On an April morning in 2019, my sister rested in a California hospital bed and gazed with wonder at her beautiful new infant. A thirty-minute drive away, my father also rested in a hospital bed, fighting his years-long battle with stage IV melanoma. Across the country, I sat perched on the edge of a plastic blue chair in the airport waiting to board a plane from Boston. Knowing my dad was very ill and that my sister would want help with her new baby, I had decided to take a week off from my busy working-parent life. 

That decision was an obvious “good choice.” But for most of us, at various points in our life journeys, we are confronted with the need to make a decision with no good options. The pain that accompanies this kind of decision is unavoidable and routinely brings patients to my therapy office. For some, it’s an unhappy marriage. Staying means accepting loneliness and unmet emotional needs, but leaving means legal warfare and an uncertain financial and social future. Or it’s the decision of whether or not to reveal an extramarital affair entered into during an unhappy phase of life. Keeping the secret guarantees a marital chasm, but revealing it ensures breaking your partner’s heart. Or it’s deciding whether to meet the acute needs of one child even if doing so means failing another one. These are painful decisions because there are simply no good choices.

The choice to visit my family in California for a week had been obvious. But the day before I was scheduled to return home to Boston, my father slipped into a coma. As a hospice nurse explained to me, in a comatose state like his, my father could die the next day, or he could continue this way for a month.

I honestly didn’t know whether the right choice was to return home to a life that demanded my attention or to stay and keep vigil for my father. I had three little boys who were missing their mom, and I them. And my mother-in-law needed to head back to her home the day after I was supposed to return; without me or my mother-in-law there, my husband would be forced to either neglect a job our family needed, or our young children. Then there were my own work obligations. I had meetings with colleagues, projects with deadlines, and scheduled sessions with patients struggling with their own crises. Still, I couldn’t fathom leaving my father’s side and abandoning my siblings and mother. Going back to Boston felt wrong. So did staying in California. 

If ever there was a decision to get right, it was this one. I found myself hunting desperately for that answer. I texted close friends, interrogated the various hospice nurses that came to see my dad, did Google searches on “length of time one could remain in a coma before dying,” and spoke to each of my siblings, my mother, and my husband. I was searching for the choice that would unburden me of internal conflict, a solution that would allow me to do the right thing by all of the roles that mattered most to me. I found none. Regardless of how wise or thoughtful or strategic the choice I made was, and regardless of how much family and colleagues supported my choice, all the options before me felt reprehensible. 

So I turned to a skill I teach patients. 

It’s a practice drawn from acceptance and commitment therapy (or ACT, pronounced as one word). This treatment is an evidence-based psychotherapy that integrates cutting-edge psychological science with ancient Buddhist ideas. Central in both Buddhism and ACT is a recognition of the universality of human suffering and the awareness that practices of acceptance, mindfulness, and clarifying values help us transcend it. These kinds of skills have been shown to help people better manage mental illness, physical illness, profoundly stressful life circumstances, and even to play a better game of chess. 

Clarifying values is a core process in ACT. Psychologists define values as the purpose or attitude we take regarding our chosen actions. A value is not a goal or destination but rather a compass that guides our journey toward a more meaningful, purpose-driven life. Values reflect the ways we most want to show up in the world. In comparison to emotions, which come and go and sometimes mistakenly lead us into thinking there is danger, values provide a steady hand that reminds us about the kind of person we want to be. In comparison to logic, values do not require us to solve anything. They require only that we choose, with clear-eyed intention, how we take our life’s journey. 

We can always choose to put our values in the driver’s seat, even when we find ourselves on a path we didn’t choose, don’t much like, or that is truly unjust. We can put our values in the driver’s seat even while experiencing the searing pain of guilt, shame, sadness, or anger. 

In the turbulence of that difficult moment, I turned to the kinds of questions I ask patients to help them clarify their values. I asked myself what I wanted to stand for as I went through this painful series of events. I considered what I’d advise my kids to do in the face of my own mortal end. And I asked myself how I thought my father would want me to choose. 

Recognizing that there was no logical or emotionally “right” choice, I allowed myself to be guided by my father’s values of prioritizing the grandchildren he adored and persisting in the work ethic he had been so proud of. I returned to Boston. Was leaving his side a moral choice? A reasonable one? Years later, I’m still not sure. But I do know that there comes a time when there are simply no good options before us. So when I find my mind replaying how I made the decision, I remind myself that I acted on my values as best I could. And I remember I tried to use my values as a guide for honoring my father. 

The post How to Make a Decision When There Are No Good Choices appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In April 2012 a dancer named Sharon Stern committed suicide. Stern was deeply committed to the Buddhist-influenced Japanese dance form of Butoh, in which mastery involves surrendering parts of the self. Prior to her suicide Stern was exhibiting mental instability, including worrisome signs of depersonalization, a condition marked by a sense of detachment from one’s body and thoughts. As Stern’s devotion to Butoh grew, so did her inability to identify as an individual with a history, personality, or future. She began writing emails in the third person, and as Rachel Aviv detailed in The New Yorker, in one of Stern’s last emails to her teacher, she asked, “So the question arises what happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?” 

It’s a question that has both inspired and haunted seekers for millennia. The deconstruction of the ego can lead to the type of transcendent oneness that is a hallmark of a profound spiritual experience, or to the type of destabilizing freefall that is a hallmark of severe mental illness or a bad psychedelic trip. As the case of Sharon Stern and others have shown, mental illness or psychedelics aren’t the only gateway to destabilization. Contemplative practice can lead there, too. Conversely, just as contemplative practice can lead to radical understanding, so too can mental illness or psychedelics. 

A recent revival of scientific research on psychedelics, which was barred from the halls of academia in the late seventies, has allowed researchers to study the brains of people undergoing experiences of ego deconstruction. In How to Change Your Mind, author Michael Pollan explains that while participants are undergoing drug-induced mystical experiences in a lab setting, “imaging tools can observe changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the ‘neural correlates’ of the sense of self and spiritual experience.” A similar mental mapping has occurred in research around both meditation and psychosis. By examining how depersonalization unfolds in the brains of meditators, during psychedelic experiences, and through psychosis, we can better understand why depersonalization can be a vector for both the profound and for profound loss, and perhaps learn how such an experience can be better integrated into one’s life.

It may be impossible to isolate the factors that determine the ultimate outcome—the profound or profound loss—but research, as well as history, points to two key, interdependent players: set and setting. The careful consideration of set and setting in research on psychedelics, and the resulting infrequency of bad trips, suggests that similar considerations could protect against negative experiences with contemplative practices. Indeed, in Buddhist practice, where ego deconstruction is a goal, there exists a framework in which proper intention can be cultivated, proper guidance is present, and contextualization and support are available.

This is Your Brain on Self

At some point in human history it became advantageous to consider one’s self in relation to everything else. In Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius explain how one’s ability to conceive of a self “has been stitched into human DNA by reproductive advantages slowly accumulating across a hundred thousand generations.” One of the primary mechanisms of the self is the ability to simulate experience internally, either by reflecting on past experiences to promote wiring of successful behavior, or by anticipating future events in order to choose the approach most likely to protect one’s self. 

When one is not engaged in a task, researchers have found that the brain’s default mode is self-referential processing, which occurs in an area of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN). The DMN seems to be most active when one is at rest and is correlated with self-referential mind-wandering, or the movie version of your life that you project while folding laundry, in which you’re either the hero or the victim, but the star nonetheless.

Activity in the DMN is also associated with unhappiness. Researchers have found that when people recognize that they were ruminating, they rate themselves as feeling less happy than when they were engaged in an activity. This raises the question: can we spend less time succumbing to self-obsession? The default mode works well, writes Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, “but what if it isn’t the only, or necessarily the best, way to go through life?”

This is Your Brain on Meditation

The self might be an excellent contrivance for keeping the project of craving-attainment humming along, a significant evolutionary advantage, but it can be a cumbersome contrivance in a world of abundance. By trafficking heavily in introspection, the DMN props up the notion of self and its paramount desires, thereby propagating the cycle of suffering. But, as the Buddha realized while meditating under the Bodhi tree, chasing cravings is not the only, or the best, way to go through life. And so began the practice of recognizing and releasing this pattern of grasping that is known as meditation. 

