There is a saying in Buddhism that before we start practice, “mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.” Once we start to meditate, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers no longer rivers. Mountains seem like rivers, and rivers look like mountains. We lose our reference point and become less sure about who and what we are. With enough understanding, things click back into place: Mountains are once more mountains and rivers are once more rivers. This progression, simple though it is, conveys something of the remarkable trajectory that meditation launches.
When we begin practice, it is with a sense of the separateness of all things. I am me and you are you. The mountain is up here and the rivers are down below. We have to close ourselves off from the world in order to meditate. Thoughts and feelings seem to be distractions that must be eliminated.
Once we start to have some meditation experiences, the boundaries begin to break down. The ego starts to reveal its innate permeability. I am no longer so sure where I start and where you leave off. Mountains overlap with, and dissolve into, rivers. I discover that I cannot isolate myself from my world.
With enough practice, we can let things return to their preexisting states, but with the knowledge that everything is connected. The mountains exist in relationship to the rivers, and they make each other possible. I am still me and you are still you, but I know what kind of intimacy we are capable of. There is an inclusiveness in the new way of seeing that was not there originally. I no longer need to make thoughts or emotions the enemy but can make use of all aspects of my self to build my sacred space. I no longer have to push away disappointment; I can use it to develop my own tolerance. The separateness that I perceive does not have to obscure knowledge of my underlying connections. Daily life can be recast in the form of a mandala, the circular Buddhist image of sacred space.
This progression from mountains and rivers to mountains and rivers is a good metaphor for understanding how we can bring what we learn from meditation back to our lives. At first it seems as if we must, like the Buddha, renounce everything in order to find ourselves. And this willingness to renounce the seeking after pleasure is indeed a fundamental aspect of Buddhism. But once we start to appreciate how it is the holding on to pleasure and the pushing away of pain that is the problem (not pleasure and pain themselves), we start to see how it is possible to practice in the midst of our daily lives. Renunciation is not so compelling once we appreciate how truly impossible it is to renounce any aspect of an interdependent world.
Once we have this understanding it becomes possible to expand the field of meditation from our own inward journey to the rest of our lives. The very passions that once seemed so threatening to meditative stability can become special opportunities for self-discovery. Bringing the lessons of meditation back to daily life is one of the most important achievements we can hope for. It lies at the heart of the most beautiful and enduring visual symbol of Buddhism—the mandala.
A mandala is a sacred circle, a model or representation of an enlightened being or an undistracted mind. At the center sits a single Buddha figure, or sometimes a couple in a passionate embrace. It is one of the most ubiquitous symbols in the Buddhist world and is often used as an object of meditation or as an encapsulation of teachings on a certain subject. Its essential meaning, as the Buddhist scholar Robert A. F. Thurman has written, is as a depiction of liberation and bliss “by an individual fully integrated with his or her environment and field of associates.”2 The mandala is a description of how it is possible to remake our environments, seeing the everyday world through the joy of realization. It is a tangible demonstration of the fact that this very world of mountains and rivers is filled with the plenitude we seek. Each of us is already the mandala of our own liberation.
One of the most interesting aspects of the mandala is just how often the central image is of an entwined couple. Naturally, there are several meanings for this. On one level the copulating couple stands for the union of form and emptiness that underlies all of reality. On another level they represent the fusion of compassion and wisdom in the awakened mind. And on yet another level they refer back to the ordinary bliss of orgasm, which in Tibetan Buddhism is extolled as a window into the underlying and fundamental mind of pure being. If there is one moment when we drop our baggage and move away from the dominance of conceptual thought, teach the Tibetans, it is in orgasm. There are advanced meditation practices in Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, that actually use this sexual bliss as a vehicle for opening the mind.
As the imagery of the mandala suggests, there are important parallels between meditation and relationships. Just as I learned on retreat that my progress in meditation depended on my ability to bear disappointment, so too we discover that happiness in a relationship depends on the same capacity. Our lovers disappoint us just as our parents once did, but the mind, as Winnicott pointed out, is capable of tolerance.
In meditation, as in relationships, we can have experiences of profound harmony or union. The impulse in beginning meditation is to try to stop all thoughts and disturbing emotions, just as the impulse when falling in love is to try to preserve the harmony of the new couple. But stopping thoughts is about as effective as trying to have a relationship without fighting. The frustration that we feel with our lovers is mirrored by the frustration that many meditators feel with their own minds. In both cases, the most difficult thoughts and feelings are those involving the mix of desire and aggression.
