The Trauma of Everyday Life

Buddhism like a great underground river. I say underground because, even within Buddhist culture, it is not always clearly acknowledged. There is a hidden trauma at the heart of the Buddha’s own story, for example, one that is known but not often spoken of, one that I have found full of meaning despite the lack of attention it has garnered over the years. The Buddha’s mother died seven days after giving birth to him. Overtly, in the myths and legends that have grown up around the life of the Buddha, very little is made of this fact. But scratch the surface of the Buddha’s biography and you can see a metaphor churning away, lying in wait, one might say, for the psychologically minded times we are now living in. Something was nagging at the Buddha’s heart, something he had no memory of, a taste of suffering so early in his life that, for all intents and purposes, it should not have mattered. Raised by loving parents—his mother’s sister stepped in and took care of him like her own—and surrounded by all the joy and wealth and caring attention his parents could muster, the young man who was to become the Buddha nevertheless felt that something was wrong. Whether this feeling stemmed from the loss of his biological mother or from a later confrontation with the realities of old age, sickness, and death we do not know, but the presence of this early loss in his psyche creates a motif that anyone who struggles with inexplicable feelings of estrangement or alienation can relate to. The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child.
    In responding to Monica, I was making a critical point. It is not as important to find the
cause
of our traumatized feelings as it is to learn how to relate to them. Because everyday life is so challenging, there is a great need to pretend. Our most intimate feelings get shunted to the side, relegated to our dreams. We all want to be normal. Life, even normal life, is arduous, demanding, and ultimately threatening. We all have to deal with it, and none of us really knows how. We are all traumatized by life, by its unpredictability, its randomness, its lack of regard for our feelings and the losses it brings. Each in our own way, we suffer. Even if nothing else goes wrong (and it is rare that this is the case), old age, illness, and death loom just over the horizon, like the monsters our children need us to protect them from in the night.
    The story of the Buddha’s enlightenment shows him confronting his own trauma and using it to broaden the horizons of his mind. A Buddhist teacher of mine, whom I met years ago in Boulder in my initial explorations of Buddhism, has a pithy way of describing how the Buddha accomplished this. When dealing with painful emotions, Joseph Goldstein (now a respected American Buddhist and the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts) suggests,
the way out is through
. Emotional pain is as fruitful an object of awareness as anything else; it may even have qualities, like intensity, that make it particularly useful as a means of training the mind. In exploring the Buddha’s life story, we can see him doing just this. He may not have known where his feelings of trauma came from, but he was able to create for himself the inner environment of attunement and responsiveness that he needed. His success is a model for the rest of us. Confronted with unpleasant feelings that we often are at a loss to explain, we can learn to use those feelings to show us the oceans of our minds.
    In a famous statement, the Buddha once said that he “taught one thing. Suffering and its end.” As has often been pointed out, to most ears this sounds like two things. 9 But the Buddha was choosing his words carefully. The clear-eyed comprehension of suffering permits its release. The Buddha, in his role as therapist, showed how this was possible. The great promise of his teachings was that suffering is only the First Truth and that acknowledging it opens up the others. By the time the Buddha, turning the wheel of the dharma
,
got to the Third Truth and the Fourth Truth (the End of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to its Relief), he had filled his listeners with new hope. Trauma, he was saying, while an indisputable fact of life, did not have to be the last word.

2
    Primitive Agony

    I t took the Buddha six years of self-imposed exile to find his way out of suffering and some extra time after his awakening to organize his insights