“Prior to contemplative practice, we simply respond to a particular type of event in the habitual, unintentional ways we have in the past,” says Buddhist scholar Dale Wright in Buddhism, What Everyone Needs to Know. “Meditative practice consciously develops alternatives to those patterns of action.” This was true millenia before functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) existed, at least in a phenomenological sense, but advances in neuroimaging have allowed researchers to observe these alternative patterns neurologically as well. The brains of meditators look different than the brains of research participants at rest.

In multiple studies, researchers have found a decrease of activity in key regions of the default mode network of meditators. The fact that meditation leads to decreased activity in the DMN suggests that it can interrupt the brain’s tendency to reify the self. When the time typically spent sorting memories, anticipating how the self might perform in future scenarios, or ruminating on past encounters starring the self gets devoted to meditation, one spends less time passively watching the movie and more time attending to the flow of unfolding sensory stimulation. And the tether that one might have felt to the concept of self could become more tenuous.

This experience can no doubt be intense. Researchers at Brown University have gathered and analyzed first-person reports of unsettling reactions to meditation in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project. Cataloguing such reports, researchers found numerous instances of practitioners who experienced an “adverse effect” regarding their sense of self. The most common one was the change in boundaries between the inner self and the outer world. In a paper summarizing the findings of the project, Jared R. Lindahl, et al., wrote: 

Some practitioners reported boundaries dissolving and general permeability with the environment or with other people; others felt like their self had expanded out from their body and merged with the world; still others used the inverse language, reporting that the world had become merged with their sense of self. A range of different affective responses were associated with this change, from neutral curiosity, to bliss and joy, to fear and terror.

It’s a description, it turns out, that bears a striking resemblance to another kind of transcendent experience.

This is Your Brain on Drugs

Before they were known as psychedelics, hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD were used in research on mental illness and called psychotomimetics for their ability to mimic the state of psychosis. Research participants exhibited behavior under the influence of these drugs that suggested that something profound was occurring in their minds. The problem with the psychotomimetic model, however, was that rather than psychosis, often what was going on in their minds seemed to be profoundly good. Participants frequently counted such experiences amongst the most meaningful ones of their lives. The psychotomimetic model gave way to the psychedelic—or “mind manifesting”—model, with the hope that such experiences could not just mimic psychosis but help otherwise healthy individuals attain deeper levels of consciousness. “What a psychiatrist might diagnose as depersonalization, hallucinations, or mania, might better be thought of as instances of mystical union, visionary experience, or ecstasy,” writes Pollan in How to Change Your Mind. “Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?” 

In the late 1960s the idea of drug-induced transcendence became problematic from the perspective of a government trying to preserve the status quo, and psychedelics became a banned substance. But the use of modern brain-imaging tools to map this inward journey has led to a resurgence in enthusiasm for this class of drugs. It has also allowed researchers to correlate the experience of depersonalization, or mystical union, with specific patterns in the brain.

“What a psychiatrist might diagnose as depersonalization, hallucinations, or mania, might better be thought of as instances of mystical union, visionary experience, or ecstasy.”

In attempting to map the neural correlates of “drug-induced ego dissolution,” researchers have administered a wide variety of substances. They’ve found that psilocybin, ayahuasca, and LSD are all linked to decreased functional integrity of the DMN, and that DMN interruption is correlated with ego dissolution and reduced rumination about the past. Furthermore, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), structures that are part of the DMN and involved in self-referential processing, both show decreased activity under the influence of these drugs. These are the same regions that also display decreased activity during mindfulness meditation. 

Reflecting on his own psychedelic journey, Pollan offers a poignant description of depersonalization:

The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. Yet something had succeeded it: this bare disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference.

The equanimity, lack of a concrete self, and bare awareness Pollan describes are all emblematic of the profound meditative experience.

Of course, drug-induced ego dissolution, as with meditation-induced self-loss, is not always a transcendently positive experience. A “bad trip,” in which the sudden loss of self leads to intense destabilization and potentially destructive behavior, is what first led researchers to conclude that psychedelics could mimic the experience of psychosis. They weren’t entirely wrong.

This is Your Brain on Psychosis

Psychosis is a broad term that, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, refers to mental health disorders in which there is some form of loss of contact with reality, including hallucinations, delusions, or schizophrenia. 

In examining resting-state fMRI data from schizophrenic patients in comparison with healthy controls, researchers have found altered DMN connectivity in schizophrenics. In another study, researchers comparing brain images from schizophrenic patients with those of healthy controls have found that decreased DMN activity correlates with the severity of symptoms in patients. Both of these studies are consistent with previous findings that show both a hyperconnectivity in the DMN and decreased DMN connectivity in schizophrenic patients. In short, it seems that schizophrenics suffer from aberrant DMN activity; a self-referential process that is either absent or on overdrive, wherein the prism through which the ego is filtered is off kilter.

Of course, perception itself is a controlled hallucination for so-called normal brains as well. As a highly efficient predictive machine, the brain will readily pick and choose what information is allowed to formulate conscious attention. It is not surprising that researchers examining the potential dark side of meditation in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study faced a conundrum in making a distinction between an “adverse effect” and a “religious experience.” They wrote, “Similar challenges affect research that attempts to compare and differentiate ‘mystical’ or ‘religious’ experiences from ‘psychopathology.’”

The above is not meant to undermine the legitimate suffering and confusion experienced by those with psychosis. There are subsets of the general population that suffer from consistent imbalances in functional connectivity resulting in debilitating mental disorders. But it is entirely possible that somewhere within this jumble of disorders are glimpses into forms of consciousness that meditation and psychedelics also offer, such as depersonalization. Furthermore, the way various cultures approach these glimpses can have a considerable impact on how those undergoing them are treated.

Phil Borges, a documentarian of indigenous and tribal cultures, notes in a TED talk that in some of these societies shamans are often those who have suffered a mental break. When this psychological crisis occurs, the individual is taken under the wing of a mentor who offers guidance, and leads the individual through a ritual of death and rebirth, in which consciousness and compassion are meant to expand, and the individual takes on a life of service as a shaman. 

Borges contrasted this with the way psychosis is approached in Western society by way of a young man named Adam who he encountered while researching this topic. Adam described his mental break first as “shattering” and “mind-opening,” featuring a “beautiful” connection to the universe in which the boundary between self and other dissipated. But the feeling shifted to panic and fear, and eventually he was diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed medication. After several years Adam attended a Vipassana meditation retreat that led to a period of stabilization. But when seeking to do another retreat, his history of mental illness was disclosed, and he was not allowed to partake. The stigma of his condition and lack of overarching guidance or support left him stranded.

There’s no question that psychosis requires professional intervention. And the depersonalization that occurs through meditation, drugs, or mental disorder can nudge one into a dangerous state, as occurred in the case of Sharon Stern. Yet it is also possible that one could be nudged in a more spiritual direction to experience depersonalization as a unifying awakening. Whether one experiences the former or the latter might depend on the support systems one has in place.

Set and Setting

Timothy Leary is a complex figure in the history of psychedelics, notorious for pushing the envelope in a way that may have antagonized the establishment into action. But he also contributed greatly to knowledge and understanding in the burgeoning field, including coining the terms “set” and “setting,” which Ido Hartogsohn, professor and author of American Trip, describes as follows:

The set and setting hypothesis basically holds that the effects of psychedelic drugs are dependent first and foremost upon set (personality, preparation, expectation, and intention of the person having the experience) and setting (the physical, social, and cultural environment in which the experience takes place).

Despite the volatility of these substances, experiences of bad trips in a research setting are more infrequent because set and setting are carefully considered. A person taking a psychedelic in a clinical setting is given time to properly frame the experience and set meaningful intentions for the journey; the individual undertakes the experience in a space designed with the proper ambience in mind, and with the help of an experienced guide (what Michael Pollan has called “White Coat Shamanism”); and following the experience the individual undergoes an integration in which the trip is contextualized with the help of the guide or clinician.

The lack of proper set and setting in the Western meditative context can lead to a dissolution of ego that is absent of the support or resources required to make sense of it.

