Somatic Energies and Emotional Traumas: A Qualitative Study of Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayāna Buddhists
Abstract
:1. Introduction
1.1. The Study of Vajrayāna Buddhism in the West
1.2. Methods of Purification and Self-Transformation in Vajrayāna Buddhism
1.3. Classification of Somatic and Affective Experiences
2. Somatic Energies
2.1. Practitioner Narratives
He goes on to describe how he also had some “initially very disconcerting physical sensations of tingling, flows of energy or heat, vibrations. […] It really feels like if you put your hand in front of the exhaust when the car engine is running, it’s a bit like that sometimes.” Since 2003, he describes how he now has “tensions and movements of energy, heat, and pressure in different places, particularly in my neck. It wakes me up at night quite a lot.” Simon compares his experiences to what “in Tibetan they call rlung,” and this is the main framework he draws upon in interpreting these experiences. He comments on how initially “disconcerting” it was not understanding these changes because “you start feeling things in your body that you haven’t experienced before and you’re wondering what the hell is it, and is this supposed to be healthy or is this a problem?” Although the pressure, heat, and energy are now “a daily reality” in which “those kinds of things are going on the whole time,” Simon manages his rlung symptoms by doing “certain exercises the whole day to keep it flowing and keep it balanced.”at one point it was like someone cut a razor in my chest on both sides. Very, very, very strong and unpleasant. If you think of channels opening and purifications, it’s like that kind of stuff. The same with pains deep inside your bones, pain deep in your joints, muscles, in your organs. [Being] really, really sore. Basically feeling after the afternoon and morning session that you’ve been in a boxing match for about ten rounds.
Richard reports various cognitive changes that corresponded with the physical tension. During these periods, “there was no point to even try to meditate because my mind was like a whirlwind. I couldn’t sleep. I felt generally wired, like having drunk 50 cups of coffee. […] I couldn’t focus on anything.” In particular, he found Tantric visualization practices exacerbated his problems with rlung:Couldn’t really sit [in meditation] anymore because my upper body got completely tense when I was sitting. It felt like being in a big kind of squeeze […] like [it’s] between two metal plates and then it gets squeezed together. […] When that happened, I would just lie down. And that helped a lot.
Richard reports consulting a Tibetan doctor about these challenges, who “basically also said, ‘Yeah, don’t meditate. That makes it worse at this point.’”What definitely I couldn’t do was try to do some visualizations. That would definitely make it worse. There were several episodes of that happening. And it just was an ongoing thing, like whether I meditated or not. But particularly visualization practice would then make it worse, so I didn’t do that.
He further interpreted experiences of pain, tension, heat, or cold as “constrictions or obscurations” where “the flows of rlung, or wind, through the subtle body have been constricted.” Practices like ’phrul ’khor or the mantra garland visualization intentionally circulate wind through the channels, but when a channel is obscured “it squeaks, and that squeak is an emotion or a conception in the mind.” In retrospect, Brandon believes that his practice approach “should be more gentle, more allowing things to release rather than pumping energy through it.”Before I even learned about that, I had a very distinct feeling of a line of pain that would go from my neck on my right side all the way down into my pelvis and then sometimes into my leg. Once we actually learned to generate those [channels] intentionally, it intensified. And that was [during] deity practice, an intensive practice of visualizing mantra garlands moving through the channels of the body in order to purify them. And [during] that practice in particular—again a lot of heart pain—but that channel in particular flaring up and being extremely sensitive.
the places where we say “no” to experience; they’re the places where we reject experience. When we reject experience, it gets lodged into our body-mind matrix, and meditation and these practices are designed to de-repress those—they’re designed to break those things loose. You know, you get the shit blessed out of you. So these knots come loose… It’s almost as if you’re given a second chance to purify this experience by relating to it with equanimity, which is the fundamental curative agent.
2.2. Rlung Disorders and Differential Diagnosis
3. Some Teachers’ Perspectives on Somatic and Affective Purification
While some Vajrayāna practitioners in our study also reported that a non-reactive “witnessing” approach or responding with “equanimity” was sufficient for navigating transient meditation difficulties, as the next section will demonstrate, emotional experiences that are too intense, intrusive, and prolonged make this approach not viable for some practitioners.Mainly it seems what nyams does is kind of enhance, almost blow up, everything very large—all your extremes. Like if you have a little anger and your anger becomes really strong. If you have some paranoia, the paranoia gets really strong. And if you’re having a more beautiful state of mind like love, compassion, it gets really big in the meditation. So nyams, for most people, is like this enhancement, this total blowing, blowing the proportion of their experience. […] So as a teacher I tell people, “Don’t react to it. Don’t get attached to it. Just witness it until it dissolves.” And that is the way to purify your consciousness of karmic patterns or to undoing your grooves in your brain; it is through abiding awareness.
