Deconstruction Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Byron Katie & Other Presence Teachings Through A Trauma-Informed Social Justice Lens
In 2015, Rachel and I went into Karen Drucker’s recording studio and recorded hours and hours of content. I was listening to those recordings yesterday, and Rachel led a meditation. I closed my eyes and followed along. Her voice is hynotic, and I can go very deep, very quickly when I hear it. She always says something like “Pay attention to that moment of peace at the end of your out breath.” And I can dive into the depths of my consciousness with a feeling of great peace.
But what Rachel never did is suggest, when I was in an acute trigger, that I should “be here now” or “let go of the past” or “stop thinking about the future.” She could guide me into the now without ever shaming me for having parts ruminating about the past or parts scared about the future.
Obviously, there is great benefit in mindfulness practices that allow us to be more present in the here and now, with less ruminating about things from the past that we cannot change or anxieties about an unknown and uncertain future. Trauma survivors have a tendency to have hurt or scared parts that get stuck in the painful past, as well as catastrophizing, future tripping parts that get anxious about the future. If our minds are so busy that we can’t actually be here in the present moment, we can miss so many of the joys of life that happen in the moment of now.
So, of course, being here now is often a useful teaching, but only if it’s trauma-informed.
It’s important to understand that not everyone has an equally easy time being here now. To suggest that all it takes is the reminder of a cliche can land on others as lacking in empathy and out of touch with lived reality. For untreated, unhealed trauma survivors still stuck reliving the past or for anyone who isn’t actually safe in the here and now because they’re actively getting oppressed, instructing someone to “Be here now” can come off as tone deaf.
Consider the utopian idea that “enlightenment” means that, like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie claim to do, you live only in the present moment and don’t get lost in ruminations about the past or anxieties about the future. First, that assumes that you’re safe in the present moment. Because if you’re being targeted for a hate crime in the present moment, if you’re an immigrant in the US right now being chased by ICE, if you’re a woman whose rights are being stripped by Trump America, if you’re a BIPOC male who just got stopped by cops, no amount of being here now is going to stop you from being legitimately scared about the reality of the dangers of such a present moment. Fear would be a legitimate response, informed by the historical knowledge that so many innocent people have been oppressed and murdered and that far too many injustices are real, right here, right now.
Add to this that if you have Complex PTSD from lifelong trauma, whether from a high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, developmental trauma, or collective traumas like being BIPOC or LGBTQIA+ or Jewish or Gazan or an immigrant in America, you’re likely to have frequent emotional flashbacks, even if you don’t have visual ones. Unless you get treatment for all that lifelong trauma, you will be unlikely to be able to mindfully meditate yourself into focusing only on the present moment without dissociating and disembodying, which is a trauma symptom, not enlightenment.
Even if it’s safe in that particular moment, it wasn’t necessarily safe in the past, and it may not be safe again in the future. While these teachings may be very helpful for some, teachers who claim to only live in the perpetual NOW reveal their privilege through such teachings. Not only are they most likely deceiving people—because they’re human and I don’t believe in human enlightenment. It’s also true that not all sentient beings on the planet have the luxury of basking in detached, peaceful, dispassionate equanimity in the bliss of now.
What’s Wrong With The Power of Now?
We can probably all agree that it can be helpful to be more present—here in the now, aware of your emotions, embodied in your flesh, present with your pain, not looping old stories repetitively and not worrying too much about the future. That’s why trauma therapy is so important. Because unless we treat the traumas that all of us have, it’s unavoidable for us to flash into past hurts, regrets, or memories. It’s also normal for us to plan for, worry about, or fantasize about the future. Only when we know how to tend to and be with our past traumas, only when we’re present with the parts of us stuck in the past or concerned about the future without bypassing them, only when our future feels legitimately safe enough, and only when “now” is not dangerous can we truly be in the potential relaxation of the present moment.
But what if your “now” isn’t blissful? What if you’re a legal observer filming an immigrant raid and you’re innocent but getting killed by ICE in the present moment? What if your house is burning in a wildfire and the air is thick with smoke and burning your lungs and eyes? What if your belly is aching from hunger? What if a cop pulls you over for speeding and you wind up in a choke hold in the now? When your life is in danger—as so many lives are right now—now may not be such a happy place.