While the mandala is supposed to be a sacred space that is undisturbed by distracting emotions, the critical question is about how to make such a space possible. While beginning meditation practices usually teach the value of subduing disturbances and quieting the mind, entering the mandala means finding another way. With enough practice in meditation we learn how to let disturbances come and go, turning them from obstacles into more grist for the mill. This is the key to the mandala. When we learn to let emotions like anger rise and fall on their own, instead of struggling to get rid of them, we can deepen our practice and enhance our capacities for relationship and passionate engagement.
If we are unwilling to make room for our most unruly feelings, we must shut ourselves down instead. The ability to not be unnerved by such powerful emotions seems to be related to the capacity to be alone. One of the things I have learned from my patients is that those people who are least secure in their aloneness have the most trouble with the pressures of intimacy. They seem to view the elimination of separateness as the desirable goal of a relationship, just as many people engaged in meditation see the elimination of disturbing emotions as the pinnacle of spiritual understanding. Yet this is a recipe for disaster.
The mandala implies that all of our experience can be enlightening. In its liberal use of the imagery of desire and aggression, it suggests that there is another way of working with the passions than trying to eliminate them, or than simply being controlled by them. To understand what the mandala promises, we need to know a bit more about the central couple, about how sexual relations are understood from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism.
In the sexual yoga of Buddhism the passion of amorous relations is harnessed as a means of converting the more familiar energy of doing into the more subtle, but ultimately more powerful and enlightening, energy of being. Sexual relations serve both as a vivid model for the spiritual journey and as a reminder of how much is lost when the spiritual dimension of sexuality is neglected.
In its recognition of how spiritual the process of lovemaking can be, the Tibetan practices remind us of something that our culture, with all of its sexual freedom and supposed uninhibition, is in danger of losing. Just as someone who is sexually abused or degraded in her early sexual encounters has trouble opening up to the potentially transcendent nature of sexual intimacy, so too our culture, with its aggressive promulgation of sexuality, has difficulty cultivating the more subtle but powerful energy of passionate intimacy. While even Freud recognized that falling in love was one of those mystical times of ego dissolution, we have had trouble realizing how exalted a state this really is.
The practice of sexual tantra is built upon the truth that clinging is as much of a problem in lovemaking as in the rest of life. In order for sexual relations to be deeply satisfying, there must be a yielding of this clinging in a manner that actually affirms the unknowability and separateness of the loved partner. It is the peculiar convergence of awe and appreciation with pleasure and release that characterizes the best sexual experiences. Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s phrase, “reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.”3 There is wisdom in this state, not just raw instinct.
In the Tibetan traditions of sexual tantra, it is understood that our usual ways of approaching sexual relations are not the most direct route to this wisdom. While these practices are cloaked in secrecy, their outlines have become much more available in recent years.4 They suggest that, while most of us will never become full-fledged practitioners of sexual yoga, that there are certain guidelines that we can all benefit from. In many ways, these guidelines speak to just the issues that many of us face in our relationships.
In sexual tantra, it is understood that most of our standard sexual conventions must stand on their heads. The male partner is encouraged to admit his dependence upon his lover, to continually subordinate his need to dominate or control, and to develop a reverent attitude toward the woman’s unfathomable arousal. “Her lap is the sacrificial altar,” reads one secret text, “her hair, the sacrificial grass.”5 Meanwhile, lovers are taught to breathe their genital feelings upward, dispersing them throughout body and mind instead of localizing them in the genitals. The intertwined couple are taught to spin a mandala palace of great bliss between them, like spiders spinning a web.
In the culmination of practice, the man is urged to absorb the female sexual secretion in orgasm. Completely reversing the usual state of affairs in which the man ejaculates into the woman, the lovers are taught to do something different, to rest instead in the female response. No longer responsible for “giving” his partner an orgasm, the man simply becomes part of it. While turning his own organs and fluids into offerings, the man is encouraged to receive the mysterious female essence as the culmination of the sexual act. Drinking this nectar of pure being, couples are able to realize the union of bliss and emptiness. “This is the best diet,” reads the Candamaharosana Tantra, “eaten by all Buddhas.”6
In their own way, the sexual tantras affirm the more traditional view of meditation, painting it with a different brush. Our habitual ways of thinking and doing obscure the underlying reality, they suggest. Just as most couples engage in sexual activity without realizing how much more subtle and all-pervasive their pleasure could be, so do we go through our lives without experiencing much of the joy that is available through the simple nonactivity of being. Just as the sexual yogi has to learn to stop doing and make himself into an offering so that he can appreciate the profundity of his partner’s arousal, so too do we have to learn how to stop proving ourselves and surrender to the more magnificent world of which we are a part.
