If you met my patient Joe, you would never think of him as greedy. A tall, thin man with a shy smile, Joe is quick to hold the door for the person behind him, eager to volunteer for the jobs nobody else wants at his local parent—teacher association, the kind of guy who’ll come over in forty-below weather to help a neighbor jump-start his car. People who know Joe would call him unselfish—even generous.
But Joe’s life is ruled by a strong sense of insufficiency, the belief that there is not enough and that he is not enough. This perception of scarcity and lack is the greatest source of unhappiness for Fear types, which is why the Buddhist term for this category is “grasping.” If you believe you’re “not enough,” you’ll always grasp for more.
Let’s look at how this works for Joe. He’s been employed for the past fifteen years at a local social-service agency, a job he usually enjoys. But when he gets caught up in his sense of insufficiency, his mind becomes unsettled and he tends to fret. Regret, wanting, and worry dominate his thoughts. He loses his access to the present moment because he’s focused on the past—things he did or didn’t do that might have given him more of what he desires now. I call it the “if-only” mind: “If only I’d taken that job in Minneapolis,” “If only I’d gotten a different degree,” “If only I’d put aside more money last year.” Life in the present begins to seem worthless, because of something that did or didn’t happen in the past.
Sometimes Joe loses his contact with the present in a different way: through worries about the future. This is also an “if-only” mind, but focused on wanting something that he believes might make him feel satisfied and secure later on. “If only I had money for that European vacation,” “If only my wife weren’t complaining all the time,” “If only I were a braver person, ready to leave this job and take a better one.”
Besides the “if-only” mind, Joe struggles with a “what-if” mind—another way of focusing on the future at the expense of the present. “What if the stock market doesn’t bounce back before my kids go to college?” “What if my marriage doesn’t recover from this rough patch and goes completely sour?” “What if my depression doesn’t go away?”
On a good day, Joe can recognize these thoughts for what they are and brush them aside. But when he’s stressed, out of balance, and vulnerable to depression, his fleeting tendency to regret might be harder to dismiss. His mind seizes on the “if-only” thoughts and responds with a powerful wave of envy, greed, and insecurity: “I’m such a timid guy. Why can’t I be more like my brother William? He’s always ready to take a chance—and look what a great life he has.” “My kids are great—but I want them to go to the best schools, and I’ll never be able to afford that on my salary. If only I had more money.” “If only my wife understood me better. If only I’d married someone warmer and more open.”
Eventually, these thoughts and feelings begin to feed on themselves, much in the manner of compound interest. From being only a small part of Joe’s mental and emotional life, they grow exponentially with every moment of attention he gives them. Soon the depression takes the familiar turn of self-questioning, self-doubt, and even self-hatred. “I’m such a loser. Why can’t I be more successful? I’m letting everybody down. Other people are so much better than I am. No wonder my wife isn’t interested in me. . . . No wonder my kids don’t respect me. . . .” Before he knows it, Joe is mired in the depths of depression, struggling against a sense of insufficiency and lack that seems far bigger than he is, grasping for something—anything—that might give him the security and peace he seeks.
Although he can’t always make use of his knowledge, Joe would be the first to admit that most of his problems start right in his own mind. This is not to say that he’s “making everything up.” He may have genuine problems that need his attention or that he may never be able to solve. But he also has trouble distinguishing between reality and what he believes about reality.
For example, Joe has no idea, really, of what his kids’ future will be. He can make a good guess, an informed prediction, about how much college is likely to cost, what he’s likely to be able to afford, and how available financial aid may be. But he doesn’t really know what the future will bring, nor how he and his kids will feel about it when it arrives. If concern over his kids’ college tuition leads him to take useful action—putting money away, researching financial aid, helping his kids get good grades—then his mind has done a good job of identifying problems and developing solutions. But if Joe’s perception of potential problems produces endless fretting, which in turn leads to fear, insecurity, and self-hatred, then his mind has led him astray.
All of us wish, to some extent, that we could control the future. We’d like to believe that if we do the right things and avoid the wrong ones, we can guarantee health and safety for ourselves and our loved ones. In one way, this wish is a good thing: The desire to protect our survival often leads us to take useful actions.
