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  To my parents, Kay and Floyd

  My sister, Barbara, and brother, David

  To my wife, Reva

  My daughters, Rachael, Ciel, and Elena

  To my teacher Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche,

  my teacher Shyalpa Tenzin, Rinpoche,

  and his teacher HH Chatral, Rinpoche

  With deep appreciation

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Tami Simon

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1The Developmental View

  CHAPTER 2The Fruitional View

  CHAPTER 3A Dialogue Between the Developmental and Fruitional Views

  CHAPTER 4Experiencing Anxiety and Struggle

  CHAPTER 5Embodied Awareness

  CHAPTER 6All Relative Experience Is Relational

  CHAPTER 7Relationship as an Evolving Path

  CHAPTER 8A Good State of Mind, Regardless of Circumstance

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Sounds True

  Copyright

  FOREWORD BY TAMI SIMON

  ONE OF THE AREAS of inquiry that is endlessly fascinating to me, like a jewel that I could hold in my hand, turn over, and continually marvel at, is: How do the discoveries of meditation and the discoveries of psychotherapy fit together? How do we build a healthy self and discover the lack of any enduring self at the same time?

  When I had the chance to sit down and talk with Bruce Tift, Boulder’s most well-known Buddhist psychotherapist, I of course wanted to bring out this jewel of a question and explore. Perhaps Bruce could help me make sense of how the Buddhist path and the path of psychotherapy fit together? I knew I was benefitting greatly from the regular work I was doing with a psychotherapist (reports from other people, especially my intimate partner, were that I was becoming much more available in relationship, for example). I also knew I was benefitting tremendously from the practice of meditation, discovering how to rest and be more and more at home in the wide, open space of awareness. But these two approaches felt like separate tracks. Perhaps Bruce could help me understand and articulate a unified vision?

  When I asked Bruce about this and how he worked with his psychotherapy clients and students, he said, “I alternate between a Buddhist approach and a psychotherapeutic approach without any hope of resolution.”

  “Excuse me?” I thought. “No hope of resolution.” I had been searching for some grand unified theory, and here this “expert” was explaining that he alternated between the two approaches based on what was needed in the moment, knowing that each path had different blind spots and offered different gifts.

  As I considered his response to me, I suddenly felt like I was on a beach drinking a piña colada. I mentioned this to Bruce. He smiled at me, as if he were saying, “What is so bad about that?” Could I entertain a dialogue, a meeting, if you will, between the teachings of Buddhism and the practice of psychotherapy that wasn’t about definitive conclusions but instead about opening my mind wide like sitting on the beach and looking out at the ocean? Could the inquiry be that spacious, enjoyable, and un-problematic?

  Bruce Tift is an unusual teacher. He writes and teaches from his own experience and the perspective that our lives are not problems to be solved. He approaches the meeting between Buddhism and psychotherapy with a deep pragmatism, employing the best that each approach has to offer in a welcome embrace of contradictory energies.

  His specialty, if you will, is the unwanted, the neglected, the disowned—those parts of ourselves that we would rather disavow than confront. In Already Free, Bruce invites us, again and again, to turn toward our disturbance, not away. Now why would this be of interest? Why might we want to turn toward our fear and anxiety and feelings of desperation? Bruce makes the very good point that if we want to be free, then we can’t have walled-off pockets of experience that we spend our life avoiding. If we want to experience what Bruce calls being “undivided,” then we need to have the capacity to be with intense (even if unwanted) experience, without cutting off and separating from the intensity.

  According to Bruce Tift, “Sanity is a counter-instinctual process.” And at first, it certainly feels counter-instinctual to turn toward what is painful and terrifying. Shouldn’t I be running as fast as I can in the opposite direction? But the counter-instinctual move turns out to be tremendously empowering. If we can face our worst fears, then maybe they won’t continue to secretly run our life. And where does real confidence come from if not from knowing that we can handle whatever experience comes our way?

  So how do we engage with the difficult and unwanted? Bruce teaches his clients and students how to practice what he calls “embodied immediacy”—in whatever moment we find ourselves, in the immediacy of this moment, we experience our physical sensations without analysis or interpretation. We are with the flutter in our stomach, the heat in our hands, the pounding in our heart. And we stay with it and stay with it.

  In my own life, I have found this practice of embodied immediacy to be of central importance. Often when I find myself in some type of neurotic spin, worried about this or that fictitious possibility, what is clearly needed is a return to embodied immediacy. There is something happening in my body that I am avoiding feeling through mental spin. In fact, Bruce writes, “disembodiment is a requirement of neurosis.”

  Bruce Tift is wise, provocative, and above all, practical. Already Free is not so much a theoretical book as it is an actual handbook to realize the open ground of our being. Bruce’s approach to freedom is not transcendent but instead all-inclusive. The freedom Bruce describes is not a freedom from any experience but a freedom that welcomes every experience as intelligent and meaningful.

