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Article Excerpt
Abstract: Inability to endure discomfort drives compulsions to eat, drink, spend, worry, and overwork. Clients come to therapists asking for relief from rage, addiction, exhaustion, frustration, and self-destructive acting out. They want skills for moving away from discomforts or strategies for moving discomforts away. Because an unquiet mind is the source of their discomfort, what is needed is a way to quiet the mind. Understanding the principles of yoga (the postures being a useful form of discomfort) without ever going to a class or practicing at home on a mat can help motivate clients to learn to hold still in the presence of discomfort. Storytelling, poetry, and the use of metaphor to demonstrate the advantages of holding still while experiencing discomfort are powerful tools to motivate clients to go deeper to touch a stillness that is there beyond the discomfort.
As professionals working with people in distress, therapists are well aware of how valuable it is to help clients develop the capacity to endure discomfort. I have selected a yoga metaphor to explore this vital matter because yoga postures can be so uncomfortable. Being asked in a yoga class to fold in half over a belly still feeling full of last night's meatloaf, one asks oneself why yoga seemed so attractive that morning. You think, "This discomfort is voluntary! I am actually paying for this agony!"
Key Words: yoga, surrender, discomfort, metaphor in therapy
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Yoga, a Sanskrit term loosely translated as union (referring to union of body, mind, and spirit), is a tool intended for (among other things) stopping fluctuations of the mind. The resulting peaceful inner experience deepens the capacity to endure uncomfortable emotions. The terms peace, stillness, silence, presence, happiness, truth, emptiness, spaciousness, and aware aliveness are interchangeable terms in the literature of yoga.
In yoga philosophy it is taught that transcending shifts in the mental and emotional tides lead to the experience of union of the personality (the small self or ego seen as a fictional construct) with the true Self. Yoga is a system for allowing access to a happiness that is always indwelling but becomes obscured by "clouds" of conditioned thought and emotion embedded in our personal histories. We identify our "self" with these personal dramas or "clouds" (our wounds, needs, dissatisfactions, moods, fears, and hopes).
"Clouds in the Sky" Metaphor
What yoga teaches is that we are not those "clouds" of experience; we are the spacious, clear "sky" in which the clouds arise. Ancient teachers right up to wisdom teachers in our own time agree that that "sky" is clear and within us. Dissolving one's identification with one's personal "clouds" can occur when the fluctuations of the mind are stilled and we can see more clearly within, so that we are able to feel the more spacious, sky-like interior depths.
In our work we are trained to help clients change their stories (change the shape and density of their clouds in this metaphor). We assist them in transforming an unhappy marriage into a happy one; we support a self-loathing woman in developing self-respect; we help the addict become sober and the bulimic become abstinent. A proponent of yoga philosophy would commend us for our compassionate work but point out that unless we had encouraged the client to explore the questions of who is having this marriage, who is exhibiting this bulimia, and what is true about them beyond their story, we will have only helped our clients change the furniture in their prison cells.
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We believe that our personalities define us, and we believe the same thing about our clients. We continue to identify others as who their Halloween costumes tell us they are. We wonder why no one can get close to us or why significant others feel unknowable.
Even with the better marriage, the abstinent lifestyle, the positive self-regard, the mind will continue to fluctuate on the emotional tide. The very definition of ourselves as a "self" reduces our space-like being-ness to an object, and the nature of an object is that it encounters obstacles. This identification of the self as the personality is itself an obstacle to the realization of one's own spacious nature.
Halloween Metaphor
In yoga philosophy, the ego is seen as the Halloween costume one puts on and forgets one is wearing. One's personal story is seen as an illusion, a wholly fictional overlay masking the nature of the true Self, which is inherently peaceful. Seekers of enlightenment are compared to fish that are thirsty. There is no seeking necessary. The journey does not need to begin; there is no need for one. We have already arrived.
Yoga and meditation teach us to sink our awareness deeper than the Halloween costume of the personality, to train our awareness to rest in the space beyond the thoughts, beliefs, Feelings, and physical sensations. There we find spaciousness and peace.
This experience can be startlingly boring at first. The ego hates that sense of nothingness and recoils. The ego likes to know there is something there and to know that it is something. Therefore, there is enormous resistance by the mind to the experience of the vast and empty space within. The yogis teach that it is this space in which all phenomena arise that is our true nature; access is possible by letting go of control and manipulation.
This article offers an opportunity to explore the use of folk tales, metaphors, and poetry to motivate clients to soften into the discomforts that they believe are the source of their distress. These less linear forms of communication can sneak up on the ego, provoking fewer resistances to disarming it. Defenses are less likely to be mobilized when one has been lured into a tale with strong imagery. We can encourage "dropping the storyline," or "going deeper," explorations a client may not otherwise be ready to accept. There is a subtle reparenting piece occurring when we tell the client a teaching story. As the clients listen, they regress; their defenses are lulled and they become receptive to a willingness to let go of the desire for control in spite of themselves.
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