  I think that network is a better conceptualization.  Modularity lends itself to the old notions of phrenology, and while it is true that certain functions correspond to regions of the brain, I believe that it is much more likely that when we talk about mind, it is the collection of multiple nodes in multiple regions of the brain that contribute to an activity that we interpret as the self at any given moment in time. 

The huge advantage of consciousness is that we have the capacity to recognize this and attend to it.  This was one of the single most important insights that helped me in my own suffering.  Thoughts and feelings think themselves, a great deal of human mental activity is unconscious and has to be, and all I have is the capacity from moment to moment to choose what I attend to. The mind is easily drawn to autopilot, because a vast collection of nodes firing away at any given moment competes for attention. This is what rumination does, pulls you away from the moment to attend to other things. 

      Rumination is a signal to the mind that something is not resolved.  This is exponentially compounded in cases of trauma, grief, and despair.  It is exhausting, but it is by no means a hopeless situation.  The insight that helped get me out of this obstacle was that I had the ability to select which module/network I wanted active.  I would occasionally wake up from an ugly dream, that I had no recollection of, just that lingering feeling of dread.  I simply told myself that this was not the network that I wanted in charge.  I want to stress the word “simply” because the insight was simple.  It was by no means simple to remind myself of this countless times throughout the day.  It is the practice of the action in this insight that helped.

     Taken together, what I am hoping to hammer home here is that the symbolic self is a powerful module that evolution has provided to protect us.  It is by no means perfect, because human beings are nowhere near perfect.  Under normal conditions we make thinking errors when presented with choices. Stress increases the likelihood, simply placing people under a time constraint increases the likelihood of making less than optimal choices.  Massive amounts of stress over prolonged periods makes it even more difficult.  Modern life has left us with enough stress to buckle any given day of the week.  And these conditions are draining, which increases suffering, which feeds isolation, and makes us identify so strongly with the self that it is hard to escape.  At the group level—we are the aggrieved, we are under attack, we are the persecuted.  At the individual level—it’s not that this is necessarily untrue, it is necessarily incomplete.

     It is not an inescapable position.  I am not suggesting that we can abandon the symbolic self, it is who we were and what we’ve carried, and it protects us in countless ways.  But, I intentionally use the word “were” because it’s not who we are.  Who we are is the process unfolding, moment by moment.  We are getting to the heart of what Maslow sought in the psychology of being.  Positive psychology has returned to this footing and holds great promise. One of the great therapeutic advancements in the treatment of trauma has been the development of Narrative Therapy.  Neuroscience and cognitive psychology have confirmed the creative processes that undergird memory.  Our great human capacity for creativity is also our remedy. Positive psychology helps to drive a better narrative.

      The stoics believed that the obstacle was the way, and sometimes the symbolic self is the obstacle. The symbolic self is the residue of living, a narrative for where we were.  If we are dissatisfied with that narrative, we have the option for writing a new narrative.  No easy feat, but we can learn to be better as with any skill. The symbolic self is the autobiographer, and has a gift for fiction. And, the lines between fiction and autobiographical elements has never been solid. 

To recap:

1.       The symbolic self was product of evolution selected because it conferred advantages to the species.

2.       It is not you, it is a mental representation of you

3.       The mind is a product of unconscious and conscious activity in a multiplicity of networks that compete for attention

4.       We have the capacity to attend to and manipulate mental schema (creativity)

5.       This function allows us to write new narrative(s)

6.       The world is neutral, it is not default negative, but we are prone to remembering and encoding negative information much more intensely and thoroughly than positive information

7.       Cognitive strategies (CBT, DBT, REBT) can help us to correct thinking errors, positive psychology allows us to build the pathways out.

Notes on suffering, DBT, and Buddhism

              I am giving some attention this week to the issue of suffering.  Two people whom I care about deeply, reached out to me this week.  Since, I have been digesting all of this social psychology material, and study of Buddhism, and spirituality in general, I figured I would offer some thoughts.  This is not advice, I cannot assure you it will work for you—more and more I notice people tune out when you start talking about mindfulness.  Have you tried meditation is becoming a bit of a punchline.  I can only share that I too have suffered deeply, and somehow achieved a massive release—personal and professional experiences collided in ways I would not have anticipated.  In many ways I am still making sense of it all.  If you wish to read no further, I will offer that this writing will address the book Why Buddhism is True, Mindfulness, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) which I practiced as a counselor for a number of years.

              Although, I have repeatedly evangelized about the book Why Buddhism is True, I have not shared personal reasons as to why it was so compelling.  People who worked with me years ago will recognize a similar evangelism I had for DBT.  That is because it works.  I saw it work.  I was sometimes chided—“yes, but it does not work for everything!”  Well of course, what does work for everything?  But, some of the reasons that I think DBT works, is the same reason why Buddhism is true—Richard Wright’s thesis.  And shit, that guy should be giving me royalties by now.  In my practice of psychotherapy I often saw two important features—skill acquisition and development, and insight.  Insight is episodic, and I suspect that it happens similarly to other cognitive and deep spiritual experiences like revelation. Skills application is the mundane, difficult, mechanical process—the hours of meditation spent redirecting a wandering mind.

              I would say that the personal relevance for me in Why Buddhism is True, came from chapter 13 on the lesson of tanha.  I had grasped the whole Buddhist concept of suffering: we suffer because we desire.  It really is not a complicated concept.  Our desire to apprehend something, whether it be another person, money, etc—all of this materialism is about gaining something. And so I meditated, sometimes up to two hours a day, at different intervals.  I repeatedly told myself that it was because I wanted these material things, and yet I still could not escape something.  And this, chapter clarified everything I had been getting wrong up to that point.  The idea of tanha also extends to what we don’t want to feel.  We are essentially, trying to grasp and obtain a version of our self that does not hurt.  Good luck with that, you will have to escape the self.  I only found one path forward; I’m not foolish enough to say it is the only way forward.  What I can tell you is that it got progressively easier because I was able—and again fortunate, to make necessary connections.