4. Emotional Traumas
4.1. Practitioner Narratives
He describes the content arising as “very clear visual images and thoughts” and says it was “completely involuntary; I couldn’t stop it at all. And I was just living with it.” Bill described how “throughout the day, the intensity varied, but it was always present and, at times, was one of the more frightening experiences I’ve ever been through.” This went on from the 20,000th to around the 80,000th mantra, and then after more than a month, “it just ended one day.” Although he did not have close contact with his teacher during this time, he was able to heed some of his advice, in particular his instruction to “hold your seat.” Bill explained that this teaching this means “just don’t freak out, just stay with it. […] Not only did I know I had to hold my seat, but I knew I had to keep practicing. So I just kept practicing and just stayed with it.” He said he knew allowing these images to arise without reactivity would be “an incredible purification process if I can allow that and stay with it. If I freak out, I could go crazy.”So I’m doing the Vajrasattva mantra practice and right around the 20,000th mantra, something opened up—wherever, in my brain or in my consciousness—and it was like all this bizarre, unconscious, psychological material started to surface. It was the most bizarre, hell-realm, bizarre sexuality, animal…just the most bizarre stuff. Like everything you could possibly think of that might freak you out. And having grown up as a middle-class white Catholic boy, it doesn’t take much. Just about everything is taboo. Anything that you can imagine that was possibly culturally taboo was arising—just the most horrific display. Like a Fellini movie on steroids. And it was like this was being blown into the side of my brain with a fire hose.
Ashley focused on one experience in particular, which she said “felt like early childhood—where the sensations were of burning in my right nostril, burning in my ears, burning in my right tonsils, in my vagina, on the exterior of my vagina.” She said she “had to re-experience that one a number of times, to experience all of the detail of it,” and over time a story came together about these parts of her body being burned with a cigarette by the husband of a babysitter. However, Ashley denied having a trauma history, and emphatically stated, “I have no reason to believe this actually happened.” She continued to go through the process of re-experiencing her life for at least “a week of all day long and into the night.” Some experiences surfaced multiple times because “some of them you had to re-experience until it was not a thing, almost—until it lost its energy. I had to experience the energy out of them. […] And then I went on to the next.”It got to this point where I would feel like there was almost this primal element that lives somewhere around my right neck and shoulder that would seize up. I would go through that process a few times. Then, in this process, I started to run through this thing where I had to re-live every experience in my life up until the present moment that I had failed to experience the first time around. Of course, they were only the negative ones.
Then, she went on to describe how “this vibrating sound that seemed to come out of my body, […] and then I knew. It felt done.” Susan attributed this process to her becoming more embodied through the practices she was doing and described how “it just felt like the subtle body outline of my three-year-old self came in to my adult body.” She explained that this was her age when her parents divorced and her father left. While at the time this process “was a really beautiful experience, […] I think later it opened up all the trauma of my life.” Later, as she tried to make sense of her experience, she realized that “I was doing all these basically Tantric practices that are […] awakening those energies, and that’s the goal. But I was so ignorant. All I knew was: ‘I love these practices, I feel really connected with [this] lineage, Go for it.’ And nobody really stopped me or slowed me down.”I had a flash of my father leaving, which I’d not really had a memory of before. And that put me in touch with some pain at the back of my spine that I often feel, like I want to crack that part of my back or adjust that part of my back. And I decided, I knew there was something… Emotionally I knew some pain wanted to come up around that. After the practice, I thought there might be some sound that would want to come out, and so I waited to really go into that pain in my back, to bring all my focus into that pain until there was a break in the practice period and everybody went to lunch. And so I just sat in the meditation hall with about ten people, and I brought all my awareness into that point of soreness in the back and could feel this sound that wanted to come out of my body. It wasn’t like crying or yelling or anything like that. It was a very primitive sound, and it came up very slowly. My body went down so that my head was on the floor. And it felt very easy to do that.
