Healing and the Spiritual Path
This post consists of a dharma talk shared as a guest teacher with the Triangle Insight Meditation Community on June 5th, 2019. The talk was shared following a period of guided meditation, and culminated in a group discussion.
Before diving into the “content”, I’d like to give voice to my awareness that I will be sharing about a very personal and sensitive topic tonight, and how I illustrate and describe the healing journey and the mind may or may not resonate with you, or adequately summarize your experience. I ask that you please just take what is useful for you, and let go of anything that does not resonate. That said, I’ll also request that you hold me accountable, and during the discussion let me know if some way that I have portrayed or discussed the healing journey, the mind, or trauma is problematic or harmful.
I have long felt that healing and the spiritual path walk hand in hand, but I have only begun to really explore and examine this idea more recently. A couple months ago this topic came up in a group discussion, and I shared a bit about my experience. In response, one friend asked, “Could you say more about what healing has to do with the spiritual path? I’ve never considered the two related.”
That made me pause and really consider the question. How is the process of engaging in healing work related to our awakening along the spiritual path?
As I reflected on this, I found myself flooded with more questions: what even is healing? What is it within us that needs healing? Why do we need healing? What is it that we are healing from? What does it mean to engage in healing work? And again, how is this relevant to the spiritual path? Is it?
“When a great misery occurs it remains with us for as long as we hold on to it...locked away within our mind and body - this is the cause of tension in our being…healing begins with acceptance and culminates in letting go...”
~Yung Pueblo
Healing feels like a slippery topic to me; I can grasp it when I’m in it, and I can sense an ongoing engagement with the process over time, but in trying to describe it, words evade me.
In approaching this topic, I realized I need teachers. So I first turned to Diego Perez, pen name Yung Pueblo. In his profound work Inward, he says, “When a great misery occurs it remains with us for as long as we hold on to it...locked away within our mind and body - this is the cause of tension in our being…healing begins with acceptance and culminates in letting go...”
These few words already start to get at some of my questions: What is it that we heal from? Great misery that we hold on to, locked away within our minds and bodies in the form of tension.
This seems to makes sense; many of us may be familiar with stress we carry in our shoulders, unexpressed anger we feel as knots in our chest, or a childhood trauma that manifests as labored breathing or digestive pain when we’re triggered. If we check in with such bodily symptoms, we may realize experientially that past occurrences, particularly suffering, carry over into the present and affect what we experience in real-time.
“Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents…”
~Carl Jung
And if this is so, might there also be suffering locked away, and playing out, that we’re carrying around all the time, that we’re not aware of?
Psychologist Carl Jung said, “Most people confuse ‘self-knowledge’ with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities,”, unquote. Conscious ego personalities: I think of that as the stream of consciousness and emotional processes that arise in our conscious awareness, and any patterns we might observe in these over time.
Jung goes on to say, quote “Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents…”
Indeed modern psychology has long accepted the existence and power of the unconscious mind, and recent work such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow point to experiments in implicit bias, priming, and heuristics that have provided evidence of how unconscious processing affects perception and behavior. Kahneman refers to the ongoing unconscious processing occurring below our level of awareness, often quickly and emotionally, as “System 1”. While “System 2” describes the cognitive processes we witness consciously. He offers one example from experiments conducted by Robert Zajonc, which revealed that exposing the unconscious mind to images, shown for only a fraction of a second and thus below conscious awareness, altered conscious decision-making outcomes and self-assessment without participants knowing.
So if there is indeed this fast, instinctual, emotional, unconscious system, or series of arisings that is unfolding all the time, below our level of awareness, and as Yung Pueblo points out, this force picks up, locks away, and carries with it intense misery that it witnesses and undergoes, what does this mean for us, as spiritual practitioners, and as humans?
