11. Self-Empathy Brings Integration

The Bodhisattva Path of Compassion - Transcending personal will through the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

Amoghasiddhi by Aloka

As part of my exploration of the common ground between Buddhism and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice, I have been keen to present a brief survey of the inner and outer aspects of the brahmavihāras. The brahmavihāras are the attitudes of Consciousness that Gendlin directs us to – they are the attitudes of Mindful Presence, and they are the characteristics of that non-personal centre within, that Gendlin called the ‘clear space’.

In this survey of the brahmavihāras, I have found myself wanting to give more time to the brahmavihāra of Compassion than I could fit into a single Substack article. So the article below continues on from my previous article, The Brahmavihāra of Compassion, where I began an exploration of two key Dharmic principles – the volitional samskaras skandha and associated brahmavihāra of Compassion (karunā). These principles are foundational – foundational both to our understanding of the Buddhist path, and to our understanding of the particular transformative power of Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ practice. I also have more to say on the social psychology of the associated Asura Realm – an archetypal drive for domination and control that profoundly shapes our world.

One of the themes that I have also found myself wanting to highlight in this article, is the idea that Compassion requires Empathy, and therefore requires needs-awareness. In the Buddhist context this needs-awareness can be very rich and multidimensional. We not only acknowledge concrete and material needs like shelter, safety and nutrition. We also include more intangible needs, like compassion, kindness, appreciation, and the realisation of our vocational potential. We develop a recognition of these key volitional factors via the faculty of intuition, and integrate them in the context of Focusing practice. These spiritual needs are also brought into our lives systematically through brahmavihāras practice – and of course through conscious, emotionally positive friendships and intimate relationships.

Compassionate needs-awareness involves a perception of the intangible, so it is easily dismissed or neglected, even in a Buddhist cultural situation where the archetype of the Bodhisattva is taken as a guiding principle. It is of great importance therefore, that the Bodhisattva is understood to be empathetic. Heroic idealism without either real Empathy or a real sense of the benevolent transcendental reality, can easily become contaminated by the psychology of the Asura Realm.

This is the eleventh article in the Buddha Meets Gendlin series. It follows on directly from tenth article: The Brahmavihāra of Compassion. If you wish to read the whole sequence of articles, the first article is Eugene Gendlin’s Clear Space.

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The Bodhisattva Archetype

In this second article on the theme of Compassion, I would like to include an acknowledgement of the centrality of the Bodhisattva archetype. This enquiry of course goes hand-in-hand with a need to acknowledge the way the historical development of the Buddhist tradition saw it flowering into its Mahayāna phase. The Mahayāna brought a much keener sense of an objective transcendental reality – an all-pervading dharmic reality, that was regarded as an ever-present beneficent force, while also being empty of self-nature, and ultimately unknowable. Just as the Buddhist tradition collectively emerged into a devotional-receptive spiritual culture, so too does the practitioner in the modern West, find themselves spontaneously emerging out of a ‘self-development’ perspective, and ‘self-power’ mode of practice, into what we can call a devotional-receptive, or Other Power approach – and into a perspective which entirely transcends spiritual individualism.

Avalokiteshvara. Image available from Tharpa Publications.

Within the comprehensive psychological system of the Five Wisdoms mandala, the green Buddhas, Samaya Tara and Amoghasiddhi, together represent both Compassion and the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, in a way that distinguishes these qualities from the other qualities of the Enlightened mind. While it goes without saying that all Buddhas are compassionate, in the earlier stages of the development of the Mahayāna, Compassion was personified by the white figure of Avalokiteshvara – the mythic figure who, having recognised the emptiness of the skandhas, ‘looks down’ with kindness and compassion on the world. Having seen through the skandhas, he looks down at the world with wisdom, and with a dharmic form of compassionate intuition, perceives the conditioning processes by which the innumerable beings of the world are still caught in the suffering of samsāra. The tradition came to see Avalokiteshvara as the quintessential bodhisattva, and he took many different forms across the Buddhist world in the course of the tradition’s geographic spread and cultural development – including the thousand-armed form in Tibet; and the female forms of Guanyin in China, Kannon in Japan, Guaneum in Korea, and Quan Âm in Vietman. Each of these traditions bore witness in different ways to the intuition that there is an evolutionary and compassionate force at work in the universe, and at work in each one of us.