The liberal use of sexual imagery in the center of the mandala drives home the message about reinvigorating daily life with the wisdom of meditation. All of the passions can be transformed, the mandalas teach. We can take what we learn from spiritual practice and make use of it in our relationships. We do not have to separate our intimate emotional lives from our spiritual ones. In my work as a therapist with people who come to me with difficulties in relationships, I am often struck by how useful the mandala imagery can be in finding a way of working through these difficulties. Just as in the mandala, the key is always in finding another way of dealing with the most disturbing difficulties.
Richard Kohn, a Buddhist scholar and art historian, made a discovery while doing research in Nepal on Tibetan Buddhist art and ritual that has helped me immeasurably in working with my patients on relationship issues.7 He found that certain mandalas and Buddhist temples shared a surprising feature. Standing at the doorways of the temple at the periphery of the circle, representing the transition point between an unenlightened and an enlightened state of mind, Kohn discovered a curious set of figures: animal-headed goddesses striking sexually provocative poses, guarding the entrances to the sacred space. Kohn became intrigued with these figures. What were they doing there? What could they represent? What were the Buddhists of one thousand years ago saying about what it took to awaken the mind?
As he examined the temple goddesses more closely, he began to decode them. With voluptuous female bodies and heads of birds or beasts of prey, they represented transitional figures, neither human nor animal, sacred nor profane. Standing in a sexually aggressive posture, each figure held a set of implements that symbolized the meditator being seduced and overcome. The four instruments—a hook that draws in, a lasso that ties up, a chain that binds, and a maddening bell—together represent the ritual acts of summoning, tying, binding, and intoxicating.
There appeared to be a double meaning to this visual language. The successful meditator must tame passion and be tamed by it, he must invoke the deity that he wishes to merge with at the center of the mandala and also be overcome by it. In psychological terms, he must “pass through” the kinds of difficult emotions that such an animal-headed goddess could provoke, just as in physical terms he would have to pass through these figures in order to gain access to the sanctity of the temple complex.
I thought of these goddess figures when working with a patient of mine, a thirty-eight-year-old artist named Joe, who despaired of ever being able to marry his current girlfriend. An appealing and accomplished man with a long history of emotionally engaged relationships that had yielded both much exaltation and much sorrow, Joe had come to a point where he knew too much about himself to enter into a new relationship without already seeing the seeds of his own discontent.
A passionate lover and devotee of female beauty and charm, Joe was never happier than when he was caught up in the excitement of a new relationship. But when that relationship stopped being perfect, when his partner lost her temper once too often, became emotionally unavailable, showed selfishness or immaturity, or became less than totally admiring, Joe would become so frustrated and angry that he would turn from a sensitive lover into a teasing older brother and gradually undermine the trust of the relationship. Enraged and resentful at his lover’s withholding, Joe found it impossible to maintain his passion for her. His aggression led him to become sexually frustrated and demanding instead of energized and appreciative. His relationships collapsed under the weight of his own outrage, and he remained frustratingly disoriented within the labyrinth of his own passions. His current relationship seemed to be following just such a scenario.
Joe, I decided, was having trouble getting in the door of his own mandala. He was being obstructed by his anger. He had not yet found a way of using his passion to tame his anger, nor was he able to subvert his resentment into the cause of desire. The animal-headed goddesses were emblematic of a transformation that Joe had not figured out. As transition figures from outside the mandala to the inside, they symbolized the possibility of using anger to find bliss. But for Joe, they were still blocking his access to the central couple.
One of the principles of the mandala is that all of the outer phenomena actually unfold from the center, as petals do from the interior of a flower. While the center represents the purest and most concentrated version of the mandala’s energy, the peripheral manifestations nonetheless carry the seed of that purity. Thus, the temple goddesses embody both the seductive and the aggressive energy necessary for the passion of the central couple. To reach the center, one had to first become the periphery. Joe was having trouble tapping this energy, however. He could not locate the goddess, nor could he become her. He was locked into his anger and resentment and could not admit that behind that anger lay desire for the very women whom he felt betrayed by.
