As Tim began his first meditation retreat, he began to notice a contraction in his heart that pained and frightened him. His old fear that his heart could just stop was happening, and his panic was rising. His teacher had told him to simply notice sensations and feelings, so he tried to just sit with what was happening.
Tim had respect for the teachings, so he followed the instructions, even as his experience of panic and pain grew larger. “What is wrong with me that I can’t do this simple thing?” he thought. He began to attack himself internally, blaming himself for his overwhelming emotions and his failure as a meditation student. He also became frightened that everyone in the meditation hall could see what was happening to him, and were judging him. Eventually the feelings became so overwhelming that he ran out of the retreat center.

Tim’s experience is not uncommon. Many meditators have suffered trauma, often more than they are consciously aware of. While meditation can be an important way to work with physical, mental, and emotional states, including trauma, it needs to be approached with skill and care.

Trauma in Meditation

Traumatic experiences are more likely to emerge in meditation than in everyday life because we don’t have our ususal ways to distract ourselves. Anyone who experiences overwhelming feelings, physical pains, or repetitive attacking thoughts during meditation may be having a version of PTSD. This can happen to people who don’t think of themselves as having trauma in their lives.

Other signs of trauma that can show up in meditation are insomnia, anxiety, depression, and physical pains or problems of a vague or unexplained nature.

A Team Approach

There are ways to work with traumatic states that arise in meditation, but skill and care is required. It’s best for the practitioner to work with a meditation teacher with awareness, training, and experience in working with arising trauma. Many traditional teachers and practices don’t take emotional states into account. However a growing number of contemporary teachers also have training in psychology and can help a student to navigate these difficult waters.

It is also best for the practitioner to have a therapist skilled in working at the interface of meditation and trauma. She or he will likely need a safe place, in addition to the meditation center, to talk about difficult things that have come up in life, and to develop skills to notice and respond to traumatic states as they arise. Meditation alone is unlikely to resolve trauma.

Meditating at the Edge of Trauma

For people who are feeling overwhelmed by their thoughts or feelings, seated meditation isn’t the best practice. Try walking meditation, or doing a simple activity such as washing dishes. If what’s happening in your meditation is too much, change it up. Go into nature and touch the earth.

To begin to use difficult states as a path of self-discovery and healing, have the support of a skilled teacher or therapist. The trauma researcher Peter Levine says that titrating painful states is key. It is important to be able to move back and forth between an experience of safety, such as a pleasant or neutral sensation in the body, and allowing for the edge of the traumatic sensation. As the trauma state gets more intense, move back to the felt sense of safety. This oscillation will, over time, allow for the distressing state to be held alongside and within a sense of safety and connection.

Indeed trauma can be used as a fuel for radical self-discovery and healing. However the path is long and intense, and must be navigated with compassion, skill, and care by all involved.

I've been keeping company  for the past few weeks with No-Gate Gateway, David Hinton's luminous new translation of the Mumonkan. This collection of koans (or sangha cases, as Hinton calls them) has been widely used for centuries, but until now most of our English translations have been done from the Japanese. Hinton is a translator and scholar of classical Chinese, and at the heart of this text is his fresh explication of the history and meaning of the original characters in the koans. Hinton emphasizes Zen's roots in Taoist philosophy, especially the dialectic between what he calls Absence (emptiness, formlessness) and Presence (form, existence). I believe No-Gate Gateway will help make koan practice vital and approachable for the next generation of Zen students.

I found No-Gate Gateway to be a fresh and exciting approach to these koans. Over and over, koans that are old friends gained new energy and layers of meaning. The introduction alone is essential reading for any student of Zen. Here he puts forth his "wilderness cosmology" of a universe in perpetual transformation. Hinton describes the character for Absence as originating in a pictograph of a woman dancing with foxtails streaming from her hands, an expressive and evocative depiction that belies any sense of nihilism. The character for Absence can also be used for a simple "no" (as in mu and wu), and this doubling of meaning threads throughout the text. He says that in meditation, "eventually the stream of thought falls silent, and we inhabit empty consciousness, free of that center of identity. That is, we inhabit the most fundamental nature of consciousness, an that fundamental nature is nothing other than Absence."

Hinton translates the first koan in the collection, often know as Chao-cho's Mu, as follows:

A monk asked Master Visitation-Land: "A dog too has Buddha-nature, no?"
"Absence," Land replied.

No-Gate Gateway offers a fresh, intimate, and clear take on koan practice, and, I believe, will help the Mumonkan to continue to dance for the next generation of Western Zen students. Because it is anchored in the rhythms of nature, it helps us respond in times of ecological crisis. Because it is wildly poetic, it captures the sweep of the koans, from the inexpressably vast to the deeply personal. And because it is rooted in an understanding of ancient China, it helps us anchor our practice in our own times.

There are aspects of this book that I am grappling with. Hinton's new terminology can feel overworked and reliant on his explication. For example, a term he uses as synonymous with Absence is origin-tissue, defined as "reality as a single tissue, undifferentiated and generative." While I appreciate the poetry here, it's hard to imagine this as a usable term. Similarly, he translates the names of people and places in a way that is hard to get used to. Chao-cho is now Visitation-Land, another shift that is provocative and hard to adapt to.