But in another way, our wish for control creates a dangerous illusion. In fact, we have no idea what the future holds. We can’t ever be sure how our actions will affect our future. Maybe the money we wisely invested will be lost in the stock market, while the silly hobby we took up on impulse turns into a million-dollar career. That doesn’t mean we should stop saving money or pursue frivolous pipe dreams. But it does mean that we shouldn’t waste time feeling anxious or insufficient, wishing we could control a future that will take its own course.
It’s bad enough when our minds simply generate thoughts—“What if this happens?” “Why didn’t that happen?” But beyond simply registering information—real or imaginary—our minds tend to add a quality or feeling tone to every experience. A job with lots of money is good, a broken heart is bad. Being able to care for our children is good, letting them down is bad.
Again, this filtering of our experiences has a useful aspect. If we didn’t pursue pleasure and avoid pain, how would we ensure our own survival? The problem comes not because our minds make these judgments, but because we overvalue them. If we think something is bad, it must be bad—and then we cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary suffering by worrying about it, fearing it, regretting it, or resenting it.
Here’s another Buddhist parable to illustrate my point:
A farmer had a beautiful stallion that he used to plow his fields. One day, the horse ran away. “That’s too bad,” the neighbors said, but the farmer simply shrugged.
Then the runaway horse returned, bringing with him a wild mare he had found. The mare was pregnant, and soon the farmer had three horses where before he had only one. “That’s great!” the neighbors said, but the farmer simply shrugged.
The mare gave birth to a new little colt, and when the time came, the farmer’s only son began to train the horse. One day, the colt bucked so hard he threw the farmer’s son onto the ground and broke the son’s back. Now the son was crippled and could not walk. “That’s too bad,” the neighbors said, but the farmer simply shrugged.
Then a war broke out, and the army came and took all the boys in the village off to fight. Eventually, they were all killed in battle. But the farmer’s son, because of his injuries, was spared and allowed to remain at home. “Lucky you,” the neighbors said, but the farmer simply shrugged....
As you can see, life takes many twists and turns. Impossible to know what apparently good fortune will turn bad, what seemingly hard luck will become our greatest blessing. Impossible, too, to escape the sorrows of life: Everyone in the farmer’s story undergoes some form of pain, and no one is granted enough knowledge to prevent it. Only the farmer, while experiencing pain, avoids suffering. He accepts what life brings him without judging—not without feeling, but without judging.
Although in theory we can always choose to stop suffering, often most of us don’t. Why not? One reason is that we have a mistaken idea about what will bring us happiness. We are all prone to think that we could overcome our insecurity if only we could fill the void that we sometimes fear is at the center of our lives.
Of course insecurity is part of life, and when we can accept that fact, we can become truly secure. But we’re far more prone to try to do something to overcome our insecurity, to buy an expensive object or distract ourselves with an endless round of parties or bury our fears in a new romance. Although I’m supposed to “know better,” I’m just as guilty in this regard as anyone else. All too often, instead of accepting my discomfort and letting it pass, I find myself struggling mightily against it. On my best days, I do my best to achieve the goals I think are right—and then I relax and accept whatever the outcome actually is. On my not-so-good days, I, too, greet “failure” with anger, resentment, envy, and the rest. At least I’ve finally learned that when these feelings arise, the solution is not to ignore them or to blame myself for having them. The solution is simply to feel them and let them pass. That may be easier said than done—but it is the road to joy, especially for Fear types.
Joe’s problem was less a conscious desire for “more” than a tendency to feel inadequate and unworthy. For him, the currency in shortest supply was love. Although he knew on some level that both his wife and his two children loved him, he often had trouble experiencing their feelings for him. Instead, he felt lonely, abandoned, and unworthy—and he blamed himself for the barren world in which he lived.
Over the years of working with me, Joe learned that the first signal for his depressive spiral was any twinge of envy. The lower he felt, the more he tended to elevate others, envying their happiness, their relationships, their character, and ultimately their greater worth. He couldn’t help feeling that if they got what they wanted, he had less chance of getting “his.”
