Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology by Rob Preece

Author:Rob Preece [Rob Preece]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2015-01-12T18:30:00+00:00

9

creating inner space

O NCE WE DEEPEN OUR capacity to meditate within the territory of sensations and feelings, together with their underlying energy/vitality, we begin to see some important aspects of our sense of self, which has two dimensions. One is a natural capacity to hold a relatively stable sense of self-identity in our relationship to the experiences of our inner and outer life. This self acts as a filter and focus for what we are going through from moment to moment, and without it we would find it extremely difficult to focus our subjective life. We would be disintegrated and scattered in relation to the events of our life. Effectively, without a sense of self, we would become extremely disoriented and psychologically unstable, potentially leading to psychosis.

Alongside—or perhaps one could say within—the emergence of this healthy sense of self as we grow up, there also grows another tendency. This is a gradual solidification of self into something that feels very real, solid, and central to who we are. I say “feels” because this is not an intellectual or philosophical notion of a self, a me, or an I; it is a felt “me.” Modern psychology has become increasingly clear that this process of constellating a sense of self begins very early on, even, some would say, within the womb. It is the influences of the environment as they impact the fetus and then the infant after birth that gradually mold a sense of me that seems solid and real. This, of course, is not described within Buddhist philosophy in any depth because Buddhism does not propose a developmental model.

In Buddhist philosophy a great deal of time may be spent analyzing the nature of the I, but that does not alter the fact that as we experience it, it is felt. It will, of course, have a mental component that holds on to a conception of me that has certain beliefs about itself. I recall going through hours of self-reflective introspection as an adolescent, trying to decide who or what I was, but this was not very helpful. What was happening organically, in spite of me, was the gradual establishment of my “identity project” with these two dimensions of the self, one the natural relative self and the other the more emotional solid self, growing in parallel. 1 From a Buddhist point of view, these two dimensions form our self-identity or self-image, our sense of me.

What we recognize in our exploration of this phenomenon from a psychological perspective is that the felt experience of me becomes focused around a number of things. One is the sense of our body and how we feel about ourselves as body. Another is the more superficial view we have of ourselves as our self-image and self-identity grow. There is also a deeper sense of whether we feel okay about ourselves or not that grows from a very early period of development and profoundly colors our sense of self. This is the sense of me that comes up when we are hurt or upset.

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