The flashbacks came intermittently, sometimes during practice sessions, and other times during dreams or upon waking up. For Betsy, the flashbacks “were a very physical sensation.”For the first couple of months that this went on—because this went on for quite a while—I didn’t even believe them. I thought I was going crazy and that I had made it up, that something was wrong with me now, and that—why would this be going on when I’m doing these practices?
It took Betsy some time—as well as some assistance—to figure out how to understand and respond to what was happening to her. When she mentioned her experiences to another practitioner who had gone through the sngon ’gro, the practitioner told Betsy, “‘I went through that too. […] It’s just part of the purification. If you’ve been keeping any secrets from yourself, they are going to come up now.’” Betsy described being “really pissed” about this and wondered “why didn’t anybody tell me that this could be a part of it?” Initially, these experiences “weren’t interfering with my life—yet,” although “they did later.” She decided to seek therapy, and her first therapist “believed in encouraging the memories,” which she found destabilizing. Her second therapist was much more supportive of her and did not work so directly with the memories. However, Betsy was not able to continue with her preliminary practices because she “wasn’t able to do prostrations at all.” She “ended up going into a pretty serious depression” and was having “difficulty dealing with the world.” Then, she lost her job and “got diagnosed with PTSD at that point. Was hospitalized for a short period of time because I felt suicidal.” After that, she met with her teacher, who encouraged her to do shamatha instead, but Betsy “couldn’t even do that at that point.” Over the next three years, she worked with therapists, friends, and family to heal from her trauma history and learned ways of managing her PTSD response. Then, she took monastic vows, which she experienced as “a container of protection” that had a “very positive effect.” From this, she “gradually moved back into my meditation practice again,” eventually practicing the Vajrasattva mantra and completing her cycle of prostrations.There’d be this sense of tension and tightness, and then when either the memory would come up or a lot of emotion would come up, it would release. […] I could feel sometimes when I was prostrating that sense of it building up energetically in my body—getting tighter and tighter. And it would either release while I was prostrating and I’d be crying, or it wouldn’t and later on I would have a flashback. […] I can remember one time even looking at my hand, and it looked like a child’s hand. I guess that made it even more destabilizing, because it was like literally going through the trauma again, physically as well as—it wasn’t just remembering things like you remember a memory. So, it had a very, very strong effect at the time. […] It’s literally like feeling as though I was in a child’s body again. It wasn’t just looking at my hand, but it’s like my hand felt like a three year old, and so having an experience of my body being very young again.
Kevin decided to seek help from a licensed therapist who was also a Buddhist and ultimately joined a different Buddhist community where therapists were “heavily involved with everything.”I still believed that I should be doing the Vajrayāna practices because that’s what these big Rinpoches were telling me to do. So I went back to doing the sngon ’gro and the deity yoga and all this weird stuff and it never helped. I don’t even know why I did it, because it wasn’t helpful. In fact I think it was very damaging and detrimental and wrong. I’m finished with those Vajrayāna practices and taking all these vows and commitments. I would never recommend that people struggling with mental health problems as much as I was go down that road. […] Trying to do Vajrayāna practices when you’re suffering from horrible, untreated PTSD is just a god-awful idea. The visualizations would just turn into nightmares, where I’d be beheading and raping the deities and stuff. And then absolutely convinced that I was gonna go to hell because of desecrating the sacred Vajrayāna. The visualization practice itself was extremely unstable and frightening and infused with—The intrusive, violent imagery became part of the visualizations, so then I was battling with that. I think that’s an important thing to note.
4.2. When Does Purification Become Re-Experiencing?
These visions parallel visualization instructions from the sādhanās that entail imagining how the descent of nectar flows from Vajrasattva’s body into the top of the practitioners head, and then “all illness flows out of your pores and two lower orifices in the form of pus and blood, negative forces emerge as insects, and negativity and obscurations pour out as black liquid” (Wangpo 2010, p. 86).20Meditational experiences or dreams in which you vomit or purge, are washing, are dressed in white, cross a wide river, fly through the sky, see the sun and moon rising, and so forth, are signs that you have purified negative actions. Dreams or experiences in which dirt, pus, blood, and lymph come out of your body are some of the indications that you have purified illnesses. Those in which minute animals such as ants emerge show that you have expelled negative forces. In particular, you may have real, direct experiences of clear awareness, of physical lightness, and of spontaneous devotion and determination to be free.