Of course, when Joe and I spoke directly about these issues, Joe insisted that he had no conscious wish to deprive anyone of anything. But at an unconscious level, Joe was ruled by what Buddhist psychologists would call the “wanting mind.” Somewhere deep inside, Joe was certain that he simply wasn’t good enough, and he desired something, anything, to fill the void inside.
Although I believe our ultimate goal is to live every moment fully in the present, I also know that sometimes, in order to understand the present, we have to visit the past. For Joe—as for many other Fear types—the issues that underlay his insecure grasping were rooted in childhood experiences of betrayal.
When I first began working with him, Joe recalled his childhood in a mostly happy light. But when he was still very young, his father had left the family for reasons that Joe didn’t understand. Although Joe got along well with his stepfather after his parents divorced, this early abandonment by his biological father left a powerful legacy.
Now, whenever Joe began to feel depressed, he was vaguely aware of something lurking just below the surface, something heavy that seemed to weigh him down. Although Joe talked relatively easily about this childhood trauma, he had a harder time acknowledging how much anger and insecurity he still felt as a result. “Sure, my father left us. But I don’t need to take it personally. And I sure don’t need to let it affect me for my entire life!”
Yet, as we explored this issue, Joe began to see that his father’s abandonment had done just that. All his life, Joe had been carrying unresolved feelings of abandonment and rejection, feelings that he’d buried at the time because they seemed too powerful and overwhelming to the five-year-old boy who’d had to deal with them. His adult mind understood that Joe’s father hadn’t left because of him. But the five-year-old Joe blamed himself, as all children tend to do. Because he had never seen the issue clearly or been willing to reexperience the grief, he had never quite realized how powerful it was.
One way of describing Joe’s problem is that his inner life was dominated by his “smaller self,” the individual ego within each of us whose only job is to guarantee our survival. In Buddhist psychology, we all have both a smaller and a larger self. The smaller self is the part of ourselves that has a history, a “story” that we hold on to at all costs. “My father left me when I was five,” or “I was sexually abused in my teens,” or “I have always had trouble getting into good relationships.” It’s not so much that this story isn’t true or even that it isn’t important—but when we are in our small selves, we tend to think that this story is all there is.
Because our small self is entirely focused on self-preservation, it tends to be dominated by fear: of not getting enough, not being enough, getting hurt, encountering the unknown, making a mistake, not being liked, displeasing others, undergoing change—you name it. Our small self fears anything that might threaten our survival—and it is sure that any changed circumstance or new idea will do just that. Like an over-protective parent, it wants to keep us safe and isolated from anything it can’t completely control.
Unfortunately, this endless search for security won’t create a happy, fulfilled life. It won’t even make us feel safe. As long as we stay locked inside our small self, we’re guaranteed to fear everything that remains outside—that is, everything. To identify with this small self is to ensure that we will suffer.
Fortunately for us, there is a larger self on which we might choose to focus. Have you ever felt a moment of true transcendence? Perhaps you were looking up at the stars, or sitting in a church or synagogue. Maybe you were with a person—friend, family member, or lover—whom you truly loved, who you knew truly loved you. Or perhaps you had just solved a pressing problem, completed some work of which you were proud, or just woken up feeling good. However you found your moment of peace—through nature, solitude, prayer, companionship, or work—at that moment, you felt large, whole, connected. You felt a sense of unshakable peace and security, as though you were finally complete. At that moment, you went beyond the bounds of your small self and found a larger understanding of who you are, a person connected to the natural world, the divine, and all humanity.
If you have ever felt this type of transcendence, you need to know that you can always re-create it for yourself, remembering who you truly are and where joy truly resides. If you’ve never had an experience like this, don’t despair. The practices I share with you in Chapter 15 will prime you for just such feelings, and you’ll learn that you can repeat the experience as often as you like. That’s not because I know some magic formula, but because this larger self is as true as our smaller self—truer— even if we’re often blind to it. And once you’ve experienced this larger self, you’ll learn to seek the feeling in your daily life as well as through the exercises I’ll suggest.