A distinguishing feature of the Mahayana perspective, which I have been calling a ‘self-surrender’ or Other Power approach, is the attitude of entrusting ourselves to the archetypal principle of Compassion that is working through us. While the Mahayana is often characterised as heroic, there is actually a beautiful humility and self-surrender in this Other Power approach – an acknowledgement that our seemingly personal acts of compassion can be regarded as manifestations of the universal dharmic spirit of Compassion that is finding expression through us.

The Other Power / ‘self-surrender’ perspective therefore, is a mode of practice in which we begin to make conscious use of intuition to fully acknowledge the transcendental dharmic reality and recognise its nature, and therefore also perceive the ways in which the evolutionary and compassionate principle is at work. It involves endeavouring to relate to and integrate psychological forces from beyond the egoic mind, while paying particular attention to the way the brahmavihāra of Compassion supports processes of Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth. It is my conviction that Gendlin’s Focusing dyad practice, with its mysterious capacity to heighten Mindfulness through the compassionate ‘holding presence’ of a friend, or Companion; and its encouragement of a deep familiarity with our own capacity to relate compassionately to all that arises in the body-mind, is a practice that can greatly assist Buddhist practitioners as they enter this stage.

The stage beyond Other Power, which, following Dharmachari Subhuti, I have been calling ‘self-discovery’, requires an even more differentiated use of intuition. In this ‘self-discovery’ stage of practice, we do not leave ‘self-development’ and ‘self-surrender’ behind, but we allow ourselves to incorporate the guidance of the great masters of the Vajrayāna – entertaining the possibility that a resonance of the transcendent dharmic reality is ever-present within us and not fundamentally separate from who we are, however deeply obscured it may be. In this stage, the Vajrayāna Buddhist psychology that we find in the Bardo Thodol texts (that are attributed to Padmasambhava) can be a wonderful source of guidance. The psychology of the mandala has the power to show us how the mind is structured – at both the egoic and at the dharmic level. We need to develop the ability to track the subtle resonances of the dharmic reality that are ever-present in the field of the body but obscured by the egoic mind. Here, once again, Focusing dyad practice can help us – providing the holding space that we need to take our Mindfulness to a deeper level.

It is a commonly-held Tibetan Buddhist view that the Buddha translated his 'emptiness of the five skandhas' teaching into a teaching on four areas of Mindfulness practice. The Buddha spoke of the ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’, each (like the skandhas) having an 'internal' and an 'external' dimension – so there are eight areas of Mindfulness practice in all. The areas of attention that Focusing practice demands, and trains us into, appears to correspond to these areas that the Buddha describes in his Five Skandhas and Four Foundations of Mindfulness teaching. The areas of Mindfulness that correspond to the samskāras skandha are the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of Mindfulness of dharmas. The term dharmas, as it is used here, is difficult to translate, and has been a source of difference of opinion as to the best translation into English. When we set the Four Foundations of Mindfulness teaching within the mandala framework of Padmasabhava's elegant and comprehensive spiritual psychology however, the meaning of dharmas, in this instance, becomes more clear. Mindfulness of dharmas – the fourth and most refined of the series of practices – is attention to the archetypal reality and inherent energy of the dharmic principles. Our attention to the dharmas reveals both the archetypal structure of the conditioned reality of samsāra, and the archetypal structure of the unconditioned reality of Enlightened mind. The dharmas show us how reality is organised.

Mindfulness of dharmas

While it is generally acknowledged that Mindfulness of dharmas refers to our engagement with the most subtle and intangible dimensions of mind, there is often a failure to recognise this domain of Mindfulness as the realm of those contents of mind and world of that are perceived through an intuitive recognition of patterns, dynamics, processes and archetypal principles. While the Buddha was urging his students to disengage from the prevailing social world of mimetic desire within ancient Indian society, he was also inviting then to engage with a framework of archetypal Dharmic principles that they could rely upon as a map on the journey to Enlightenment. The dharmas are the points in the spiritual landscape, by which we can find our bearings. By becoming orientated by these Dharmic landmarks, we find authentic motivation – we contact those energies which will lead to our real and ultimate fulfilment.