5. Some Practitioners’ Perspectives on Teachers
She felt a similar letdown when she found that her community, which had previously also been supportive of her retreat, “didn’t have any extra energy or time to put into someone whose life was in crisis. [...] And in a lot of ways, they didn’t understand.” By contrast, other practitioners, such as Bill, were able to draw upon their devotion to feel connected to their teacher even if he or she was absent. About being away from his teacher’s presence, Bill said that practice “never felt destabilizing because there was some quality of being held […] by his mind.” Although he practiced for many years without regular contact with his teacher, he felt “plugged into” and “connected” to his guru’s mind, which he attributes to “my ability to generate that through this practice.”there would be obstacles in my retreat, but that if I persevered through the hardships, then I would perfectly accomplish my retreat. And so even though I kind of had a knowing of what I needed to do, I really trusted him and really admired him, and so I transgressed my own sense of what I needed to do because I trusted him. […] That kind of a split happened where I stopped listening to myself and I gave over my power or my sense of things to someone who I thought knew more than me. […] I think I had that mistaken concept or notion that, if I just followed everything that my lamas were saying, that…everything would be okay. […] And so that was a little bit disconcerting, actually, that I got into a place that they couldn’t help me out of. And I still don’t quite know how to make sense of that, and in some ways I’ve felt really let down by that.
Similarly, Barbara also found it difficult to navigate the expectation of trust and devotion and the differences in sociocultural context. In particular, she was critical of “the whole way that the Tibetan community treats, number one: women, and number two: Westerners, and number three: ordained women Westerners. So I constantly felt like I was the red-headed bastard step-child, who wasn’t worth teaching or worth getting any training.” Rachel also found that even when working with a female Tibetan teacher, cultural differences and the hierarchical nature of the community were hard for her to adapt to. She attributed some of her dedication to her sngon ’gro as an attempt to gain more recognition in her teacher’s eyes. “I felt very like, like I had to really prove myself to her. […] I think she was proud of me, but I felt still disappointed in her response or something.” On the one hand, Rachel felt like her relationship to her teacher was “parent-wound-related,” but she also felt that “people shouldn’t abdicate all their own power to the teacher and feel like their self-worth has to come from that.” Even practitioners working with Western teachers found that the influence of their trauma history on their practice was not fully appreciated or understood. Betsy described how her teacher suggested transitioning to other practices such as shamatha (a concentration practice) or tonglen (a visualization practice on suffering and compassion) in order “to get me to work with my mind with practice. And I just couldn’t, you know?” She felt like the response she was getting from her American teacher was “‘well you should just get over this and keep going,’” whereas the way she saw it was, “no… it’s part of my path, and I have to deal with it.” Later on, Betsy heard a talk by a Tibetan teacher. He addressed a situation she felt was similar to hers by saying that some practitioners “‘don’t need to work with their own mind [because] they are not strong enough yet.’” She felt validated by that and wished that had been the support and advice that she had received from her own teacher. In addition to the perceived appropriateness of practical advice, the narratives from this section suggest that differences in sociocultural context, access to a teacher, student–teacher bond, and the hierarchical nature of practice communities and student–teacher relationships are all important variables in both interpreting and responding to practice-related challenges.is based on this complete surrender to a teacher is just really, really hard to mesh with the kind of trauma history that I had and, critically, without the cultural context of not being born and raised in Tibet. I mean I’m sure that for a Tibetan who maybe was tortured by the Chinese or something and then runs into the Rinpoche—it’s all good, you know? But that’s too much to ask for someone born and raised in the United States to bridge that gap, culturally.
