Andrea Miller: How can Western psychology and Buddhism work together to help people heal from trauma?
Jack Kornfield: There’s a very simple word underlying this question, which is suffering. The deep medicine of the dharma acknowledges that there’s suffering, that it has its causes, and that there’s a path to its end. Western clinical psychology also acknowledges that there is suffering, and it offers a variety of tools to help alleviate that suffering. They each have particular strengths. The Western psychological strength includes that it’s a relational healing process, and the strength of the Buddhist dimension includes a profound understanding that trauma is not who you are.
What do you mean by “a relational healing process”?
Most of the traumas we have involve other people—not all—there can be accidents and things like that, but even then, having someone be a witness to the memories, the experience, the emotions, and to hold it in a broader and wiser and more loving consciousness makes an enormous difference.
When people come to meditation with significant trauma, they often hope that the trauma will get resolved over the years by their sitting in meditation. Half the time that happens, but half the time it doesn’t, because healing requires us to have a loving and spacious or wise witness.
You mentioned that trauma is not who we are, which you described as a key insight from the Buddhist perspective. Could you elaborate on what that means and how it influences healing?
The fundamental understanding is that you are and have always been free. You can be identified with your trauma, or you can remember that who you are is consciousness itself. Loving-awareness shifts you out of identification with your roles, your body, your history.
When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island prison after twenty-seven years and became such an inspiration to South Africa and the world, part of his message was that they can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit, and no event in history can do that either.
Modern trauma research shows that trauma exists in a different part of the brain than painful memories. The part of the brain that’s carrying trauma is experiencing you still being in danger—still in the midst of it. If you’re a vet on the street and a car backfires and you duck because it sounds like you’re under mortar fire, you’re still living in that field of trauma. A lot of the best trauma work helps you shift from the trauma still being alive and actively directing your life, to having felt and experienced the trauma, but knowing it as memory from the past.
Photo by Elisa Stone
What role can mindfulness play in healing trauma?
Well, almost all healing involves mindfulness. There’s a sign in a casino in Las Vegas that says, “You must be present to win.” Similarly, what helps with trauma is the capacity to be present, and that is learned in meditation.
When we learn to sit with the ten thousand joys and sorrows that arise, whether your knee pain or outrage, anxiety, joy, love, and frustration, you gradually open what the neuroscientists call “the window of tolerance.” You learn the capacity to be present for this human life. That’s a first step—to be able to be mindfully present and recognize what’s happening. Then with practice you can shift to become the space of awareness, to hold it all in compassion.
There are other things that are helpful to people. They vary from culture to culture and individual to individual. For many people, telling their story and having it witnessed is critical.
I’ve worked with combat vets on retreat who’ve never told anyone about their trauma. These vets don’t dare tell their families—they’re afraid it will overwhelm them. They say, “I can’t tell you what I saw, and worse, I can’t tell you what I had to do!” Bringing the combat vets together and inviting them to express the trauma by using storytelling, meditation, movement, poetry, and art allows what was buried and unapproachable to rise into consciousness and be expressed and witnessed.
Those are some practices that involve mindfulness and are relational. But not all helpful practices include relationship. When my teacher Ajahn Chah was walking across the dikes in the rice paddies, with some of us monks following with our alms bowls, he pointed to a huge boulder on the horizon. He said, “Monks, is that boulder heavy?” And being intelligent young monks, we said, “Yes, it is.” He laughed. “Not if you don’t pick it up.”
Part of the meditative capacity that Ajahn Chah taught was to witness what is there, to be unafraid of it, but not to repeatedly pick it up. So, if you have repetitive unhealthy thoughts, for example, once you’ve worked with them for a while, you can avert or turn your attention to more healthy states. It’s a different kind of strategy.
But Ajahn Chah wasn’t afraid of working with emotions. When I was twenty-two, I went to live and meditate in a forest hut. At that time, I was a peaceful person in my own eyes. My father had been violent and abusive, and I’d been the peacemaker of the four boys. That’s who I thought I was. Then when I meditated, to my surprise I discovered I had an immense amount of anger that I’d stuffed down. The monks near me were irritating me, and all of a sudden, I wanted to, you know, strangle them. It wasn’t their fault. It was all the stuff I’d never looked at.
I went to Ajahn Chah and said, “I’m really angry.” He smiled, “Good. You’ll learn about anger. Go back to your hut, close the door and the window, and sit there. If you’re going to be angry, do it right. See how big it gets, let yourself feel it.”
