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Self-care and selflessness: a contradiction?

In the research for the dissertation I’m writing on the ways in which spiritual belief and practice can serve a defensive function, I’ve come across the writings of Miles Neale, a Buddhist-oriented psychologist in New York City (who I ended up interviewing as part of the study). Miles recently sent me an article he just published which covers an important area in the ongoing dialogue between psychological/ therapeutic and contemplative approaches to health and well-being. One of the hot topics in contemporary psychospiritual inquiry has to do with the understanding of the “self,” i.e. its ontological status, what it is, how if at all it might be worked with, and how practitioners might be able to reconcile self-development/ self-love/ self-acceptance/ self-care with the contemplative discoveries of no-self, selflessness, shunyata, and so forth.

During our free video series on the Self-Acceptance Project, more than one participant asked, “So what is this ‘self’ that we’re accepting, anyway?” Or, in other words, how can we accept a self that isn’t actually there upon investigation? All fair questions, of course.

I’ll leave you with the first part of Miles’ paper below. If you find it interesting, you can head over to his website to download the entire piece, which I quite enjoyed. Or just go straight to Miles’ website and read the entire article.

Self-care and Selflessness: A Contradiction?

The nearly half century dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology has created a potential forum for a mutually enriching exchange. It has also raised productive questions about the points of overlap and dissonance between the two traditions. One of the most apparent differences is in the way these disciplines relate to the self.  Psychotherapy emphasizes genuine care for the self and its feelings, needs and wounds, helps to restore a continuity in the sense of self when it begins to fragment and investigates how self-denial creates profound psychic disturbance and dysfunction in relationships.  Buddhist meditation establishes attentional equipoise, facilitates direct observation of the impermanent, insubstantial nature of the self and culminates in an intuitive insight of emptiness that ends the habits of self-reification and self-grasping at the root of suffering.

Is there a contradiction between the goals of self-care and selflessness, and what does each tradition stand to learn from the other’s approach?

“Spiritual bypassing”: spiritual practice as pain-avoidance 

Psychotherapy encourages meditators to take a more care-ful approach to their traumatic wounds rather than circumventing them.  I’ve frequently observed meditators devaluing their own personal traumas in pursuit of more exalted and seductive spiritual virtues like the bodhisattva ideal of saving others from suffering. Likewise, some yogis aim for mystical heights of ecstatic bliss hoping to transcend their ordinary human fragility, only to come crashing down to their painful reality once practice is over. This phenomenon of using spiritual tools and teachings to avoid psychological issues, traumatic wounds, and unmet developmental tasks occurs so frequently, that in the early 1980’s Dr. John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to characterize this tendency. Frequent scandals involving so-called spiritual masters who have had inappropriate relations with their students as well as students who see little psychological progress after years of spiritual practice stand as testaments to the deleterious effects of neglecting basic human needs. Indeed it may be possible to have profound spiritual insights, and at the same time neglect other areas of our complex being – including emotional, psychological, interpersonal or somatic dimensions. If we don’t take all of these dimensions seriously and incorporate them into “the work” of human development – then the shadow-side of our split identity can reemerge outside of conscious awareness, when we least expect it and with painful consequences.

Common forms of spiritual bypassing

Spiritual bypassing occurs when we unconsciously attempt to avoid pain, shame and the unpleasant side of our humanity and can manifests in a myriad of ways. The most common forms I have observed in myself as well as in my clinical work with yogis and meditators include: when fear of rejection, fear of burdening others or conflict-avoidance masquerade as being easygoing, patient and accommodating; when co-dependency poses as care-giving and compassion; when guru-devotion leads to subservience and conceals unresolved childhood dynamics such as over-idealization or fear of reprisal; when the spiritual virtue of detachment is misunderstood as disinterest and one attempts to avoid pain by disconnecting from feelings and relationships; when spiritual success and accomplishment end up reinforcing narcissism and the very inflated self-images they were designed to see through; when ultimate truths such as selflessness and emptiness are misunderstood and privileged over relative truths and one consequently falls into the nihilistic extreme of self-denial or apathy. All of these examples share one thing in common; they are unconscious adaptations of pain-avoidance concealed in the fabric of spiritual practice.  Without a skilled objective observer such as a therapist or teacher to alert us, we can miss our unconscious attempts at bypassing, just as we do the blindspot in a rearview mirror.