Western models of the unconscious mind have shifted in exciting ways over the past one hundred years. From Freud's repressed and dynamic models of the unconscious, we have expanded to think about relational, cultural, and ecological dimensions to the aspects of mind of which we are not consciously aware. An emphasis on making the unconscious (more) conscious is at the heart of contemporary depth models of psychotherapy.

Meditation is also a way of coming into relationship with our unconscious mind in a different way. Anyone who has done a meditation retreat knows that aspects of the hidden mind swarm around, and it's not easy to distract ourselves. The first five or so years of my own practice was a messy karmic purge of old fear, rage, and desolation. As usual the practice was just to sit with it, not avoiding or fixing or dramatizing.

And, in meditation, there are moments when all the stories drop away, when our personal psychology gives way to the vastness. We have experiences of deep stillness and absolute interconnection. What we consider to be the "self" is radically altered. Though, for better and for worse, our personalities remain!

Buddhism has a fascinating model of the "storehouse consciousness" in which all the seeds of our karma, and those of generations preceding us, incubate and give rise to our current karma. One fruit of meditation, according to this teaching, is to understand and uproot this karma. But, that's a topic for another day--one I hope to teach soon.

In a life of practice, we become intimate with many aspect of the unconscious. Here are a few I notice. I'm curious about your experience!

-The everyday level of shifting moods, habits, and relational patterns, our "autopilot."

-The deep personal unconscious, the stuff that repeats and reminds us of our childhood and which we'd do anything to escape but we can't... (And which we secretly hope meditation will fix but really we just marinate in it.)

-The aspect of the unconscious that is bigger than the self. From the relational dynamics between two people to currents present in generations of families, cultures, and groups of all kinds. At this level we know we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

-The level of the Absolute. This is impossible to talk about, but we try with language like God or emptiness. Here we find that any personal or transpersonal unconscious is co-extensive with everything, creating a vast and beautiful flow.

Each of these levels of Mind are present at all times, but mostly we are unaware of them. How they relate to each other, and how we can skillfully work with them, is a fascinating work in progress. I look forward to talking together about this!

When I came to Zen practice in my 20s, I wasn't aware of how much pain I carried. I had managed to seem successful by being a good student, having a decent job, even being a good Zen student. But as I sat all the feelings I had pushed down came crashing into view: the massive self-doubt, the desperate need to be loved, all the buried pain I had managed to gloss over. I approached this in my usual way, by trying to follow the rules, to get better at meditation, with the hope that it would all go away.

Eventually I was honest with my teacher, who recognized that, instead of striving to "fix" myself, what I really needed was the medicine of compassion. As I began to approach my own suffering with a heart of compassion, it became natural to be able to offer kindness more freely to others.

Here's the good news. Compassion is our deepest nature. We don't have to manufacture it, but rather we uncover it. Compassion arises naturally when we see that we are truly interconnected with others.

Thick layers of delusion can obscure our access to compassion. We may believe that if we are compassionate with our selves, we will lose motivation, that we need to whip ourselves so we don't get soft. We may believe we are deserving of punishment. The problem of self-hatred and self-condemnation are rampant in our culture. A lack of compassion is often accompanied by agitation, anxiety and fear, judgment of self and others, and quick anger.

In our afternoon workshop, Fierce Compassion: Cultivating Radical Kindness for Self and Others, we will explore the stories and habits that occlude compassion, as well as guided practices and tools to allow our innate compassion to shine through. Join us!

The coin lost in the river is found in the river. 
-Zen koan

"Tis a delight to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found."
-D.W. Winnicott

"You gotta be lost to be found."
-The Wood Brothers

I've been practicing the last couple of weeks,  in different settings, the lovely and friendly koan, "The coin lost in the river is found in the river." This koan, from the always amazing Yunmen, often evokes emotion, imagery, and somatic experiences. Try dropping the koan into your meditation and see what happens. Here are some reflections on the koan, your experience may vary.

What does the image of a river evoke? Perhaps it's a specific river. Maybe it's a body feeling of flow. Or other feelings, images, memories.

How do you experience this coin? Is it just an object, perhaps something of value? A particular kind of coin? Something in your body? Or maybe you didn't even notice the coin.

What do you feel you have lost? Can you feel desperate to fill a void, to find something missing, or to fix what's wrong with you? Or perhaps there is a welcome loss, like shedding a skin.

What's it like to find, to be found? What do you most want to find? Did you really lose it? What's it like to feel found by a person or group? Indeed, it is a disaster not to be found.

Crimson Gate Meditation Community is dedicated to offering Zen meditation and inquiry, classes, workshops, retreats and depth psychotherapy that integrates contemporary relational  meditation practice with the wisdom of psychology. 

Our community meditations are every Sunday evening from 7:30-9pm. This is a drop in group that is free of charge (donations welcomed) and open all. If you are new to us, please come by 7:15 to get meditation guidance and orientation.

Our emphasis is on contemporary practice for modern lives. In our practice we draw on Zen teachings and traditions, as well as contemporary work in psychology, the sciences of complexity and ecosystems, the arts, poetry, philosophy, and social engagement.

Zazen—meditation in silence and stillness—study, and shared inquiry are at the heart of everything we do. Through your participation and sincere practice you help create this community for deep inquiry into our lives and the timeless wisdom and compassion of the Buddhist tradition. This realization permeates the world through our everyday actions, words, and thoughts. Our community is connected not by ritual, dogma, or obligation, but by our aspiration and mutual care. Together we cultivate this dynamic process of waking up and growing up. This is our offering to a troubled world.