Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today is a rebroadcast of one of my favorite episodes. I hope you enjoy it.
Today, my guest is someone whose work I deeply value—Bruce Tift. Bruce Tift has been in private practice as a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, since 1979. He has taught at Naropa University for 25 years and has given presentations in the United States, Mexico, and Japan. A practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism for more than 35 years, he had the good fortune to be a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
With Sounds True, Bruce has written a new book called Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, where he examines how psychotherapy’s developmental approach of understanding the way our childhood experiences shape our adult selves both challenges and supports the fruitional approach of Buddhism, which tells us that the freedom we seek is always available.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Bruce and I spoke about how the approaches of both Western psychotherapy and Buddhism contain blind spots, and how we might be able to address those blind spots. We talked about neurosis and neurotic behavior, and how—in Bruce’s experience—neurosis always requires disembodiment. We talked about what Bruce calls “unconditional practices,” including the practice of unconditional kindness. Finally, we talked about the difference between problems and disturbances, and how Bruce experiences disturbance on a regular basis—and how this is not a problem. Here’s my conversation with Bruce Tift.
Welcome, Bruce. It’s always great to be with you and to have the chance to be with you in person here, in the Sounds True studio.
Bruce Tift: Thanks for inviting me. I enjoy our discussions. Yes.
Tami Simon: My goal for our conversation today is to bring forward—to highlight—some of the themes in your new book, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. I want to do this because I think there are some ideas in the book that are really intriguing. So I want to see if we can bring those forward for our listeners.
You begin the book by describing two different ways of viewing, if you will, our human experience. You call them “the developmental view,” and you contrast this view—the developmental view—to “the fruitional view.” So, to begin with, can you describe what these two different perspectives are?
Bruce Tift: Well, very basically, a developmental view is an “over-time” view. It’s an acknowledging that, as humans, we have this amazing capacity to remember the past, to think about the future, to locate ourselves in what feels like a present. I think that gives us a lot of choices [and] a lot of potential that probably most animals who seem to be living more just in the present don’t have.
In the book, [it’s] talking about that over-time view especially as it relates to psychotherapy. Western therapy is complex. It can’t be reduced to a simplistic formula, but I think it’s fair to say that at least the majority of therapists practicing in a traditional Western way work with the idea that experiences that we had as very young children tend to shape how we are engaging with our life now as adults.
So there’s a lot of interest—a lot of very good work has been done—to speculate, have theories about, and research how different types of experience when young seem to persist in the form of survival strategies or ways of organizing our experience. Some of these, of course, are very valuable and we want to continue to have access to [them]. But therapy tends to focus on the ways in which our experience when young is persisting now as adults in ways that are no longer accurate, are several decades out of date, or are not actually serving us or others.
So, in Western therapy, there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand—to investigate— what [it was] like for us as young children. In Western therapy, there’s a focus on our relationship with our parents. That’s the main focus. But siblings, gender, life experiences, trauma—that’s very complex.
I find that that’s so pervasive that—from what I can tell; I just hear from clients that I work with—but from what I can tell, it’s almost a given in a lot of types of Western therapy that there are unresolved issues from our past that some people call “wounds” or whatever, and that there’s an idea that these unresolved patterns of behavior have to be resolved in order to be present.
So a lot of times there’s work in what’s called a transferential relationship, where the therapist takes on the attitude of not disclosing much about themselves, not offering many theories, keeping things very open—to invite the person they’re working with to project these unresolved issues from their past as if the therapist were the parent. Once these deep, unconscious projections are out in the open, then they can be worked with.
So that’s a transferential model of working. That’s not how I work, but it’s a very common way of working in therapy.
What I call a fruitional view comes from my Buddhist training and practice, and it refers to a type of organization in Buddhism called “Ground-Path-Fruition.” “Ground” is where we find ourselves to be—our current reality. “Fruition” is understood as where we would like to be, and “path” is how we get from here to there.
My training is in Vajrayana Buddhism—Tibetan Buddhism—and in that tradition, the ground and the fruition are seen as essentially the same. But the difference [is] that, in our ground experience, we’re taking what we experience unconsciously as if it’s the whole story—as if it is what’s true. A fruitional experience is basically the same experience, but in the environment of—the context of—awareness, so that the same feelings, thoughts, sensations, perceptions are arising perhaps, but there is a conscious participation in an open awareness that prevents us actually, experientially from taking any of this display as if it’s the whole story—taking it too seriously.
And then the path, from that point of view, is not about how to get somewhere else because it’s the same immediate experience. It’s more about a variety of practices, views, studies, [and] techniques that invite more and more conscious participation in open awareness—which, in this tradition, is said to always be present already. The view is that this experience of open nature is already is most fundamental, most basic, most intimate in all of our experiencing. But, for a lot of reasons—which I don’t completely understand—we pretend to not be aware of what is actually present.