  Take for example the experience of anxiety. Bruce offers the counter-instinctual advice that we can “commit to the feeling of anxiety as an approximation of an open state of mind.” Instead of viewing anxiety as something that we need to get rid of, we are invited to “commit to it,” to stay with the experience and discover its intelligence. There are so many books and teachers that try to “cure us” or try to “pump us up,” encouraging us to achieve some future positive state. Bruce’s approach is different. What if we are already free? What if even our intense anxiety is not actually a problem, but instead, as Bruce writes, “an intelligent response to the perception of groundlessness from the ego’s point of view”?

  Being able to commit to our disturbance when we are alone, perhaps on the meditation cushion or lying in bed, is one thing, but committing to disturbance in relationship, in my experience, is of a whole different order of magnitude. Bruce writes in Already Free that he thinks it is accurate to say that in his forty-year relationship (a relationship that appears to be loving and committed), he has “found himself disturbed every day.” I found that statement so shocking, refreshing, and normalizing! Most spiritual teachers who write about the open ground of being never discuss disturbance in relationship, and yet in my experience, it is where so much of our personal growth lies. Fortunately, Bruce devotes two chapters to exploring our patterns in intimate relationships and how we can benefit from the teachings of both Buddhism and psychotherapy to explore what triggers us and why, how to replace blame with personal responsibility, and how to find a freedom in intimacy that honors our need for separateness as well as our need for closeness.

  Bruce Tift is confrontative. He confronts us with our patterns of escape and he confronts us with our freedom. Read Already Free as a process of inquiry, as a way to grow in consciousness, and ultimately, as a way to discover a freedom that leaves nothing out.

  INTRODUCTION

  RECENTLY A YOUNG MAN in his mid-thirties—we’ll call him Darren—walked into my office. He was looking for help with a recurring pattern he had noticed in his life. In brief, he had a very h
ard time following through on almost anything he started. He would leave relationships after they became too serious; he would find a reason to change his job or even his entire career just as he was approaching success; and while he had experimented with a variety of therapies and spiritual paths, he hadn’t stuck with any of them long enough for them to prove helpful.

  As he approached midlife, Darren was becoming increasingly anxious that he would never settle down in a relationship, livelihood, or spiritual path. He had done enough personal work to know that he was the common denominator in all these scenarios, but he felt hopeless about changing the pattern.

  Darren is by no means alone. This kind of recurring pattern is what brings clients, both individuals and couples, into my office every day. Some find me when they’re going through unfortunate life circumstances, but the majority of the people I see are suffering from more chronic issues—patterns of behavior and experience that have been with them for years. Usually, there is an intuition that this suffering is largely unnecessary and somehow self-created. Perhaps, like Darren, they have trouble maintaining successful relationships, finding enjoyment in their work, or seeing results from their spiritual practice. Perhaps they feel disengaged and uninspired by the lives they’ve created for themselves. Or perhaps, more simply, they have a hard time feeling happy and content, but they know that somehow a more satisfying life is possible. You might have picked up this book for very similar reasons.

  Over the course of more than thirty-five years in practice, I have investigated and worked with a variety of different approaches to bringing awareness of and freedom from the deeply embedded conditioning that keeps us in these historical patterns—often these patterns have been with us for our entire lives. From my experience of what actually works most effectively, my practice has evolved into a combination of Western psychotherapy and traditional Buddhism. Used together in an ongoing dialogue, these two styles offer guidance for how we can liberate ourselves from unnecessary suffering and experience a freedom that is already present in our lives.

  After many years of working in these ways myself and of offering this path to my clients, I now have the pleasure of offering it to you in this book.

  FREEING OURSELVES

  Clients come to see me for all sorts of reasons—relationship issues, personal issues, work issues. But underneath it all, they come to me for one reason: in some way, they are not experiencing themselves as free.

  What do I mean by “free”? Freedom is by its very nature hard to define. It seems to include the qualities of freshness and spontaneity, expansiveness, contentment and well-being, completeness, openheartedness, and open awareness. Freedom is also experienced as inherently satisfying and meaningful, not as a means or condition for some greater good. By contrast, many of our more familiar goals—a good relationship, good health, money, political and social justice, and so on—are usually seen as conditions that will bring about a greater good. “If I just had better health, more money, etc., then I would be happy.” With the experience of freedom, life does not become perfect, but we do have a sense that everything is workable, that nothing is missing. When we don’t feel free, on the other hand, it seems like something is keeping us from experiencing joy and contentment. At times we feel this sense of completeness and presence, and we know on some level that it’s available at any moment. But something about our life feels off, and we experience a sense of complaint. I almost always find this sense of basic dissatisfaction beneath the specific problems my clients present when they first sit down in my office.

  Whenever we’re talking about freeing ourselves, we’re implying that we are already experiencing a type of imprisonment. We’re saying there’s something we need to resolve or remove in order to experience freedom. So a major theme in my work is to investigate the nature of any such obstacle. Do we feel imprisoned in our lives because of our life circumstances? Because of unresolved issues from our history? Or might our imprisonment be more about how we relate to our experience?

