Our need for wholeness has revealed itself clearly in many ways, and one of them relates to trauma. And, that puts us in dangerous wisdom territory, because talking about trauma can provoke anxiety and confusion. How can we relate most skillfully to the experiences we consider traumatic, and to our lives and our world as we metabolize those experiences?

Five Errors of “Embodiment”—and How to Transcend Them

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow to Sophia.

In our last contemplation, we considered the central issues of the fifth error of embodiment, which has to do with our need for vision and holism. As part of that we considered some of the holism of our context of embodiment, which includes our political and economic philosophies. Among other things, we talked about soap, and we critiqued the development and sale of anti-bacterial soap.

Synchronistically, after recording that episode, my aunt sent me a video in which a supposed pharmacist advised people not to use anti-bacterial soaps. My aunt had no idea that I had just recorded those reflections on anti-bacterial soaps, so it gave me a laugh. And I thought maybe it meant I should mention it again, especially for anyone who is jumping in here and missed that contemplation.

Maybe I should also point out again that I am a fan of soap, and a fan of basic hygiene. But we saw in that contemplation that capitalism produces dirty soap, and in general capitalism has a significant negative impact on our embodiment. And all of that relates to holism, because capitalism forms part of our context of embodiment, and most of the philosophies around us remain stuck in fragmentation.

Our need for wholeness has revealed itself clearly in many ways, and one of them relates to trauma. And, that puts us in dangerous wisdom territory, because talking about trauma can provoke anxiety and confusion.

We cannot possibly consider everything important in relation to trauma, but we’re going to try to think together about the spread of so-called trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive mindfulness.

The dominant culture knows how to create trauma—both the concept of trauma and the intense negative experiences we refer to as traumatic—and it behooves us to recognize that. This in turn means we need to recognize that we may carry intense, negatively valanced, unmetabolized experience—our own experience and even the experience of others.

Because of the pervasiveness of trauma, and the general context of the patterns of insanity that characterize the dominant culture, we have begun to realize that trauma creates rather pervasive challenges for us. As a response, we start to develop so-called trauma-informed practices, including spiritual practices.

This is a nuanced situation. But a certain aspect of our response has manifested as an attempt to correct the wisdom traditions, as if they lacked something. In other words, the idea of a trauma-informed spiritual practice suggests that the spiritual traditions need to be informed by a new problem, and by our somehow advanced understanding. We need to add something extra that the tradition lacks. In the case of meditation, we decide that we need trauma-informed meditation practice.

We could have had a very different response. One alternative response might have gone like this: “Wait a second. Something is going on here. Maybe we don’t understand meditation. Maybe we don’t understand our own mind and body—. Maybe we should slow down and study these traditions with more care. Maybe we don’t know what we’re doing.”

In other words, if “trauma-sensitive mindfulness” means something like, “being sensitive to the person experiencing trauma as they learn mindfulness,” then maybe we could consider the possibility that something else belongs prior to that. We could instead say that “trauma-sensitive mindfulness” means “being sensitive to how much we don’t understand about mindfulness and the wisdom traditions in general”—or even, “being sensitive to how much we don’t understand life”.

We can develop this notion into the suggestion that, in place of “trauma-informed mindfulness,” we need “mindfulness-informed trauma”. We need more a more skillful and holistic practice of mindfulness, which doesn’t necessarily mean informing the practice on the basis of trauma, but more skillfully informing our trauma on the basis of our holistic practice of life, a holistic philosophy of life. Because trauma-informed psychotherapy is not a holistic philosophy of life, but another medicalization of experience, and another symptom of our fragmented and fragmenting culture..

Put another way: We need wisdom, love, and beauty as the proper medicine for our suffering, not just information about trauma or sensitivity to the fact that our culture produces trauma so reliably (as important as that it to recognize).

This relates to a rather central issue: If anywhere from 60-90% of people in the U.S. have experienced or will experience trauma in their lifetime—and some estimates put it that high—then we need some serious rethinking about our whole way of life, especially since so much of our so-called “spiritual life” can remain disconnected from systemic causes of suffering. Such a disconnection goes precisely against the holism of the wisdom traditions, and that’s part of what we need to address.

Until we face the larger issues, “trauma-informed” anything can more easily become co-opted into the pattern of insanity, precisely because it allows the pattern to keep going—just with a “sensitivity” to the trauma it creates.

