Chasing Elephants: Healing Psychologically with Buddhist Wisdom

Chasing Elephants

Healing Psychologically With Buddhist Wisdom

by Diane Shainberg

Book Case Engine, New York

CHASING ELEPHANTS: Healing Psychologically With Buddhist Wisdom. Copyright © 2000 by Diane Shainberg, renewed © 2002 by Nancy Colier

By Diane Shainberg, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-91848

ISBN: TRADE 978-1-62848-065-8

ISBN: MOBI 978-1-62848-063-4

ISBN: EPUB 978-1-62848-064-1

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File under: Psychology / Self-Help / Buddhism

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Dedicated to my daughter, Nancy

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Excerpts from Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, edited by Adriano Clemente. Copyright © 1996 by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. Reprinted with permission of Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York.

Excerpts from The Kabir Book by Robert Ely. Copyright © 1971,1977 by Robert Ely; Copyright © 1977 by the Seventies Press. Reprinted with permission of Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts.

Excerpts from Living Buddha Zen by Lex Hixon. Copyright © 1995 by Lex Hixon. Reprinted with permission by Larson Publications, Burdett, New York.

Excerpts from Natural Great Perfection by Nyoshul Khenpo and translated by Lama Surya Das. Copyright © 1995 by Surya Das (Jeffrey Miller). Reprinted with permission of Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York.

Excerpts from Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory by Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell. Copyright © 1983 GM by Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Excerpts from Rumi Birdsong, translated by Coleman Earks. Copyright © 1993 by Coleman Earks. Reprinted with permission of Coleman Barks.

Excerpts from The Still Point, a Beginners Guide to Zen Meditation by John Daido Loori. Copyright © 1996 by the Mountains and Rivers Order.

Excerpts from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans., English/Feng. Copyright © 1972 by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, New York.

Excerpts from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. Copyright © 1992 by Rigpa Fellowship.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1. Leaving Things as They Are

Chapter 2. Our Inner Treasures

Chapter 3. Spirit’s Healing Power

Chapter 4. Healing Into Awareness and Self-Knowing

Chapter 5. Experiential Process

Chapter 6. The Beginning of Wisdom

Chapter 7. Finding Elephants

Chapter 8. Healing into the Invisible body of Truth

Bibliography

About the Author

About Book Case Engine

Acknowledgments

So many people have influenced my work as a psychotherapist and teacher that at times I can’t separate my ideas from ideas in the world for thousands of years. I met Roshi Bernie Glassman in Los Angeles twenty-five years ago. He embodied the Buddhist view of compassion and wisdom in the moment-to- moment way of living our everyday life. He took me into situations I might never have entered and taught me how to be intimate with them. Maezumi Roshi welcomed me to UCLA at a time of crisis and showed me the natural way true nature heals when we leave things as they are.

I met Lama Surya Das seven years ago and have done Dzogchen retreats with him every year since. Surya is a friend and wonderful Buddhist teacher who teaches and lives the Dzogchen teachings that completion is found in leaving things as they are. I learned from other Dzogchen and Buddhist teachers such as Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Namkhai Norbu, Venerable Pema Chödrön, and Sogyal Rinpoche how to bring the Buddhist teachings into my life. I return to Lama Surya Das each year to imbibe his down-to-earth loving wisdom. What he has taught permeates this book and the in-the-moment psychotherapy work I discuss.

For many years I have studied and read Advaita Vedanta starting with our New York City classes with Sandra Eisenstein and then with teacher Swami Dayananda. The years of Advaita were spent with avid reading of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Ramesh Balsekar. I have meditated with Maharshi’s mantra for years, and I’ve had the privilege of meeting Ramesh Balsekar in Germany and Bombay, exploring his teachings that consciousness is all there is. Ramesh has opened my heart and shown me the egoic sense of doership that I sometimes insist on. His brilliant, loving teachings are burning through as I now return from Bombay. Whatever the destiny of this book, he has shown, has nothing to do with me.

So many spiritual friends have influenced me. We are all designated seekers and now all finders too. It is a great pleasure to mention those who have supported the work of the spiritual-psychological continuum. A special thank-you to Sandra Weinberg, Eve Marko, Vivian Goldstein, Ken Porter, Barbara O’Hara, Pat O’Hara, Sheila Hixon, Adam Fedder, Ann Twitty, Brenda Lukeman, Evelyn Talbot, Nancy Baker, Maggy and Dean Sluyter, John Makransky, Joel Baehr, Ann Singer, Jane Bronson, Jan Jack, Sally Gottesfeld, Neil Elson, Joan Faulkner, Jan Crawford, and Valtraud Ireland. And thanks to the wonderful friends in the Thursday group who have explored this area of healing psychologically and spiritually for many years: Freida Birnbaum, Elisa Stein, Rosanna Magarelli, Finn O’Gorman, C. C. Cotlin, David Aftergood, Carol Serigliano, Perri Fescier, Nancy Taphorn, Betsy Naylor, and Tamara Greeley. Your passionate interest in these issues has inspired me for many years.