6. Concluding Thoughts on Trauma and Culture
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
- Amihai, Ido, and Maria Kozhenikov. 2014. Arousal vs. Relaxation: A Comparison of the Neurophysiological and Cognitive Correlates of Vajrayana and Theravada Meditative Practices. PLoS ONE 9: e102990. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed][Green Version]
- Benedict, Adriana Lee, Linda Mancini, and Michael A. Grodin. 2009. Struggling to Meditate: Contextualising Integrated Treatment of Traumatised Tibetan Refugee Monks. Mental Health, Religion, and Culture 12: 485–99. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef][Green Version]
- Brewin, Chris R., James D. Gregory, Michelle Lipton, and Neil Burgess. 2010. Intrusive Images in Psychological Disorders: Characteristics, Neural Mechanisms, and Treatment Implications. Psychological Review 11: 210–32. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Cayton, Amy. 2007. Balanced Mind, Balanced Body: Anecdotes and Advice from Tibetan Buddhist Practitioners on Wind Disease. Portland: FMPT. [Google Scholar]
- Chagme, Karma. 2000. Naked Awareness: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. Translated by B. Alan Wallace. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Chaoul, Marco Alejandro. 2006. Magical Movements (’Phrul ’Khor): Ancient Yogic Practices in the Bön Religion and Contemporary Medical Perspectives. Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA. [Google Scholar]
- Clifford, Terry. 1984. Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry. York Beach: Weiser Books. [Google Scholar]
- Cozort, Daniel. 1986. Highest Yoga Tantra: An Introduction to the Esoteric Buddhism of Tibet. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Dahl, Cortland, ed. 2007. Deity, Mantra, and Wisdom: Development Stage Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Deane, Susannah. 2014. From Madness to Sadness: Tibetan Perspectives on the Causation and Treatment of Psychiatric Illness. Religions 5: 444–58. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Dorje, Rangjung. 2009. Luminous Heart: The Third Karmapa on Consciousness, Wisdom, and Buddha Nature. Translated by Karl Brunnholzl. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Gerke, Barbara. 2013. On the ‘Subtle Body’ and ‘Circulation’ in Tibetan Medicine. In Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body. Edited by Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]
- Gleig, Ann. 2016. External Mindfulness, Secure (Non-)Attachment, and Healing Relational Trauma: Emerging Models of Wellness for Modern Buddhists and Buddhist Modernism. Journal of Global Buddhism 17: 1–21. [Google Scholar]
- Gyatso, Janet. 1998. Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Gyatso, Janet. 1999. Healing Burns with Fire: The Facilitations of Experience in Tibetan Buddhism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61: 113–47. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Gyatso, Khedrup Norsang. 2004. The Ornament of Stainless Light: An Exposition on the Kālacakra Tantra. Translated by Gavin Kilty. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Gyatso, Janet. 2015. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hayes, Glen A. 2014. Possible Selves, Body Schemas, and Sādhana: Using Cognitive Science and Neuroscience in the Study of Medieval Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā Hindu Tantric Texts. Religions 5: 684–99. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Hickey, Wakoh Shannon. 2010. Two Buddhisms, Three Buddhisms, and Racism. Journal of Global Buddhism 11: 1–25. [Google Scholar]
- Jacobson, Eric. 2007. Life-Wind Illness’ in Tibetan Medicine: Depression, Generalized Anxiety, and Panic Attack. In Soundings in Tibetan Medicine: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies. Edited by Mona Schrempf. Leiden: Brill, pp. 223–43. [Google Scholar]
- Janes, Craig R. 1999. Imagined Lives, Suffering, and the Work of Culture: The Embodied Discourses of Conflict in Modern Tibet. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13: 391–412. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Kongtrul, Jamgon. 1977. The Torch of Certainty. Boston: Shambhala Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Kongtrul, Jamgon. 2002. Creation and Completion: Essential Points of Tantric Meditation. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Kongtrul, Jamgon. 2005. Systems of Buddhist Tantra. Translated by Elio Guarisco, and Ingrid McLeod. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Kongtrul, Jamgon. 2008. Elements of Tantric Practice. Translated by Elio Guarisco, and Ingrid McLeod. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Kozhenikov, Maria, Olga Louchakova, Zoran Josipovic, and Michael A. Motes. 2009. The Enchancement of Visuospatial Processing Efficiency through Buddhist Deity Meditation. Psychological Science 20: 645–53. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Lewis, Sara E. 2013. Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the Tibetan Exile Community. ETHOS 41: 313–36. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Lindahl, Jared, Nathan Fisher, David Cooper, Rochelle Rosen, and Willoughby Britton. 2017. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists. PLoS ONE 12: e0176239. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Lingpa, Dudjom. 2015. The Vajra Essence. In Dudjom Lingpa’s Visions of the Great Perfection. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Martin, Dan. 1992. A Twelfth-Century Tibetan Classic of Mahamudra, the Path of Ultimate Profundity: The Great Seal Instructions of Zhang. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15: 243–319. [Google Scholar]