In his book on sexual intimacy, Love Relations, the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg observed that the most important missing ingredient in an otherwise satisfactory but sexually uninvigorating relationship is what he called “polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality.”8 While this is an old concept in psychoanalysis, it is usually used to describe the early sexualized behavior of young children. Kernberg was talking specifically about adults, about the aggressive components of sexual excitement that can permit a couple to “recruit aggression in the service of love.”9 This is what Joe needed help in permitting. By becoming locked into his anger, Joe became stuck in it. He could not stay fluid enough in his responses to blend his anger into his desire. He kept the two emotions separate, and he isolated himself as a result.
The sexual arena is one in which the frustrations of separateness can be calmed and the resentments of disappointment drowned. It is an environment in which the most primitive, and taboo, impulses—of sucking, biting, teasing, prohibition, and surrender—can be acted out in the pursuit of union. Just as a child needs her fears held and calmed in her mother’s understanding, so too a lover needs her clamor for reunion contained by a passionate response. Passion is a vehicle for containing the incendiary mix of anger and desire. Anger loses its aversive quality and becomes raw excitement. As lovers attack each other’s boundaries and gradually yield to each other’s desire, they enter a territory in which the emotions of separateness pulse as one.
In my role as therapist, I saw the lovers at the heart of the mandala as the embodiment of mature sexual love that was able to fuse tenderness, passion, love, and erotic desire. From a Buddhist perspective, I knew that they symbolized a more generalized version of this capacity, the ability to bring the bliss of orgasm to bear on the everyday world. For Joe, neither of these lofty goals were achievable because of his inability to get through the outer doorway. He could not approach the copulating figures at the center without getting derailed by his own resentment. The metaphoric goddesses were not letting him pass.
While I never used the mandala imagery directly with Joe, I did focus attention on his anger and resentment. Joe was letting his anger get in the way of his ultimate satisfaction: He was using it as a reason to avoid marriage. The mandala principle suggested that this was unnecessary, as did the experts on mature sexual love like Dr. Kernberg. Joe needed to learn a different way of relating to his angry responses. As we talked about this, Joe discovered why these particular emotions were so difficult. His earliest memories were of being told what he was feeling by his intrusive mother, whose controlling ways permeated his family’s dynamics. She would feed him dinner but unilaterally override his protestations of being full and force him to eat until he felt sick. “I’m full, I’m full!” he would scream, but she would yell back, “No, you’re not! You’ll be hungry again in an hour.”
Joe’s older sisters took up their mother’s mantle and perpetuated his distrust of controlling women. Joe’s father never really distinguished himself in his work, surrendering to a dependent reliance on his wife’s business acumen. Joe grew up secretly vowing never to succumb to a woman’s power as he had seen his father do. He wanted at all costs, he would say, to avoid appearing weak or dependent.
There is no way to experience desire, however, without yielding some amount of control. By its very nature, desire affirms that the loved person is just slightly out of reach and that we need them. Most of us have had the experience of too much availability diminishing desire. For Joe, this was a big problem. He found that he unconsciously resented whomever he was most attracted to because of the power that his desire conferred on them. He envied their ability to tempt him. When they disappointed him, which was virtually inevitable, his resentment would flower into rage and he would become self-righteous or spiteful. He was so vigilant in avoiding dependency that he never learned how to work with these emotions.
Complicating this picture, Joe started to see, was the fact that he did his best to choose girlfriends who were nothing like his mother or sisters. When confronted by his rage, these women, who had, as a rule, grown up in repressed households with very little display of aggression, became frightened and withdrawn. They were not able to help Joe with his anger because they were so intimidated by it. They could not be his goddess at the doorway, summoning, tying, binding, and intoxicating Joe’s aggression. Joe’s compromise was to favor relationships that hinged on his being admired, but that did not involve much in the way of reciprocity. Joe could be at the center of the mandala by himself but not in the company of another.
