Posts Tagged ‘wisdom’
A Buddhist Perspective on Healing: Wisdom and Compassion
My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the healing process. The central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism are wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom in Healing
From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows. It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness. Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions. Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.
Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side. Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor. It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.
From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.” I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings. So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion. We all construct our own “psychic reality.”
This realization is very powerful. It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points. We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances. We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.” We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion). We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation.
Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.
Compassion In Healing
Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism. Narcissism is the root of all suffering. When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed. When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.
Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird. In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight. The darkness of our delusions is dispelled. The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded. We are free.
A Psychiatrist’s Journey: “Nothing can be created or destroyed”
“Nothing can be created or destroyed”
I remember having this thought, with great conviction, at the age of three. I was gazing intently at a large rock covered with green moss.
Not the thought of a three year old ….
Valentinus, a second century Gnostic, wrote:
“What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became, where we were, whereinto we have been thrown, whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth.”
From the age of five, I have been inexplicably drawn to and mesmerized by Tibetan mandalas.
Throughout my life, I have experienced external reality as a projective field. What we apprehend through our five senses, and our sixth sense, is a highly idiosyncratic construction.
This perspective motivated me to study anthropology and psychology in college. I wanted to learn how culture, language, memory and desire shape perception.
During graduate work in psychology, I investigated the physiology of perception. Concurrently I did research at Rockefeller University, on the localization of opiate receptors in the brain.
My interest in higher integrative functioning remained a passion throughout medical school. Inspired by Wilder Penfield’s “Mystery of The Mind,” I decided to become a neurosurgeon.
Three thousand miles (New York to San Francisco) and two years later, I had an epiphany: I truly wanted to be a psychiatrist. As the British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, wrote:
“Home is where we start from.”
The manifest context for my felt urgent need to choose psychiatry included an impassioned reading of Goethe’s Faust, a spontaneous total immersion in philosophical Taoism and a resurgent compelling interest in the life and work of Carl Jung. Jung’s autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” had made a searing impression on me as a fifteen year old.
The reading of a book, “The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self,” by the Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, crystallized my decision.
Some years later, my connection with Tibetan Buddhism resurfaced. I was drawn to seek out teachings from a few Tibetan lamas, notably the Dalai Lama and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.
The twin principles of Tibetan Buddhism are compassion and wisdom, “like the two wings of a bird.” I have come to experience compassion as the life force, Henri Bergson’s “Elan Vital.” This force sustains me. It infuses my work.
As Santideva, an 8th century Buddhist, wrote in “The Way of the Bodhisattva:”
“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world.”