Unshakeable: Trauma-Informed Mindfulness for Collective Awakening

IntroductionWe’re all moving on a journey to nowhere,taking it easytaking it slow.…So goes an endearing song commonly heard in the Plum Village Buddhist community, the Zen tradition in which I practice. Are you kidding? Looking around me, I don’t see very many folks taking it easy or taking it slow! For most of us, the following Zen story might sound more familiar: A horse came running swiftly down a road, carrying a rider on its back. A passer-by hailed the rider, shouting, “Hey, where are you going?” As they whizzed past, the rider retorted, “I don’t know, ask the horse!”Where are we going in this whirlwind of a life? Sometimes it seems like we forget to ask this fundamental question before we find ourselves already embarked toward our next destination, at breakneck speed, only to find out that our path is being chosen for us. For a more satisfying ride, wouldn’t it be better to make friends with the horse, to get to know its nature, and to do what we can to provide guidance? Along the way, things may spook the horse, uneven ground may cause it to stumble, or it might get frustratingly stuck in muddy patches. Instead of simply hanging onto the reins obliviously, we need to learn to anticipate obstacles, to adjust the way we ride to avoid ditches, and to hang on for dear life when we need to.That’s the individual picture. Pulling back a bit, we can see that the path we’re riding down is part of a complex network of roads, all of them affected by common issues: if it rains, we all have to navigate mud puddles; if nobody maintains the roads, we all get stuck in ruts. There is no need to enumerate the collective problems facing every world citizen today; this book is meant to inspire, and a litany of downers won’t do that. But if we as a species are to survive, we need to be able to work collaboratively. We need to find both individual and collective balance in order to become calm enough to hear a variety of views, to broaden our perspectives, and to find the creativity needed to solve problems—big ones.Today, our inner lives are chaotic. We’re letting the horses we’re riding get out of control, and we’re not making good decisions—individually, in our communities, in our governments, and in our collective psyche. To find our way down the road more effectively, we need to learn how to create an inner life of wisdom and compassion, to stay regulated in difficult situations, and to function collaboratively without our individual nervous systems derailing us. We need to learn how to find inner stability amid the outer chaos; in short, we need to become unshakeable.As a tree standing in the forest may encounter strong winds that blow its branches around wildly, to survive, it must have a strong trunk and be held in the ground by formidable roots. It knows how to take in nourishment from above and below. This tree is also supported by the root systems of all the other trees in the forest. Together they produce the oxygen that supports all of life; that is their calling. So, too, may our journey to wholeness lead us to participate in the collective awakening that is needed for a future of complex life to be possible.Some 2,600 years ago, the Buddha, troubled by our human predicament, set out to find a way to transform the immense human suffering that he saw around him. This was also the situation that led the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to explore this path for himself in the 1940s and 50s, vowing to renew a Buddhism that had lost track of its mission in a century—and in a country—that urgently needed its teachings and practices. In this new millennium, this is again where we are, needing to readapt this journey to our own times and incorporate the knowledge that science and spirit have been gathering together for many years.This book is about how Buddhist practice, understood through the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition, offers us a firm foundation to meet the challenges of our times—individually, in our communities, and in the world. (After all, Buddhists have spent more than 2,600 years crafting very skillful means of encountering and overcoming adversity!) It is about understanding our inner life and learning how to take good care of it so that it can bring us into the only destination there is, this very moment, clear and bright and wondrous. This journey along the Way of Understanding and Love—another title for the Buddhist path—offers many doors into the goodness of life.There is the door of mind training, of actually sculpting the physiology of the brain that shapes our experience. Through diligent practice, mind training can alter our default demeanors, balance the dark and light in our lives, and help us endure the inevitable slings and arrows of life whizzing by and through us. Developing a clear mind affects the way we see, feel, hear, and taste our lives.There is the door of community, discovering a sense of belonging in a world that appears lonely. We learn how to truly connect to the outside world when we are deeply connected to our inner selves. Our individual relationships become more satisfying. Belonging to a diverse community gives us entry into a larger sense of belonging—where we fit into the web of life, and where the web faithfully lives inside us.There is the door of purpose. In Zen, the highest purpose of life is called the Bodhisattva Vow: to live our lives for the benefit of all sentient beings, to help others live lives of safety, happiness, and liberation. It is about cultivating altruism and