So a fruitional point of view—in this context—is one in which we focus on coming into immediacy, embodiment, presence, acceptance, [and] surrender to whatever is arising in our immediate experience with no claim that we have to clear anything up from our history as a requirement for being fully present in our life—that we can be present in anything that arises without exception and with kindness. Anybody can do that as a practice.
But, of course, [this is] along a continuum. The more frequently we have moments of awareness, the more that view makes sense.
Tami Simon: Now, in your work as a therapist, you work both with a developmental approach and a fruitional approach. However, I want to clarify one thing. When you were describing the developmental approach, you said that you didn’t work with the transference style that many therapists do. So why not?
Bruce Tift: Well, I could probably examine my personal history to understand why I don’t [and] haven’t ever been attracted to that. [Laughs.] That would be accurate.
But I would say the more useful understanding is that I prefer to work with people as if they are adults who are responsible for learning how to relate to their own experience—whatever it is, including what’s conscious or unconscious, resolved or not resolved—with an almost a generic approach of being present and non-interpretative, embodied, and unconditionally kind to whatever we find there. My bias is that—as long as we are looking to the other person, whether it’s the therapist, our partners, [our spiritual teacher,] or whoever as if my capacity to be fully present and aware is somehow in the future or it’s outside of myself—I think that it actually can be counterproductive to a fruitional view, which is my basic ground to work from.
So, in a lot of my work, I’m relating to those I work with as if they are actually already awake and pretending not to be. So I find that it is more congruent with that view to relate to people as if they are fully responsible for how they relate to their own experience and not imply that there’s something that has to be healed or resolved before that’s possible.
Tami Simon: So even though the book is set up as a meeting—if you will—between the developmental approach—or we could say psychotherapy—and the fruitional approach—we could say Buddhism—it sounds [like] you actually are saying that you have a preference or a bias towards the fruitional approach.
Bruce Tift: Yes.
Tami Simon: And yet you incorporate the developmental approach. But tell me a little bit about that—this bias. You called the book Already Free, so you gave it a fruitional title.
Bruce Tift: Right. Well, let’s say we’re in a relationship. I’m married. My wife and I have been together 36 years. We’ve been together almost 40 years. I would say that my bias is to [ground] my experience in the reality that I love her. And—as you have talked about in the past—my experience is that I get disturbed in my relationship pretty much every day. So I have found it very helpful to work with that disturbance so that I am not feeling so upset, so I can be more kind to my partner, so that things work better.
So, on a relative level, I find it very helpful to work on the display of our experience. But my preference is to hold as the basic ground what is most true—the fact that I love this person and I feel loved by her. Or why in the world would I still be in a relationship?
So, in a similar way, I prefer to relate to the people I work with as if I feel that they are already wakeful in their basic nature and that there’s always work to do on the relative level. That’s never going to end. You can’t solve one’s life. Life isn’t solvable. It’s not a problem to fix. It’s a process that we can participate in. Things are always improving. They’re always falling apart.
So my particular bias is that it’s very helpful to work on the relative developmental level to clean up our act, to reduce our unnecessary suffering and not cause unnecessary harm to others. But I find that the experience of open awareness is what is most reliable in my life. That is addressed in the fruitional view, and it’s basically not addressed at all, really, in Western therapy.
Tami Simon: Now, a couple of times you’ve used this interesting word in our conversation. You’ve talked about the “display.” Our experience—life—as a display. I notice every time you use that word—“display”—I think a little bit, “Are you not taking life as seriously as I am?” Or, “What’s going on with this word? ‘It’s a display.’”
Bruce Tift: Well, I’m not taking life as seriously as I used to. I don’t know about you.
[Tami laughs.]
In the book, I use an example that makes sense to me: If we go to the movies, we’re actually paying to get captured by that display. We all know it’s a display, but our unconscious agreement and hope is that it’ll be so fascinating that we’ll get a little break from our life for a couple of hours and get entertained. But it requires that we get captured by that display as if it’s reality.
But, in getting captured, we have almost no choice. If it’s a happy movie, we laugh. If it’s a sad movie, we cry. If we took exactly the same movie and showed it out in a broad field, middle of the day, it’s unlikely that we’re going to get captured by that display. We’re going to know it’s a display because everything that’s around it is so much more real and vivid to us. That open expanse within which the display is happening makes it clear that it is a display. Whereas when we have a more tunnel-vision approach to our experience—meaning without an environment of awareness—we take that display as if it’s reality.
So I happen to use “display” as an invitation for somebody to just consider that what we tend to take as reality may not be so in the way that we assume it to be.
