Only use the raft to cross the water...
There's a Buddhist story about a person building a raft to cross water. The point of the story is how, once the person reaches the other side, they leave the raft there. Taking it with them will only burden them, and if they leave it there someone else may be able to use it.
Some months ago my VA appointed therapist had to rekajigger her client list to allow for new responsibilities. That would be the third time that has happened to me in the ten-ish years I've been seeing VA therapists. I had some trouble scheduling my intake with my new therapist while my mother was dying, and when I finally did get with her it was a pretty mediocre intake. About a month later she called me and said that she was shifting departments and I could be assigned to a new therapist who had just joined the department.
The way she said it kinda pissed me off. She was like, “if you want to continue...” Like... I do this for fun? I want to talk with newbie therapists who are expecting to do 8-12 week stretches of basic CBT with vets with combat PTSD and then get rid of them as soon as they're not in danger of killing themselves in a way that is not mediapathic? I want to work with therapists who get intimidated when I bring up any mode of therapy outside of their personal formal education experience?
So I decided to think about it for a while. I thought. I talked with Spouse. I talked with my Psych who has earned my trust as a patient and as a human. I suggested that I might like to take a sabbatical from therapy at the VA. I use that word on purpose because the most useful parts of my therapeutic experience have had a great deal of academic rigor and have involved a huge amount of autodidactic investment.
Sometime last spring or summer I discovered the Plum Village App. I had been using Headspace for over a year, but mostly only used it for the sleepytime stories which are amazing and read by the most lovely voices. The meditations were just, too... I don't know. Flat. The Plum Village App is free and has a whole bunch of great deep relaxation tracks in different lengths and voices. It also has guided meditations, a meditation timer with variable interval bells, resources, videos, and the very welcoming and gentle spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh and his community.
This last element really contrasted with Headspace's kind of “hip and vibrant hooah hooah productivity” feel. Thich Nhat Hanh has kind of a “Well, life is really very scary and violent, but it is also very beautiful and we can sit and enjoy a beautiful cup of tea together.” feel. I've been a walking wounded survivor for so long that I want to choose to abide in calm. I do not choose to take some advil and keep going. I do not choose to push through the pain by behaving mean and rude. I choose differently.
I was looking through documentaries and found an old one about Thich Nhat Hanh and through it learned about his Order of Interbeing. Just the name of that gave me a thrill of truth. Like when you learn that that painting is called “The Scream”, you think, “Hell, yeah, it is.” The Order of Interbeing. Hell, yeah, it is. I looked it up and discovered that I live in the middle of a group of related Sanghas that follow the Plum Village Tradition and they do weekly sits via Zoom. They're about an hour long and really mellow and the folks there are exactly the class/age/color that I would expect them to be for our region. But they do behave like lovely people.
Then I discovered that doing five 1 hour dedicated periods of social mindfulness and meditation with other people felt really good to me and was something that I could accomplish without exhausting myself. After having covid I've had to schedule long naps in my day if I do anything physical and I've had to start sharing more of the household duties that I find fulfilling with Spouse. It's really easy for me to feel useless and pathetic and then to let that need to nap slide into straight up depression and anhedonia. Anhedonia isn't fun for anybody.
Then I remembered HH The Dalai Lama, the scientist. And I remembered that Buddhism has a whole-ass science of psychology that is often glossed over to Westerners as “just too confusing” and regarded by Westerners as “confusing lists of things that don't make sense”. And THEN I remember why I've always thought that Tibet's monastic class is a really interesting cultural development: Whenever your society gets a stable enough food supply, you've got to find some way to engage your folks in some kind of work. This might be building big civic projects or conquering neighbors or developing internal competitions, but in Tibet they grabbed the young men who might be fighting for inheritance or creating violent gangs and made the highest aspiration to become a monk. The monks get fed, they are required to study, and they spend large amounts of time sitting still and thinking.
(I'm not saying that this is ideal as the whole situation really sucked for just about anybody who wasn't a man in the ruling class or a man in the monastic system, but it does seem strikingly clever to basically employ all of your young troublemaking men by telling them to sit down and think big thoughts.... and then they do that.)
Why couldn't I look into learning about Buddhist psychology science and use my new sitting still requirement to meditate?
Yeah, there's no reason I couldn't. The challenges lie in finding the intersections of translators who know about meditating, meditators who know about psychology, and neurobiologists who think that meditation is cool. I'm likely not going to find all of those in one person, but I've been doing similar work between trauma/DBT/bi-polar already and those people all pretend they're talking about the same thing when they're not.
The blessing here is that Buddhism is rooted in oral tradition so many of the textual structures are in place to facilitate memorization and obviously do not contain all of the details. Those lists remain long after anybody remembers what they were supposed to represent. I mean, do you know what the partridge in a pear tree is supposed to represent? Fortunately there have been many many great thinkers and writers who have shared their opinions and discussed their understandings of these things with other people. I can read competing interpretations and see what makes sense in time. There isn't a lot of non-sectarian meditation science out there right now, but I have found The Mind Illuminated which I think may serve as a good jumping off point.
The key, I think, is to figure out what I don't know, get a grip on some vocabulary, and find ways to compose questions. Right now I don't really know what I don't know, but I have started a basic daily practice and making up to an hour to sit mornings and evenings has improved my mental health through helping me abide in calm and by letting me feel that I'm doing something constructive without burning energy.
Right now that's pretty awesome, and we'll see where everything goes from here.