Learning How to Love

What American practice has come to acknowledge is that many of the deep issues we uncover in spiritual life cannot be healed by meditation alone.  Problems such as early abuse, addiction, and difficulties of love and sexuality require the close, conscious, and ongoing support of a skillful healer to resolve…Many spiritual teachers also are not skilled in working with these areas.  Some have not even dealt with them in themselves.

    …the best of modern therapy is much like a process of shared meditation, where therapist and client sit together, learning to pay close attention to those aspects and dimensions of the self that the client may be unable to touch on his or her own.  More than the profound concentration of many meditation practices, therapy has the quality of investigation and discovery.  In this joint meditation, the therapist joins in the listening, sensing, and feeling and may direct the client toward ways to pay a deeper attention to the roots of his or her suffering, entanglements, and difficulty. 

   Even…Mahasi Saydaw, Burma’s…meditation master…exclaimed how many students seemed to be suffering from a range of problems unfamiliar to him in Asia.  He called it “psycho-logical suffering.”  The Dalai Lama too, in dialogue with Western psychologists, expressed shock at the amount of unconsciousness in whole other parts of their lives.  We may experience understanding and peace in meditation, but when we return to the problems of daily life or visit our families or even fall in love, suddenly old patterns of suffering, neurosis, attachment, and delusion can be as strong as ever.  We have to find ways to include them on our path.

   ….after problems…a teacher, though not abusive, was painfully insensitive, distant, and unavailable.  With great integrity, after thirty years of spiritual teaching, at age 74,…he decided to begin psychotherapy to address these issues in his life.

   After decades of experience with Eastern practices in the West, we have now begun to see quite clearly the results of failing to include the area of personal problems in our practice.  Much of the discussion in the next chapter, The Emperor’s New Clothes, examines the way such failures, with quite disastrous results in some cases, can occur in the relationship of teachers [priests, nuns…] and communities.  Because the issues of personal life are often the source of our greatest suffering and neurosis, of our deepest attachments and greatest delusion, we fear them [Most often completely deny and repress them.] and may unconsciously use spiritual practice to avoid dealing with them [Unfortunately, it is here that painful, destructive and very powerful projections occur that search out and ‘nail to the wall’ our scapegoats whom we choose to ‘carry our sins.’]…how many…find that after [decades]…they still have not really faced their life, not faced the root fears and the areas of suffering that limit and entangle them.

   A skilled psychotherapist can offer specific practices and tools for addressing the most painful areas of our life…..one student …His therapy was a long process of untangling childhood abuse, sexual fear and compulsion, and deep shame and anger.  In his years of meditation, he had successfully avoided these issues, but every time he tried to establish an intimate relationship, he became flooded with these problems.  He realized how much of his life, even the meditation…, had been a reaction to his early abuse.  In therapy he began to focus on his deep longing for love, his shame, and his confused sexuality.  For him it was slow process of learning to trust the close relationship of the therapy.  …Often…after starting therapy…Unworthiness, grief, and confusion poured out when…looked at the knot of his childhood….We must “find our own way and our own voice…a great space of new freedom…a process of truly maturing and flowering…”

…unfortunately…many view this process as one that “will lead only to a ‘rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic,’ adjusting the problems of their life, yet never coming to a freedom beyond their small, limited [and they feel safe] identity.  [However, “How’s that working out for you?”]

…”We must learn how to love…