Tami Simon: OK. You’ve shared now that you have a bias towards the fruitional approach. And yet, you value a developmental perspective as well. With your clients, you alternate—and this is what you say in the book—between these two approaches and—here’s the key thing—“without any hope of resolution.” You alternate between these two approaches.
So you don’t have some kind of system or grand unified theory that puts it all together? You just alternate between these two different ways of working with experience?
Bruce Tift: Yes. To be a little abstract, the complimentarity principle in quantum physics asserts that reality is so complex and fundamentally ungraspable that the most complete descriptions of reality have to tolerate holding contradictory modes of investigation and descriptions. That’s actually going to be the most complete—never total—but the most complete approximation of the non-divided nature of what we call reality.
If we said, “Well, there’s night and there’s day,” hopefully we’re not trying to integrate those into being the same thing. We accept that there’s winter, there’s summer; there’s up and down; there’s death, there’s birth. The actual reality of our human experience is that the larger, non-divided—maybe we can say whole, but whatever it is—is made up of apparent contradictions.
So if somebody is trying to integrate two opposing views, I think that reflects an idea—maybe not examined—that there’s some problem with contradiction. I don’t think there is. I think contradiction is the display of relative experience.
Another more abstract way of saying that is that in my training [in] Vajrayana Buddhism—which one of the things I’ve always appreciated is the idea that most of us of course start with a complete identification with our thoughts, feelings, [and] everything, and then if we are fortunate in our spiritual path-work, we have more and more moments of hope and awareness, basic nature, whatever people call that. But, unlike some traditions, the point isn’t to escape from the limitations of our relative experience and somehow go into a state of open, formless bliss. My understanding is that the point is that as we become confident in the fundamentally open, non-graspable nature of our experiencing, then the point is to return and participate even more deeply in the relative precisely because we’re not taking it so seriously.
So my current understanding is that what is most accurate—and I think helpful—is to practice at least holding what we call relative and absolute—this display that all we take seriously and in more open awareness that has no bias, actually—to hold both of those ways of experiencing simultaneously with no fantasy of resolution, because that’s really going to be taking sides, which is going to maintain dualistic experience, actually, on a subtle level.
Beyond that view, [I think] we actually explore the possibility that awareness is inseparable from our relative experience. It can’t actually be divided in the ways I’m talking about it, and even that there’s a simultaneity of formless and form in which both of them are saturated with the other. No description actually is going to capture that. We can’t take a position about it.
So that’s a view. But I find that it makes the most sense to me to understand and work in ways that invite that direct experience that you called that of our life [and] our self being unresolvable. I think the feeling—the actual experience—of nothing be resolvable is a closer approximation to open mind than a theory that seems to explain whatever we’re interested in.
Tami Simon: What is so interesting to me, Bruce, is so many different Sounds True authors will give—let’s say, for a moment—the fruitional view. They don’t talk at all about the value of looking at things as a progression in time. They’re only talking about the timeless. So it seems like these different teachers—and then we’ll publish another person who’s very much looking at, “We have to go back and heal these traumas from our past,” or whatever.
So it’s very rare to actually find someone who says both of these things are important and they can be seemingly contradictory, and that’s not a problem. That’s pretty rare, actually.
Bruce Tift: I think it’s not a culturally familiar view. It’s one of the things that I’m really appreciative of my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche—that he had apparently no problem with contradictory things that he would say or teachings that he would give. It was very difficult to ever feel like there was any certainty to stand on when you were listening to him.
Tami Simon: Now, one of the things that I find so valuable about this perspective that you’re offering is that it helps reveal blind spots—if you will—in either one of these approaches. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you think the main blind spots are in the psychotherapeutic or developmental view, and what the main blind spots are in the fruitional view.
Bruce Tift: I think that in the Western psychotherapy view—the developmental view—because there’s so much interest in historic origins of current ways we organize our experience, it’s very easy to somewhat unconsciously take the attitude that there actually is a problem in the past that needs to be healed—there are wounds that need to be healed—before somebody can be fully present. I think—again, unconsciously—it’s very easy then to take on a project of self-improvement where we don’t realize that we’re postponing recognizing that we always are fully present. We’re always fully intimate with life and with each other. We’re always fully engaged. There’s no other possibility.
But [I think] a lot of us have this unexamined idea that when I clear these things up in the future, then I’ll show up. Then I’ll accept myself. Then I’ll bring my vulnerability to my partner. Whatever our thing is.
So one of the problems with the over-time approach—in our culture especially—is that we postpone acceptance until there’s a certain type of improvement. I think that’s invited by that view—that blind spot.
In the fruitional point of view, it’s sort of the flip side, where there’s much more focus on acceptance, and improvement is seen as a story or a fundamental aggression toward reality. So I’ve worked with many clients who are practitioners who, in my opinion, are somewhat unconsciously using immediacy as an avoidance of dealing with their actual, human, messy life.