One of the consequences of this situation was that Joe was unable to make use of the anger and resentment that inevitably shadowed his desire. As we talked about this, I began to see that Joe feared that his anger would destroy his girlfriend. He was withdrawing, not just out of frustration, but out of fear that she could not tolerate how bad he was. This led him to withhold his aggression in the sexual arena as well, so that, as a couple, they were never given a chance to transmute anger through passion. Joe did not have faith in his girlfriend’s love for him. He did not believe that her love could survive his aggression. But he was not giving her a chance. In his desire to avoid such a confrontation, Joe attempted to control his lover just as he imagined his mother had once controlled him. He wanted everything to be perfect in his relationship, but when it could not be, he withdrew. In order for Joe to actually enter into the mandala he had to first learn how to work with the disturbing feelings that were aroused by his lover’s autonomy.
In Otto Kernberg’s pioneering work on mature sexual love, he made much of this capacity to tolerate one’s lover’s separateness. “The beloved,” he made clear, “presents himself or herself simultaneously as a body which can be penetrated and a consciousness which is impenetrable.” There is always an element of separation in even the most profound union. “Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom,”10 he concluded. This revelation is almost always painful because it confronts our most possessive desires.
Just as a mind rises up and rebels at an unskillful attempt to subdue it in meditation, a relationship will fall apart if the partners are not respectful of each other’s differences. No matter how much we yearn for complete attunement, this is not what we need. Just as a young child needs to be left on her own in the presence of her mother so that she can discover her own vast unknowability, so too we continue to need that freedom to be alone in the midst of our intimacy. It is that continuing unknowability that fuels a relationship. While there can be intense pressure in a couple to override differences and to eliminate separateness, the insistence on complete attunement has a suffocating effect. Attraction is based in otherness and difference as much as it depends on recurrent harmony or satisfaction. Separateness and connection make each other possible; they are not mutually exclusive.
Like Freud’s friends, who shrunk back from the terrifying transitoriness of the flower’s bloom, and like Joe, we recoil from the revelation of our lover’s freedom. We insist on holding on, or we withdraw prematurely, rather than trusting in love’s ability to constantly reassert itself. Yet this is precisely what makes a relationship as much of a spiritual teaching as a classical meditation. Both confront us with our refusal to let go, with our expectations for how things are supposed to be. Both demand faith that we will survive our own worst impulses. Both reveal the essential unknowability of self and other while at the same time providing a means of revelling in it.
The temple goddesses at the doorway of the mandala have a lot to teach us about the harnessing of primitive aggression and frustration in the service of passion and appreciation. “It is not such a long stretch from disappointment to empathy,”11 wrote my therapist Michael Vincent Miller in his book Intimate Terrorism, some years after I had completed my work with him. We must find a way of bringing those very feelings of outrage and envy that are the inevitable consequence of our lover’s freedom into the service of our relationships. Tantric Buddhism makes such liberal use of the sexual metaphor because the methods employed in passion and in meditation to convert disappointment into empathy are so similar. Rather than treating such feelings as enemies to be defeated, both require learning how to summon, tie, bind, and intoxicate like the goddesses at the temple doors.
While I was working with Joe on passing through the doorways of the temple goddesses, my son had a dream of being mauled by a huge tiger. He woke up his sister and she comforted him, and he told me about it the next morning as I was getting myself ready for an appointment with Joe.
“Try making friends with that tiger,” I suggested offhandedly to my son. “He might have a present for you or something.”
“I heard a voice in the dream, Daddy,” my son then told me. “From someone who wasn’t there. It said, ‘Look into its eyes.’ ”
My son’s dream message was the key to Joe’s predicament. Rather than avoiding the disturbing mix of desire and aggression that the goddesses represented, Joe had to look into their eyes. With their voluptuous bodies, their provocative stance, and their bird-of-prey features, they perfectly embodied the mix of feelings that Joe’s girlfriend had engendered in him. Intolerant of how frustrated her otherness was making him, Joe had shut down his love and inhibited his desire. He had stopped idealizing her the way he once had because it made him too insecure to adore someone who could be so disappointing.12
Joe was reluctant to admit that this was how it had to be. His love for his girlfriend meant that he could not be in complete control. Given this predicament, there was no way to avoid feeling vulnerable, and no way to avoid feeling angry or hurt. Worse yet, there was no way to be absolutely sure that she could tolerate him. But Joe’s aggression did not have to be such a threat. If he could let his anger rise and fall without shutting down, if he could submerge his outrage in the passion of his sexual relations, if he could admit to envying the very person whom he so needed, then his relationship could survive. By looking into his goddess’s eyes, Joe could experience his love in all of its terrifying splendor. It was not what he thought it should be, but it was real.