Of course, I did—in the hot season and under a tin roof. After a while, it felt like the anger could burn up the whole monastery, the whole world. Then came tremendous pain—grief and sobbing and all the layers around trauma. Ajahn Chah was really instructing me not to avert my gaze.
In the Buddhist tradition, is there a particular story that speaks directly to the experience of suffering and healing?
There is what happened to Kisa Gotami. When her child died, she carried the corpse around with her. She wanted the Buddha to bring this child back to life and asked if he could do it. “Yes,” he said, which stunned everybody, “but you must get me a mustard seed from a household that has not known death.”
So, Kisa Gotami went around the village looking for a mustard seed, which is part of all Indian cooking. “Do you have mustard seed?” she asked. “It’s the medicine I need to bring my baby back to life.” Everyone said yes. But when she asked, “Has this household ever known death?” they all said, “Oh, this child died,” or “This uncle died,” or “This grandmother died.” Every single household knew death, and after going from house to house to house, she came back to see the Buddha with a more awakened heart that was conscious of the universality of suffering.
It can feel tremendously isolating to lose a child. When I’ve worked with people who’ve lost children, one of the things that we do—not right away, but when it’s time—is to link awareness with all the other mothers on this earth who’ve lost children.
I’ll tell you another story. I was teaching with Pema Chödrön in San Francisco some years ago, and we had a couple of thousand people come. After teaching on compassion, we were taking questions, and a woman stood up and talked about how her partner had died by suicide just the week before. She was shaky and raw and could hardly stand, and Pema beautifully guided her to feel the power of compassion that could hold her and her partner, who had died.
I could also feel how tremendously isolated she felt. So, I said, “Those who have lost someone close to them by suicide, would you please stand up?” Two hundred or more people stood. I asked them to turn their gaze to the woman, and I invited her to look into their eyes. Immediately the room turned into a holy place. There was so much shared tenderness and compassion and love. That was a big step of what she needed for her healing.
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra
What is your advice for someone who is a meditator and wants to heal from trauma?
Be respectful of the trauma and take it easy with it. It’s not like, “Let’s dive in and get rid of this,” because the point isn’t to get rid of it. You’re trying to bring the trauma into consciousness so that it can heal.
Our meditation and our inner work can become a grim duty. You know, I work out in the gym. I have a really good diet. I jog. I meditate. I do all these good things. I’m trying to take care of myself, and that’s okay, but it’s not a grim duty. You do it out of love, love for your body, love for well-being. It’s not about trying to get somewhere. It’s about coming back to live in what Oscar Wilde called “the tainted glory” of the world and holding it all with mindful loving-awareness.
Then, I would say, if the trauma is persistent, find a therapist or meditation teacher who has training in working with trauma. The person that works with you has to be able to see you as already whole and free and to understand that while the trauma is a cause and condition for suffering, you can learn how to be with it so that it doesn’t take you over. It’s not who you are.
Another important dimension of healing is respect—respect for the pain, respect for what happened, respect for what caused it, and, if other people were involved, respect for them and all the causes and conditions.
Some people find meditation triggering. They try to sit, and it brings them back into their trauma. How do you approach this with your students?
When students that I work with say they can’t sit because their trauma is overwhelming, rather than being scared—“Oh my gosh, meditation is retriggering, we better not do it!”—I get curious. I invite them to be curious with me. I ask them questions: What do you think is happening? What do you feel in your body when you feel triggered? What are the stories it tells? What are the emotions? Now they’re sitting in a safe space talking with me about how they think they might most wisely approach this, because often they will know intuitively better than anyone else. And it might not be that the prescription is to go back, sit, grit their teeth, and grim duty it out.
A woman told me that whenever she started to get deep into meditation—where your body can feel like you’re unmoving and very still—then all of a sudden, she got terrified. I asked her questions about the terror: Where do you feel it in your body? What are the emotions? What is the story? Then I asked, “As you start to feel what you feel, let an image come or a sense of what you’re dealing with—just a little, so it’s not overwhelming.” “Ropes,” she said. Her eyes were filled with fear.
It turned out that years before, she had been abducted and tied up.
“Let’s bring in compassion, to modulate what’s happening,” I said, and we wrapped her in compassion.
Then I said. “Stand up slowly and feel yourself freeing yourself from the ropes. Imagine you’ve got scissors. You can cut them.” After this, the practice I suggested she do for the next few days on the retreat was walking meditation. That allowed her to feel free from bondage, and it worked fine for her.