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have come into therapy—and they usually don’t stay long, given my style—basically reporting that they never have had a long-time job. They’re there because their partner tells them that they’re ready to leave them because they yell at them or they’re drinking too much. You’re familiar of course with the term “spiritual bypassing,” and that’s a way of saying it—that people can use immediacy—because it’s true that in the present moment, it’s almost impossible to find any evidence of a problem. We can find disturbance in stuff, but no evidence of a problem. “Problem” basically means a refusal to be present.
It’s very pervasive in the spiritual path community that people will be drawn to a path of nonviolence—let’s say in Buddhism—when they have issues of anger. “Oh, great. I’ll go be calm and generous and kind and everything like that.” They use these practices often as a way of not having a relationship with their own rage, their sadistic impulses, their basic aggressive energy—which all humans have.
So I think the blind spot in the fruitional view is that by focusing only on immediacy, we can ignore the patterns in our experience which are only revealed over time. But, in therapy especially, basically we’re looking for out-of-date patterns of experiencing.
Tami Simon: OK. I want to talk about neurosis. There’s a couple of interesting quotes that I’ve pulled from the book, Already Free. But, to begin with, how do you define neurosis?
Bruce Tift: I usually don’t, but I did in the book, I guess. I guess I would say that neurosis is a practice that has to be maintained with a lot of intelligence and creativity—and discipline, even—in which we are constantly looking for ways in which to ignore the truth of our experience and focus on ritualized dramas, apparent problems, [and] distractions as a way to pretend that we don’t really have to feel and work with what we don’t want to experience. Usually these patterns of ignoring and distraction could be understood as having their origin in young childhood. I think that’s very accurate.
But my view is not so much about how did they get formed [as young children]—I’m always curious—but the real question for me is: how is it that we are maintaining these patterns of avoidance in the present moment when there’s almost never any evidence that they are necessary and justified? So, in my work, I have the view that most of us actually actively are looking for evidence all the time that will justify our investment in these patterns of avoidance.
Tami Simon: So I’m wondering if you can give me a concrete example that would make it—just a common neurotic pattern that’s an avoidance pattern.
Bruce Tift: I don’t like to pay bills. I get anxious because I’m not independently wealthy. That’s not why I get anxious—that’s my fantasy. [Laughs.]
Anyway, I get anxious about paying bills and I can—
Tami Simon: Are you giving us a personal example here?
Bruce Tift: Yes.
Tami Simon: This is a personal one. OK. Good. That’s great.
Bruce Tift: This is a personal example. I figure that’s—I could talk about you, but it’s more kind to talk about myself. [Laughs.]
So I find that I have a tendency to put bills off to the side somewhere, either literally in a little pile or just out of my mind. I don’t often deal with the bill-paying proactively, but a lot of times I’ll suddenly realize, “Oh no. Did I pay that bill?” I’ll go look for it in the pile and say, “Oh, damn, I forgot it,” or, “Oh good, I’ve got another couple of days.” So I generate a drama about paying bills.
It obviously doesn’t prevent me from feeling disturbed, but like a lot of procrastination strategies, it allows us to unconsciously pretend that my anxiety is about this issue—of let’s say paying bills—rather than recognizing that I have anxiety every day of my life. If I had a very organized system and paid my bills ahead of time as I was able to, I’d have to feel that anxiety every day. But if I can sort of condense it into a little short drama, then I can unconsciously ignore that reality of that part of my life.
Tami Simon: This brings me to one of the quotes from the book: “Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity.” I wonder if you can unpack that for us.
Bruce Tift: Yes, that’s just a paraphrase of a quote by Carl Jung which I like, which is that, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” That was his quote.
I like that because it points to neurosis as the activity of intelligence, whereas—I’m not a Freudian, but I think that some of that view was that it was this sort of blind conflict between our libidinal, primitive sexual energy and our superego type of energies. A lot of people see neurosis as something that happens to them or they inherited from their history. I prefer to think of neurosis as a practice that has to be maintained continually. I think that our basic agenda in our avoidance strategies is to stay out of too much aliveness—too much openness—which can include suffering [as well,] as Jung said.
But also, I think we organize our lives around avoiding too much sexual intensity, power, joy, open appreciation, uncertainty—things like that. It’s actually very, very intense to be fully present in our life.
Tami Simon: Let’s talk about this for a moment. Most people what they want is—
Bruce Tift: To be open?
Tami Simon: Well, to have intense sexual experience and to feel incredibly alive and powerful and joyful. Now, you’re saying that that’s actually what we’re avoiding through our neurosis.
Bruce Tift: Yes, and it doesn’t mean that some aspect of us—to use that language—doesn’t want that. It just means that there’s another aspect of us that avoids that.