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Adyashanti: Ultimate Flexibility

Tami Simon speaks with Adyashanti, a spiritual teacher trained in the Zen tradition who lives in Northern California. Adya (as he is called by friends and students) is often described as a non–dual teacher, someone who teaches about “awakening to oneness” or what he calls awakening to “non-division.” Sounds True has published many programs with Adya including Spontaneous Awakening, True Meditation, and The End of Your World. Adya discusses the way many contemporary non–dual teachers talk about how important it is to be “without position”—to not believe in the reality of any thought or belief or take a position on anything and how to make sense out of your thoughts. (36 minutes)

Matthieu Ricard: Happiness Is a Skill

Tami Simon speaks with Matthieu Ricard, an author and photographer who earned a PhD in cell genetics. He is also a Buddhist monk who has served as the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter since 1989. Matthieu has written several books, including The Monk and the Philosopher, The Quantum and the Lotus, as well as The Art of Meditation. With Sounds True, he has released an audio learning program based on his book Happiness. Matthieu speaks about the skill of happiness, as well as the conditions for happiness. He also discusses the physical and psychological effects of meditation, along with the ways to track the progress you make in your spiritual practice. (37 minutes)

Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 1

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and her new book with Sounds True is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the first part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about what she sees as the difference between spirit and soul, and what she learned during her own “red night of the soul.” She also speaks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypassing, and why she always sees the divine in shades of red. (60 minutes)

Release Your Traumas with This Forgiveness Practice

Forgiveness Practice - Inner Alchemy Sounds True Blog

The “horizontal axis” of the soul is where we have stored many lessons and a great deal of energy that remains trapped and stagnant. It is this trapped energy that feeds our internal “demons” and the behaviors that plague us so much. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

With a framework of self-care, qi gong, and mental awareness practice, we can delve into the “darkness” of the shadow and start the alchemical process in full force. Finding the “lead,” which we will turn into “gold,” is easy—we simply need to discover the things that bother us the most in any given day and start with them. It may be a reaction to our spouse’s dilly-dallying or maybe the behavior of a certain coworker. Whatever it is that upsets us, chances are it isn’t anything new to us.

We start to create the spin in the bolstered energy fields of our attachments, and in doing so, our fields take on other similar issues. They fall into families of issues by topic and class.

We start with what Alfred Korzybski called “the original event,” and then we keep branching out and expanding from there, moving further and further into levels of “abstraction.” We get further away from the essential truth of the original event, and we start to create storylines for ourselves to make it okay. The more this goes on, the more energy we pump into this artificial field. The more energy we put in, the more it seems utterly impossible for us to penetrate this mutated, powerful field and face the truth. We create monsters out of undesirable events and we feed them until they own us.

So, here’s the way out. First and foremost, we have to stop the bleeding. This requires awareness of these patterns and forgiveness in the moment. We should be constantly scanning to see what mess we’re about to get involved in and stop it right there. Once we get the hang of it, we invariably find that we’re about to go down a very familiar road with a given subject. This is where the attention of the shen (the energy center housed in the heart) comes in. We have detected a given behavior or karmic action from an old theme, and we have recognized that we are about to go into some old trance behavior. What can we do?

We must first acknowledge this behavior and then, focusing on our heart, we must immediately go into forgiving whomever, whatever, and however anyone was involved. Far from the polarity consciousness of our reactive mind, the heart holds our personal connection with the primordial Tao. It is our true state of being, prior to the separation of yin and yang. Once we tap into this with the energy of forgiveness, we can hold it in our heart and consciously reclaim our power from this event or memory. We do this by understanding the fundamental split that took place in our mind and then pulling back the energy we deposited into the opposite pole.

For instance, say your father was abusive to you as a child and you are still harboring ill will toward him, even though he’s now a broken-down old man. The typical behavior you automatically default to when he calls is to get very short and cool with him. You could be out at the pool with the family having the perfect day, and then he calls. Your breath shortens, your pulse speeds up, and you are suddenly in a very different space. What’s the first thing to do? Recognize what it is that you’re doing right then. You are the one getting revved up, you are the one raising your blood pressure, and you are the one lowering your voice and going from smile to frown over this. So, what then? Stop it. Recognize the unconscious behavior and then stop it in that instant.