The attention to set and setting here bears a striking resemblance to the support offered to (and by) shamans in indigenous and tribal communities. Similarly, in Buddhist practice one takes refuge in the Three Jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Buddha refers to the historical Buddha, as well as the teachers in one’s life that embody the teachings; the dharma refers to the teachings and the truth of reality; and the sangha refers to the community one practices amongst. 

Unfortunately, this framework is often absent from the meditative experience that has been taken up in the West. Rachel Aviv quoted Robert Sharf, a professor of Buddhist studies, who explained:

The depersonalization to which Buddhists aspire is not supposed to result in dysfunctional alienation. The dissolution of the ego is meant to occur within an institutional and ideological framework that helps one make sense of the experience. Nowadays, people who become depressed or depersonalized through secularized meditation practices don’t have access to the conceptual resources and social structures to help them handle what is happening to them.

The lack of proper set and setting in the Western meditative context can lead to a dissolution of ego that is absent of the support or resources required to make sense of it.

Returning to the case of Sharon Stern, the descent from dancer to self-destruction becomes clearer. Stern dove headfirst into a Buddhist-influenced form of dance that prizes surrendering the self and committing completely to the form. She became overly involved with her teacher, Katsura Kan (a Butoh master who had studied Zen Buddhism for three decades), to the point that her family intervened, leaving Stern feeling alienated and adrift. She remained in contact with Kan, and continued to dance and attend his workshops, though she suffered a psychological crisis, ended up in a psychiatric ward, and was put on medication. Stern’s email to Kan in which she asked, “What happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?” was sent a week before she killed herself.

It is possible that Stern suffered from mental illness and that this imbalance and subsequent behavior would have surfaced regardless of the path she had taken. It is also possible that her devotion to a form of dance that likely deactivated her DMN in a manner similar to meditation or psychedelics resulted in a depersonalization that pushed her to that liminal stage between psychosis and spirituality. But Stern lacked the context and care that set and setting provide. She lacked a place to take refuge, such as the Three Jewels, to help support and direct this experience.

Granted, as the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project has made clear, even with proper support, depersonalization can be deeply unsettling. The Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young has described such experiences of no self as “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin.” In a 2011 blog post, he wrote, “This is serious but still manageable through intensive, perhaps daily, guidance under a competent teacher. In some cases it takes months or even years to fully metabolize, but in my experience the results are almost always highly positive.” As with the experience of shamans-in-training, or psychedelics, Young emphasizes the continuous guidance and support that allow for the intensity of the experience to be enfolded into the spiritual journey. Just as psychedelics taken outside of a clinical setting are more likely to result in bad trips, in the absence of the Three Jewels, secularized meditation in the West runs the risk of inducing profound experiences without the proper tools to process them. Taking a page from the secularized process of psychedelic research, accounting for set and setting could go a long way toward supporting the depersonalization that can occur when “one” becomes “none.”

The concept of a self has allowed the human species to flourish to an extent that is unrivaled in the history of life on this planet. By ruminating on the past and strategizing for the future, countless generations of selves have been able to orchestrate growth on a scale and magnitude that has dramatic implications for all life. By learning how to properly support and integrate experiences of self-loss, perhaps humans can begin to act on these implications and these countless other lives in a more compassionate way, leading to the sense of unity to which mystical experiences so tantalizingly point. 

The post The Dangerous Art of Depersonalization  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Some years ago I was talking to a friend, who is also a Zen teacher, about prayer. He mentioned that he had been in the practice of talking to Kuan Yin, [the bodhisattva of compassion], every day for some time until he realized that he was talking to himself and decided to stop. This left me with a question: why should he have stopped just because he was talking to himself? 

Kuan Yin, also known as Kanzeon and Avalokiteshvara, is one of the cosmic, or archetypal, bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism. These larger than life figures are beings dedicated to the salvation of all beings, whose presence and powers are cosmic in scope. Kuan Yin, Jizo, Manjushri, Tara, and dozens of others have been real and important presences in Buddhist history. 

Throughout Buddhist stories they have been mythologized, prayed to, depicted in Buddhist art, worshipped, channeled, and even identified with. Some Buddhists think they are real, and others view them as products of the mind—focuses of meditation or imagined embodiments of archetypal forces. Still others refuse to make a clear distinction between them being real and being unreal, as in the case of one Tibetan teacher who, when asked if cosmic bodhisattvas are real, replied, “Yes, but they know they are not.” 

It is, I think, natural, when one takes up a Mahayana practice like devotion to a cosmic bodhisattva or the deity yoga practices of Tibetan Buddhism, to wonder if the being one is imagining is real or not. Certainly this question occurred to me when I was experimenting with Tibetan deity yoga practice where one imagines a Buddha or bodhisattva and identifies with them. 

As for myself, I concluded—with all due respect to others who view it differently—that cosmic bodhisattvas are imaginary characters who Buddhists have invested with a degree of power that may be transpersonal. In other words, although I don’t believe Kuan Yin is an objectively real being outside of human minds, I believe her power transcends that which I give her with my own personal mind. I think there is room for mystery here. Has Kuan Yin really appeared to lost pilgrims in the mountains of Asia and guided them home, as many have reported? Maybe she has, even being a “mere” product of human minds. 

This way of viewing the bodhisattvas is similar to the way archetypes of the collective unconscious function in the psychological theories of psychiatrist Carl Jung, who in fact invented the term “archetype” I have been using here. Archetypes are imaginary beings, yet they exist outside of any particular human mind and have a certain autonomy. They function within the collective psyche and the world due to the mysterious powers of our collective human mind. Jung developed a way of accessing the figures of our unconscious-—both archetypal ones and more local, personal symbols, in a practice he called “active imagination.” It consists of actively dialoguing with symbolic figures who are invited to appear in one’s imagination. “Active imagination is distinct from fantasy,” wrote Jung, “meaning that the images encountered in active imagination have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic.” Jung himself had a long series of conversations with a being called Philemon, which he recorded in his Red Book. The technique was further developed by Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson, whose approach informs my own practice. “Active imagination is a special way of using the power of the imagination to develop a working relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious,” wrote Johnson in Inner Work. 

Having practiced and led active imagination sessions myself, I wondered, could bodhisattvas be accessed this way? Within the paradigm of active imagination, the bodhisattva is a figure that embodies and channels the wisdom they represent to us. They become a way to access the wisdom we hide from ourselves—the wisdom that is unconscious. I thought this was worth an experiment, and I asked another Zen friend of mine which bodhisattva I should talk to. In true Zen fashion, he gave me a wise and surprising answer. He thought I should talk to Fudo. 

Fudo Myo-o 

Fudo is depicted as a fierce warrior, a manifestation of the wisdom mind of the primordial Buddha. He is a guardian—a defender of boundaries and an incinerator of obstacles to enlightenment, often depicted carrying a sword and a noose. 

He would not have been my first choice. 

I was thinking of Jizo, the gentle monk-like bodhisattva who protects children and the lost, ferrying them through darkness. The more I thought about Fudo, though, as well as my own struggles to maintain good boundaries in my life, and my longstanding struggle with certain persistent obstacles, the more I thought Fudo might indeed be just right. I decided the only way to decide would be to talk to him. 

Following the protocol for an active imagination session, I sat down somewhere quiet, closed my eyes, and imagined myself entering a space that symbolizes my own unconscious mind. I walked down a stone spiral staircase inside a mountain, into a dark, circular space. There in the center, luminous with fire, was Fudo. I asked him questions and listened to the responses. In this practice you do not deliberately imagine a reply from the being, but rather wait and let them reply in a way that feels autonomous. This does actually happen and the being often says surprising and sometimes shocking things which, by virtue of the logic of the exercise, get around your natural ego filters. By the end of our discussion I was convinced Fudo was the right choice to be my interlocutor. 

I vividly imagined myself walking over a green field towards a huge tree, which had a spiral staircase in its trunk that led into the ground. I walked down the spiral into a very dark place where there was a cavern with a simple, empty altar. I left flowers and incense and then invited Fudo to appear. He did, hovering over the altar, surrounded in flames, his body bronze. I asked him what message he had for me.

“You have to be willing to die,” he said. 