Tami Simon: Why would we avoid it?
Bruce Tift: Well, I think as biological beings—also given our personal history—most of us actually are going to put survival as a higher priority than quality of life. Most of us unconsciously are invested in our young survival strategies as if those are what’s going to keep us alive and functional—to protect us. From a Buddhist point of view, even that that is my identity. “I’m somebody is always looking for the love that he will never get.” Something like that. That sort of drama.
So I think it’s true that we want aliveness and I think it’s true that we want safety and security. But in a very primitive, unconscious way, I think most of us are probably going to go for safety and security if the aliveness gets to be too much.
Tami Simon: Any way I can have both? Door Number Three?
Bruce Tift: Yes. You already have both. [Laughs.]
So it’s more consciously participating in that unresolvable simultaneity of contradictory energies. That is: the more we try to choose sides, therapy jargon, the more black and white organization there is from childhood—the more we act as if it’s one or the other.
So if we work from that reality, I think that it’s helpful to give ourselves permission at first to alternate back and forth rather than our unexamined fantasy that it’s one or the other. So that might mean that I’m going to allow myself to have moments of passion or of open mind or of rage or feeling very confident—whatever it is—and then I don’t have to stay there.
I think it’s just as important to be open to being closed as it is to be open to being open. But [I think] a lot of therapy-spiritual path people have a prejudice that it’s good to be open and it’s bad to be closed. So they keep on trying to be open all the time, but that just guarantees that their need to be closed—meaning protected, safe, secure—will get expressed unconsciously and indirectly.
But if we want to practice unconditional openness, if it’s unconditional we have to be just as open to being closed as we’re open to being open. Then I think it’s more like breathing in and breathing out. It’s appropriate, skillful, [and] accurate to alternate between these two energies knowing that they will never be resolved.
Sometimes, I might want to be close. Sometimes, I’m not going to want to be close. Sometimes, I’m open to ecstatic experiences. Sometimes, I just want to watch TV. Maybe none of that’s a problem.
Tami Simon: OK. We have another quote from the book about neurosis that I found quite important, actually: “Neurosis requires disembodiment.”
Bruce Tift: If it makes sense that neurosis is fundamentally an avoidance strategy, where we’re trying to get out of experiential intensity, [I believe] it’s very difficult to ignore the truth of our experience if we’re aware of what our embodied experience is. If my heart’s beating fast and my stomach’s tight, it’s hard to pretend that I’m calm and together.
So I think that life is always disturbing us. It’s not really, but that’s how we think of it. Life is always affecting us in ways that don’t fit our fantasies or preferences. We call it “disturbance.”
I think that the level that is hardest to ignore our disturbance on is the embodied sensation, physical level. If I’m disturbed in my body, it’s sort of hard to pretend—again—that I’m an evolved person who’s never affected by anything.
So I think one of fundamental requirements of neurotic organization is a dissociation from our immediate, embodied vulnerabilities. So from that point of view, the antidotal process if we want to dissolve neurotic organization really—I don’t know if it’s a requirement or not, but it certainly is very important, very central—[is to] train ourselves to bring our attention back into our immediate, sensation-level, embodied vulnerabilities so we can discover [where the problem is]. Do I actually have to bail out of my body? Do I have to dissociate? Do I have to avoid the truth of my experience?
As children, we do. There’s no way in the world that we can tolerate the inner and outer overwhelming intensities of being a fragile little being in the world. But by the time we’re adults, a lot of us actually have the capacity to stay embodied through very, very intense experience. But until we discipline ourselves to go into what we don’t want to feel, we’re probably going to take our young assumptions for granted—as if they’re still true.
So it seems to me that for somebody to successfully ignore the truth of their experience, it’s really almost necessary to disembody—to get out of our immediate body vulnerabilities. To dissolve neurotic organization, I see that as a very central part of that work—to re-embody.
But, again, nobody wants to feel unsafe. Or we don’t want to feel our rage and our panic and our grief and our fear. So this is all counter-instinctual work. [I think] a lot of Western therapy mistakes the practical need to feel safe [in order] to do certain types of work—especially trauma work—I think there’s an unconscious extension of that in thinking that the point is that we’re supposed to feel safe in relationships [and] we’re supposed to feel safe in our life. Nobody feels safe in their life. How could anybody? Life isn’t safe. Life isn’t organized around our survival or our preferences.
So I think it’s very important to learn to discriminate between feeling unsafe, for example, and whether we actually are unsafe.
Tami Simon: OK. I want to help a listener at this point bring this into their own life. So if someone’s listening and they’re thinking, “I wonder in what way am I neurotic?” They could ask anybody that knows them and probably get a good answer.
Bruce Tift: Good idea.