“ If our spiritual path includes the intention to minimize the harm we inflict on ourselves and on others, then we cannot ignore the unconscious stream that constantly trickles delusions into our present experience.This is what we heal. “
Yung Pueblo might say it means that, quote “freedom is deeper than believing that we are free on the conscious level of the mind- the conscious may think this to be so, but if the subconscious is still burdened with patterns that cause us misery, delusion, and the pain that comes with unceasing reactions then we are not yet wholly free”
To me, this begins to illustrate why healing is relevant not just to our psychology, but to our spiritual paths as well: not only does old pain create tension and suffering in the present, it causes or produces delusions that may interfere with our ability to carry out skillful actions both internally and externally. If our spiritual path includes the intention to minimize the harm we inflict on ourselves and on others, then we cannot ignore the unconscious stream that constantly trickles delusions into our present experience. This is what we heal.
“…this work requires certain basic conditions to be met first. In addition to the most basic necessities, healing requires stability, time, energy, emotional labor, a support network, and in the case of hiring a professional for guidance, money…recall the privilege and blessing of being able to engage in such work“
So how do we do it? How do we heal something we are not even aware of most of the time? It feels important to note at this point that engaging in this work requires certain basic conditions to be met first. In addition to the most basic necessities, healing requires stability, time, energy, emotional labor, a support network, and in the case of hiring a professional for guidance, money. As we contemplate this process we may want to also recall the privilege and blessing of being able to engage in such work, and cultivate the wish and motivation to work so that more folks might have access to the resources necessary to heal as well.
So, what does the process of healing look like? In preparing to speak on this particular subject, I actually hesitated to try to describe it at all, since it will necessarily be deeply personal and take different forms for every individual. For example, some may find a fertile path in revisiting past memories in a therapeutic setting and talking through what arises. Others may settle deeply into their bodily sensations when old pain is triggered in day-to-day life. Still others may find healing by abiding in deep, concentrated states as karmic outcomes wash over them on the cushion. Others may find that creative expression brings hidden and trapped suffering to light, and that giving it a voice and outlet allows acceptance and letting go. For others movement may facilitate their ability to move through the resistance that is keeping suffering trapped within. And likely, even within an individual different times will call for different approaches to engaging in the healing work.
“Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation...the key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open” .
~Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Perhaps to explore this more deeply without overgeneralizing we might ask, what do these different approaches have in common? Are there certain characteristics of the time we spend engaged with healing work that we can rely upon to carry us to the freedom that Yung Pueblo describes?
Well, in any healing work it seems, though it might not always be the case, that there is a need to access mental or emotional material that is hidden deep within the psyche, as we cannot begin to see, to hold, to accept, and to release what needs to be healed, until it is revealed. Yung Pueblo writes:
“Before we can
Heal and let go,
What ails us
Deeply
Must first
Come to the
Surface”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes offers an illustration of how we might think about or approach this uncovering process through symbolic imagery of doors and keys in her analysis of the story of Bluebeard in her work “Women Who Run with the Wolves”:
Estes writes, “...the very image of door meant something of spiritual value was within, or that there was something within which must be kept contained. The door...is portrayed as a psychic barrier, as a kind of sentry that is placed in front of the secret...in order to breach this barrier, a proper counter-magic must be employed. And the fitting magic is found in the symbol of the key.
“Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation...the key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open” .
This passage reveals that, perhaps we can consider one of the first steps in uncovering, and thus one of the first steps in the healing process, to contact a place of curiosity that will lead us to the right questions, or keys, that will grant us access to what lies behind our doors.
“And perhaps also when we feel curious about something, we are necessarily humbled, because we are admitting there is something we do not know and would like to learn. “
Perhaps curiosity is important because when we are curious about what we will find behind our inner doors, we are motivated to find the keys that will open them.
And perhaps also when we feel curious about something, we are necessarily humbled, because we are admitting there is something we do not know and would like to learn. It seems that entering into a humbled state could help distance us from the ego’s tendency to try to anticipate and control what unfolds, so that we might see what we find with clarity and move towards acceptance and release.