- McMahan, David. 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Miller, John J. 1993. The Unveiling of Traumatic Memories and Emotions through Mindfulness and Concentration Meditation: Clinical Implications and Three Case Reports. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 25: 169–80. [Google Scholar]
- Namgyal, Dakpo Tashi. 2006. Mahāmudrā: The Moonlight: Quintessence of Mind and Meditation. Translated by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Nyima, Kunkhyen Tenpe, and Shechen Gyaltsap IV. 2003. Vajra Wisdom: Deity Practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Translated by Dharmacakra Translation Committee. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Preece, Rob. 2011. Preparing for Tantra: Creating the Psychological Ground for Practice. Boston: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Prost, Audrey. 2006. Causation as Strategy: Interpreting Humours among Tibetan Refugees. Anthropology and Medicine 13: 119–30. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Rabten, Geshe. 1992. The Essential Nectar: Meditations on the Buddhist Path. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Rinpoche, Patrul. 1998. The Words of My Perfect Teacher. Boston: Shambhala Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Rinpoche, Dudjom. 2011. A Torch Lighting the Way to Freedom: Complete Instructions on the Preliminary Practices. Boston: Shambhala Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Rinpoche, Kirti Tsenshap. 2011. Principles of Buddhist Tantra. Translated by Ian Coghlan, and Voula Zarpani. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Rinpoche, Tsoknyi. 2012. Open Heart, Open Mind. New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]
- Rinpoche, Tsoknyi. 2016. Tsoknyi Rinpoche Interview on Lung. Available online: http://www.tsoknyirinpoche.org/8877/tsoknyi-rinpoche-interview-lung/ (accessed on 16 June 2016).
- Rominger, Alma. 2013. Illuminating Rlung: The Vital Energy of Tibetan Medicine. SIT Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection. Paper 1745. Available online: http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/1745 (accessed on 16 June 2016).
- Sferra, Francesco. 1999. The Concept of Purification in Some Texts of Late Indian Buddhism. Journal of Indian Philosophy 27: 83–103. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Treleaven, David A. 2012. Meditation and Trauma: A Hermeneutic Study of Western Vipassana Practice through the Perspective of Somatic Experience. Ph.D. dissertation, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA. [Google Scholar]
- Urban, Hugh B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Wangpo, Jamyang Khyentse. 2010. The Quintessential Nectar of the Profound Meaning. In Entrance to the Great Perfection: A Guide to the Dzogchen Preliminary Practices. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Yeshe, Thubten. 2012. Becoming Vajrasattva: The Tantric Path of Purification. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Google Scholar]
1 | For a more extensive description of the project’s methodology and for an overview of the results, see Lindahl et al. (2017). In particular, on the appropriateness of qualitative methodology, see Methods: Qualitative approach and research paradigm. For more information on subject recruiting see Methods: Participants, and Methods: Sampling strategy. As a qualitative methodology, purposive sampling precludes the ability to assess the frequency of meditation-related challenges beyond the study sample. On the topic of assessing non-rerpresentative samples, see Discussion: Limitations. |
2 | The practitioner interview protocol can be found as the supporting information S1 appendix associated with Lindahl et al. (2017). The expert interview protocol can be found in the supporting information S2 appendix associated with the same publication. |
3 | For more information on this instrument, see Methods: Additional instruments and quantitative measures in Lindahl et al. (2017). |
4 | A more detailed discussion of the qualitative content analysis can be found in Methods: Data analysis in Lindahl et al. (2017). A summary of these codebooks can be found in Results: Phenomenology: Domains and categories, and Results: Influencing factors: Domains and categories. The complete codebooks are available as the supporting information S4 and S5 appendices associated with the same publication. |
5 | I will refrain from attempting to make a case for fitting these practitioners into a particular “typology” of American Buddhists, the pros and cons of which have been well addressed by Hickey (2010). It is worth mentioning, however, that this sample’s demographics precludes making broader claims about “American Buddhism” and that the findings reported in this paper may or may not extend to other demographics, communities, or traditions. |
6 | The total number here exceeds 12 due to many practitioners practicing in multiple lineages. |
7 | For a complete list of categories and for a description of the phenomenology see Lindahl et al. (2017). The supporting information, Appendix S4, provides a detailed description of each of the 59 phenomenology categories. |