Tami Simon: But what would be your suggestion, first of all, how they could choose to just work through this here with us—to pick one of their—out of a handful. How would they find, “Oh, yes, that’s how I know. I’m definitely neurotic in that respect.”
Bruce Tift: Well, I think your question is a good one to start with. Which is: “How am I neurotic?” instead of, “Am I neurotic?”
Tami Simon: Yes. We’re going to presume.
Bruce Tift: We’re going to presume that all of our experiencing is an inseparable entanglement of sanity and neurosis. So, “How am I sane [and] how am I neurotic?” is the more useful question.
There’s a lot of ways to approach that. One, let’s say—because relationship is very important to many of us—let’s say that any experience that I have of complaint about my partner is almost certainly evidence of neurotic organization.
Tami Simon: Well, everyone’s going to have something on that front. Every single person. So that’s a safe one. So everyone’s going to have a complaint about their partner. I’m going to bet my career on it. OK.
[Bruce laughs.]
Once they identify that, then what’s the next step?
Bruce Tift: So then they could consider the view that their actual complaint more precisely is probably that their partner is triggering feelings in them that they don’t want to feel. If I’m irritated with my partner, that probably means I’m irritated [with] having to feel some vulnerability that I’ve had all my life that my partner is triggering but not causing—because I had this issue before I ever met them. If we split up, I’ll still have this issue. They’re not the cause.
But codependent dynamics involve this mutual agreement that we’ll each blame each other. Nobody will have effective boundaries, so nobody has to deal with their own vulnerabilities because the finger is always going over to one’s partner.
So anytime we have a complaint, we could start by asking, “Oh, what is it that I’m having to feel right this moment that I don’t want to feel?” Then investigate that. My bias is to investigate it as raw sensation-level experience, no interpretation at all. Certainly no claim that it’s about my partner—because it’s not, really—and then see, first of all, is it killing me to feel my tight stomach, my heart hurts, my throat’s constricted. Whatever.
Is it damaging me? Is there any evidence about my worth as a person? I’ve never found it. We’re not going to find shame or guilt or abandonment as sensations. They’re not. They’re already dissociative interpretations of our immediate vulnerability, in my view.
So our practice is to continually use our sense of complaint—let’s say—as a signal to return to our immediate, embodied vulnerability and start to have a conscious, embodied, kind relationship with that aspect of our own experience—because it’s us. It’s not something that’s happening to us, and at some point we get the clarity, “Doesn’t it just make sense for me to be kind to my own difficult experience? Nobody else on the planet’s lining up to be kind to my vulnerabilities. Maybe it’s up to me.”
So basically we can use any repetitive, dissociative experience—whether it’s self-aggression as another very common thing that I would say is always a dissociative escape from some immediate, embodied vulnerability that’s happening—
Tami Simon: OK, so let’s slow down on that one. So that means that anytime that I’m feeling terrible about myself—”Oh my God, I can’t believe I said that,” or, “I could have handled that better,” or et cetera—that I’m leaving my body in some way?
Bruce Tift: I would say almost certainly—and substituting what’s probably a historically learned explanation for my difficult feelings. Most kids have to learn to blame themself rather than blame their parents, because that’s not very safe when you’re young.
So, first of all, your language was, “When I’m feeling like I’ve done something wrong.” But that’s not a feeling. That’s already an interpretation.
So a lot of us unconsciously actually relate to our story about our disturbance as if it’s our feelings. But they’re actually stories. They’re dissociative explanations for why I’m feeling anxious or vulnerable or raw or expose or something very hard. It’s hard to stay embodied with that—that raw exposure sort of feeling.
But I would say if somebody investigates with that sort of question—“What am I feeling right this second that I don’t want to feel?”—[and staying] embodied with no interpretations, they’re never going to find any evidence of my being unworthy or somehow worthy of shame or anything like that. It’s just not there. There’s just raw vulnerability.
Tami Simon: Now, you speak at one point in the book about these unconditional practices that we can bring into our life. You could call them fruitional practices. One of them is this practice of unconditional kindness. I’d love for you to say more about that, because I think it’s something that’s really challenging for a lot of people.
Bruce Tift: Yes, our culture isn’t exactly mature. We have a lot of aggression in our culture and lot of it gets turned against ourselves and others.
Sometimes, if I’m working with a client and they happen to be a parent, I’ll invite them to remember what it was like when they had their little infant—maybe six months old or something—and that infant was inconsolable. They were in pain, they were upset, and the parent tries everything they can. Nothing works.
When I ask a parent, “Well, what do you do then? What did you do?” I have had a couple of parents say, “Well, throw him in the room until they feel better,” but 99 percent of the parents say, “Well, I’ll just keep holding my little baby. I’m not going to abandon my baby, but it’s tearing my heart apart to not be able to solve my baby’s pain.”