“How do I do that?”

“You need to die to the things you’re clinging to. Let go of the things you’re carrying. Let them burn away. Be willing for my flames to burn them to ash.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“Wait patiently through the pain and anxiety that arises. Trust me, I’ll burn them away without hurting you. You will emerge on the other side stronger.” 

I felt carried, or supported by Fudo, who had the look of a fierce but wise and loyal general within the flames. “I’m here for you,” he said, tapping a staff on the ground, like a loyal and strong general speaking to his leader. I thanked Fudo and left an offering again, then walked up the spiral and out of the tree. Knowing the next step was to take action, I thought of things I needed to let go of. A relationship where I am taking excessive responsibility for the other person and the relationship itself. Pet pleasures that take away from my meditation time. I decided that in the week ahead I would work on both, and I would remember Fudo’s advice to wait in the flames while these things burnt away. 

For five days I met with Fudo in my internal sacred space, each time talking with him and listening to what he had to say, then leaving imaginary offerings (a Buddhist touch) and walking back up the stairs to the virtual forested ground above. During those days, Fudo quickly became my guide and friend in setting stronger boundaries in my practice and life, and being more willing to be fierce in confronting the obstacles that I say I want to let go while still keeping just a pocketful of around in case I need them. 

My conclusion: Buddhist practice and active imagination are a fruitful fusion. Especially, but not exclusively, for those who would like to relate to cosmic bodhisattvas but who, like me, are not of a devotional bent, it opens a unique pathway. 

Here are some brief instructions on doing this experiment for yourself. [For a deeper dive I recommend the book Inner Work by Robert A. Johnson, where the following steps are set out].  

1. Preparation Get writing materials ready and then sit somewhere quiet and private and close your eyes. Imagine yourself entering into the depths of your own mind. You might picture this as walking into a forest glade, or into a cave or a temple, or down a spiral staircase into a cavern (my favorite). 
2. Invitation Imagine the bodhisattva or spiritual figure you want to speak to, or invite them to appear. Don’t worry if you experience some mental static or false starts. Keep trying until you feel that they are present, or at least that a clear mental image of some kind appears. Ask them if they are who you want to talk to. If they say yes, keep going. If not, invite who you want to appear. 
3. Dialogue Once they appear, begin asking them questions. I often start with, “What do you have to teach me?” or a more specific question arising from challenges in my spiritual practice. I will ask questions until it feels right to stop, or until mental static takes over, as happens sometimes. Then I leave an offering, or make some other gesture of gratitude or respect,  and imagine myself leaving the space. 
4. Embodiment I then write down what I saw and the conversation as clearly as possible. Johnson recommends integrating what you’ve learned into your life through action, making changes, or a physical ritual of some kind.

One warning: Active Imagination is not possession or contact with a higher authority. It’s a dialogue between the conscious mind and a guide or symbolic force. According to both Jung and Johnson, the ego, with its sense of ethics and values, should remain in charge. The job of the ego is not to submit to the entities encountered in the practice, but to responsibly integrate what they have to say with ethical responsibility and common sense. On the one hand this means one doesn’t have to, and in fact shouldn’t, uncritically listen to whatever they have to say. On the other hand this does mean one is allowed to talk back! 

The post Talking to the Bodhisattva Inside  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The mindfulness boom keeps on booming. As the pandemic continues to change our way of life, people are turning to meditation and mindfulness practices to help them cope with the stress, anxiety, and isolation that social distancing causes. The Washington Post recently reported on a marked spike in meditation app usage—a trend that may only increase as the impact of COVID-19 is felt more acutely around the world. 

For practicing psychotherapists, this may not come as a huge surprise. Scholars have noted that the immense popularity of mainstream mindfulness is due in large part to their successful entrenchment in health care and, especially, psychotherapy. Contemporary therapeutic mindfulness practices are an established feature of the mental health field—studies assessing the clinical effectiveness of mindfulness practices number in the many thousands, and have even become the foundation of entire treatment modalities (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive therapy). And though it continues to be referred to as a “new fad,” the use of mindfulness practices in psychotherapy is actually decades old.

But many mental health care professionals disagree with the ways mindfulness can be used in psychotherapy. In fact, a robust debate surrounds so-called mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), dating at least as far back as the 1990s. Many psychotherapists seem to view the very popularity of mindfulness practices as a sign of their superficiality. For them, the practices’ appeal comes at the cost of their co-option within a global capitalism that appropriates rich cultural traditions and then markets them for unwholesome ends in corporate and military sectors. Other therapists harbor resentments that MBIs seem like a juggernaut, eclipsing the other ways that psychotherapists have approached Buddhist traditions. 

If we look farther back into history, we see that the current state of mindfulness was far from inevitable. I explored this history at length in my book Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion, and found that when psychotherapists began taking an interest in Buddhist teachings and practices (not too long after the invention of talk therapy as a discipline), they investigated Buddhist thought as a whole and never seriously considered using actual practices in their clinical work. 

For well over a century now, clinicians have approached Buddhist teachings and practices in surprisingly diverse ways that go far beyond mindfulness. Early talk therapists, most famously Carl Jung, pored over some of the first Buddhist texts to be translated into German or English, believing they held important insights into human psychology. Some colleagues pathologized Buddhist meditative states as based in a narcissistic wish for return to a state of maternal union. Jung, however, advanced a highly romantic interpretation of Buddhist practices as inward-facing means for achieving a self-actualization that required, as he wrote, a “penetration into the ground layers of consciousness.” Early therapists like Jung attended to Buddhist cosmographies and, moreover, to topics like rebirth and nirvana, which they understood to mean escape from the cycle of rebirth. They assumed such concepts were not metaphysical but psychological realities, metaphors that described vital truths about being human.

Psychologists and psychotherapists at the turn of the 20th century thus played a major role in introducing the newly named world religion “Buddhism” to communities in Europe and the United States as a uniquely psychological religion. Jung himself provided introductions to seminal texts such as W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s influential edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When preparing his Introduction to Zen Buddhism for publication in German (and subsequently English), the modern Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese scholar often referred to as the person who brought Zen Buddhism to the West, wrote Jung requesting he contribute a foreword.  

Psychotherapists’ intensive theoretical dialogue with Buddhist thought in general, and Suzuki in particular, continued in the decades that followed. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the US was experiencing a “Zen boom,” in some ways as influential as our present-day mindfulness mania. Growing numbers of psychoanalytic therapists like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm became convinced Zen philosophy could inform therapy. Horney, for example, suggested that Zen teachings offered models for an ideal therapeutic presence she named “wholeheartedness” (a posture some have described as a proto-“mindfulness” at a time when virtually no one was using the term). 

The highwater mark may have been the 1957 meeting Fromm arranged between Suzuki and nearly fifty psychoanalysts at the University of Mexico. The edited volume produced from the gathering’s conversations, Zen and Psychoanalysis, represents therapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions during this period: intellectual explorations comparing Buddhist and psychoanalytic metapsychologies surrounding, for example, conceptions of the self. Analysts were fascinated by the notion of satori [sudden enlightenment] experiences and wondered if Buddhists were describing phenomena akin to the moments of transformative insight and self-realization awakened by psychotherapy. 

Nonetheless, most psychoanalysts imagined Buddhist practice to be a parallel path to talk therapy and did not actively incorporate Buddhist elements into actual sessions. Yet through the 1970s, communities of humanistic and, a bit later, transpersonal psychotherapists, began to mix together practices from a number of different sources, including Buddhist traditions. Zen meditation practices started to be viewed as viable therapeutic interventions that could be placed alongside yoga poses, Taoist philosophy, and Gestalt therapy’s emphasis on the present moment.  Scientists like Herbert Benson conducted empirical research on techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM), helping legitimize them to major medical institutions. These therapists laid the groundwork for taking seriously the healing potential of practices associated with Asian religious traditions. 

The development of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) is often seen as arising directly from this trajectory. This is somewhat ironic because the humanistic and transpersonal therapists who paved the way for the incorporation of mindfulness were often highly opposed to what they referred to as the “medical model,” with its emphasis on empiricism and symptom- reduction. 

