by Marie Snyder

In my last post of meditation, I suggested that there’s not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn’t need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, inToward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we’ve leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, “Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual” (1984).

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about “developing a new kind of loving relationship with one’s experience,” and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn’t address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn’t address the need to transcend our personal feelings.

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (nownarratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don’t learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the “breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities” so that childrenjust get influenced by parents or justone parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to “spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves” from this singular impact in order to find theirown sense of self. It’s somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it’s necessary to have this “stable self-structure” before trying to go further.

But without a spiritual element, we have “too literal-minded and serious … too small a vision of what a human being is.” Psychotherapy can focus too much on content and not enough on the human being. It’s changing more recently, focusing less on content and more on how weare with our experience. Welwood wants to stop trying to overcome emotional content and insteadopen up to it. If we can’t open up to anger, for example, we end up trying to be nicer (people pleasing) or overmonitoring our behaviour to avoid triggers, which can createmore stress. Yet there’s even more ground to cover than just this.

The purpose of spiritual practice is “to help liberate us from attachment to an imprisoning self-structure.” Specifically, Welwood talks about working with the five poisons (kleshas) of grasping, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, pride, or clinging, aversion, delusion, and comparison. We can also remember it with rhyming couplets: praise, blame, failure, fame, loss, gain, pleasure, pain. Spirituality focuses on noticing that we’re clinging or grasping at things and learning to let go of some of what feelsnecessary to our lives, like being the best at work or never making mistakes, etc. When we glorify the ego in psychotherapy or focus too much on our issues, it impedes our capacity to move beyond ourselves towards a more open awareness. We’re terrified of the idea of being egoless, but it can help us cope with life to overcome our identification with whatever we imagine ourselves to be.

Welwood’s version of spirituality hinges on meditation. He traces a misunderstanding we have about it to Jung, who saw meditation as a move inward down a road to the unconscious. However, according to Welwood, Buddhist meditation is to develop transparent perception, which doesn’t require inward concentration. It’s about sharpening awareness to see things as they are through diffuse attention to everything all at once. Being a part of it all, all the time, by noticing thoughts, feelings, sensations from all senses. I think of it using a film analogy: it’s the shift from rack focusing (back and forth between foreground and background) to a deep depth of field where everything is in sharp focus at once. It’snot trying to get rid of thoughts, to stop them or ignore them, but trying to notice them and let them go. No longer clinging to or believing every thought that pops in our head, “allows us to eat the poisons of confused mind and also transmute them.” The goal is a recognition of our “suchness” by staying in the present moment.

I still don’t have a regular meditation practice despite immersing myself in a lot of books on the topic, but I do find a change just fromnoticingthings, the thoughts and feelings that come and go, as well as the behaviour of others in my vicinity, and the larger canvas. OneZen primer suggests that curious, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness is most of the task, with meditation actually a much smaller part of the daily practice, and I’m banking on that for the time being.

With a mix of psychotherapy and spirituality, instead of getting stuck in a problem by dwelling on thecontent of the experience, or rising above it and the ins and outs of regular life as well, Welwood says we can “stay with our frozen structures and transform them. That is the core of practice, I believe, in both psychotherapy and meditation.” Psychotherapy is reflective and spirituality gives us pure presence. Without the mix, we end up stuck in one of three traps.

The first trap, spiritual bypass or “premature transcendence“, is from step-skipping: jumping over psychotherapy to immerse in spirituality. When we avoid doing our psychological “work” with any unfinished business, and hope to overcome it all with meditation, it’s an attempt to obliterate ourselves, and spirituality just becomes another avoidant defense mechanism. Welwood explains that this originates because, “Many people are introduced to spiritual teachings and practices which come from cultures that assume a person having already passed through the basic developmental stages.” But we have to make peace with the “raw and messy side of our humanness” before we can go beyond it. For instance, if we practice detachment by dismissing the need for love, it only drives the need underground where it can act out when we least expect it and grow in intensity. In aninterview in 2011, Welwood said this bypassing can develop a compensatory identity that defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel like we’re not good enough and use our spiritual practice as a defense against our own inner turmoil. He says,

“I’ve often seen how attempts to be unattached are used in the service of sealing people off from their human and emotional vulnerabilities. In effect, identifying oneself as a spiritual practitioner becomes used as a way of avoiding a depth of personal engagement with others that might stir up old wounds and longing for love. It’s painful to see someone maintaining a stance of detachment when underneath they are starving for positive experiences of bonding and connection.”