              Why does mindfulness meditation work?  Because your mind wanders.  And we live in an environment built with distractions, responsibility, and hardship.  And for many of us those stressors are not going anywhere and they require response.  But, a great amount of what we respond to does not require a response because it has no solution.  A ton of our human problems are simply irresolute, but through time.  Go ahead and dwell as hard as you want about something in the next year, I guarantee you don’t come closer now.  I used to see this commonly, and it was easily observable because I do it.  It is human. I would say that a great amount of our human misery is bookended by two phenomenon—our desire to apprehend the past (correct mistakes) and our desire to apprehend the future (control anxiety/avoid pain).

Past                                                                Present                                                          Future

ß-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------à

If you routinely find your thoughts  like "I should have, could have, would have"….you are trying to correct a mistake.  It’s a thinking error, time moves one direction.  If you are plagued by “what if” at the other end of the continuum, you are trying to assert control over the future.  It’s an illusion.  There is great line in positive psychology:  I don’t control my destiny, but I do control my probabilities.  This is true, you can only exercise control and correct mistakes when something is apparent, and that is often times only in the moment.  Forgive yourself for the mistakes you made, acknowledge you will do your best in the future.  Remind yourself you are human, you will fail again.  As Samuel Beckett said: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.

          I want to tell you this--It is not easy.  Life drags you a way from the moment with its countless demands and stimuli.  There is also horrific pain and suffering.  I will try to place this in the most secular terms, but I am going to use the concept of a soul. There is actually a psychologist who studies the “soul.”  More accurately, what we might traditionally refer to as a self.  There are other terms including personality, ego, spirit, etc—but they tend to have a limit to capturing a certain essence that we recognize about the experience of the self.  Why Buddhism is True may well flip many of your assumptions. So for the purpose of this writing I will refer to the soul to try to characterize a certain essence that some may believe transcends the mind and body. 

              I would offer a theory that trauma pins the soul to the brain and body.  It is a profound injury to the brain, and as such the brain’s software (the mind) gets glitchy, pulled inexorably again and again from the moment to attend to whatever is throbbing.  These are analogies of course, but the fact of the matter is that pain—even physical pain resides in the mind, and not anywhere else.  Your experience of pain is nothing more than a signal from the body.  This is easily proven by the phenomenon of phantom limb pain and other neurological conditions where something goes wrong with the signal/perception system.  But, this is extraordinarily complicated when the pain signal is in the brain/mind. 

              The mind is the only path to managing this, and for that reason the pain management clinics are now teaching mindfulness meditation.   The professor who trained under for internship used to say there is a difference between pain and misery.  Misery is what the mind adds to pain.  And when we have a mental injury, as in the case of trauma, it is much, much harder to get free from the pain, because the mental mechanisms have likely been injured in the process.  This is why I have taken to distinguishing between mind, soul, and brain.  These are semantic labels, but I know no other way to explain it.  The positivist will say this is all nonsense and that it is just the brain.  But, the positivist will run into limitations applying science to human experience, that’s why we have poets and novelists.

              I would sometimes hear patients say, meditation yes, tried it—it didn’t work.  I would hear similar things when I worked with parents on behavior coaching, time out—tried it, it didn’t work.  Except they do.  They are not applicable to every problem, or the expectation was probably too high.  If you thought mindfulness meditation was going to stop your suffering, it’s akin to sitting down to the piano and expecting to slip right into Chopin.  It’s not that I can’t play the piano, it’s that I play the piano really shitty.  Unless you like Heart and Soul, then I am ok. 

              The other thing is that sometimes the tool just isn’t the right tool.  With regard to meditation, I have found sometimes that I need guided meditation when I can’t get my mind settled, sometimes I can get it from walking meditation, sometimes I can get it quiet enough that it is just my breath.  And this lesson applies to the DBT skills too.  I would see this in therapy also, when I taught deep breathing with panic attacks—again, tried that it didn’t work, can the doctor just give me Xanax?  Sure, but you will build a tolerance, and then you will have untreated anxiety and dependence.  The model that I would suggest is that some tasks require more than one tool.  Distract is another skill in DBT.  It works, but it does not work for everything.  Radical Acceptance is sometimes the skill that is necessary.  Sometimes, you need to do mindfulness meditation, non-judgment, and distract, just to get to silence.  They build from each other, and sometimes you arrive back at Radical Acceptance.

              To return to the original example I was using on my own suffering.  I was stuck in a space where I could not seem to get free from emotions that were unpleasant, and this was propelled by a drive to apprehend something that was not possible, and so I began to let it go.  This desire to not hurt, it is no different than any other desire to be something we are not at the given moment we are provided.  It is the same mental mechanism that allows me to day dream about the better job that will provide me more money and prestige, and allow me to be something other than the person I am now.  It is hard to be a hurting person.  In fact, it is quite possible that a byproduct of evolution is that we can dream and reflect and that this has propelled our species to unimaginable heights. It allows us momentarily to escape pain.  But, it also comes with a cost.  We don’t get to live there.  And there is a cost to trying to live there—correcting the past or trying to control the future: it takes enormous mental energy.  You return to the broken and hurting body, it never went anywhere, it was here waiting for you to get ok with hurting.