When spiritual practice reveals widespread trauma, our reaction so far seems to be that we must change the spiritual practice. If that meant that we must become more holistic in our approach, then it would make for an excellent suggestion. But that’s not how things unfold in practice. In practice, we keep doing what we’re doing, but we try to become sensitive to the fact that many people are doing it under the influence of what we refer to as trauma.

It’s as if we encounter all this very real suffering and say, “Wow. These practices are so powerful that they revealed all this suffering. This is valuable. It tells us we should probably change our culture. Of course, we’re not going to do that, are we? No, that sounds daunting. So let’s change these ancient practices, let’s call this suffering trauma, let’s adapt the practices to all our trauma—and all our suspicion about education in general.”

And we have suggested that a rather different response might go like this: “Hey . . . these practices are uncovering a lot of suffering. Maybe we need to stop producing so much suffering. How did we make so much suffering? How can we stop doing that? Do we not understand how to live well? We don’t seem to know our own minds. Maybe we need to slow down, gather together, start some big conversations about what has gone wrong. Maybe we need other practices, and more education from teachers with a lot of expertise.”

Part of a larger shift would involve seeing that our ignorance about our own ignorance comes before anything else. And though we seem to have a genuine need right now to become more sensitive to the forms of suffering we refer to as trauma, we have an even deeper need to become more sensitive to wisdom, love, and beauty, because this will empower our sensitivity for all beings, whether traumatized or not, and it will allow us and the world to heal and become revitalized together.

We can start making the world we share in ways that reduce the amount of suffering in it.

But trauma-informed everything gets co-opted into the pattern of insanity so that we can keep the trauma-creating aspects of the pattern of insanity going. We can instead take more care about focusing on how to get past a need for trauma-informed everything, by cultivating a better world.

Again, this is a nuanced situation, for a variety of reasons, especially in relation to philosophical traditions that can help us become more sensitive to the medicine of wisdom, love, and beauty. For one thing, a venerable tradition that operates across time and culture will naturally evolve and adapt, and wisdom always has an aliveness, a freshness that makes it responsive to present conditions. Moreover, dominant culture science has not been totally devoid of insights, and the traditions can learn from these insights.

For instance, one of the more significant figures in the trauma-informed approach to mindfulness wrote a book on the subject. His name is David Treleaven. In the introduction to his book, he tells us that he took up meditation because he was suffering from what we would now call empathy distress. He was working as a therapist serving people who spoke with him about very intense experiences of suffering. Naturally, he got burned out.

The proper medicine for such a situation is not an abstract idea called “meditation”. In such a situation, we need a holistic path, which means a lot of learning about the mind, working with our values, and so on. We especially need training in compassion.

True spiritual practice requires a revolution. Sadly, we don’t always have access to the holistic teachings we need in order to make a healthy start. We may not even realize how much we have to learn—how much our culture has both failed to educate us, and has even miseducated us. We may not realize how much of a revolution our soul demands.

It seems evident that Mr. Treleavan didn’t have the necessary support for this kind of revolution, because, again, it would have meant a lot more education before he got too far into meditation. If we were to start with any sort of meditation at all as beginners, compassion meditation seems like the best choice, and even compassion practice can require a slower pace than we might at first guess.

Unfortunately, Mr. Treleaven seems to have jumped into the practice of mindfulness, which, in the dominant culture, tends to involve a lot of abstraction—abstraction that strips away the wholeness of a tradition. And the thing is, meditation seemed to help him at first. That’s important to recognize, because it’s an essential aspect of our situation.

At some point, Mr. Treleaven went on a silent retreat. That sounds like a distinctly bad idea, given that he began with burnout from empathy distress. Sadly, he returned from the retreat in far worse shape than when he started. And the trauma that bothered him was the trauma of his clients, not his own personal trauma.

So, we can see how important it is to approach these practices with tremendous humility. We may think we are fine, but emotional contagion alone can create suffering for us. This speaks to the importance of compassion training for all of us.

Treleaven says he still believes in mindfulness and meditation, but he realizes we need more care. That’s a good thing. However, our attempts to move forward with more care can fail to clarify our deeper need for holism, and we may instead perpetuate certain kinds of confusion.