No amount of meditation is going to make you not scared when your safety is legitimately threatened, not in a healthy human body, anyway. Only people who are dissociating stop feeling real and necessary human emotions, like fear, when their safety is threatened. This is why “be here now” teachings can be confusing and may not be helpful to people whose safety is actually at risk or who have not had the privilege of access to cutting edge trauma therapies often not covered by insurance.
It can be especially confusing and potentially damaging when unintegrated, dissociated “presence teachers” sell the idea that enlightenment means you’ll never be triggered, you’ll never feel pain, suffering is optional, your ego will just die, and all human suffering will cease at that moment and never return. It’s such a lovely fantasy. Who doesn’t want instant enlightenment and the end of pain and suffering forever? Only it’s not true.
It certainly sets up a hierarchy, doesn’t it? The enlightened person is special and all those less special people who feel painful emotions must be in some way inferior. But where’s the empathy or honesty in this? Why would we even want to teach something that positions people who actually feel suffering in their hearts, minds, or bodies as “less than?”
Dissociation Is Not To Be Glorified
I once heard Byron Katie say that she wakes up every day and sees her husband as a brand new human that she doesn’t even recognize, so fresh in the now that he has to introduce himself, like the traumatic brain injury survivor Drew Barrymore does to Adam Sandler in the romantic comedy 50 First Dates. How bewildering to suggest that enlightenment means that you’ll lose your memory of the past or your ability to plan for the future! That’s not enlightenment; that’s the result of severe physical or emotional trauma. While these teachers may not have experienced a traumatic brain injury, they do seem to be experiencing chronic dissociation, which is a severe trauma symptom.
We’ve all heard of the extreme cases of dissociation—the Multiple Personality Disorders (now called Dissociative Identity Disorders) typified by movies like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve. Yet dissociation happens on a spectrum, and Dissociative Identity Disorder is a rare extreme of the common phenomena of dissociation. At its most benign and basic, dissociation happens to all of us when we’re daydreaming or when we drive somewhere on autopilot and arrive at our destination without really being aware how we got there. We even consciously choose to dissociate when we practice escapism and get absorbed into fiction novels, binge watch Netflix, use consciousness-altering substances like alcohol or marijuana, practice transcendent forms of meditation, or even sometimes when we wind up in flow states. When time/space awareness disappears and you’re fully absorbed in running, making art, making love, or otherwise entering ecstatic realms, that can feel really great. But it can also be a pleasant form of dissociation.
Voluntary dissociation is different than involuntary dissociation, which is a trauma symptom and happens on autopilot, sometimes as a default setting. When this happens, it’s like a switch flips and you disconnect and detach from your sensory experience, your thoughts, your sense of self, your body, your awareness of time, place, and identity, your sense that the world is real and you belong to it, and even your personal history and memories. Dissociation impacts your consciousness, identity, memory, emotions, self-awareness, awareness of your surroundings, and embodiment. You could say that its opposite is a kind of integrated wholeness alive with presence, awareness, sensation, embodiment, emotions, intact critical thinking, a healthy weaving between aspects of your being, and a good strong reality check.
Anytime you’ve had an out of body experience, like a near death experience, a sense of floating above yourself (as might occur during a traumatic event), astral travel, mystical journeying to other realms, meditative experiences when you transcend or leave your body, or even a kind of waking dream state, it’s likely that you’re dissociating. As such, it’s an intelligent strategy that may have helped you survive hard times—or even unbearable or deplorable times, such as childhood physical or sexual abuse or living through wartime.
When your body isn’t a safe place to be or when your emotions are just too intense for your young nervous system to handle, it makes sense that you’d leave your body and go someplace where it doesn’t hurt so much. As a child, you might even become so masterful at dissociating that you reflexively check out that way once you’re an adult. Or you might just dissociate automatically. When you’re dissociated, you don’t tend to feel your painful emotions, you can numb or leave your body, you may not remember bad things that happened to you, and you may even gain access to ecstatic mystical realms that fill you with hormones like oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, giving you a kind of blissed out (but spaced out) high.
What Is Dissociation?
You might notice that some of the characteristics of dissociation sound remarkably like what spiritual teachers associate with some transcendent state. Notice the similarities of the following characteristics, and then notice how they track with the awakening stories of Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, in their own words...
Please go here for the original article: https://lissarankinmd.substack.com/p/be-here-now-unless-now-is-dangerous
.webp)