I would suggest however that there is a natural progression through the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness – kāya (body); vedanā (sensation); citta (heart-mind); and finally dharmas – where Mindfulness of dharmas represents our intuitive awareness of the way that the mind is given form by archetypal structures and processes. Most importantly, as we deepen our Mindfulness in this domain of awareness, we recognise the impact, on our energy, or on our volitional functioning, of that dharmic dimension of mind that is beyond the egoic. For me it is this awareness of the energetic impact on us of the dharmic, or transcendental dimension of mind, that is the key feature of Mindfulness of dharmas.

We only have to look at the equivalent domain within Western philosophy, within Neoplatonic thought, to recognise how important this intuitive mode of awareness is to our practice of ethics, meditation and wisdom. For Socrates, Plato and the Neoplatonists, the task of the spiritual life was to become orientated by the pure forms of goodness and virtue that exist beyond this world, in a good, indivisible, and perfect realm of which this world is only an imperfect reflection. There is a similar idea in Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, where we are invited to recognise that our virtues, compassionate motivations and authentic desires are always a reflection of what he called 'universal human needs' – life-serving energies that appear as personal 'needs' when we are identified with them, but are actually universal energetic principles, or ‘life-energies’. Rosenberg invites us to become keenly aware of our relationship with these universal life energies that animate our lives and move us towards fulfilment – distinguishing these energetic phenomena from the specific strategies and concrete actions that we might adopt to achieve fulfilment.

Viewed through the lens of this broader perspective – a perspective which includes the great philosophers of the Western tradition and one of the great innovators of Humanistic Psychology – we can start to see what the notion of Mindfulness of dharmas is pointing to. To find the spirit of Compassion that is the dharmic reflection of the volitional samskāras skandha, and of the dark, violent, envious psychology of the Asura Realm, we need to become attuned to the animating volitional energies that Marshall Rosenberg called the life energies of the universal human needs, since it is by our Mindful awareness without identification of the volitional (samskāras) dimension of mind that we recognise the dharmic motivations that are at work in us. Our practice of Mindfulness of dharmas, must include, it would seem, a form of compassionate 'needs-awareness' of the sort that Rosenberg advocated.

In my experience this transition to a non-personal view of volition, and therefore to a non-heroic view of personal practice and Sangha culture, is not easy, and may even be resisted by those of our spiritual companions who prefer the more hierarchical and heroic form of collegiality that characterises the 'self-development' approach – and who refuse to see the extent to which this approach tends to lead to conformity; to a subtle restraint of individuality and independent thinking; and to a diffusion of responsibility that profoundly undermines individual ethical discernment. The transition that we need to undergo comes in two profound stages – firstly a receptive opening to the dharmic reality as Other Power; and secondly a resolution of the dichotomy of 'self-power' and Other Power, in the 'self-discovery' perspective that we find expressed in Tibetan Vajrayāna.

We need to get serious about confronting the Shadow aspect of the prevailing 'self-development' approach within Buddhism (the phenomena that Dharmachari Subhuti referred to as the 'back' of this perspective), because the social cohesion of the Sangha is unfortunately often achieved by polarising against the world outside the Sangha. At worst, we find ourselves in a Shadow projection onto the world, or in an ungrounded spiritual quietism – a withdrawal from our world, rather than a compassionate engagement with it, and a solidarity with it. I believe Gendlin's Focusing practice can serve us in our transition out of the limitations of the default 'self-development' view. It teaches us to open beyond a narrow, singular, and personalising view of the egoic will, and to entertain the possibility that even Consciousness is not personal.

Renouncing Violence – Inside and Out

Even more profoundly, Focusing teaches us to recognise the roots of violence in ourselves. It trains us to notice the way that, in the egoic mind, volitional processes (samskāras) always arise as polarities – polarities that we are called to bring into reconciliation, resolution and harmony in the Focusing process. While all the polarities within the mind, and especially the basic polarities that give the mind its archetypal mandala structure, are unconscious; we will always tend to identify with one pole of each polarity and against the other. An awareness of this tendency of the mind to polarise into conscious and unconscious opposites, naturally arises through the practice of Mindfulness of dharmas, and of the corresponding samskāras skandha. By teaching us to recognise and reconcile polarities, this mode of awareness brings us to that state of flow and compassionate effectiveness that Buddhist tradition calls the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