A well-known meditation researcher wrote the preface to Mr. Treleaven’s book. Her name is Willoughby Britton. In her preface, she talks about her research on negative experiences with meditation, and she opens by mentioning her presentation of some of this research to the Dalai Lama.

She spoke to the Dalai Lama about people who have experienced such a level of challenge in their meditation practice that they couldn’t hold down their job for a month or longer. In fact, the average disruption in the lives of her research participants is something like 3 years, which goes to show how serious these matters can be.

But she also admits that the people she focused on practiced over a long period, and they went to at least some kind of retreat, even if only a short one. In fact, many experienced problems as a result of going on retreat.

It can feel a little challenging to listen to Willoughby Britton talk about her work. We have to remain clear that people are experiencing real suffering here. People think they can take up meditation in a fragmented way (or don’t realize they have done so), and they think they understand their own needs. But we don’t always understand our own needs.

In our context, that can actually sound offensive to some of us. We may say, “I know what I need. Who are you to tell me I don’t understand my own needs? It’s my body, my mind, my life. Don’t tell me what I need!”

We can sense a level of incoherence in that reaction. On the one hand, we can indeed learn to get in touch with a deeper knowing, and arrive at insight into our own true nature. Moreover, in some sense, all healing is ultimately endogenous, which means we heal ourselves.

At the same time, we don’t know everything, and the spiritual problem of ignorance means we actively misknow a great deal. If we truly, truly knew what we needed, we’d already be healed and fully liberated.

In other realms, we find these facts easier to accept. For instance, we often go to a medical doctor or other healer precisely when we don’t know what’s wrong and how to heal, and we require both a proper diagnosis as well as a proper prescription for healing, which we in most cases need to follow as directed, even if we need the therapy tailored to our unique constitution.

The health of the soul often requires the same thing: A skillful and realistic diagnosis coupled with a skillful and realistic prescription. It seems so important to acknowledge that—by definition—we don’t fully understand ourselves, or we’d be fully liberated, fully wise, fully loving, compassionate, and graceful. We wouldn’t need any spiritual guidance.

And so, when we reflect with some humility, we can accept that it’s okay to receive some help and guidance, that even Buddha, Socrates, Rumi, and other great spiritual geniuses had teachers, and they followed the instructions of those teachers.

At the end of the day, we can always refuse to do what a teacher tells us—and we need to keep that firmly in mind. The power, so to speak, lies with the student. At the same time, we may find ourselves needing to trust a tradition and a teacher, so we must choose them wisely. All of this requires discernment and humility.

But to assert that only I can know what I need in my life is to deny that I have any ignorance in me at all, and also to deny that I have an unconscious. Moreover, it denies the whole meaning of knowledge and experience, the meaning of teachers, elders, and trusted beings.

To say someone has knowledge in the most proper sense means they have undergone experiences that changed them in ways that allowed them to arrive at insights, and someone with greater knowledge thus understands things that someone without those experiences and insights effectively does not understand. We may claim that somewhere deep within us, the soul does know, but that doesn’t change the fact that we may be out of touch with that understanding.

We go to someone who knows because they have intimacy with what we have lost touch with, or can see something we cannot yet see (just as someone can see the back of our head far more easily than we ourselves can).

Teachings in a cultural tradition reflect the presence of the experience and insight of those who have gone before us. Teachers have an obligation to pass on that experience and insight, in the best case because they have verified those teachings as far as possible.

Sometimes when we listen to people talk about difficult experiences coming out of their meditation practice, we can start to think the fault lies in the teachings. While no teaching is perfect, it seems essential to recognize that the more important fault for many of us today may lie in the fragmented context we find ourselves in. That context drives us to then fragment a holistic ecology of teachings that could otherwise have spared us the very suffering we then blame on the fragment.

In other words, meditation as some isolated practice only exists in our misguided imagination. Historically, it always exists in a holistic context, and no serious practitioner in such a context takes up meditation as an isolated thing. Rather, they must first learn a great deal before they can engage in practices that could bring up challenging experiences, and they have a vast array of additional teachings and practices to help them deal with those challenging experiences.

We need preparation that both helps avoid certain pitfalls while also giving us everything we need to face the challenges that do arise. This is certainly part of the message of a trauma-sensitive approach, and we are just emphasizing certain aspects of this that don’t always get enough attention and care.