Fromm was actually a vocal critic of psychotherapy that merely “adjusted” people or helped people cope with suffering he believed was often generated by societal injustice. He had warned his fellow analysts that Suzuki’s Zen, as Fromm wrote in his 1960 collection Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, “is not a ‘technique’ which can be isolated from the premise of Buddhist thinking, of the behavior and ethical values” of Buddhist traditions. Interestingly, late in his life, he learned a style of meditation from the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera (née Siegmund Feniger) that would today likely be recognized as a mindfulness practice. Fromm came to believe that it was this meditation that, like an authentic psychotherapy, would allow sufferers to cull away conscious and unconscious barriers to self-liberation from the psychic structures that left one vulnerable to submission to politico-economic oppressors.

Contrary to Fromm’s vision, mindfulness practices were initially viewed positively by cognitive behavioral therapists in the 1990s precisely because they believed they could be translated into secular techniques for those who would otherwise be averse to the religious. Even as these clinical techniques became more prevalent, psychotherapists continued to seriously engage with Buddhist philosophy, and many sought to integrate Buddhist and psychotherapeutic frames.

Where earlier comparative analyses often focused on similarities between Buddhist and psychotherapeutic ideas, in the 1980s and 1990s clinicians increasingly observed significant differences, which they often described as incommensurable—such as psychotherapy’s aim of restoring a whole healthy self and the Buddhist concept of non-self. Some sought to resolve these incompatibilities, such as in transpersonal therapist Jack Engler’s famous dictum “you have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” Others have emphasized the need to preserve a differentiation between Buddhism and psychotherapy without subsuming one within the other. Contemporary clinician Pilar Jennings draws on relational psychoanalysis to explain the importance of maintaining differentiation and healthy boundaries in all relationships, including, as she writes in her 2010 book Mixing Minds, the “relationship between Buddhism and psychoanalysis.” Nonetheless, the resulting integrative forms have at times been described as mixtures, new psycho-Buddhist schools uniquely suited to a contemporary culture in the US. 

Many decades since Jung took up the first Buddhist texts to be translated for European consumption, psychotherapists have copious (and far more accurate) resources for their investigation of Buddhist traditions. Therapists’ passion for Buddhist study has even driven some to obtain additional degrees. Well into his career as a psychiatrist, Joe Loizzo earned a PhD in Buddhist studies under the prominent Tibetologist Robert A.F. Thurman. And, perhaps most dramatically, psychotherapists in the US have doubled as founders and leaders of Buddhist communities. In her book American Dharma (2019), Buddhist studies scholar Ann Gleig observed that psychotherapeutic resources are utilized to assist practitioners in clearing psychological obstacles blocking their meditation practice.

The fact remains, however, that even those contemporary therapists who take a more thoroughly integrative approach to Buddhist traditions cannot ignore the impact that mindfulness-based psychotherapies have had on the field. Some, like Loizzo, have simply included mindfulness practices within his larger “Buddhist psychotherapy,” as he has called it. Others have become vocal critics of the mindfulness movement. Psychoanalyst and Zen teacher Barry Magid has strongly critiqued the explicit insertion of Buddhist teachings or practices into clinical sessions; Magid considers it, among other things, an“instrumentalization” of Buddhist practices within a dehumanizing “means-to-end” way of living that is directly counter to his understanding of a Buddhist path. In 2016, Magid and therapist Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum co-edited the book What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (and What Isn’t), in which several clinicians expressed their concern about the decontextualization of mindfulness from Buddhist doctrine, philosophy and ethics.

Yet as therapeutic mindfulness practices reach ever closer to ubiquity, psychotherapists continue to employ a diversity of approaches to Buddhist teachings and practices, and there are multiple perspectives among mindfulness practitioners, too. A decade and a half ago, feminist psychologist Jan Surrey was developing a “relational mindfulness” as a response, in part, to what she perceived to be overly individualistic mindfulness trainings. Her mindfulness practices were framed as essentially relational in nature, holding the capacity to awaken an awareness of one’s interconnectedness to all beings. The peer-reviewed journal Mindfulness devoted its entire first issue of 2020 to what it dubbed “second-generation mindfulness-based interventions,” which, for example, offer an answer to a deracinated mindfulness by teaching “right mindfulness” recontextualized within the larger eightfold path.

Within these perspectives, we also see continuities that extend back through the century-plus history of psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhism. Surrey carries forward a conversation surrounding what Buddhist teachings say about the nature of the self that goes back to Jung. But while some Buddhist psychotherapists (and even some mindfulness practitioners) decry a psychotherapy limited to symptom-reduction and champion recovering the salvific or soteriological aspects of Buddhist practice, they do not strive for a nirvana that is liberation from a literal cycle of rebirth. For clinicians who practice relational-cultural therapy, which focuses on the importance of relationships to well-being, the interrelatedness revealed by the concept of dependent co-arising is not a web of karmic ensnarement one seeks to escape but part of understanding an optimal state of human health and wellness. 

Over the decades, psychotherapists have variously focused on Buddhisms of the Pali canon, D.T. Suzuki’s Zen, or the Dalai Lama’s dialogues with neuroscientists. But, from the first therapists to study Buddhist doctrine to today, contemporary clinicians often begin with the assumption that concepts like rebirth or merit-making are psychological metaphors, though in the lived experience of Buddhist communities across the globe they are often anything but. Cultivating an awareness of the diversity and continuities of psychotherapists’ interactions with Buddhist traditions can hopefully bring us toward an ever more nuanced understanding of the dharma’s role in mental health care. 

The post Not Just Mindfulness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In her 2010 book Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, psychotherapist Pilar Jennings notes, “It is very possible to have a deep and rich spiritual life that reaps all manner of spiritual rewards while core psychological patterns and struggles remain untouched.” Without a doubt, mindfulness is a helpful tool, but nothing can replace the healing power of a relationship with a well-trained and dedicated listener.

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in spiritually based mindfulness meditation practices, and Jennings succinctly describes a phenomenon, generally known as spiritual bypass, that can happen when we try to use these techniques to solve psychological problems and end up avoiding them instead. Mindfulness meditation increases the ability to live in the present moment and may produce profound insights into the nature of reality, both invaluable tools for crafting a conscious, well-lived life. But these practices were not designed to heal an injured heart.

An American Zen teacher I know recently told me that when people come to talk to her about their anxiety or depression, she frequently suggests that that they should really be seeing a psychotherapist. Like me, she has come to believe that talk therapy, specifically psychodynamic psychotherapy, is more effective than meditation for dealing with emotional problems because it is able to undo psychological patterns and resolve the symptoms that they create.

The Danger of Spiritual Bypass

I fell in love with Buddhist philosophy as a teenager and believed that Buddhist meditation held the key to magically dissolve the anxiety that had plagued me since childhood. Since I privileged Buddhism over Western science, it never occurred to me to turn to the field of psychology for help.

As soon as I graduated from college, I moved to Japan to study with an esteemed Zen master. The discipline was strict, the floor of the meditation hall was cold, and the teacher was deeply intimidating, but I felt like I had finally arrived and was solidly on my way to transcending the vicissitudes of the mundane world. It soon became apparent, however, that I was also becoming increasingly anxious and depressed, and I started to have frightening visions during meditation that left me feeling physically shaky and disconnected from my body.

I made an appointment to see the teacher and tried to tell him about what was going on. He cut me off mid-sentence and yelled at me. “Illusions!” he shouted. “Your feelings and visions are nothing more than illusions. Forget about them, go back to your cushion, and concentrate on your meditation. Just sit!”

In other words, “Suck it up and get over it.”

And I did. I went back to my cushion and steeled myself against the feelings of the little girl inside me who was terrified and felt completely alone, the one he had just annihilated.

I continued to meditate for years under the guidance of a series of Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist teachers and became skilled at one-pointed concentration and mindfulness. And I just kept stuffing down those “illusory” feelings—until one day in my fifties when I was walking down a street in Greenwich Village and had a full-blown panic attack. I was terrified and called a Buddhist friend of mine, who happens to be a psychoanalyst, to ask her what she thought I should do.

“You need to talk to somebody,” she said.

And that’s how I ended up on the couch of an interpersonal psychoanalyst.