From the egoic mind's personalising and polarising perspective, the only resolution to the samskāra polarities appears to be through some form of violence – through some form of domination, control, or destruction of the opposite polarity. Clearly this way of thinking can lead to extremely dysfunctional social dynamics – even in a Sangha. When violence is unconstrained by an ethic of non-violence that is rooted in a bodily-felt experience of the dharmic reality of karunā (Empathy and Compassion) there is fear; and where there is fear there is mimetic conformity and a crushing of creativity and individuality. We might expect that a Sangha that is embracing mimesis as a path, will be a powerhouse of spiritual idealism – a dynamic behaviourally-focused spiritual group where the intensity of engagement with personal development leads people to continuously comparing themselves with each other; idealising and imitating those in authority; and aspiring to develop the behavioural characteristics, understandings, motivations and values of those that are above them in the spiritual hierarchy. While this is an understandable personal development model, it is not the model that the All-Accomplishing Wisdom suggests.

A Sangha that encourages a culture of mimesis can certainly generate a lot of motivation for a while. Its members are spurred on by memetic desire, so that the group may appear to makes rapid progress together. The psychosocial logic is that the individual spiritual will, and the individual practitioner's adherence to the spiritual ideal, is heightened by the intuitively-felt sense of group membership and solidarity. In reality what occurs can be very different. While this sort of Sangha culture may indeed generate a lot of heroic energy and egoic drama, there is no guarantee that each person in the group will be gaining self-awareness and achieving Integration and Positive Emotion. Indeed, we are likely to see subtle forms of psychological dis-integration and subtle forms of violence towards self and other – forms of trauma that are repressed, but come to consciousness later. A culture of mimesis always undermines individuality. A 'positive group' is still a group.

Buddhism depicts the collective psychology of the samskāras skandha and the klesha category of irshya (envy) in the mythological imagery of the Asura Realm – the realm of the violent, acquisitive and manipulative archetypal war gods of ancient India. Clearly, the volitional energies (the samskāras) are integral to spiritual transformation, but to free these life energies from the matrix of the egoic mind, and make them available to us spiritually, we need first to gather them by coming into relationship with them, rather than merely identifying with some of them while repressing others into the unconscious. This involves acknowledging: firstly, that the samskaras are multiple; and secondly that they are not personal but universal – that they are 'empty' of self-nature. Indeed, one of the best ways to release our habitual personalisation of the samskāras is to see them as the universal human needs – as universal life-energies and universal human motivations. The non-personal nature of these energies, is only fully revealed however, when we renounce the egoic habit of personalising everything, and start to live for the greater good of the whole, and with a radical openness to what the dharmic reality – the beneficial transcendental dimension – wants to bring into our life.

The Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition speaks of the spiritual psychology of the bodhisattva's engagement with the intuitive-volitional samskāras skandha, and of the skilful application of the will in Buddhist practice, in terms of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, and the corresponding brahmavihāra of Compassion (karunā). The All-Accomplishing Wisdom is personified by the green Buddhas Amoghasiddhi and Samāya Tārā (Green Tara). These figures are of enormous importance in Buddhist tradition, since they function together to embody not just the active volitional impulse that we call Compassion, but also the willingness to intuitively sense the real needs, fears, and sufferings of self and other. This conscious willingness to open to the needs, fears and sufferings of self and world is called Empathy in the English language – a very important word, and a foundational principle for all who would claim to be seeking Enlightenment or living an ethical life.

Empathy is an essential and inseparable dimension of karunā (Compassion), but is a principle that can easily be overlooked in Buddhist practice because it appears to lack an exact equivalent in the ancient Indian languages of Pali and Sanskrit. I would argue that, in fact, it does not lack an equivalent – that karunā is its equivalent. Karunā needs to be regarded as having the dual connotation of Compassion and Empathy. I might go further and say that, in regard to the duality of Compassion and Empathy that the word karunā points to, Empathy should probably be regarded as the more important and the more fundamental of the two, since the activity of Compassion springs from the emotional and imaginative response that we call Empathy. The failure of some Buddhist communities to give value to Empathy highlights our tendency to fall into semantic rigidities through poor translation and narrow textual interpretation – something that I talked about in relation to the descriptive, 'form-creating' rūpa skandha, which is the skandha that uses words and conceptualisations to create our apparently objective, but often delusional, sense of the reality of self and world.