From this broader perspective we may understand that, in an important sense, nothing Willoughby Britton talks about is entirely new to these traditions. The new thing, the strange thing, is that conquest consciousness has created such a level of suffering that people infected with it can have psychophysical breakdowns if they practice too much meditation.

Related to this, we can say that people infected with conquest consciousness not only don’t realize the full nature of their infection, but that, as part of this infection, they may think they can do whatever they want (in other words, we, perhaps even unconsciously, seek to conquer the problem of meditation or liberation . . . our philosophical or spiritual life becomes another manifestation of conquest consciousness).

If you watch Willoughby Britton’s presentation to the Dalai Lama online, you will see that he remains quite unfazed by her report. He diagnoses the situation in the same way we have here: A lack of holism.

She admits to him that we in the dominant culture have decontextualized and medicalized some of the practices from his own tradition. Naturally she doesn’t know how to proceed, in part because the simplest answer involves going against that decontextualization and medicalization—which means a revolution . . . which sounds rather daunting, but it may nevertheless be the most realistic thing for us to acknowledge.

That gives us another meaning for “trauma-sensitive mindfulness”: trauma-sensitive mindfulness means we have discovered a deep need for cultural transformation, a need to heal self and world, Nature and culture, at the same time.

In the meantime, and maybe also as part of moving toward that cultural transformation, we might need some basic suggestions. At Willoughby Britton’s request, the Dalai Lama offered several suggestions. Even these basic suggestions might not sound so good to some of us.

First, he says we need to arrive at a deeper, more holistic understanding, and he says that people in the dominant culture often think they understand far more than they actually do. I myself have seen this countless times, including in clients I have worked with and students I have taught. And I have seen many spiritual teachers and even university professors struggle with an arrogance that might not seem at all like arrogance to the people who manifest it. In some cases we could think of it less as outright arrogance and more as ignorance coupled with limited experience.

Sometimes this ignorance masks itself as independence of thought, or self-confidence, or even reclaiming our power from some alleged patriarchal authority. We can forget that, just because a biological male studied and practiced for decades in a venerable tradition, and then offered teachings, doesn’t make those teachings fundamentally patriarchal or oppressive, even if they got co-opted into patriarchal structures or present hierarchical instructions.

Co-opting is something we all must take care to avoid. As for hierarchy itself, the term literally means “a sacred ordering”. Though the dominant culture carries itself forward on the basis of false hierarchies rooted in ignorance rather than vitalizing hierarchies rooted in the sacred, that doesn’t mean no sacred orderings exist—such as the sacred ordering that certain meditation practices should come only after a solid foundation has been established. In our confusion, we may dismiss a sacred ordering the same way we dismiss a hierarchy rooted in ignorance.

This subtle arrogance or ignorance also appears in our insistence on what we think we know. We in the dominant culture may hear some good teachings, or we may read a popular book. We may then think we understand more than we actually do. Finding it cogent, and thinking we can help ourselves.

Naturally, we get excited, and we go off to meditate—not realizing how unprepared we are, not realizing how much more we need to learn, and not realizing the depth of our own suffering. And then we might push very hard to meditate, not realizing that meditation means cultivating or making something real, and therefore not realizing that we may thereby make some of our ignorance more seemingly real, rather than making wisdom, love, and beauty real.

And so the Dalai Lama advises deep, critical study—specifically reading books and learning from teachers who really know what they’re doing. We need refuge and support in a healthy community of practice, with teachers of significant accomplishment. Just being in the presence of an advanced practitioner can teach us a great deal, because many teachings get transmitted from body to body, so to speak. The embodiment of a true teacher teaches us, and we bring tremendous benefit into our own life and into the world when we receive such teachings.

But we also need study. We bring tremendous benefit into our own life and into the world when we study true spiritual geniuses—not just people who tell us things we like hearing, and not even just the fine teachers we meet in this life. We benefit from entering as deeply as we can into the teachings of the greatest adepts the world has ever produced.

This in part has to do with honesty and humility. Most of us wouldn’t compare ourselves to Einstein, da Vinci, Mozart, or Tesla, and yet we may behave as if we have no need to read the teachings of Buddha, Dōgen, Plato, Rumi, or Meister Eckhart (who is not the same person as Eckhart Tolle). The greatest spiritual geniuses not only arrived at exceptional levels of insight, but they belong to traditions of practice that elaborated and furthered their teachings to create vast treasure troves of wisdom, love, and beauty.