Although we don’t talk about it much in Western society, people find transcendence—a connection to something larger—in all sorts of places: religion, politics, work, love, even at a sports game, where for one shining moment you share your team’s victory with ten thousand other people and feel connected to every one of them. You can also find transcendence in those small, private moments when you give or receive kindness—when the counter guy smiles at you while handing you your coffee, or when you hold the door for a woman burdened with packages and hear her grateful “thank you.” Somehow, you and another person—friend or stranger—have made a connection through love and compassion, and this connection reminds you of who you really are.
Joe liked the distinction between the small, false self and the larger, true self, because it made room for the parts of himself that he didn’t like so much. Now he didn’t have to think of his insecurities or his envy as wrong or bad. He could think of them as simply less skilled or less wise responses, reactions that came from a smaller, less complete place. Instead of berating himself for his shortcomings, he could simply acknowledge that he had different ways of operating—which he could expect to result in different outcomes. Instead of trying to change himself—which implied a judgment that there was something wrong with him—he could simply work to become more aware—more mindful, in Buddhist terms—of what he was feeling and how he was acting. He could decide, too, which self to feed, his small self or his larger one.
Half of any person is wrong and weak and off the beaten path. Half! The other half is dancing and swimming and flying in the invisible joy!
—RUMI
As these lines from a Rumi poem suggest, we are more than just a walking bag of insecurities, small selves, problems, symptoms, or illness. Much more. But how do we coax ourselves into the larger self, where all that invisible joy resides?
The first step is to remember that being human isn’t bad. It’s just incomplete. No matter how much we yearn for the joy and contentment of our larger selves, as long as we’re on this earth, we’re going to have times of slipping back into the insecurity of our smaller selves. I love the Rumi poem because it reminds me that all of us are both strong and weak, large and small, whole and unwhole. And so we can choose to focus on our best, largest, and most alive selves—while not despairing at the continued existence of our smaller selves.
So Joe had to realize that he was continually feeding his own pain by the kinds of thoughts he was reinforcing within himself, the core beliefs to which he clung. He began to see how competitive he was, how his first response to a friend’s happiness was pain, envy, and anxiety. It hurt Joe to hear about one friend’s sudden growth and transformation, another’s involvement with an exciting new relationship, and a third’s success at work. “I guess every time someone else gets some good news, I feel like they’re gaining on me,” Joe admitted. He saw another’s victory as his own defeat—and the price of defeat seemed to be the loss of his very self.
As we worked further, Joe’s understanding became more specific. It wasn’t so much that he thought he’d lose his identity as that he’d stop being “special,” “the only one.” Of course, in one sense, every single one of us is unique and special. But Joe was used to seeing his specialness in terms of others’ lack. If he was smart, then someone else had to be stupid. If he was successful, someone else had failed. This put a terrible price on Joe’s success, for every time he felt happy, he had also to feel the guilt that came from being happy at another’s expense. And then whenever a loved one or even a stranger enjoyed a measure of happiness, Joe felt—unconsciously—that it came at his expense.
This process of self-awareness has its dangers. As Joe learned things he didn’t like about himself and his core beliefs, he risked falling into an even deeper depression. Now that he knew how involved he was with negative core beliefs, how many negative qualities he was feeding, he might feel even worse about himself than he did before. But I encouraged Joe to be easy with himself, to hold these insights lightly and not grasp on to them with his smaller self. If he could embrace this insight instead of resisting it, then, like the woman who had lost her child, he could begin to see that all of us suffer from the power of our smaller selves, that all of us, as Rumi said, are at least halfway wrong and weak and off the beaten path. Even Joe’s suffering and smallness could be a bridge to link him to the rest of humanity.
Ultimately, becoming more aware of his flaws enabled Joe to accept them—and then move beyond them. He came to understand that while he—like the rest of us—will always be an envious, grasping person, he could also—like the rest of us—always be generous, giving, and secure, “dancing in the invisible joy.”