It was serendipity that drew my attention to the following quotes. I have not heard of John Welwood before but the concept of “spiritual bypassing” rings a bell.
“When people use spiritual practice to try to compensate for feelings of alienation and low self-esteem, they corrupt the true nature of spiritual practice. Instead of loosening the manipulative ego that tries to control its experience, they strengthen it, and their spiritual practice remains unintegrated with the rest of their life.”
- John Welwood, “The Psychology of Awakening”
http://www.johnwelwood.com/index.htm
“In the early 1980s John Welwood emerged as a major figure in the fields of transpersonal psychology and East/West psychology. He developed the term “spiritual bypassing” to point to the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional and psychological issues.”
http://www.shambhala.com/authors/u-z/john-welwood.html
 |
| Mark Epstein |
The counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatry section of my personal library is quite extensive. However, none of the books reference Welwood. My favorite author on the east/west psychotherapy theme is the much referenced Mark Epstein whose main books are:
(1996) Thoughts without a thinker – psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective
(1998) Going to pieces without falling apart – a Buddhist perspective on wholeness
(2007) psychotherapy without the self – a Buddhist perspective
Epstein’s main theme is liberation through self awareness. But east and west have fundamentally different views about the self.
The west has the concept of an abiding self that is rooted in a malign subconscious that must be dug into using Freudian techniques.
The east has the concept of no-self (anatta). The illusory self derives from a largely benign unconscious. The Buddha presented techniques for overcoming the illusion and thus of becoming liberated and enlightened.
There is thus a feeling in some quarters that it is only a robust self that can know that it does not exist. SO – you should not meditate until you have been cleared by a shrink. Discuss?
I often sit for 20 minutes of stillness – especially when I notice stress arising.
There is a witnessing of the stress inducing thought trains and they tend to dissolve as a result. If they don’t dissolve immediately there is a switch to counting the breaths. This invariably solves the problem by shifting attention away from the troublesome thought/feeling.
Having begun the process and experienced the peace, there is often a second and third burst of 20 minutes of quiet sitting.
But there is also quite often a drifting into dose and sleep. Sometimes this is OK as I may not have had enough sleep at night. But at other times it is due to the ‘hindrance’ that is ‘sloth and torpor’.
Sometimes there is guilt about ‘Just sitting’; about ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. It is a waste of time. There are more important things that need to be done! Thoughts of to-do-lists and of time management. Projectisation. Busy-ness. Workaholism. Distraction.
This raises thoughts about retreat and renunciation. My lifestyle is not quite monastic but I live alone, work from home, avoid most distractions and keep things simple and basic.
But, in my case, there are the old age and Parkinson’s factors. Am I in denial? They are not much of a problem when I am alone in the house. I renounce old habits and accept slowness. However, when in company there are three types of problems - voice (softness and stuttering), hands (writing and typing) and attention (poor multi-tasking and short term memory).
Thich Nhat Hahn has the notion of seeds in the unconscious. Those that are watered grow, those that are not watered gradually wither. To water a seed is to give it space in the attention centre. The mindfulness task is to be constantly awake so that only the good seeds are watered. Thus do you change. Thus does the world change. Being peace.
To study Buddhism is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be one with others.
- Dogen
No comments:
Post a Comment