  The first view is basically that of Western psychotherapy. The Western tradition says there are actual difficulties in our lives that can and should be resolved. The goal of Western therapy is to improve our sense of self and our life circumstances so that we can feel more free, more satisfied, and more engaged. The second view is the Buddhist view, which says that how we relate to whatever we’re experiencing is even more important than the experience itself. Obviously, it makes a big difference for most of us whether we’re healthy or sick, whether we’re in poverty or have adequate money, and whether we have to deal with depression or have an easy sense of well-being. But from the Buddhist view, how we relate to each of these experiences is actually more impactful to our sense of freedom than the circumstances themselves. So from the Western view—which I will also refer to as the developmental view—we try, appropriately, to improve ourselves and our circumstances. But from the Buddhist, or fruitional, view, our work is not primarily to improve our experience; instead, it’s to invite a shift in perspective so that we are willing and able to fully relate to any experience we might have, regardless of what it may be.

  My passion for the past thirty-five years or so has been to combine what is most skillful about therapy with what is most skillful in Buddhism. Both are powerful, yet both focus on a limited range of phenomena; neither addresses everything. Some people have a tendency to appreciate therapy and be cautious about a spiritual path; others are very invested in a spiritual path and somewhat cynical about therapy. My experience is that although both are very helpful and important, they are probably impossible to fully reconcile. In my opinion, the basic assumptions of therapy and the view and practice of the spiritual journey cannot be integrated into one path. Therapy, as an expression of Western culture, takes as a given that we are independently existing selves. It makes complete sense, therefore, to protect and improve this self; the challenge is to do so in a skillful and up-to-date way. Buddhism asserts the view that our experience of being a separate self with some essential nature is mistaken. Therefore, our work is to investigate this appearance, see through it, and experience the freedom that comes from having open awareness and compassion, rather than a personal self, as our basic ground. The fundamental lack of resolvability between these two views is what I find most fertile and interesting to work with.

  MY INTRODUCTION TO THE TWO VIEWS

  The ideas, views, and practices discussed in this book come not only from my clinical work with clients, but also, most fundamentally, from my own personal experience. I have never felt comfortable taking other people’s ideas without testing them myself. And both Western psychology and Buddhism have been central to my own personal journey, starting when I was in my twenties.

  After college, I started a PhD program in clinical psychology, but I dropped out after one year. More accurately, I ran out screaming. There seemed to be an assumption built into the program that anyone studying psychology was, by definition, sane, and anyone in the client chair was, by definition, neurotic (or worse). I was so disturbed by this unexamined assumption that I left the program and, soon thereafter, the country. I spent two very formative years abroad, traveling by motorcycle through Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. In India and Nepal, I encountered the Tibetan community in exile and became very interested in Tibetan Buddhism. When I returned, I met my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama who had moved to the United States and had begun offering the Buddhist teachings to a lay audience.

  In this tradition, I found a sophisticated and deep understanding of the nature of mind, practical ways to work with one’s most difficult experiencing, and a view based on our greatest potential rather than on pathology. When Trungpa Rinpoche began the Naropa Institute, he encouraged the establishment of a master’s program in psychology, which I soon enrolled in. At that time, in the 1970s, no one was really articulating a way to join therapy and Buddhism, so our classes alternated between work with very skilled Western psychotherapists and lessons i
n Buddhist practice and theory. In hindsight, this was a fortunate experience: we were forced to hold these two approaches with no theories offered about how they might be integrated. (Trungpa Rinpoche himself had no apparent problems with contradictory energies. At one moment, he would be encouraging of our training, and in another, he would describe therapists as “cosmic vultures,” living off the experience of others.)

  Over time, I have become more and more passionate about this work. I think about it every day. Every day, with some exceptions, of course, I ask myself how I can be helpful with whomever I may be relating to. When working as a therapist, I am continually experimenting with how I might support the person who has courageously placed his or her vulnerability in my hands. How can this person find some relief from any actually unnecessary suffering and experience more freedom in daily life? Freedom that may not require that person to be in therapy every week for ten years. Even though I am a therapist and working with clients pays my bills, like all ethical therapists, I am not interested in keeping people dependent on therapy. I would rather offer them tools that might actually make a significant difference, teach them how to use these tools, and then support the integration of this work into their daily life.

  For me, something shifted a number of years ago. I think of it as a change in my psychic center of gravity. Before this shift, my baseline—what I returned to, spontaneously, off and on, every moment—was feeling, to some extent, like a problematic person. I was always trying to improve, trying to wake up, trying to feel completely at peace. From that ground of dissatisfaction, moments of clarity, peace, and freedom would arise. But those moments were temporary, and I would always return to a more fundamental sense of problem.

  Then this shift happened, over some time and with no apparent cause; it was certainly supported by my Buddhist meditation practices, my many years of personal therapy, and the good fortune of relating to some very wakeful and kind teachers. My personal opinion is that waking up is not caused by anything. Not meditation, not prayer, not devotion. How can we cause something that’s already present? But it does seem accurate that we can invite this experience, make it more likely that what’s already true may arise into our awareness. As American Zen teacher Baker Roshi once said: “Enlightenment is an accident—but meditation makes us accident-prone.”