Emptiness and the Relational-self

What all this seems to be pointing to is something inexplicably present in sponsorship that is unmistakable, yet indefinable in terms of mere words. Sometimes sponsorship comes from a place of "not knowing." Sometimes we just don't know enough to determine what is going on and we end up being with others in a way that is both dependent on and capable of deepening our process of self-sponsorship. At such times we often find ourselves in a state of "dumbfounded awe"—a perplexing and confusing mix of irrationality, unpredictable pain, and unearned joy, which paradoxically leads to a surprising and unexpected appreciation of the beauty and grace of life—while we hold the sense of anticipation that something sacred is being born if we can just hang in there long enough, actually allowing space for creative discovery on the part of clients, uncolored by our preferences and attitudes.⁶

For example, recently I had the unusual challenge of having to do therapy lying flat on my back. I had had surgery on one of my knees. Because the spinal "leaked" (a condition that occasionally happens with spinal blocks), I had unbearable headaches that I could tolerate only if I laid flat on my back with my knee elevated above my head. My helplessness, in combination with the unique perspective of seeing the world "upside down," radically transformed the shape of the relational field between my clients and me and paradoxically opened up the therapy in unexpected ways. I literally did not have a leg to stand on. The recognition of my helplessness and a shared sense of woundedness sponsored an unexpected appreciation of the beauty and grace of life on the part of both my clients and me. A delightful tenderness and openness came into the relational field. Both my clients and I were struck by the presence of something inexplicable that opened us up and deepened our sharing, leaving us both wondering if I should continue to offer my sessions lying flat on my back. Several of my clients looked at this event as a turning point in their therapy.

Here we are talking about sponsoring a relational paradigm shift, a genuine birth of soul where both therapist and client discover something sacred in the relational field and open enough spaciousness for new life and new understandings to be born. This is a true marriage of spirit and soul where sponsorship midwifes something new and sacred into the world.

Thus to briefly review, in the unified "fields" of presence, neither perception nor awareness can be objectified as anything for the mind to grasp. This ungraspable quality of experience is the basic meaning that Buddhists call emptiness. There have been many different ways of talking about the notion of emptiness in different Buddhist and psychotherapeutic traditions. We explored one flowing out of the Tibetan tradition that suggested that emptiness and being are essentially inseparable, two sides of the same coin that can only be dealt with relationally, and then attempted to show some similarities it shared with quantum field theory as applied to notions of the "self" in self-relations psychotherapy.

However, there are many different ways to articulate this basic relationship. To flesh out these ideas a bit more, I would briefly like to present two other examples of contemporary psychotherapists who have attempted to build bridges between post-modern psychotherapy and these ancient Buddhist traditions. One, flowing out of Zen Buddhism, is articulated in John Tarrant's lucid book, The Light inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life. (1998). The other is an exploration of the relationship between Buddhism and modern methods for promoting personal and spiritual transformation, found in John Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening. (2002). Welwood has spent a lifetime attempting to explore how Buddhism and post-modern psychotherapy might be drawn together. This is the latest of several attempts to explore the relationship.⁷

Let us begin by examining John Welwood's lucid description of the relationship between Buddhism and post-modern psychotherapy. As a psychotherapist Welwood is a master at building bridges between the two traditions and showing how they can be made more complementary. I particularly appreciate the careful way he shows how one particular set of techniques from within contemporary psychotherapy, namely, "focusing" (Cf., Gendlin, 1962; 1981; 1996) can be used as a natural complement to various mindfulness and meditative practices. As can be seen from preceding paragraphs, I have found hypnosis and self-relations psychotherapy an equally useful set of practices to be applied in bridging the two traditions.

Welwood points out that Buddhist psychology has the potential of taking us far beyond the Western obsession with the contents of mind by opening to a more dynamic view of the mindstream . . .as a flow of experience. . . as offering practices that open consciousness to the presence of nonconceptual awareness. At the same time Western psychology and clinical practice has much to offer Eastern psychology. The Western idea of the individual has helped liberate the capacity to ask question and freely investigate the nature of things without allegiance to rigid orthodoxies, giving rise to the scientific method, and a vast potential for new precision and depth in thinking about the "self." Though both Eastern and Western psychology at times seem to have spawned two distinct methods of inquiry that point in two totally different directions, there is much to be gained from any attempt to see them as complementary approaches. Both are necessary for a full realization of the potentials inherent in human existence.