Now, yes, I understand that’s easier said than done, but that’s because there is such a massive charge around your relationship with your father. The energy is stored up like a balloon about to burst. But this is where you must change your typical behavior or else you’ll feed even more negative energy into your chapter of “father.” This is where you drop into your heart; forgive him for whatever he has done right there and then, and with the energy neutralized (in the moment), begin to see the pattern for what it is. Every time he comes up in your thought field, a whole slew of emotions race in and get you all fired up. But now, instead of channeling daggers into the aversion of your father, channel forgiveness to the man himself. Forgive him, forgive his behavior, forgive yourself, and forgive the situation. Thank him for the lessons he has given you and for the opportunity to be more loving. Understand that his behavior (whatever it was he did or still does) is a product of an imbalance. He was (is) acting out on his demons, and they, in turn, have infected you. Do not accept them! The only way you can get infected is if you buy into and then co-create that imbalanced energy yourself. A powerful thing to say in this instance is, “This is not my energy, these are not my demons, and I do not accept this into my field.”

Having withdrawn our energy from our typical patterns, we may now focus on the original split that created the charge around this field and apply our knowledge to actively target and mend that schism. Remember, all movement and life began with the split into yin and yang. Therefore, our polarization of the energy related to any given event is what gave it an initial charge and brought it to life. Our recognition of this allows us to withdraw our attention from this polarity and reunite the energy as a whole. We focus on the item in our mind’s eye and simply feel where we’ve been misdirecting all our energy. And remember, it’s our power, so it should be easy to find. Once we reclaim it, we can pull it back into our lower dantien (an energy center right below the navel) and then seal it in there mentally. From that point, we can watch the energy field of the original issue collapse, and then we can continue to forgive it until it is completely gone.

In the example of dealing with your dad, go back to the first time you recall him treating you that way and forgive that moment. Use the mental practice to trace around the timeline and clean and clear with forgiveness. You should be able to heal any particular issue within one to three times of following this practice. The more you pay attention and the more focused you remain, the quicker it’ll be done. If you catch yourself leaking more energy into the shadow when you think about a subject, simply trace your way back to the root of it again. Like the pull of gravity, follow the cord of energy flow back to the original event and confront it there. This is the quickest way to heal these attachments. They don’t want to live in the shadow; all discordant energy wants to return to the Source. Think of it like a homecoming—pull all your fragmented pieces back into yourself.

Excerpted from Inner Alchemy: The Urban Monk’s Guide to Happiness, Health, and Vitality by Pedram Shojai.

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Pedram Shojai - Inner Alchemy Sounds True Blog

Pedram Shojai is a New York Times bestselling author, accomplished physician, Qi Gong master, and former Taoist monk. Perhaps best known as the Urban Monk, Shojai is a dynamic teacher who’s helped thousands of people create more time, energy, and passion with modern hacks for well-being. He is the author of the bestselling book The Urban Monk and is the creator of the Urban Monk Academy, podcast, and Mastermind program. His DVD series, The Alchemy of Qi Gong, received acclaim at the COVR awards. Shojai is currently involved in a number of philanthropic causes that revolve around public health, fair trade, and education. For more, visit theurbanmonk.com.

 

 

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The Compassionate Brain … free online video seri...

Dear friends, we want to make sure you are aware of a truly wonderful free, online video series that we’ve put together here at Sounds True, in cooperation with our dear friend Dr. Rick Hanson, who serves as the host for the series. In each episode, Dr. Hanson is joined by a world-class scholar/teacher, including Richie Davidson, Dan Siegel, Tara Brach, Dacher Keltner, Kelly McGonigal, Kristin Neff, and Jean Houston, where they discuss different ways to use the power of neuroplasticity—how the mind can change the brain to transform the mind—to open the heart, build courage, find compassion, forgive oneself and others, and heal the world.

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Here, Dr. Rick Hanson introduces the series and what you can expect. Over 30,000 people from around the world have registered for this groundbreaking series; we look forward to sharing these profound discoveries with you.

 

 

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