Kornfield: True Inner Work, True Emptiness

True inner work is to experience the reality of contraction or fear, just now, and then to discover that it’s not our true nature, not who you are. Knowing the story doesn’t solve it. What brings freedom is turning to face the root of that suffering, and the identity that’s constructed around it, going right into the center of it until one comes to its true emptiness. And wise psychotherapy must also do that in the same way that dharma practice does, because that’s how liberation happens.

The therapist wouldn’t put more emphasis on deconstructing the story line or on evoking description to release suffering?

Not necessarily. Let me give you an example. A woman practitioner came to me in great grief because her husband had recently left her. They had a four-year-old child, and the woman had imagined this beautiful, loving marriage, and it broke up. Her grief was exacerbated by the fact that when she was three years old, her own father had walked out and never returned. When he abandoned her she had come to the conclusions, somewhere deep inside, that men were untrustworthy and that she wasn’t lovable. So we worked first with awareness to hold her grief with compassion, not to get rid of it, but to take the meditative seat and accept her situation with mindfulness and compassion. She grieved and wept and there was some necessary storytelling. After a fair amount of work, it seemed time to go back to the core of this primary suffering that she carried. So I asked her to close her eyes, and through visualization meditation she went back to being three years old standing at the top of the stairs, looking down, as a little girl, and her father had his suitcase in his hand and was about to walk out of the door and never see her again. Immediately, she felt grief and terror, this was horrible for her, and I had her tell me what it felt like in her three-year-old body and hold all of that within a spacious attention and compassion. Then I said, “See if you can shift your consciousness and enter your father’s body. Tell me what it feels like.” So she did. There she was. She said, “It’s rigid, I’m filled with pain and suffering and anger. But more than anything, I feel desperate.” I said, “Why are you leaving?” She went on, “I’m trapped. I’m in a terrible marriage where I’m losing my life, I’m going to die. I want to have a life and I feel like the marriage is so difficult and if I’m here another day I’m just going to die. I have to get out of here in order to survive.” She could feel the rigidity and the desperation. And I said, “Do you know that your daughter is there at the top of the stairs, watching you?” “Yes, I do.” “Well, why do you want to leave her? Why don’t you say anything . . . ?” “Because if I even look at her for a moment,I love her so dearly, I would not be able to walk out that door. But I can’t stay. I’ll die. I made the wrong marriage. It’s horrible. So I have to keep my eyes down, and grit my teeth, and walk out that door to survive.” She just sat there for a moment, stunned, and I said, “All right. Now go back and be that little girl again, looking.” She sees him leave. What is the story that she tells herself? She said, “He’s leaving because he doesn’t love me. And because my father doesn’t love me, I can’t be loved. There’s something wrong with me.” I asked her, “Who made up that story?” Somewhat astonished she answered, “I did.” Well, I said, “Is that really who you are?” Ahhhh. In this moment came a whole realization of emptiness-that’s not who I am. Next I had her go become her mother, filled with anger and fear, chopping carrots in the kitchen as her husband walks off. As she felt the rage that her mother carried and the anxiety that was in her mother, it made her much more sympathetic to her mother’s experience. Finally, she went back to being a little girl again. And she said, “Now I can see the suffering that was there, which as a child I was asked to bear and didn’t understand.”I asked, “Can you see how you created a sense of self from that suffering that is not who you really are?” And from that moment, things began to change in her. She had seen her life from the wisdom Ajahn Chah called “The one who knows.” I didn’t give her teachings about emptiness and selflessness, or have her do a special Buddhist meditation. But when the inner work is grounded in an understanding of emptiness, then we shift from the “body of fear” to inherent freedom. It’s quite natural. When I’m working with people, the ground is emptiness. I’ll say to them, “Who are you, and what is the possibility in your life of really being free?” Not in just changing the plot of the story, but letting go of all that we cling to as a false self. In this way, the best of modern psychotherapy can be a kind of paired meditation, which is informed from a spiritual point of view. ‘
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