We have so many shallow teachings in the dominant culture, especially under the guise of self-proclaimed “nondual” approaches. “Nondual” has now become a synonym for “enlightenment is easy, and you can have it right now, without any effort”. Americans in particular seem to love this, even as they may insist that they are fine with effort.

Let’s try to understand that. On the one hand, people may claim that they are willing to put in a lot of effort, in relation to the body and the soul. In terms of our embodiment, we can put in all manner of effort into yoga, qigong, weight training, somatic practices, and more.

We may go all the way to India, live with a spiritual master, and have all sorts of big experiences and witness various miracles. These things may lead us to assume we know more than we in fact know. Consciously or unconsciously, we may have the attitude that we’ve seen it all. Willoughby Briton specifically mentions that some of the people in her research interpreted their experiences as evidence of profound enlightenment.

It seems clear that these people aren’t the second coming of Buddha or Christ. And, unfortunately, the ego loves to put out precisely this kind of effort of travelling to faraway places, spending time with a teacher onto whom it has projected perfection, and perhaps even pushing intensely with various body practices, and it does all of this as part of avoiding things it wants to avoid.

That’s challenging to discuss, because we don’t consciously want to avoid the work of a spiritual or philosophical life. Consciously we want to heal and flourish. But if the ego can turn the effort into a vacation or an adrenaline rush, if the ego manipulate the effort into avoidance, and if the effort can become a badge of honor the ego gets to wear, that’s how it will steer the process.

That can sound harsh—ironically, of course, it sounds harsh to our ego—but it’s not meant in a mean way. It has to do with acknowledging both the power of the unconscious and the restrictions imposed by the larger culture. We’re just trying to attain some honesty about the challenges of spiritual materialism, the limits of our understanding, and the potential extent of our ignorance.

If someone tells us we need to sit around reading books for hours, that we need to think critically, studying with teachers who instruct us to do more than just sit quietly and do nothing, we may start to resist. It may seem an odd suggestion—To get more richly embodied, we might have to carefully study a challenging book?

That’s a nuanced thing, because it involves no insistence that only by means of books can we realize ourselves. The issue is that, in our current context, books might help us tremendously, and we should take care if we dismiss them too readily.

I say this as someone with a significant level of ambivalence when it comes to books, but I do recognize their importance in our current context and in relation to many traditions, including traditions outside the dominant culture. Every tradition passes down knowledge, and books can support that process.

When it comes to reading as a way to become more skillfully embodied, we find temperament plays no small role. Some people would love to do nothing more than read books, and the thought of meditating in a cave makes them brace.

For some of those people, sitting in a cave would become just another form of delusion, and could lead to a lot of suffering, so they are indeed better off studying the books. After all, if they try their best to live by those books, they will live an ethical life, and may arrive at more wisdom than people who rush off to the cave without sufficient preparation. The books have to get into our embodiment in order to become real, and this can actually happen if we work in as holistic a way as we can.

Yet another nuance emerges in all of this if a tradition tells us that enlightenment requires many lifetimes, and that we may need to begin with preliminary practices such as reciting a particular mantra 100,000 times, or doing 100,000 prostrations. We may receive that suggestion as rather depressing, and it may tempt us to give in to laziness, or even to give up altogether.

Alternatively, we may receive that suggestion as some imagined patriarchal oppression. We then stamp our foot and resolve to become enlightened by next spring. A part of us may not want to hear that we have to slow way, way down, and broaden our vision so much that we have to think and study with great passion, because the whole world depends on it.

We may think of 100,000 prostrations and recitations as some oppressive demand of patriarchy, and not something essential. And whether or not we have done 100,000 prostrations and recitations, we may get rather attached to our spiritual experiences and once again fall into thinking we know more than we do.

