At first, I superimposed my dysfunctional view onto religious characters, pretending it was some kind of supernatural insight. This was back in the monastery, when I had the mind and emotional life of an addict, but no insight as to why.
Take my thoughts during one Advent, for instance. I was working in geriatric care on behalf of our senior monks back then, many of them bedridden. That was only on of my 3 different high-profile jobs around the monastery. Stress management was a constant concern
I remember the day. I was passing the senior wing’s eucharistic adoration chapel, and had turned to reverence the divine presence. I “realized” that Mary must have felt somewhat disappointed on discovering that her savior was to come as an infant. I intuited, perhaps rightly, that pinning one's hopes for salvation on a child who can’t communicate without crying and needs his diapers changed—well, a certain amount of disappointment would accompany that, if I were Mary, as I switched my messianic paradigm from “someone who takes care of me” to “someone I care for.”
Looking back, I don’t know if I was right about Mary’s motivations. I had subsequent “insights” about how growing up poor—and if the legends about Joseph’s early death are true, fatherless for large chunks of time— both of these must have given Jesus complex ptsd (the kind from repeated trauma, like abused children, as opposed to the kind from periodic trauma, like a soldier). I thought Jesus’ followers must have had ptsd, since the communal trauma of the Crucifixion was so pivotal in the Christian journey. It’s telling that the insight came to me as I was coming to identify as an adult child. It took me years to hear and identify with the program’s cautions: don’t, it says, use the spiritual life to do an end-run around your pain.
It didn’t occur to me that seeing PTSD in everybody and everything might indicate the pertinence of the diagnosis for myself. Nowadays I see my error. In short, this post is an attempt to set the record straight, to get honest about the roots of my own case of PTSD, which is both mediocre and certain: mediocre, because my premature birth was no more taxing than those of any premie, and certain, because even the slight dysfunction of my family served to confirm it. Growing up, PTSD was the drain around which all water swirled, and it seems prudent to name that.
Of the earliest pictures taken of me, only a couple of them—as far as I can remember—predate 3 months old. One particular picture shows me in a small, clear plastic incubator: I was covered in tubes and IV’s and medical tape holding it all in place. This is because I happened into the world twelve weeks premature, and spent my first three months in an oxygen rich environment. The following detail is important: I was born before my lungs were fully formed. In that oxygen tent, hobbies that filled my spare time included allowing my lungs to continue baking, and learning to breathe with them. A few times, for a few minutes, I decided the task was beyond me. I stopped breathing, and the resulting oxygen deprivation made for a mercifully-mild case of cerebral palsy.
I’ve written about my two brothers from the monastery—the jewish buddhist and the ex-con turned cabinet maker. They can testify to the fact that, at some point during the my time at the monastery, I developed nervous ticks involving breathing. This is weird, but let me explain: I was down in the basement of the monastic library one morning, farting-around with Yoga magazine while I should have been praying. My mindless leafing through its pages stopped eventually on an article about the bandhas, or “locks” that align the core and enable multiple yoga positions. The Mula Bandha is a contraction of the perineum. The Uddiyana bandha contracts the abdomen into the rib cage. The Jalandhara Bandha tucks the chin close to the chest.
In short, as I read about these, I tried locking them. To this day, I’ll always remember how it felt to bring my chin close to my chest: the ensuing ease of breathing struck me as so novel. It made my head pin-drop silent. I was so used to my breath being influenced by nerves, and so used to my head racing with compulsive thoughts, that discovering there was a remedy became the subject of a compulsive need. After that day, my brothers began to notice me compulsively chin-tucking, trying to recapture both the ease of breathing and the clearheadedness. Even after the monastery, they’ve noticed that I do it less as I’ve progressed in self-awareness. It’s a strong argument that the lungs are chief among the places I store congenital pain.
In her book Emotional Sobriety: from Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance, Tian Dayton quite plainly states that “the body is the unconscious.” I read these words only recently, but they named what my hour-long morning meditations in the monastery began to show me: that the body stores the pain of old trauma, trauma that comes out sideways in our actions till we face, and begin to integrate it. During those meditation hours, I began to be conscious, for the first time in my life, of bodily sensations. Even before I named my trauma specifically, I knew it was there. And the few times “sitting with my pain, then releasing it” resulted in relief—well, just like flexing the bandhas did, it led me to the misconception that I could reproduce the experience by effort, and another compulsive need to do so.
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| I'm unable to find the photo to which the post refers. Hopefully this gets at the sense of it... |
“Om Day” was incredibly ordinary. I simply remember being in the monastic church, chanting the psalms with the monks. At one point I consciously attempted to align my bandhas. Suddenly I had a feeling that I equate to “unzipping:” a sensation that started at the top of my head, and extended down through my mid-thigh. It created a feeling on the skin like “Icy Hot” does. To this day I don’t know what created the feeling. I only know that it did, for my body, what glasses do for people with poor eyesight. An optometrist once said to me “People who finally get glasses say ‘Before glasses, I could see the trees. After glasses, I could see every leaf on the trees.” Well, before Om Day, I could move my shoulders. After Om Day, I could feel my trapezius muscles—by being present, in fact, to any muscle, I could experience them from, as it were, the inside out.