He points out that pure "presence" is the realization of being-as-emptiness: being without being something. Being is empty, not because it lacks anything, but because it cannot be comprehended in terms of any reference point outside itself. Being is precisely that which can never be grasped or contained in any physical boundary or conceptual designation.

Emptiness thus is not a specific "attribute" belonging to awareness, appearance, or being, but their utter transparency when apprehended in pure presence, beyond the subject/object division. This realization has been called many things within these two traditions: self-illuminating awareness, Buddha-nature, wisdom mind, great bliss, in the Buddhist tradition, "felt sense," insight, self-as-relationship, transformation, in the new emerging non-dualistic psychotherapeutic traditions. What has been missing is a bridging language adding more precision and clarity in the ways the two traditions might be brought together.

Welwood shows that the larger nature of consciousness takes no shape or form and therefore is often described as emptiness. He offers the following interesting analogy (2002:49):

If the contents of the mind are like pails and buckets floating in a stream, and the mindstream is like the dynamic flowing of the water, pure awareness is like the water itself in its essential wetness. Sometimes the water is still, sometimes it is turbulent; yet it always remains as it is, fluid, watery. In the same way, pure awareness is never confined or disrupted by any mind-state. Therefore, it is the source of liberation and true equanimity.

When we start to observe the play of the mind, what we most readily notice are the contents of consciousness—the ongoing overlapping sequences of perceptions, thoughts, feelings. As we develop a subtler, finer, more sustained kind of witnessing, through a discipline such a meditation, we discover in addition to these differentiated mind-moments another aspect of the mindstream that usually remains hidden: inarticulate gaps or spaces appearing between our discrete thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. These spaces between the bucketsful of water floating in the stream are hard to see at first, and impossible to remember because they have no definite form or shape we can grasp onto. Yet if we do not try to grasp them, these undifferentiated mind-moments can provide a glimpse of the larger reality that lies beyond the mindstream: the pure ground of nonconceptual awareness that encompasses and also surpasses all the activities of mind.

Most clients who find their way into our offices have become lost in the grasping tendencies of everyday thought and experience and have lost the capacity to look beyond them to the "felt penumbra that gives our experience its subtle beauty and meaning." He points out that by neglecting these fluid spaces within the mindstream, we come to over-identify with the contents of the mind and erroneously assume that we are the originator and custody of our "reality" narrowly and "objectively" defined. "The troublesome equation 'I = my thoughts about reality' creates a narrowed sense of self, along with anxiety about our thoughts as territory we have to defend."

Particularly useful to practitioners in both traditions, are Welwood's discussions of the "unfolding of experience" described in Chapter 7 in his book. As he says (2002:87):

Our path in life evolves through a process of unfolding, which gives rise to an emerging flow of new discoveries, as what was hidden becomes revealed and what was obscure becomes accessible and clear. At least two different kinds of unfolding operate in human development: a gradual or "horizontal" unfolding, in which new discoveries and developments appear progressively, each one building on those that preceded it; and beyond that, a more sudden and surprising kind of "vertical" emergence, in which a larger, deeper kind of awareness unexpectedly breaks through into consciousness, allowing us to see things in a radically new light.

Although the process of unfolding is evident in all fields within which we find the play of spirit and soul -- for example in the case of musical participation and performance, discussed above -- the process of unfolding that takes place in psychotherapy is the one of most interest to Welwood. In psychotherapy it is the dialogue between therapist and client that opens up the unfolding process—helping clients tune into their inchoate experience and bring it into fuller realization, instead of fixating on particular ways of seeing or feeling. Welwood (2002:95) describes this unfolding in the therapeutic context as a two-way interactive process that involves ". . . referring inwardly to a felt sense and then carrying it forward through inquiry and unfolding." This is a more dynamic field based model of therapy than the one-way street of making the unconscious conscious, so characteristic of the "dominant discourse" of psychotherapy. He points out that ". . . the old notion of the unconscious as a separate region of the mind, with its own explicit contents and drives, fosters a deterministic approach to therapy that seeks to uncover, through rational analysis, solid problems stored in the psyche. By failing to recognize or honor the ever-evolving richness and open-endedness of human experiencing—which continually unfolds in surprising and unpredictable ways—deterministic models of therapy reinforce the split between the surface, focal mind and our deeper being, the division that lies at the root of our problems in the first place."

The horizontal shifts in the unfolding process are described through the analogy of a ball of yarn unraveling and changing shape. In this way clients discover that psychological problems are forever mutable and capable of being seen in new ways, rather than being seen as solid, fixed entities lodged inside us. Therapy thus becomes a liberating experience leading to more expansive understandings of one's life and the human situation.