Jung gives us a good perspective there. Jung wrote that he didn’t think people from the dominant culture should engage in philosophical training of the kind we see in various traditions outside the dominant culture. Here’s some of what Jung wrote:

“Great as is the value of Zen Buddhism for understanding the religious transformation process, its use among Western people is very problematical. The mental education necessary for Zen is lacking in the West. Who among us would place such implicit trust in a superior Master and his incomprehensible ways? This respect for the greater human personality is found only in the East. Could any of us boast that he believes in the possibility of a boundlessly paradoxical transformation experience, to the extent, moreover, of sacrificing many years of his life to the wearisome pursuit of such a goal? . . . let a “Master” set us a hard task, which requires more than mere parrot-talk, and the European begins to have doubts, for the steep path of self-development is to him as mournful and gloomy as the path to hell.”

That’s pretty interesting. Our own evolution and liberation look to us like the path to hell. And that matter a lot. We want healing to be pain free. We want life to be pain free. But healing may involve a lot of pain, and it may come with no cure.

Moreover, all that pain may be needed to heal what transcends our ego. In other words, the larger web of life may need our pain, may need our sacrifice. Healing transcends the ego in the most decisive ways.

Jung felt that part of the problem for us in the dominant culture had to do with the poor condition of the culture itself, which then creates human beings with an unhealthy relative self. You can’t transcend a self that lacks the strength to undergo that transcendence. All our trauma, and our continued ecological degradation, indicates things may have only gotten worse.

Jung spoke as both a person with a deep understanding of the dominant culture—in other words, someone who had studied many of the key spiritual texts of the dominant culture—and also as a skilled therapist who had seen first-hand the state of the souls of many people infected with conquest consciousness. He basically diagnosed the typical person of the dominant culture as unready for what a tradition like Zen, for instance, might demand of them, and in some cases also unwilling to do what the traditions prescribe.

It almost seems that, in at least some cases, the response of these traditions has recast our spiritual path in a way that may feel uncomfortably modest and slow, and in some cases that may even lead to our thinking we know more than we do. If someone gives us a very, very basic teachings, or puts a somewhat sophisticated teaching in highly accessible language, we can mistakenly think we understand more than we do.

I mean no disrespect to David Treleaven, Willoughby Britton, or anyone else who sincerely wants to recognize and alleviate suffering. They have done important work to raise awareness and ease pain. People offering a trauma-sensitive approach want to help, and they draw from research and clinical experience that has developed in the dominant culture in relation to the elaboration of suffering peculiar to this culture. A lot of that work offers genuine amelioration of suffering, even if it also may involve limitations and unintended side-effects.

Our emphasis, as usual, is that the wisdom traditions have much more medicine to offer. It seems worthwhile to study them further. For instance, Mr. Treleaven recommends Internal Family Systems therapy in his book. But he makes no mention of an ancient Tibetan practice that bears a strong resemblance to Internal Family Systems therapy.

Arguably, that practice, developed by a great female philosopher named Machig Labdron, can do everything Internal Family Systems therapy does while preserving the holism of the wisdom traditions. In that sense, it may offer much more for us. In any case, Internal Family Systems therapy is not a holistic philosophy of life, and we should not keep trying to heal without such philosophies.

I don’t expect Mr. Treleaven to know about Machig Labdron’s teachings, but we consider it here as an excellent example of fragmentation: We take a handful of meditation practices from these venerable traditions, and when things go wrong we try to correct them by adding things from the dominant culture, without understanding that the problems arose in part because we abstracted from these traditions, leaving them fragmented in a way that leads to a greater risk of problems in the first place. We need to move from and toward wholeness, and we keep failing to do that.

And, as part of this, we also tend to leave out what the venerable wisdom traditions themselves have developed to aid in our healing. The Buddhist traditions in particular speak of 84,000 kinds of teachings, and we have left ourselves with a remarkably narrow range of them, including a narrow range of meditation practices and ways of healing heart, mind, body, and world.

We might begin to hear the label “trauma-informed” or “trauma-sensitive” as a signifier of our ignorance—and maybe that’s what some of these thinkers intend. In other words, “trauma-informed” mindfulness doesn’t mean we have to add something extra that the traditions lack, but instead means we don’t understand our own suffering, and we don’t understand the holistic philosophical traditions well enough to proceed without greater care.