For three days after Om Day, I thought I was experiencing what would become a “new normal.” But, as the actual event receded into the past and I attempted to prolong it by thinking too much about it, I began to lose the loose, conscious and particular body awareness Om Day came with.
I continued to attend ACA meetings, to notice and interrupt the ways childhood pain was affecting my adult relationships. Breathing became what it remains to this day— an increasingly terrible tool for focusing during prayer, as mine was so often constricted by nerves. In any case, as far as I’m concerned, this led to my first remembrance of a sensation that I’d long-ago lost to infantile amnesia. One day I was at prayer in that same senior wing chapel. It wasn’t going well. For reasons I don’t know, I was so nervous I couldn’t breathe. At one point it was so bad I began to panic. Quite spontaneously, I became conscious of the open space in the chapel, its alive and dynamic character. Br. Hugh of New Melleray, a friend who spent his first years as a monk of Mepkin, called it “the presence of absence.” In any case, I spoke into the abyss. “Help me,” I found myself saying aloud, “without you I can’t breathe!” With the utterance of that prayer, my panic calmed, my breathing slowed, and my head filled with the pin-drop silence that would remain for the next 24 solid hours.
Something about this prayer triggered deja-vu. I’ll never be absolutely certain that I’m correct, but it struck me that “Help me, without you I can’t breathe” is the first prayer I’d ever prayed. Something in my body remembered the panic of not being able to breathe. And then something else: I knew for certain that God was the reason I could breathe. It occurred to me that this might have been the prayer I prayed for those initial three months in the oxygen tent. However much I might be wrong about this, something about it feels right.
The suppositions with which this post began—about the motivations of the holy family and the effect of the crucifixion on Jesus earliest followers—they all seem, in later light, to be projections of pain I’d not yet dealt with.
They were wrong, most certainly. But Jesus wasn’t done with me: it amounts to yet another reason why I remain Christian. When I came into full awareness of my ego and its negative effects on my life, rather than striking me as traumatizing, Christ’s crucifixion seemed to be his own authentic confrontation with the pain of his own egotism and others’. For him, this was his “egoic death” that should, for all people, precede physical death. To accept his cross, I see now, was the truest manifestation of the mahatman, his true self. This recast, in a positive light, my own journey of becoming aware of ego, to say nothing of what Ekhart Tolle called the “pain body” we each keep as a repository of woundedness. If egolessness is a goal, facing these sorts of things is certainly a means to that end.
My own increasing consciousness of potential early childhood emotions showed me that, while I would have once supposed that Jesus’ humble beginnings were painful, they, too, were revealing a paradigm. Through ACA, I had experienced my own inner-wounded-child, my inner dysfunctional adult, and my inner healthy adult. Jesus was trying to guide me, though, to my Original Child. By now, I’ve had a total of a single experience of it. Its meaning is as full of guess-work as the event itself was certain. It’s easiest to describe in distinction to the wounded child. My wounded child is full of panic and helplessness. My inner original child is free of both family trauma and disability, and he looks on the world with the non-dual perspective that’s my life’s work to reclaim. Because his inside and his outside are the same, he looks on the world with pure, fascinated awareness. Because he’s not yet learned that some things are negative, and some positive, he looks on his experiences undividedly, with total acceptance.
So, in the Monastery, when I read the Big Book’s testimony, the one that famously said “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today,” it resonated with me because it stirred impulses that would, by acceptance, lead me back to the Original Child within. My original child was the one who breathed when I first locked the Uddiyana Bandha. My original child was the one who breathed when I spontaneously admitted I needed God to do so. Interestingly enough, “Original Child Bomb” is the literal translation of the Japanese name for the “Atomic Bomb.” This is helpful: it makes a strong argument that the “original child” is something I might access when I accept and let go of what psychology has written on my atoms.
My name, Joshua, means “God saves.” Orthodox Jews, who don’t pronounce God’s name, theorize that “YHWH” is actually the spelling of a breath cycle: that “yah” is our first out-breath when we leave the womb, and “weh” is our last utterance before the death-rattle ushers us into Abraham’s bosom. They say we’re constantly and automatically saying it our whole lives, and that to cease doing it would certainly mean death.
I went to an ACA meeting on the same day the “Help me, without you I can’t breathe” thing happened. To that precious group of my fellow crazies, I said something that I sometimes forget, but that was foundational. I described the experience to them and said “The program tells us we have a higher power. I don’t believe it, now, because it’s a recovery saying. I believe it because God has always been both the reason I’m alive in the first place and the reason I’m here now.” Heads nodded, and a few people thanked me for saying something that resonated with them. If this is the “conscious contact with God” that step 11 is always telling us to cultivate--and if it is only a way of echoing what God did, first, within us, then there is no more worthwhile thing for which to hope.
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