maintaining the intention to make our lives about something much larger than self-improvement and self-satisfaction. Having such purpose in life can buoy us through fear and darkness, helping us get it together to be unshakeable in our vision.Sounds good, doesn’t it? But let’s get real right from the start so you can relax and know that you’re not alone if you have doubts about your ability to follow this path. I, myself, have felt like an impostor as a Buddhist practitioner because the chattering monkey mind is incessantly alive in the jungle of my head. When I first began to explore Buddhism, I was deeply unfamiliar with Eastern culture, and at times I felt like I had an allergy to anything spiritual! In fact, it was only after I had finished college, in the late 1960s, that I discovered that I had an inner life at all. This strikes me, now, as almost unthinkable—how could someone live over twenty years without ever noticing something going on inside that could come into conscious awareness, something that could be an object of curiosity and deep satisfaction? Why had I not run into this concept before?Perhaps it was because I was born when the chill of World War II was still fresh in the air. In our anxiety-driven Jewish home, there was never any talk of inner territory. My father was busy running collections for my uncle the bookie, and later, selling used cars on commission. He was too proud to “let” my mother work, and the end of each month was tension-packed to see if we could make ends meet.The story I was told, which I unquestioningly adopted as my own, was that the war “didn’t affect our family.” Perhaps that was because my grandparents had emigrated to the US at the turn of the twentieth century, escaping the pogroms of Bessarabia in Eastern Europe; most of their relatives who remained there had already perished before the Holocaust began. In any case, my family—like the families of most of my peers—insisted on not looking back and thought that bringing up the past was uncomfortable and unnecessary. But later, I understood how the past lived on in our nervous systems, even if we didn’t talk about it. The past emerged in my father’s angry outbursts, in my mother’s fearful distance. I can understand now that my mother had no skills to keep the overwhelm of our family history at bay, so it was simply buried. Likewise, my father had no skills to deal with the volcano of emotions that came up when he felt abandoned. As a child, I learned from my mother how to protect myself from overwhelm through creating distance, and from my father, how to unload the pain when I perceived others disconnecting from me. This was my inheritance.As a result of never talking about the past, I lost my history, my sense of connection, the stories that would help me make sense of my life. I sensed somehow that the world was unsafe and if I explored deeper, I’d have to go it alone. This would stunt my curiosity for many formative years to come.It wasn’t until 1995 that I began to reconnect with my ancestral inheritance, while attending a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh in northern California. Knowing virtually nothing at the time about Buddhist practice or the Plum Village tradition, I didn’t understand what a revolutionary form of Buddhism I had run into. Like me, this practice seemed very practical. I had no idea of just how relentless and horrific the conditions were that had birthed this path, nor how it had evolved to be so helpful to my daily life. All I could see was the golden rolling hills and all the beautiful people stretched out on blankets—it was like Buddhist Woodstock.As I came into the Plum Village community, while the forms were unfamiliar, it didn’t take long for me to find comfort in the practices of bowing, sitting, silence, and being in community. Slowly, I began to realize that many of the practices were curiously similar to those of my own heritage. Gatha practices were like the mitzvot; a day of mindfulness, Shabbat; the wearing of the robes like yarmulkas and tallit; meditation, davening; mindful eating, kashrut; entering and leaving spaces with a bow like touching a mezuzah. Recognizing these similarities piqued my curiosity about other ways I’d rejected my roots. I began to feel more connected, not only to those roots, but to life in general. Beyond insight and appreciation, this was a healing step for me: healing my childhood, healing the traumas of my ancestors, and hopefully, aiding in healing for future generations.I began to find great understanding and compassion for myself and my family, yet my quick, judgmental reactivity didn’t seem to change much. Thay, as his students called him (“teacher,” in Vietnamese), talked about Right Effort and how to deal with difficult emotions by holding them like a baby. I didn’t get it. By the time I knew what difficult emotions were even hitting me, I’d already mouthed off in some way that I often regretted. Bewildered by this hijacking, not only was I a bit of an emotional wreck, my body was often in a state of shock: tense, overheated, shaky, like I was carbonated too much of the time.You would think that my training as a psychotherapist and my experiences as a client would have given me some clue as to what was happening in my body. After all, I’d trained in various counseling methods that were aimed at trauma healing. But our physiology wasn’t a point of inquiry during the 1990s; at that time, psychotherapy was all about story, about providing clients with an empathetic listener. Yet as a client, telling my story seemed to do very little to my reactivity. What