The vertical shifts in the unfolding process are described through the analogy of the garuda, the mythical bird in Tibetan Buddhism, symbolizing the imminent capacity in all humans to catch glimpses of their true nature beyond horizontal evolution and becoming.

Going back to the analogy of the buckets or water flowing in the mind-stream, Welwood asks (2002:97):

How can we let the bottom of our lives break through into this radical openness, without continually having to patch up the bucket because we fear this larger space? While psychological work can provide glimpses of the larger openness at the core of our nature, spiritual practice aims at it more directly. If psychological work helps us find ourselves, spiritual work takes a further step, helping us let go of ourselves. In this sense, psychological and spiritual work, horizontal unfolding and vertical emergence, finding ourselves and letting go of ourselves, are two sides of one whole dialectic of self-discovery.

One can also see these interrelated processes of horizontal and vertical unfolding in my analogy of the blissful experience of joining in musical participation. The horizontal unfolding of experience as we join others in making music is found in the exquisite inter-being of holding on and letting go of the shul of notes transcribed on inert pieces of paper by others beings at other times. The vertical unfolding is seen in the brief glimpses such experiences give of a transcendent order of expression that lies beyond the notes in themselves, and in the way they connect the experience as a whole to a realm of "timelessness in time" to borrow T.S. Eliot's words.

Welwood thus shows how therapy can become a vehicle for entering the "larger sacred ground of being underlying all our thoughts and feelings." The challenge is finding a way to help clients practice horizontal and vertical unfolding in their own lives. There are many paths. The main challenge is helping clients find one that is authentic for them, and deepen it. In this way Western psychology will not need to negate either the foundations of its own science, with its marvelous explorations of the surface mind, or its own traditions, which hold many valid methods for inquiry into the experience of the body-mind. At its best, Welwood observes, psychotherapy can introduce us to "the awake, spacious presence of our being," thus revealing the "essential integrity that lies at the core of human existence." What higher calling is there than that?

Now let us turn to John Tarrant's book, The Light Inside the Dark (1998). This book is a poetic and extremely penetrating look at the relationship between "soul" and "spirit" in everyday life. Drawing richly from both Zen Buddhism and the Jungian analytic tradition, Tarrant shows how the dynamic relationship between being and emptiness might be seen in terms of the relationship between soul and spirit. The vicissitudes of being are addressed in the language of "soul" while the inchoate realm of the implicate order is described as the realm of "spirit." Each are embodied and drawn into relationship through the ongoing dance of being and emptiness. With the penetrating and ironic insight flowing out of the Zen Buddhist tradition, he explores the myriad textures of the felt sense of this basic split in our everyday lived experience. Though he begins with the fundamental perception of Zen Buddhism that there is no such thing a soul, spirit or self, the energies of soul and spirit in being nevertheless "beam at us and demand our attention, like the 'grin without a cat' that beams at Alice from another giver of non-directions." Allow me to give just a taste of his description of the relationship between soul and spirit in everyday life.

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⁶I am grateful to Chuck Holton and Cindy Franklin, two of my colleagues in the self-relations practitioner community, for suggesting some of these important ideas linking psychotherapy and meditative states.

⁷See also, his edited volume, The Meeting of the Ways: Explorations in East/West Psychology (1979); Awakening the Heart: East/West Approaches to Psychotherapy and the Healing Relationship (1983); Challenge of the Heart: Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Changing Times (1985); Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love. (1990); Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path. (1992); and Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationships (1996).

*Robert D. Rossel, Ph.D. is a Life Coach/hypnotherapist practicing in Los Altos Hills, California. He is a long-time practitioner of self-relations psychotherapy and Ericksonian hypnotherapy. With an abiding interest in music, art, yoga, and other body-mind practices, Dr. Rossel is also a long-time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and has sought for many years to find ways to apply meditation and mindfulness in his psychotherapy practice. He may be reached at 10490 Albertsworth Lane, Los Altos Hills, CA 94024. Address all correspondence to his e-mail address: Rosselrob@aol.com.

We also thank Robert for his other articles, which we were happy to publish on our site:

Foundations:
The Ericksonian Legacy and Self-relations Psychotherapy
The Paradox of Surrender:
Finding Strength and Wisdom in the Struggle
The Expansion and Contraction of Being
Liminal Spaces and Transformation
Emptiness and the Relational-self
Our Clients, Our Teachers
Growing Up With Music
Things that Last
Mirror Work

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