In that spirit, it behooves us to slow down and ask ourselves, “Well . . . just how fragmented and confused might I have become—not because I’m ‘bad,’ inadequate, stupid, or unable to think for myself, but just because I’ve been influenced by a culture that knows how to produce fragmentation and trauma, a culture that knows how to perpetuate ignorance, confusion, and spiritual materialism? Just how much more might I need to learn from the wisdom traditions and from people trained in those traditions—not because I’m incapable of learning on my own, but because I may not realize how much ignorance affects me and how much the teachings have become fragmented and abstract, and because I want to take advantage of the vast learning others have put so much passion and energy into accomplishing for themselves and passing down through the generations?”

Our interest in embodiment can awaken an interest in the wisdom traditions of the world, which can liberate our hearts, minds, bodies, and the world we share. We’re not alone in seeking a vitalizing experience of life. The wisdom traditions offer us a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty that each and all of us can learn to embody. This common ground arises as the nonduality of Nature and Culture.

Culture has to do with passing on learning, sparing us from repeating errors, helping us attune to spiritual and ecological realities, giving us a boost in fulfilling our greatest potential (indeed, giving us inspiring visions of that potential, at times far beyond what we might imagine for ourselves), and keeping open an evolving horizon of insights that help us cultivate the whole of life onward. Learning in this sense is part of taking care of both our body and the whole world, Nature and culture in nonduality, which we can only most properly do on the basis of wholeness.

“Culture” also designates the field of practice. The dominant culture has trained us to work with our trauma as a “personal” problem. Not only does our culture help to constitute our trauma, but it also restricts the options for healing. If we can create a cultural shift, we can begin to establish a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, in harmony with spiritual and ecological realities.

That means, for instance, that from an early age we could get instructions about the mind and learn how to train our minds. We could learn practices of wisdom and wildness, love and compassion, beauty and grace that not only prevent trauma from happening, but help us heal more effectively when it does happen. And we could do all of this without a duality between Nature and culture, such that Nature would always be there to help us realize the profound resilience of our mind, heart, body, and world, and to heal our suffering.

A central point of these reflections about trauma has to do with trying to open our minds, hearts, bodies, and worlds to the wholeness we can find both in Nature and in the wisdom traditions. When I taught in the university, I saw a lot of students disconnected from Nature, and ecological illiteracy is practically a foundation of the dominant culture.

Moreover, students would rather frequently behave as if they thought themselves smarter than Plato, Buddha, or other great philosophers. We can sometimes imagine that a philosopher like Buddha couldn’t help us with our trauma or with our daily life, but we think that way in part because we don’t know his teachings very well.

I once said to someone, “If reading a philosopher doesn’t improve your dancing, then either the philosopher wasn’t very skilled, or you didn’t read them deeply enough.” The point is that the wisdom traditions teach reality. They teach us how to realize exactly who we are, and no one should be told they cannot work with these traditions to find out who they are. We just need more clarity about the holism those traditions require, and the extent of our fragmentation as a result of conquest consciousness.

For instance, Sister Dang Nghiem wrote a book called, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal Trauma with Mindfulness. Sister D. has a medical degree from an American medical school, but she was born in Viet Nam, during the Tet offensive, with bombs falling all around.

She suffered intense abuse from a young age, and lost her mother at age 12. It does no good to compare wounds, but it’s safe to say Sister D. understands trauma—as did her teachers, all of whom survived the war in Viet Nam by means of the practice of mindfulness. We would think it quite natural if her teachers suffered from PTSD . . . but they didn’t.

And so, her book is not about adding something extra to mindfulness, but how a holistic practice mindfulness itself offers us the medicine we need to heal even intense trauma—if we handle it with care. When we practice slowly, deeply, and creatively—on the basis of wisdom and wholeness—then mindfulness will begin inform our trauma—and that’s a wonderful way forward.

The trauma needs informing—reforming, releasing, and metabolizing. And mindfulness can help—if it’s in the context of a holistic ecology, a living holistic philosophy of life, which includes exceptional teachers, exceptional teachings, and a vitalizing community of friends.

Healing deep trauma, and in general healing ignorance and realizing our true nature, can take many years of consistent effort, including deep study, and refuge in a healthy community and a venerable lineage of teachers and teachings. It also demands that we be as honest as we can about what we’re experiencing, and whether or not that experience has become overwhelming.

As a final note related to all of this, we may want to recognize that our wisdom traditions may know how to access capacities of the heart, mind, body, world, and Cosmos that we in the dominant culture, by and large, may not understand at all.