You have a PhD in clinical psychology, but not all Buddhist teachers have this background. What are some common mistakes or blind spots that some Buddhist teachers make when they’re dealing with trauma survivors? How could Buddhist communities be safer spaces?
When I first started teaching fifty years ago, I used some of the skills I’d learned in my training as a Western clinician, and I was really criticized widely for this. I was seen as watering down the dharma. The prevailing idea in Buddhist communities at that time was that meditation practices will take care of everything. If you do what your lama tells you, it will take care of everything, or if you go to some Burmese monastery and practice Vipassana fully, that will take care of everything. This turned out not to be quite true. People needed help in other ways. Just sitting alone would sometimes work, but often it didn’t. Buddhist teachers in the West had to learn over the decades that just doing formal practice actually wasn’t enough.
Teacher training should always include trauma training. If you’re in a community where your teachers haven’t had that kind of training, then it would be really good for them to get some. They could do Peter Levine’s trauma training, and it gives a whole sense of the landscape of trauma. If someone wants to work with people’s hearts and minds really deeply in the way that we do as Buddhist teachers, having some savvy about trauma is incredibly helpful.
Photo by Mai Trung Kien
What role can ritual play in healing?
We’ve lost the sense of sacred ritual in our culture. The fundamental ritual energies are earth, air, fire, and water. We’ll start with fire, lighting a candle. I went into the biggest corporations in Silicon Valley and worked with some of the top people. Before we’d have a conversation, I would light a candle in the middle of the table and say, “We want to talk from the place of our most illuminated and best intention. Get quiet for a moment and think, what’s your best intention, and then tell everybody.” This would change the entire room.
Water in a ritual can be sprinkling holy water or libations of different kinds. Air is prayers, the language that we use. Stones are earth.
I’ll tell you a story. I was leading a men’s retreat with a couple of wonderful healers and artists. There was Luis Rodriguez, who was the poet laureate of Los Angeles and wrote a book called Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. Luis does a lot of work in prisons and with kids coming out of gangs. And there was Michael Mead—a remarkable mythologist, storyteller, and drummer in the tradition of Joseph Campbell—who knows all the world’s myths and brings them alive with veterans and kids in high schools where there have been shootings. So, we’re in a retreat, in a little auditorium, with these kids who were trying to get out of street gangs. They were sitting there with their hoods up and their hats back, and the attitude was like, “You’re gonna bring us some poetry, tell us some stories, do a little drumming? We’re out on the street. People got nine millimeters. You got to give us something better than that.”
We looked at them and said, “We can’t begin to talk because there are too many people in the room who haven’t been respected.” We lit a candle and put it on a table. Then we continued, “Now, would you go out into the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who’s been killed or died?” Some of these young people came back with their hands full of stones. We said, “As you put them by the candle say their names.” This is for Tito. This is for Home Girl. This is for RJ… Pretty soon, a pile of stones grew around this one simple candle, and the hoods came off. The whole room changed because now we were getting real. Ritual creates a common safe space that invites the other parts of healing that need to happen.
You could go to Buddhist monasteries as an anthropologist and say, “Oh, the Thai and Lao people, they wrap strings around things, and they say these kinds of sacred mantras, and the Tibetans, they bring in the lama dance.” But if you look through the lens of universal healing at the common elements of rituals around the world, you start to see them functioning not as an anthropological curiosity. Instead, you see people talking to each other through the language of ritual, and you see that this is part of what makes a wise society.
In my new book, All in This Together, there are lots of stories of healing and respect, including a ritual from one of my colleagues, Malidoma Patrice Somé, who was a shaman and ritualist from West Africa with two PhDs, one from the Sorbonne and another from an American university. He said that the Dagara, his people in West Africa, believe everyone is born carrying a certain cargo for this world, and our job is to deliver our cargo. A good spiritual education and wise community help us discover our cargo—our gift, what we have to bring this world—and then help us find a way to deliver it.
Trauma is obviously a wound, but can it also be a gateway to awakening?
Over the years, the great majority of people who are drawn to practice come because they’re suffering. The thing is that suffering isn’t wrong. It’s the first noble truth: There is suffering in human life. There is a lot of human-caused suffering in the world. The more greed, the more suffering. The more hate and fear, the more suffering. It’s possible to alleviate suffering, to become free from it. But this doesn’t free us from old age, sickness, death, and loss, which are part of the human curriculum. They’re the place where your heart learns compassion and where you learn true freedom. So, suffering isn’t bad. As you say, it is a gateway to awakening.
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