So, we feel the pull of curiosity, we search for the right questions that will grant us access to what lies beyond our awareness; we open an inner door and examine what we find. Then, what does healing look like? How might we approach what we discover lurking in the shadows of our minds? I turned to Buddhist texts for guidance here.
In Bikkhu Analayo’s commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta, he describes the component of non-reactive awareness in contemplation of the mind:
“It is noteworthy that contemplation of the mind does not involve active measures to oppose unwholesome state of mind (Such as lust or anger). Rather, the task of mindfulness is to remain receptively aware by clearly recognizing the state of mind that underlies a particular train of thoughts or reactions. Such uninvolved receptivity is required because of one’s instinctive tendency to ignore whatever contradicts or threatens one’s sense of importance and personal integrity. The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one’s self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgment of the existence of hidden emotions, motives, and tendencies in the mind, without immediately suppressing them. Maintaining non-reactive awareness in this way counters the impulse towards either reaction or suppression contained in unwholesome states of mind, and thereby deactivates their emotional and attentional pull.”
This is something I found particularly interesting: Analayo describes how “unwholesome states of mind”, what I will call in this context “states of mind in need of healing” actually contain the impulse towards either reaction or suppression; which means they potentiate themselves through this feed-forward mechanism. An example: A painful state of mind arises, let’s say intense social anxiety triggered by conditioning from adolescence. One aspect of that state includes this strong impulse to interact with it in an unskillful way. The impulse towards reaction might manifest as canceling plans to connect with a close friend, thereby feeding, protecting, and strengthening this state of mind so that it will continue to arise in the future. The impulse towards suppression might manifest as trying to convince oneself that one’s not anxious, thereby pushing the anxiety down back below awareness, from where it came. Again, ensuring that it will arise again in the future. By their very nature these states of mind that are in need of healing urge us to remain in cyclic relationship with them.
“…in order to come to grips with the repeated occurrence of unwholesome thoughts, attention turns to the nature of these thoughts and to the volitional disposition or driving force that produced them.“
~Bikkhu Analayo
But Analayo goes on to describe how we can “deactivate” this cycle by practicing engaging with states of mind in need of healing in a new way, with non-reactive awareness:
“The Vitakkasanthana Sutta offers a description of such deactivation: in order to come to grips with the repeated occurrence of unwholesome thoughts, attention turns to the nature of these thoughts and to the volitional disposition or driving force that produced them. The discourse explains this simple but ingenious method of turning the full light of attention on the mental condition underlying one’s thoughts with the help of a simile. One is walking quite fast for no particular reason. Becoming fully aware of what one is doing, one might walk slower, or even stand still, or instead of standing one might sit or lie down. This progressive increase in physical comfort and tranquility vividly illustrates how the mental agitation and tension of unwholesome thought processes can be gradually reduced and overcome through direct observation. Watching an unwholesome state of mind without involvement in this way will deprive it of its fuel so that it will gradually lose its power.”
So perhaps we can consider non-reactive awareness, or direct observation, a component of the healing process as well, practicing becoming fully aware of what arises when we identify that we are experiencing a state of mind in need of healing.
As I reflect on this with regards to my own healing journey, it resonates. It also feels like, for me, there is another component, one of softness and kindness, that requires cultivation during healing work in addition to this direct observation, in order to move into a phase of accepting what I see behind the doors.
Tara Brach describes this component as “unconditional friendliness”. As noted by Analayo, there is no need to take active measures to oppose states of mind in need of healing. Tara takes this a step further and says:
“We practice Radical Acceptance by pausing and then meeting whatever is happening inside us with this kind of unconditional friendliness. Instead of turning our jealous thoughts or angry feelings into the enemy, we pay attention in a way that enables us to recognize and touch any experience with care. Nothing is wrong - whatever is happening is just ‘real life’. Such unconditional friendliness is the spirit of Radical Acceptance.”