So, of course, that is analogous to how we might hold our own deep grief and rage and fear and panic and everything. We can actually hold exactly what is most disturbing to us in the sense of love, as if we’re actually holding—it’s not an intellectual practice, it’s a heart practice.
And I find that for many of us in our culture, the more heart-based practice of unconditional kindness—which means toward everything, without exception—is actually much more powerful than just clarity practices. We have to have enough clarity to know what we’re practicing with, but a lot of us take refuge in clarity as a way of staying out of the vulnerability of opening our heart to feelings that are really, really disturbing [and] are not resolvable, actually.
Tami Simon: I’m curious to know, in your own life, how the practice of unconditional kindness has unfolded for you.
Bruce Tift: Well, I think there was some shift in my 40s and another type of shift in my 50s. I used to be incredibly sarcastic—and I know you won’t believe this about me—but [I was] very aggressive and everything. But I would say maybe in the last 15 to 20 years, I don’t experience self-aggression at all.
Tami Simon: Not at all? It doesn’t come up at all?
Bruce Tift: It doesn’t come up at all. I think that has come out of some variety of factors, but I think an intention to practice kindness at some point in my life was very central to that—that I really committed to returning to my immediate experience whatever it was—and often I really, really did not want to feel that. I just found in my direct evidence that my state of mind was so much more positive or satisfying or workable when I stopped being aggressive to whatever was true—and in fact actually even practiced being kind.
I think being a parent—which I am—was very helpful with that in the same ways I was just talking about. Certainly being married has been very helpful for me. Being a therapist has been very helpful for me that way. And my Buddhist practice has been really helpful that way.
I would say it’s not even an issue. It doesn’t come up anymore—about self-aggression. So I don’t have a current practice of being kind because that’s sort of an antidotal practice.
Tami Simon: Pretty cool, Bruce.
Bruce Tift: It sounds good. You don’t know if it’s true or not! [Laughs.]
Tami Simon: I trust you. You’re a truthful guy.
Now, there are two other unconditional practices that you write about in the book: unconditional immediacy and unconditional embodiment. I wonder if you can give us the sort of pith instruction, if you will, on both of those.
Bruce Tift: Well, we’ve touched on both of those I think. The fruitional view has a lot to do with immediacy. So the more we return to what is most true in this present moment—whatever a moment is—but in this present moment, understanding we’re only living in the present moment—this is the only moment in which we can find out is most true. There’s always some unfolding happening on a relative level.
But, in my experience, what we find to be most true in the present moment as we go deeper and deeper and deeper—and more and more immediate in our experiencing—is that we find less and less and less evidence of any problem, any division, any conflict, anything missing. As you and I have talked about, that’s not the whole story, because as humans there’s also the over-time recognition—the patterns that will continue to manifest.
But when we have a ground of immediacy, then we can work with these patterns without a sense that they are a problem. We actually increasingly just work with these patterns as practical issues to help improve the quality of our life and our capacity to be a benefit to other people—but not because there’s something wrong with me that I have to heal before I’m OK.
Embodiment we were just talking about. That, again, is an unconditional commitment to return—because most of us are always dissociating—to immediate, embodied experience [not just] when there’s a problem, but just as an ongoing practice. [It’s] almost like being aware of our breathing. It’s not because there’s a problem, but because that’s more true than my stories about what’s happening.
I remember reading at some point about a Western student doing a retreat in Thailand. The teacher gave the instructions, “In the next 10 days, don’t do anything that takes you out of your body.” So I thought that was a great instruction for a retreat.
We could actually commit to that practice not as an accomplishment—but as a practice—for the rest of our life. Why should we ever intentionally do anything that takes us out of our immediate experience if that’s the only moment we’re living in? That just seems to make sense to me.
So all of these practices of immediate embodiment, immediacy, unconditional kindness—to me—are resonant with the open, ungraspable, unconditional, nonbiased nature of open awareness, which from a Vajrayana point of view is already our basic nature. So if we can take on practices that are most resonant with our basic nature, my hope is that it actually will—through a process of resonance—start to invite more and more conscious participation in this fundamental nature.
I sometimes just use the analogy of two tuning forks tuned to the same frequency. If you hit one, the other’s going to start vibrating without being hit. So if we can take on active practices that keep inviting this sense of unconditional awareness, embodiment, kindness—in Buddhism, we talk about mind and body and relationship as sort of three things.
I think that it’s an invitation. It’s not causal, but I think it’s an invitation to have more and more frequent moments of investigating that really interesting question of, “What is aware of all this? What’s the nature of awareness? Is awareness disturbed when I’m disturbed? Does awareness care if I’m dying or if I’m healthy? Does awareness care if I have abandonment issues?” I’d say no.