The Value of Talk Therapy

All my analyst required me to do was to show up and to talk. And as I began to speak, my emotional body seemed to wake up and find its voice. And, lo and behold, it had a lot to say. I kept talking and my analyst kept listening.

One day, as I was nattering on about something that happened when I was a child, my analyst observed, quietly, “You seem sad.” I started to protest, but then stopped. He had heard it. The sadness underlying my brittle cheerfulness. And then, maybe for the first time, I heard it too. And I started to cry.

This crack in my veneer led me to uncover the deep-seated emotional conflicts that had been festering in my unconscious for years. As we began to explore them, I gradually started to feel better and my life-long anxiety symptoms, such as an exaggerated startle response and chronic nausea, disappeared completely.

Therapy was able to resolve issues that meditation never had.

Over time, I realized that none of my Buddhist teachers had ever really listened to what I had to say. Even with the appearance of a relationship between a meditator and a teacher, when I was performing mindfulness meditation practices, I was basically alone. With my analyst, I was not. And that seems to have made all the difference.

The post The Couch and the Cushion: Why Mindfulness Is No Substitute for Therapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

People turn to Buddhism for a variety of reasons ranging from emotional or psychological issues, family conflicts, health problems, and a feeling of emptiness in their lives to dissatisfaction with the religion they grew up with. But with the overwhelming variety of Buddhist schools, teachers, and centers, it is difficult to know where to start.

Some newcomers end up at a center associated with a teacher whose work caught their attention. Others may follow the recommendation of a friend or family member to go to their first local Buddhist center. Before they know it, they find themselves engaging in the practices of a particular lineage often without questioning the underlying meaning. Then, many people end up abandoning the practice because they aren’t able to relate to the traditional setup or hierarchy at a particular Buddhist center.

While this variety of schools and styles can be disorienting, it’s also one of Buddhism’s greatest strengths. The Buddha adapted his teachings to meet the needs of people with different personalities. He recognized the importance of difference in individuals’ temperament and emotional and intellectual makeup.

If newcomers had a way to find the school that was best suited to them, perhaps they could find refuge instead of confusion and alienation. No tradition is the “best” one, but you can find the practice most suited to your needs. Doing so requires familiarizing yourself with the various traditions, researching teachers and centers, and allowing yourself to experiment with different communities until you find one where you feel comfortable and supported.

First, be honest with yourself about what your personality style is. If you feel like you can’t accurately judge yourself, the online DISC personality test is an excellent free self-assessment. Unlike most personality tests that are based on assessing psychopathology, DISC is determined by a person’s day-to-day behavior pattern.

To match your personality style with the appropriate Buddhist tradition and school, you need to familiarize yourself with the main ones, each of which has its own underlying philosophical and conceptual framework and practice modalities. (Vajrayana, for instance, is more nonconventional and commitment-based than, say, Theravada Buddhism.) And each has its own religious and cultural underpinnings.  Often a teacher may overemphasize these components, overshadowing the core philosophies and practices. They may overlook introducing the four noble truths and eightfold noble path as the core teachings of the Buddha. Instead they might introduce you to the teachings of the founder of their particular school. Reading a book not just by a well known teacher but also by reputable scholars can help you get a good idea of not just the differences among the traditions and the schools within them but also about the core underlying teachings.

After getting an idea of the tradition and school you prefer, it’s important to find a good teacher. Though an emotional connection with a teacher is a critical factor, also consider if the teacher or their qualified assistant teachers have enough availability. An amazing teacher won’t do you much good if you can’t consult with them regularly.

Given the demands of Buddhist practice, a cohesive and supportive modern sangha is critical.  Remember that while the teacher is the central figure, the sangha is no less important. We know from research on group process, or group dynamics, that a community can function parasitically—discord eats away at the sangha—when the members fail to recognize their role and relevance in the success of the group’s activity.

As far as the practice center is concerned, you should have a good idea of the setup and the hierarchy. If a center is secretive about the authority of the teacher and the administration, and questions are discouraged, this might not bode well for optimal learning and growth. It is also critical that there are ethical guidelines that govern student-teacher relationships and that there is an independent committee to address these issues of conflict and potential abuse.

It might also be worthwhile to revisit the priority of your Buddhist practice in relationships to other priorities such as family, work, finances, and health. Knowing how much time and emotion you can commit to the practice can help to draw up a plan of your practice for the next year. Based on the time you can commit, you should determine the type of practice, and how deep you should get into the practice.

At the same time you should assess your level of motivation, which plays a major role in the success of your practice. Research show that people who take on a practice with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation are more likely to develop a deep interest and commitment, while people with extrinsic motivation tend to look for instant rewards and gratification. People who are intrinsically motivated to turn to Buddhism are likely to fully commit themselves emotionally as well as in terms of time. People who turn to Buddhism to avoid negative consequences or instantly obtain external rewards may restrict their commitment to a part of the teachings that meets their fancy.   

Finally, newcomers should familiarize themselves with the three stages of in-depth study, critical analysis, and contemplative meditation. Studies show that students who simply listen, memorize, chant, and meditate may be engaging in what is known as surface learning. They tend to take what is taught at face value without really grasping the underlying meaning of the teaching because they don’t question and analyze the teachings for themselves. Deep learners rely on understanding the meaning behind the teaching by making arguments and finding evidence from their life experiences to confirm or disconfirm their assumptions.  

Keep these things in mind when exploring the various schools of Buddhism. The Buddha taught that there are 84,000 paths to enlightenment. Make sure to find the one that’s right for you, where you are getting the education and support that you need.

The post What School of Buddhism Is Right for You? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Positive psychology gurus and coaches give lots of advice about how we should lead our lives. Their threat is that if we don’t follow their advice, we will not only be unhappy, we risk sickness and death.

When Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America was published outside of the United States, the book was retitled Smile or Die. The publisher was concerned that non-native English speakers might not understand the play on words in the original title. I think the retitling is actually more apt in capturing the message of positive psychology: buy our advice, buy our books, attend our workshops or die.

Positive psychology claims to distinguish itself from New Age hucksters and silliness because it is based on solid science, top-notch research. These claims have recently fallen on hard times.

First, there was the savaging of Barbara Fredrickson’s absurdly precise positivity ratio. She had claimed in books and workshops that a balance of 2.9013 of positive to negative feelings was necessary to flourish. A team consisting of a psychology graduate student, a psychology professor, and a physicist critically examined the original journal article, “Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing,” on which these claims were based. They concluded,

We find no theoretical or empirical justification for the use of differential equations drawn from fluid dynamics, a subfield of physics, to describe changes in human emotions over time; furthermore, we demonstrate that the purported application of these equations contains numerous fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors.

One of the authors, physicist Alan Sokal, later remarked,

The main claim made by Fredrickson and Losada is so implausible on its face that some red flags ought to have been raised.

Then there was the demise of Fredrickson’s claim to have used genomic analysis to resolve the classic question of whether people should just strive for happiness (hedonic well-being) or pursue meaning (eudaimonic well-being) in their lives. Fredrickson claimed to find that “hedonic and eudaimonic well-being engage distinct gene regulatory programs despite their similar effects on total well-being and depressive symptoms” and came down on the side of striving for meaningfulness.

Fredrickson explained to her results to the media:

It’s not the amount of hedonic happiness that’s a problem…It’s that it’s not matched by eudaimonic well-being. It’s great when both are in step. But if you have more hedonic well-being than would be expected, that’s when this [gene] pattern that’s akin to adversity emerged.

So, the heading of an Atlantic article:

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity.

The basis for the claims had appeared in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). But I showed in a blog post that like the positivity ratio, these claims were based on statistical nonsense. The Short Flourishing Scale supposedly measures distinct concepts of eudaimonic well-being versus hedonic well-being. But scores were so highly correlated (.71) that two could be considered to be assessing facets of the same characteristic. It is only by voodoo statistics that they could be shown to be related differently to gene expression. Complicated multivariate statistical analyses were used to produce results that were an artifact of the analyses, not the patterns in the original data.