seemed most effective for me were quirky tricks that focused on my body. I began to study the nervous system and learn about the new field of somatic psychology. The field is expanding quickly, but for our purposes, somatic psychology teaches that unless we can change our bodily reaction to trauma-related stimuli, we will remain under the spell of trauma. Somatic modalities impact bodily reactions to being triggered—the sudden limbic response to a perceived threat. When we can stop this reaction, the real story is more available to us, and healing of both body and mind occurs.Connecting the dots, I could see that what traumas I’d inherited still resided in my body, and that practicing with my body had begun to make an impact on that reactive self that Buddhism had revealed to me.Over the next several years, as the neuroscience-based protocols that I had found calmed my body, I became impressed at how much they mirrored what I was learning about Buddhist psychology. Developing an engaged Buddhist practice felt like a way to offer much-needed support on a larger scale, and in a way I had not been able to achieve as a counselor, which I was doing with individuals and small groups. Although many people find support in counseling settings, many others do not. Some think that going to a counselor means there is something wrong or broken or sick about themselves. Others may not be able to find someone they can trust, or identify with, or afford. And others dislike having their problems seen as an individual matter, rather than as the result of institutional or cultural illness. I began to work with larger numbers of people, offering instruction in how to regulate their nervous systems (both as individuals and in groups).At the same time, I was becoming more involved in the Plum Village community and realizing that many Buddhist practitioners lack the support they need to understand and deal with their overburdened nervous systems. As a therapist, I recognized that the degree of suffering in my community, as well as communities I was working with in Israel and the West Bank, was so much more widespread than any army of therapists could possibly support. Offering these body-based practices seemed like an answer—a way to scale up. Yet I also felt that vital elements were missing that really could only be addressed within an ethical/spiritual framework, and in a community that was oriented toward understanding the mind, working in community, and offering service. Not only was Buddhism poised to address these issues, it had already developed a body-based psychology of healing that was extremely compatible with what I was learning and teaching.It was when I could see the Dharma through the lens of neuroscience, to feel this scientific accompaniment to the search for goodness, that I could drop the notion that I was “faking it” as a Buddhist, and have a deeper compassion, not just for my own situation, but for the whole of the present human catastrophe.Writing this book became a mission to help others avoid some of the pitfalls and obstacles I’ve encountered on this path. This book is meant to support you, to help you realize we’re all in the same boat of human predicament, and to make this path more accessible and useful to other self-proclaimed imposters.In this book I focus on establishing stability or unshakeability, understanding how to identify and navigate the difficulties we might encounter with both formal and informal practice, and opening into interbeing—all of which leads to getting out of the pickle we’re in. It offers what I call a neuro-informed approach to Buddhist practice, using basic principles of neuroscience to enhance stability so that the wondrous and healing elements of the practice are more widely accessible and effective in relieving suffering.[…]This book calls us all to come to terms with what it means to be in a human body with a human nervous system, what it means to have inherited a legacy of unbroken trauma, and what it will take to begin to slow that legacy down to a standstill. Although trauma has strong roots in biology, it takes its toll not only on the body but on the underlying social structure that human life depends on for our very survival. And although some trauma is a response to purely physical phenomena like earthquakes, floods, and drought, there is often a social component as well: racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, xenophobia. To heal as individuals and as a planet, these ills and their roots—greed, hatred, and delusion—must be addressed as well. Unless we allow for a very personal experience with the dynamics of trauma and its healing, we won’t be able to heal ourselves or contribute to the collective healing of the world.Unshakeable takes us beyond the legacy of trauma because it also incorporates our human legacy of resilience, helping us recognize, celebrate, and resource ourselves as part of the healing process that brings us into the the miraculous wholeness of our potential.The Buddha was a brilliant neuroscientist. In a relatively short time, using his surroundings as a laboratory and with a sample size of one, he discovered basically all the processes of how our body and mind work together, and how to transcend the traumatic experiences of this life. Yet the Buddha was not content with keeping these healing discoveries to himself; he was on a mission to bring them to as many suffering souls as he could. In order to do that, he developed a large community that could reach out further than any one person could and that would last beyond one person’s individual lifespan.