Tara goes on to describe a story of the Buddha that demonstrates this kind quality of healing. Mara, the demon who tried to derail the Buddha’s awakening with temptation, continued to appear before the Buddha even after his Enlightenment. In response, the Buddha would say “I see you, Mara”. Tara says:
“He would then invite him for tea and serve him as an honored guest. Offering Mara a cushion so that he could sit comfortably, the Buddha would fill two earthen cups with tea, place them on the low table between them, and only then take his own seat. Mara would stay for a while and then go, but throughout the Buddha remained free and undisturbed”.
As we engage in this work of gently sifting through and revealing that which lies beneath our awareness, that suffering which we are holding on to from our past, it may be tempting to view these states of mind as obstacles to be overcome or defeated. But the Buddha shows us that even Mara, whom some call “the evil one”, should be welcomed, greeted warmly, and treated with respect and care.
I’d like to share a poem on this topic which I believe beautifully conveys this idea of kind acceptance towards our own healing minds:
The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
There is certainly more to be said about the process of engaging with states of mind in need of healing - wisdom from great teachers about how to STAY with what we see, to not run away, specific suggestions on how to navigate tricky aspects of the mind with discernment and skillfulness…. But for the sake of time, I’d like to jump ahead a bit. Recall that Yung Pueblo said “healing begins with acceptance and culminates in letting go...” What might it mean to let go, in the context of healing and spiritual path?
I’ll admit, when I reached my preparation of this part of the talk, I felt nervous. Because I realized, I didn’t yet know what letting go means. I knew that in my own healing work I had released some of my hidden pain, but I still felt confused about how it had happened and how to talk about it. So again, I turned to Yung Pueblo for guidance. He writes:
“It is through the observation of all that we are and accepting what we observe with honesty and without judgment that we can release the tension that creates delusions in the mind and walls in the heart. This is why the keys to our freedom lie in our darkness, because when we observe our darkness by bringing our light of awareness inward, the ego begins to dissipate into nothingness and the subconscious slowly becomes understood.
The mind is full of shadows, but shadows cannot withstand the patience and perseverance of light- our minds can become like stars, powerful united fields of pure light. But unlike a star, the healed mind will dwell in awareness and wisdom.”
It was not until I read this passage that I realized that “letting go” means “allowing something to take its leave”. I always thought that once I witness my pain, I have to DO something to make it go away. I have to take some action that would let it know “okay, it’s time to go now”. I thought I had to control it. I am learning now that actually, our trapped pain wants to be released. Upon being uncovered, seen, accepted, loved, it will free itself. Our only job at this stage is to step back, allow it to go, and perhaps in some cases, to grieve its loss.
“…As I heal myself from the suffering of my past, I feel my heart soften, bloom, and open. I feel my capacity to witness and feel compassion for suffering, within myself and others, expand.“
I want to close with some final thoughts on the outcomes of healing work, and how they too relate to the spiritual path. As we walk through these stages - uncovering what lies below the conscious mind, observing it clearly through non-reactive awareness, accepting it from a place of unconditional friendliness, and letting it go by allowing it to release itself - how does our being change? Here, I will speak from my own experience.
As I heal myself from the suffering of my past, I feel my heart soften, bloom, and open. I feel my capacity to witness and feel compassion for suffering, within myself and others, expand. I feel an earnest and heartfelt desire for others to experience healing as well. I am more quick to forgive both myself and others for our human mistakes. I view the truths of Dukkha and Samsaric existence more readily, often, and clearly. And I begin to sense more clearly the interconnectedness of all living beings.
In short, as I heal, I observe virtuous qualities associated with spiritual awakening, unfolding and growing within me. As I reflect on this Truth I feel in my heart, I am reminded of another conversation I had with a friend. This friend said to me, “I think the healing process and the spiritual path are one and the same. Both move us closer to the end of suffering.”