8 | While in the context of Tantric Buddhism, especially the subtle body practices of the completion stage, rlung is more commonly and perhaps better translated as “energy” or “energies”, in the context of Tibetan medicine, where bodily functions are described in terms of various elemental processes, rlung is often translated as “wind”. This ambiguity is in part due to one Tibetan word being used to translate both the Sanskrit term prāna and the term vāyu. For comparisons between Tantric and medical conceptions of the subtle body and the interplay between these two systems see Gerke (2013) and Gyatso (2015). |
9 | Generation stage practices typically involve visualization of Tantric deities and mandalas. They are considered preparatory for completion stage practices and are distinguished from the latter insofar as completion stage practices have the purpose of controlling the energies of the practitioner’s subtle body. On these two main aspects of Vajrayāna Buddhism. On these two main aspects of Vajrayāna Buddhism, see Cozort (1986) and Kongtrul (2002). |
10 | The “four modes of birth” (skye gnas bzhi) that are purified through generation stage practice are “miraculous birth,” “heat-moisture birth,” “egg birth,” and “womb birth. |
11 | For the inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria of these and other categories from the Varieties of Contemplative Experience phenomenology and influencing factors codebooks, see the Supplementary Information appendices S4 and S5 associated with Lindahl et al. (2017). |
12 | Specifically, “As a child: physical/sexual/emotional abuse or neglect; loss, injury or death of a family member or caregiver. Any age: Experienced or witnessed life-threatening injury/illness, rape, violence, death, warfare.” |
13 | All practitioner narratives quoted below were reported as either resulting from or interacting with one or more Vajrayāna practices. Transcript excerpts have been lightly edited for the sake of brevity and clarity, and key Tibetan terminology has been rendered according to the Wylie system of transliteration. |
14 | All names have been changed to protect the identities of those who participated in the study. |
15 | She describes these as types of qigong and yoga, though they seem to be serving a similar purpose for her as ’phrul ’khor practices, which other practitioners reported engaging in conjunction with subtle body yogas such as gtum mo for similar reasons. |
16 | |
17 | For instance, Meg reports the following exchange with her teacher about changes in her menstrual cycle during a three-year retreat: “I stopped having my menstrual period for a year and a half, and that was also really confusing because I’ve had really painful menstrual cramps my entire life, and when I entered retreat I made this really powerful prayer that I did not want my menstrual cycle to interfere with my practice. […] So I made really powerful aspiration prayers for my period not to interfere with my practice, and then I lost my period for a year and a half. And I asked Rinpoche, I said, ‘Is this the blessing of the yidam, or is this part of my health problem?’ And he said, which is very surprising to me, ‘It’s not clear.’ He didn’t know. He can see most things, so it was very surprising to me that he couldn’t tell.” |
18 | Given the open-ended and semi-structured nature of the interviews, this does not mean that we can conclude that such practitioners did not have re-experiencing in the context of their practice, as they were not asked directly one way or the other. |
19 | The four types of obscurations are: karmic obscurations (las kyi sgrib pa), obscurations of afflictive emotions (nyon mongs kyi sgrib pa), conceptual obscurations (shes bya’i sgrib pa), and obscurations of habitual tendencies (bag chags kyi sgrib pa). |
20 | |
21 | Specifically, he proposes undertaking practices such as Vajrasattva visualization with a change in “intention” and “attitude” from “purification” to “healing,” which primarily entails removing the evaluative judgments traditionally part of “the power of release.” An explanation for why he thinks a shift in intention is sufficient to make Tantric preliminaries helpful rather than harmful is not provided. |
22 | In support of this view, neuroscientific models of trauma Brewin et al. (2010) contend that recurrent intrusive memories (flashbacks) are created and maintained by an overemphasis on somatic and sensate rather than contextual and conceptual processing, such that the lack of linguistic, temporal, and contextual frameworks impairs the ability to integrate the experience into a meaningful narrative. |
© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
Lindahl, J.R. Somatic Energies and Emotional Traumas: A Qualitative Study of Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayāna Buddhists. Religions 2017, 8, 153. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080153
Lindahl JR. Somatic Energies and Emotional Traumas: A Qualitative Study of Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayāna Buddhists. Religions. 2017; 8(8):153. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080153
Chicago/Turabian StyleLindahl, Jared R. 2017. "Somatic Energies and Emotional Traumas: A Qualitative Study of Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayāna Buddhists" Religions 8, no. 8: 153. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080153