For the past five years I studied and practiced the Diamond Heart work of A. H. Almaas. This is a path genuinely integrating spiritual and psychological work. Although the questions, inquiries, and explorations of how to end human suffering have been with us since the Buddha manifested them some people can brilliantly apply and teach them. A. H. Almaas, who began the Diamond Heart work, and Alia Johnson, my Diamond Heart teacher in New York City, are two such people. The ways A. H. Almaas has brought the Sufi and Buddhist and Vedanta paths to the work of inner transformation has had a positive and lasting effect on me.

Alia Johnson’s brilliant and always creative work has interpenetrated my own. Her original, loving way of helping her students discover their freedom has colored my life beyond measure and my gratitude to her is immense. My clients have greatly benefited from the natural way she inquires into living process as it unfolds. Her loving heart opened mine.

Special thanks to my friend Elaine Norman, who has always supported my work, and to my sensitive editors, Betsy Robinson and Deborah Miller, who gave me helpful suggestions on this book with clarity and kindness. My son, Steven, and my daughter, Nancy, have taught me how to stay present and see what’s happening no matter what.

I am grateful beyond words for what I can pass on from so many sources of wisdom and healing. To the Source itself I say, "Thy will be done.

Diane Shainberg

Preface

Fifteen years have elapsed since the first publication of Chasing Elephants. With insight, it is easy to see the remarkable achievement of overlooked, if not consistently neglected, of before-their-time books. True to form, it is a delight to see this book reprinted today, not so much to bring justice to a groundbreaking work but also to disseminate the importance of Diane Shainberg's ideas.

What are those precursory ideas? Fifteen years is not a long time and, yet it is a good benchmark to be able to accept, dismiss, or follow the evolution and impact of one lifework. Given the demonstrated climate, economic, and humanitarian crisis already unraveling at our doorsteps, the work appears properly time to exercise its wisdom. More than ever a new global consciousness is needed if we want to avoid, once again, catastrophic decisions and outcome, based on outdated models. We must think in terms of totality, implying that it is paramount that we create a new global awareness and consciousness. We must write the integral trends for the future, the complex nexus of interrelatedness, cross-fields and pluri- or multi-disciplines. The elaboration of this new consciousness however starts with each of us. Before going global, we must not only think local but learn to develop this awareness ourselves, on our own. No one but our self is responsible, and no one can bypass this process. No shortcut exists. After the work is done, the multiplicity of our new single consciousness will create the totality the world needs. An ambitious program from which we cannot turn a blind eye.

Here we touch upon the theme of evolution, and more specifically of the evolution of consciousness, an evolution which itself brings about its own complication. The problem of duality. We can look backward to the creation of the world, wind up our history to the beginning of time, while holding the firm belief that we are part of something bigger than we are, a universe with a teleological design, from the standpoint of a history (to put it in Hegelian term) with a goal getting clearer as humanity progresses towards it. This would be where we stand today. The investigative nature of this mode of interpretation however relates more to a contemplative form of life than an active stance. The look backward is indeed static.

We may look forward. From the standpoint of where we are today, we try to control how we want this consciousness to evolve. This mode leads to action. If we want to control our future, say, rescue the planet from its degraded state, it is imperative that we embrace this method. But it cannot be a blind action. Something which would merely loop us back to where we have been so far. The action must be the one of a conscious awareness, that is where consciousness must be aware of itself. The danger lies in believing that it must not lose itself into the mode of action but remain vigilant as it moves forth. Conscious awareness mends the bifurcation of duality. Conscious awareness is the first step to monitor the evolution of consciousness.

While Chasing Elephants does not aspire to the broad scope of universal consciousness, Shainberg's writing clearly points into the direction of conscious awareness. It advocates for the first step necessary for personal healing, a crucial step if we want to contribute to the new consciousness without reliving or reenacting the wounds and decisions of the past in complete blindness, falling back into our personal trenches. The Elephants only stay in the room as long as we need them. Once we spot them, they lose their power. Often they are on their way to take a leave of absence. This is the inspiring journey Diane Shainberg takes us on. With heart-wrenching anecdotes, case-studies, first-row testimonies, like the trip she took in the death camps of Germany, without shying away from her own struggles and suffering, she ushers us on the road to freedom and peace. Without forgetting that along the way, during her long journey into the world of Buddhism, she reminds us that compassion stands as our best companion.