I examined the original reports concerning the scales and the data presented in Fredrickson’s PNAS paper and I could not understand the basis for her claim that these scales provided valid and reliable assessments of personal characteristics. The supposedly contrasting scales certainly did not have a needed discriminant validity for measuring two distinct concepts. To examine content validity, I looked at the actual items. I found some particularly serious problems with the measure of eudaimonic well-being.

The general question is phrased “During the past month how often did you feel…?” And the six response options are “never, once or twice, about once a week, about two or three times a week, almost every day, or every day.” The specific items to be evaluated were

• that you had something important to contribute to society,

• that you belonged to a community (like a social group, your school, or your neighborhood)

• that our society is a good place, or is becoming a better place, for all people

• that people are basically good

• that the way our society works made sense to you

The documentation for the scale cautions:

The original wording for item 6 was ‘that our society is becoming a better place for people like you.’ This item does not work in all cultural contexts.

Indeed. But I think there are more defects in the construction of this scale.

Positive psychology has been criticized for overemphasizing the potential of individuals to transcend their circumstances. But not every life context affords the same opportunities for flourishing. The promise “smile, think positive thoughts, and you will be happy and healthy” underestimates the importance of social context for psychological well-being and health. Look at these items with that criticism in mind.

It would be fascinating to do a cognitive interview assessment of what respondents are actually thinking about when they complete the items. I think there are strong class and minority/majority differences. Certainly, priveleged white people have many more opportunities to draw upon than low-income minority persons to feel they contributed something to society and much more basis for concluding that our society is a good place and the way it works makes sense.

In its pencil and paper and online self-assessments, positive psychology assumes that it is personal characteristics that are being assessed and that they are modifiable with the advice and exercises that the workshops and the books provide. The emphasis on character and character-building is neo-Victorian. Positive psychology assumes that life is a level playing field except for the advantages or disadvantages that people have created for themselves. It is not circumstances that matter, so much as what we think about them.

Once we acknowledge the contribution of socioeconomic circumstances, it can be readily seen that for many people, it is not personal characteristics driving responses to these items. In the case of the poor and minorities and other disadvantaged people, responses can be driven by overwhelmingly crushing characteristics of their circumstances.

Undoubtedly, rich white persons in the suburbs are more likely to score high on these measures. Positive psychology is applied ideology, not science, in encouraging them to congratulate themselves on the personal achievement the high score represents. And if they are still unhappy or in ill health, the problem lies with the personal characteristics and their modifiable attitudes.

As for the poor and disadvantaged and the physically ill, they have only themselves to blame. As a wealthy positive psychology entrepreneur recently declared “Your attitude is the reason you are poor.” He went on to cite Barbara Fredrickson:

In an article in the Journal of Business Venturing, leading positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson found positive emotions help build essential resources for entrepreneurs. Among those resources, the top three she found were social capital, resilience, and big picture thinking.

‘It’s not just one of those things that’s going to matter more than the others,’ Fredrickson said. ‘All three are part of a larger web that creates an upward spiral.’

So what is the solution to poverty and social inequality? Poor people have to think positive, start smiling, and express gratitude. What a program for individual and social change—or a shameful fraud. As Barbara Ehrenrich has pointed out in Bright-Sided (or Smile or Die), the downside of this ideology is personal self-blame and national denial. Reviewing Bright-Sided, Thomas Frank remarked,

We’re always being told that looking on the bright side is good for us, but now we see that it’s a great way to brush off poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless—why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves.

More at Tricycle:

The post Self-Help for the Affluent appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

 My previous blog post reflecting on Gish Jen’s new book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self, generated quite a bit of discussion. Some respondents dismissed as mere “personal observation” the claim that people from Western and Eastern cultures tend toward different types of self-construal. Others considered such generalizations as an Eastern “collectivist self” vs. a Western “individualist self” stereotypical, unhelpful, or completely irrelevant. One reader, while acknowledging that cultural differences of self-construal were “well known and not new,” stated flatly that such differences are “not important as far as awakening is concerned,” while another worried that they were so important the dharma transmission to the West must be doomed—since the dharma is so deeply rooted in Asian contexts, how could it possibly exist elsewhere?

So I wanted to address these concerns.

First I want to set facts straight. It is well accepted among many scholars across academic fields that self-identity is construed differently across cultures and over time. While Gish Jen speaks for the most part from her own experience, she also cites several empirical studies by cross-cultural psychologists. The points she makes about differences between Western “individualism” and Asian “collectivism” are also affirmed by a large body of anthropological and historical research. Western Buddhists are largely unaware of this scholarship and we have yet to explore its implications for the transmission of the dharma to the West.

For those interested in reading some of the research on this topic, a good starting place is the anthology Culture and Self, edited by Anthony J. Marella, George Devos, and Francis L.K. Hsu, which includes essays by a range of anthropologists who explore various ways subjectivity is constituted in specific cultural contexts. For insight into how the Western self-construal has changed over time, read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self—The Making of the Modern Identity. For more on why these types of differences matter to Western Buddhists, see my Tricycle article “What’s at Stake as the Dharma Goes Modern?” from the Fall 2012 issue.

Second, there is an important difference between acknowledging valid cultural differences and stereotyping. Acknowledgments of cultural difference admittedly are too often appropriated by prejudice, but they need not be. Gish Jen put this point quite well:

Before I begin, I’d like to say that with this, as with all discussions involving cultural difference, I am aware of the danger of stereotyping. “Simplistic and overexaggerated beliefs about a group, generally acquired second-hand and resistant to change,” as sociologist Martin M. Marger put it, are obviously to be roundly condemned and absolutely avoided. I am also aware, though, that fear of stereotyping has sometimes led to a discomfort with any assertion of cultural difference, no matter how thoroughly accepted by psychologists or how firmly grounded in research.

To be unaware of (or outright deny) what is factually true is a kind of blindness. Perhaps in the case of the blog post respondents the blindness is well-meaning—a kind of “don’t-want-to-go-there” resistance to walking down a road known to be perilously vulnerable to sabotage by prejudice, power, and hatred. But when we don’t pay conscious attention to differences, we tend to see others through our own filters, construct them in our image, and believe—falsely—that we see them accurately.

Gish Jen again:

In his 1932 classic, Remembering, psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett describes an experiment in which British test subjects were asked to repeatedly retell a Native American ghost tale after intervals that ranged from a matter of minutes to a matter of months. The results were revealing: with each new round, the subjects misremembered yet more, unconsciously editing and reshaping the tale—changing seal hunting to “fishing,” for example, and removing and altering what seemed to them weird story elements—until it had become something no longer Native American at all—until it had become, in fact, pretty bloody British.

You might think that’s just what does and should happen. The dharma as seal-hunting-in-Alaska comes to the West as fishing-on-the-Thames. But what if there are important elements of seal hunting that gave that ghost tale its meaning—such as the danger involved, the taking of risk, or the need for courage—that are utterly left out of a fishing picnic on the river? Would that be “translating” the dharma or would that be “reimagining” it?

The reader who wrote that differences in self construal between Asians and Westerners “are not important as far as awakening is concerned” was in one particular sense correct: the dharma teaches that what ultimately binds us in samsara is clinging to any self as truly existent—hungry ghost, animal, human-interdependent, human-independent—the type of self isn’t the problem, our clinging to it is. From this perspective, there is nothing exceptional about Westerners vis-à-vis Asians; we’re equally bound, and we can equally become free. But these differences are critically important to our awakening in quite another sense.

Although all societies construct delusions in deep and hidden and stubborn ways, cultures have specific delusions that are particularly recalcitrant. The dharma in this sense is not one-size-fits-all. It must be interpreted and applied to its specific context. The real potential trouble spots in translating dharma teachings and practices to the West occur at those cross points where our culture is not only different from Asian culture, but different in an exactly-upside-down-and-backwards sort of way. Consider the following from the well-known sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. (For his complete interview with Tricycle’s Andrew Cooper, see “The Future of Religion”.)

Zen Buddhism began in Japan at a time when strong social structures hemmed in individuals on every side. The family you were born to determined most of your life-chances. Buddhism was a way to step outside these constricting structures. Becoming a monk was called shukke, literally, “leaving the family.” We live in an almost completely opposite kind of society, where all institutions are weak and the family is in shambles. You don’t need Buddhism to “leave the family.” To emphasize primarily the individualistic side of Buddhism (especially Zen) in America is only to contribute to our pathology, not ameliorate it.