So, again, we don’t take refuge in that with the Vajrayana view. But we bring these two together so that all of our workings [and] our investigations of this crazy display of being humans can be worked with from this ground of open joy, workability, non-bias, and confidence—things like that. It just makes working with our human issues so much more practical and non-problematic because we’ve removed our identity drama at that point from it.
Tami Simon: OK. I want to ask a question that maybe puts a little pressure on the system. Which is: you said the unconditional kindness—the practice of unconditional kindness—now comes naturally to you. You don’t experience self-aggression.
So I’m curious to know: of the beautiful teachings that you’re offering in this book, Already Free, where do you find trouble spots in your own life at this point? Do you find any trouble spots?
Bruce Tift: Well, I discriminate between “disturbance” and “problems.” I would say—again, I could be just bullshitting myself—but I would say my report is that I don’t experience problems. But I definitely experience disturbance every day of my life. Some of that disturbance is very obviously related to lifelong core vulnerabilities. But I personally don’t have the agenda anymore—like I did when I was younger—that they need to be resolved or cleared up.
Tami Simon: So your distinction between disturbance and problems—just help me be clear about that.
Bruce Tift: I would say a problem is probably a disturbance that we’re refusing to have a fully conscious, embodied, kind relationship with to participate in fully. It’s a problem because I’m trying to avoid it. I’m trying to get around it, make it go away.
So my bias—a lot of people don’t like this—is that almost all the time—at least with neurotically organized people—that what they call wounds are not problems. They reflect a refusal to stay present and embodied with really difficult feelings they don’t want to feel. But the fact that they’re refusing to stay present and participate as deeply as possible gives it the appearance of being a problem. Then I can have the project of trying to heal it before I have to show up in my life. So one of my many biases.
So I would say that I honestly can’t call to mind any experience in my recent memory of feeling there’s a problem. But I certainly have disturbances all the time. I have a lot of limitations in my experience of relationship. I don’t like to feel anxiety, and I can see myself—as I said about that example earlier—having an impulse to avoid certain engagements that would trigger anxiety. I feel irritation come up. Blah blah blah. All that stuff.
To me, it’s just part of being human. But [in] my experience, every once and a while they get a little traction. But almost always what happens is these very difficult feelings get triggered and almost immediately they are experience in an environment of awareness. So they don’t go anywhere. They just have their life and they fade away and sometimes they’re actually sort of funny. It’s funny to see myself getting irritated at something. Other times, I sort of take it seriously for a little bit.
But I don’t have a personal agenda to clear up my neuroses. I don’t see that it’s a problem to avoid certain types of experience. I think there are practical benefits of clearing those things up, but I’m not going to make my life into a therapy project.
Tami Simon: Truth is, Bruce, I could talk to you for a really long time.
Bruce Tift: [Laughs.] And I with you, Tami.
Tami Simon: But instead I’m going to ask you a final question.
Bruce Tift: OK.
Tami Simon: The book Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation came into existence because students, clients, and friends of yours encouraged you, cornered you. We didn’t exactly flog you, but we were in that direction—
Bruce Tift: You were actually very generous in encouraging me.
Tami Simon: Now the book exists. It’s published. I’m curious to know if you have any hopes, if you will, for how this book might impact people.
Bruce Tift: Well, my basic hope is that it might be of benefit to some of the people who read it. My guess is that different aspects of the book may be helpful to different people. My most fundamental hope would be that something about the variety of views and examples and everything that’s offered would strike somebody in a way that, again, could resonate with an actual glimpse or direct experience that, “I don’t need to continue calling myself a problematic person. I don’t need to keep claiming that life is a problem. Maybe the fact that I have difficult experiences is not evidence of something wrong that has to be fixed.”
So I guess my hope would be that something in the book might spark an interest—a little view for a moment—that it actually might make sense to be kind to oneself and others regardless of our failings, not wait until we feel happy to be kind, and that might reduce unnecessary suffering. [It] might help others be more kind to themselves and to the people that are important to them in their life.
I think probably anybody writing this type of book is probably just finding their own way of passing on teachings they’ve received. So I don’t think there’s anything radically new in the book except for maybe how some things are presented—but I’ve found that sometimes that different presentation of very basic ideas strikes me in a new way that’s very helpful.
So I think that would be my hope—not that, “Oh, this is some new material,” as much as maybe it’s a different way of presenting it that might be more accessible to some people.
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Bruce Tift. He’s the author of a new book—as well as an audio teaching series—called Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. I do have to say I feel quite a bit more embodied, alive, a sense of immediacy, and I feel even more free, Bruce, at the end of our conversation than I did at the beginning. So thank you so much.
Bruce Tift: All right! Good testimonial.
Tami Simon: Thank you.
Bruce Tift: Thank you.
Tami Simon: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