The second trap comes with being enmeshed with psychology without any spiritual elements, and we end up naval-gazing, being overly fascinated with our own personal stuff. Welwood describes it as becoming an “emotional junky who gets hooked on processing personal stuff.” When we lose sight of the rest of the universe, we miss how much our identity is created by everything outside ourselves. In Jay Garfield’s excellent book,Losing Ourselves, he discusses the importance of putting aside the egocentricity of self-absorbed improvement because we can’t actuallyseeourselves without also noticing the field around us. Garfield explains,

“We are social animals who only become the individuals we do in social contexts that scaffold our flourishing. We can only make sense of our lives and see them as meaningful when we understand our personhood and when we give up the fantasy of independence encoded in the idea of a self.”

This idea also runs as a thread in Richard Polt’s book on Heidegger, where Polt explains,

“If our connections to other beings were cut, we would not end up inside our mind – we would end upwithout a mind at all. Themind is dependent onminding — caring about other beings, which show up as mattering to us. The less involved we are with who we are, the more we can recognize our deep bond with all sentient beings.”

There’s nothing inside that we can latch on to that can make sense without also looking outside at the same time.

The final trap is fear-born apathy. Our culture has us too desensitized to our personal and spiritual development. We don’t doeither well because we hate to look too deeply or feel too strongly. It’sscary! We numb ourselves to avoid feeling the full range of pleasures and pains. We avoid what’s painful or intense and grasp anything comfortable, familiar, or convenient. This feeds all our addictions and compulsions, which are typically masking our aversions. Nietzsche nailed this idea back in 1872 inUnpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations:

“Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear–and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability [or scrolling or meditation]. The human being evades suffering as best he can, but even more so he evades the meaning of endured suffering; he seeks to forget what lies behind it by constantly setting new goals.”

I’m not just name dropping what I’ve read lately, but seeing this same perspective in so many places gives it greater weight.

Welwood offers a solution in three simple principles to remember from ancient China: earth, heaven, man. He reframes it bodily as feet, head, and torso. Our feet stand on the ground, rooted, to remind us that we are part of the world. Our psychology doesn’t need to be fixed, but can be pruned and fertilized like a tree by repairing any damage to develop a workable sense of self. He references several methodologies (Jungian, Focusing, Gestalt…) but primarily those that get out of the head and into the felt sense of things to reach the emotional core of issues. At the other end, our head is oriented to the sky, the spiritual, and we need to extricate ourselves from roots that are circling back to the self. Like a plant that’s root-bound, ther’s no room for further growth. This is done by letting go of attachment to our idea of who we are to “just let ourselves be, without holding onto some structure, some agenda, some goal or purpose.” We’re terrified of uncertainty, but wecan get comfortable with emptiness to see gaps in conversation like rest bars in a piece of music and await the next refrain with curiosity instead of an agenda. We can also psychologically let go of old conditioned patterns by noticing the judgment involved when we’re grasping, defensive, resistant, or judgmentally comparing ourselves to others. Just noticing how often we’re in that place is a big first step.

Finally, Welwood points out that, unlike most animals, humans move around with our torso exposed, our vulnerable belly and heart, without shells or quills or claws to protect it. Our self is entirely relational, and we’re made to be emotionally affected by each other. But that’s terrifying! So we build some “character armor”. We have to cut through the armor to let others in and appreciate them as they are. Welwood describes the armor like a saloon door; our task is “oiling the door so that it can open in both directions without getting stuck”. Psychology can help here, but it’s mainly a spiritual letting go and opening space for others to reach us. Fortunately, “letting go also means developing a greater sense of humor which arises from being able to step out of being stuck in a structure,” and compassion comes from involvement in the world and having the possibility of transcending limitations. With training, instead of guarding against others, we can let others touch us more deeply, less wary of their emotional expression,

“For pain and neurosis also contain their own colors and energies which wake us up. This dance of phenomena, this play of the mind, has its own kind of beauty. … I can begin to appreciate someone’s character armor, how it served to protect him, and what a skillful creation it is in its own way.”

It starts with noticing the inner and outer world in the present moment without judgment. That sounds like a life’s work right there! Welwood, and so many others, make it seem that meditation is the one task that helps us find and maintain that present moment perspective, so it’s understandable that people dive right in before developing a stable sense of self. But we have to find ourselves before we can lose ourselves.

The image that stayed with me from Welwood’s work isbeing a big tent at a festival. The life inside it is the life inside us always at play, but we’re also the container that protects that life from the elements with wide open sides that enable an ongoing interplay with the world. We’re tied to the earth, but constantly expanding in all directions. It gives me the same feeling as when neuroscientist Louis Cozolino suggested that the space between each of us is like a synaptic gap between neurons. The entire world is a place for communication and connection if we’re receptive to it.

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