In this regard, I recommend the book, Meditation Saved My Life, by Phakyab Rinpoche. Phakyab Rinpoche’s example stands out, because he had a clear diagnosis and prognosis from the dominant culture, and he did something that should be impossible, based on advanced meditation practice.

Phakyab Rinpoche was captured by the Chinese, imprisoned, and tortured. He managed to escape, but in the process of the ordeal of capture, he injured his leg severely. (We can note here again, as with Thich Nhat Hanh and other advanced practitioners, Phakyab Rinpoche did not suffer from PTSD from his ordeal.)

Because he had been a victim of torture, he was able to seek asylum in the U.S., and receive free medical care with the help of a translator. While on the plane from Asia to the U.S., his leg began to swell incredibly. When he got to a reputable U.S. hospital, he received a diagnosis of gangrene, which entailed amputation just below the knee.

In the medicine of the dominant culture, gangrene is not a fuzzy diagnosis. It’s black and white, and failure to amputate in this case meant death.

Initially, Phakyab Rinpoche was so impressed with the hospital and the doctors that he readily agreed to amputation. Part of what convinced him was that his leg had swollen so much (he compares it to an elephant’s leg), and he could actually smell the rotting flesh. It did seem that the limb was dying.

But, for some reason, he began to have doubts. So, he asked the translator to return to the hospital with him. He asked the doctor some questions, and then asked if he could see another doctor, for a second opinion. The original doctor informed him that gangrene is not the kind of thing that gets varying diagnoses. He said that if Phakyab Rinpoche didn’t agree to an amputation quickly enough, he would lose more of the limb, and eventually he would die.

Phakyab Rinpoche believed he could still sense an “energetic” connection all the way to his foot. He asked to see another doctor. He was allowed to do so. The second doctor fully confirmed the diagnosis: amputate now, or lose more of the limb; keep putting it off, and you will die. What makes the story compelling in part has to do with the fact that we have a detailed, official medical diagnosis from two different doctors, with an unambiguous conclusion: The limb could not heal, and it required amputation.

However, Phakyab Rinpoche was a spiritual prodigy who had been trained in advanced meditation practices that he felt could heal his leg. The hospital initially tried to support him, and he watched them scoop out necrotic tissue from his leg. But they finally told him that, if he didn’t want the amputation, he was on his own.

So he focused on meditation practice for hours each day. Two years later, he was walking around like nothing had ever happened—not even so much as a limp. That kind of embodiment practice should give us pause. It had nothing to do with yoga poses or workouts at the gym. Rather it had to do with training the mind and heart, including training the imagination, in order to relate to embodiment with exceptional skill and insight. It suggests that meditation, as part of a truly holistic practice of life that includes sophisticated teachings refined over centuries, has a vital role to play in the practice of embodiment.

We should emphasize that Phakyab Rinpoche received teachings that had a long history in a holistic ecology of practice. If a person without such training were to simply wish for their leg to heal, or make some of the other gestures common to the self-help catastrophe, they might very well die rather than heal. The place for good teachers and good teachings remains central. We need wisdom-informed healing. We need wisdom-informed everything.

Concluding reflections

Realizing our fullest potential for embodiment, and realizing our fullest potential beyond this current embodiment, involves moving from and toward wholeness—something the dominant culture does not teach and does not understand. Even as we begin to talk about things like “systems thinking,” we tend to think about systems. Skillful embodiment involves becoming the wise, loving, creative compassionate, beautiful, graceful thinking of complex systems no ego (no doer) can control. The wisdom traditions of the world can help us accomplish this.

The high priests of academia speak of “violence done to bodies,” rather than just violence, “the oppression of bodies” instead of just oppression. As part of our suffering, we live abstractions instead of realities, and this kind of language can help to loosen us from some of our abstractions, releasing us into a fuller reality. But this loosening doesn’t tend to last. The ego plays a mercurial game, and “bodies,” “embodiment,” and “coming into the body” can all become new varieties of abstraction—and spiritual materialism.

In our personal and professional life, we may find a lot of embodiment training vying for our attention. It seems wise to begin to apply more discernment, or else the self-help-industrial complex will pull us further into the pattern of insanity, rather than liberating us from it.

In a future contemplation or series of contemplations, we’ll consider how we can transcend these errors of embodiment.