Liberation requires going against the grain of our pattern of clinging, no matter what that pattern is. If our self-construct is highly individualistic, then against the grain would be toward interdependence and mutual support; if the sense is highly enmeshed in social roles, then against the grain would be toward autonomy. But if the prevailing construct is individualistic and the teachings we employ focus on autonomy, then they don’t push against the grain at all; they in fact reinforce the very problem Buddhism seeks to help us find a way out of. 

Westerners can and need to make the dharma authentically our own. That is precisely the point of looking closely at cultural difference—to understand what the teachings mean in the culture we are taking them from so that we can translate that meaning accurately into a different context. The better we understand what differences are at play, the more skill we will have in navigating them. But if we simply adopt Buddhist teachings and practices without paying attention to the cultural contexts that have framed them for millennia, we risk understanding those teachings in a manner diametrically opposed to their intent. Our meditation might then reinforce the scaffolding of our suffering rather than destroy it. In what sense could we then consider our practice Buddhist?

With support from the John Templeton Foundation, Tricycle’s Buddhism and Modernity project is initiating a conversation between Buddhists and leading thinkers across the humanities and social sciences. Tricycle is exploring how perspectives drawn from critical theory about the nature of religion, culture, science, and secularism can shed light on unexamined assumptions shaping the transmission of Buddhism to modernity. This project offers Western Buddhists new ways of thinking about their spiritual experiences by demonstrating how reason can be used as a tool to open up—rather than shut down—access to traditional faith.

Photograph by Alison Wright, originally printed in Tricycle’s Winter 2011 “Living Buddhism,” by Dharmavidya David Brazier. Read it here.

The post Eastern Self/Western Self Revisited appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We in the West are quite concerned these days with how to make the dharma authentically Western. But caution please, folks. Before we start inventing a new flavor of Buddhism to suit Western palettes, it is important to look closely at the implicit assumptions we are bringing to this project.

To start, we might examine more closely our underlying picture about the nature of cultural difference. It looks something like this: Westerners tend to think of Asians as people basically like us who just have different customs—they hold different beliefs and have different ways of doing things. We tend to assume that Asians experience self-identity in the same way we do—that they are the same equation, if you will, just with different values for the variables. But what if in fact Asians aren’t basically like us at all?  What if the structure of the self—or call it the ego or the personality—is essentially different across cultures? Wouldn’t this give us pause?

And if we are fundamentally different in this sense, how could we even know?

One way would be to take into account firsthand reports from people who straddle both worlds. So I was intrigued to come across Wesley Yang’s review of novelist Gish Jen’s new book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, which explores narrative style differences between Asian and Western literary traditions. (You can hear her discuss the main themes of her book in a three-minute video here.) She traces the source of these differences to deeper differences in the fundamental structures of Asian and Western self-identity.

Jen is a second generation Chinese-American who speaks from her experiences navigating two distinct kinds of selves—an Asian identity shaped at home by her immigrant parents and a Western identity acquired outside the home growing up in Scarsdale, New York. At home, she learned an outward-looking sense of self, one acutely aware of her role in society, her duties, her obligations—she calls it “interdependent.” But outside the home, the self-identity she was encouraged to develop was inward-looking and “independent.” Her task as an American youth was to discover what it was she really wanted and to articulate what made her unique. As it turns out, those were two truly different projects.

Because she is a novelist, Jen is particularly attuned to the ways that the structure, meaning, and purpose of narrative show up differently against the backdrop of the two kinds of selves. As reviewer Yang reports, Jen was struck when she read her father’s memoir:

The account…offered few details of his own grandfather’s “appearance or personality or tastes—the sorts of things we in the West might include as a way of conveying both his uniqueness and his importance as a figure in the narrative.” It instead described at great length the number of doors in the house where her father grew up and whether they were open or shut—concentrating not on his individual self, but on the context within which that self was situated, and by which it was constrained. The world he describes is not, as Jen puts it, “a modern, linear world of conflict and rising action, but rather one of harmony and eternal, cyclical action, in which order, ritual and peace are beauty, and events spell, not excitement or progress, but disruption.”

…Jen’s father had been born into a culture whose parenting style explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective. (Parents engage in short, selective conversation with their children, emphasizing “proper behavior, self-restraint and attunement to others.”) What this “low elaborative” parenting style aims at instead is the creation of an “interdependent self,” defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself.

The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world. Jen cites an experiment in which a group of old Singaporean men were shown images of a changing figure on an unchanging background. The men were so fixated on the background at the expense of the figure that fMRI readings failed to register any change in perception when the figure changed from a bucket to a guitar to a vacuum cleaner to a house plant.

Decontextualizing and isolating are Western values; they are axiomatic in scientific practice and foundational in Western individualism. As such, they shape our mode of being and our self-identity. Indeed—in just the manner of the Singaporean men in the fMRI experiment—these values translate into how we literally see the physical world. As a consequence, when we turn to our task of making the dharma authentically our own, we are perhaps too quick to pull it out of its Asian context.

We have been largely insensitive to how intimately interwoven the dharma is with the kind of Asian psychic space in which it developed. Andrew Cooper discussed this point with American Buddhist teacher Lewis Richmond in “The Authentic Life” three years ago in Tricycle:

Cooper: There is a subfield of anthropology, often called psychological anthropology, that examines the specific ways the ego, the personality, the sense of being a subject, are constructed in different cultural settings. When one reads some of the literature, what is fascinating is seeing the degree to which the very sense of subjectivity is culturally formed. It could be a long time before we grasp the implications of this for translating Buddhism across cultures. 

Richmond: I think it may well be that many practices developed in Asia might not be psychologically beneficial for Westerners for just that reason. When I left Zen Center, I felt like I had a bad case of spiritual indigestion, as though I had taken in something that I couldn’t fully break down. This idea of the ego structure being significantly conditioned by culture probably has a lot to do with this. It might also speak to a common experience among many longtime practitioners I know, including myself: the discrepancy between what the tradition says should happen as a result of practice and the reality of what actually happens.

If, as Jen maintains, narratives read so differently against the backdrop of Asian and Western minds, so too could meditation practices read differently. The way Westerners interpret meditation in terms of inner experiences and psychology, for instance, might be simply the result of how we as Westerners are constructed—as interior-oriented and individualistic. But maybe what we need from Buddhism is not simply those elements that confirm the interior self but those that go against the grain of how we view the world.

Ironically, the very Buddhist teachings we are so concerned with transmitting to the West emphasize interdependence as the true nature of things. Seeing ourselves or the objects of our world as isolated or independent is considered ignorance according to the very teachings we are busily removing from their context and liberally putting into the service of Western individualism. I suggest we all take a deep breath, pause, and then go read Gish Jen’s book.

With support from the John Templeton Foundation, Tricycle’s Buddhism and Modernity project is initiating a conversation between Buddhists and leading thinkers across the humanities and social sciences. Tricycle is exploring how perspectives drawn from critical theory about the nature of religion, culture, science, and secularism can shed light on unexamined assumptions shaping the transmission of Buddhism to modernity. This project offers Western Buddhists new ways of thinking about their spiritual experiences by demonstrating how reason can be used as a tool to open up—rather than shut down—access to traditional faith.

The post Eastern Self/Western Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Next week we’ll begin Shinzen Young’s month-long Tricycle Online Retreat “What is Mindfulness?”  Through talks and guided practices, Shinzen will elucidate how mindfulness is defined from numerous points of view and discuss factors that could facilitate or inhibit a global mindfulness revolution. The practice sessions will parallel the talks and offer an experiential point of view. Retreat participants will also be guided in Breath Focus and explore how this practice develops four aspects of mindful awareness: concentration power, sensory clarity, equanimity, and insight.

In this video, Shinzen Young speaks with Polly Young-Eisendrath, a Jungian psychologist and a student of Shinzen’s, about the Vipassana he teaches and why it’s important for students to understand the commonalities between different forms of mindfulness practice.

Tune in Tuesday, September 4, for the beginning of Shinzen Young’s retreat!

The post Video Interview with Shinzen Young appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.