Frederic Colier

October 2016

Foreword

I’m writing this book as a psychotherapist as well as a Buddhist priest. This book looks, from the perspective of a practicing psychotherapist and spiritual practitioner, at the question of how we really change. Chasing Elephants looks at how psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology specifically work to create inner change, and the methods presented can be used on one’s own or in combination with a psychological or spiritual guide. My practice base is both Zen and Dzogchen Buddhism. I hope the encounters in the book clarify the path of healing into our inner wisdom where we can see things as they are. I hope they convey the journey within to come home to our intrinsic comfort and ease.

My own passage was from being trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the 1960s. I began my own spiritual journey with J. J. Krishnamurti. He taught me that choosing to come into the now brings us our freedom and our truth. His pure presence had a profound impact on me. The walks I had with Krishnamurti in Ojai convinced me that there is a place in us where our own being is the fullness we seek. I remember hearing thirty years ago from him, The observer is the observed and instantly opening into non-duality. It has taken me all these years to begin to stabilize that original opening.

I began to sit in Zen meditation as a way of giving myself a few moments of peace. I found that stillness and staying open calmed my frantic mind. Eido Roshi from the New York Zen Center came to my home and taught a group of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers to sit in Zen Buddhist meditation. I sat in Zen practice with Maezumi Roshi and then became a student of Roshi Bernie Glassman, with whom I still study and with whom I ordained as a Zen Peacemaker priest.

With Roshi Glassman I learned to live in the unknown, to bear witness, and to trust staying present to realize the intimate connection with what is. With Roshi Glassman I did things I could never have imagined doing like living in a bakery, living at Auschwitz concentration camp, collecting money from everyone I ever knew for mala beads, and staying open frame by frame. Along the way I studied Advaita Vedanta with Sandra Eisenstein and Ramesh Balsekar, I became a passionate reader of Nisargadatta Maharaj, H. W. L. Poonja, Ramesh Balsekar, and Advaita Vedanta. It has been a meaningful center of my meditation practice. Some years ago I began to practice Dzogchen Buddhism with the American teacher Lama Surya Das. In New York City I teach meditation and Buddhism in a school called the Main Center for Integral Psychotherapy. In the school, healers, therapists, counselors, and others come to learn how to bring spiritual principles, practices, and meditation into their work.

There is a continuum from the psychological into the spiritual where learning to bring awareness into the Right Now brings us to our true nature; brings us home inside where we are full and complete as we are. All of this plus the love of the people I’ve met along the way made a passage from my being an orthodox psychotherapist to one who sees the intimate connection between spirituality, psychotherapy, and healing.

Introduction

This is a book about discovering the inborn potentials and wisdom we have inside to change and heal ourselves. Chasing elephants is a phrase that means looking for things outside of ourselves. In this book I discuss the process of turning toward ourselves—a process where we don’t chase elephants anymore. We no longer look for external solutions. We stay present, let things be, experience what is there, and in the process discover how things naturally unfold and transform.

Last year, I had an experience that opened my eyes to how we heal. I was going to meet my friend for dinner at a restaurant. This was a very close friend—someone whose friendship I certainly wanted to continue, although we had been estranged for the past several months. On my way to the restaurant I felt a certain kind of pressure because I hadn’t been able to help her make any connections to find a new job. It wasn’t that I saw that as my particular duty, but I thought I should be able to help somehow, and she certainly thought I should. I had already introduced her to the only people I knew, and none of them had been helpful, and one had hurt her. There was a sense of unfinished business between us. There was also a bit of anger on my part that she had not put as much effort into looking for a job as I felt she should. In addition, I was feeling depressed and had been going through a lonely period. I was aware that I hoped she would cheer me up, and I began to speculate on how I wanted something from her—not only this evening but in general. Sometimes it was possible to get this from her, sometimes not. I was also aware that I didn’t want to lose her. I expected her to have a period of attacking me that evening as she spoke of her unemployment, boredom, and frustrated creativity, and we’d both know the hidden agenda was that somehow I should be doing more for her. All these thoughts were going on as I approached the restaurant.

The meeting was tense, and she was in an argumentative frame of mind as she recounted how badly things were going for her. However, instead of reacting in my usual