This recognition that karunā involves both an external behavioural response that we can call Compassion, and an internal emotional openness and imaginative identification with the other that we can call Empathy, is essential. If either one of these two components is not present then what we have is not karunā. Because Compassion is associated with volition, some Buddhists are tempted to think of Compassion exclusively in terms of action, in such a way that the 'internal', or intuitional, or Empathy aspects are neglected or devalued. At worst, Buddhists may adopt a position which sees Empathy as an obstacle – and as bringing an unnecessary psychological sophistication and complexity into their psychologically heroic and single-minded approach to embodying the bodhisattva principle. The symbolism of Amoghasiddhi and Tara however, is of a perfect integration of inner and outer aspects of Compassion – and the message of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom is that the mind is multi-dimensional and multi-faceted, and that the energetic complexity of the mind's polarities and paradoxes is something that we must be willing to investigate if we are to become truly compassionate.

Asura Culture in the Modern World

In the modern world there is much that masquerades as Compassion that is just virtue signalling and moral posturing – mimetic versions of Compassion that are not grounded in real Empathy. By setting out to cultivate Empathy, as we do by learning Eugene Gendlin's Focusing, or Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) we gain an awareness and a vigilance regarding such bogus narratives. Real empathy allows us to gain a recognition of how even Compassion can be mimetic and a mere cultural performance. We may find ourselves seeing, increasingly clearly, the stark inconsistencies and incongruities in the so-called 'humanitarian interventions' of the Western powers – who spin narratives of 'freedom and democracy' to justify their violent and destructive regime change operations and their collective punishment of states that they have found to be non-compliant with their agenda of hegemonic domination.

What I have touched on here is one of the most disturbing and dangerous features of the modern world – the way in which the social and psychological mechanisms of mimesis, such as we see depicted in the imagery of the Asura Realm, appear to prevent our government, media and academic institutions from being able to prevent entirely unnecessary wars. Because all social groups and institutions are subject to mimetic group dynamics – not just the general population – these institutions are also subject to manipulation by those who understand how mimetic group dynamics work. The worst organisations of all in this regard, are of course the military-industrial ones like NATO, where the livelihood of everyone involved is dependent on the maintenance of a scapegoat, or enemy-image narrative, that will provide justification for war, and for the maintenance of the massive flows of money that sustain the organisation.

Some Buddhists will be taken aback by my switch from an individual moral enquiry to a social and geopolitical one, but it is precisely this dual individual-social perspective that the Buddha was inviting us into. By saying in his anatman doctrine, that there is no individual psychology, just an expression of archetypal structural patterns (skandhas) and collective processes, he was saying that the social and political world is shaped by the same archetypal principles. While the clarity of this observation appears to have been somewhat lost during early Buddhism, Padmasambhava in his remarkable hermetic, or archetypal psychology, appears to have recovered this wisdom and highlighted it. What we are being offered in the archetypal psychology of the Asura Realm is a penetrating sociological analysis of the fundamental processes that lead human beings to violence and war. This Buddhist perspective is highly relevant to the study of Politics, Sociology, History, and Anthropology, but simply absent from the academic discourse – primarily because it is such a neglected perspective within Buddhist scholarship itself. Hence the importance I give to this sociological, or social psychological perspective. It would be a moral failure on my part to fail to try to establish this understanding of the profound relevance of the archetypal psychology of the asura in my reader's mind.

NATO has been the most relentlessly expansionist military alliance on the planet for the last 30 years – expanding to the borders of the Russian Federation (while openly expressing the wish to break-up the Russian Federation and loot its resources) despite commitments made at the end of the Cold War not to do this; and despite repeated warnings that this was presenting an existential threat to Russia. This dangerous and irrational belligerence is an example of asura culture – 'scapegoating'; Shadow projection, manipulation, and violence borne of envy. No less dysfunctional than NATO itself, are our government bureaucracies and parliaments – and the media organisations that are supposed to hold those governments to account. All are subject to the group dynamics of mimesis; all appear to prevent the truth from being spoken; all serve to constrain the emergence of true individuality; and all serve to distract us from real human needs.

Compassion, Harmony, and ‘Life-Forward’ Direction

Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is potentially the practice par excellence, for overcoming a lack of attention to the value of Empathy in Buddhist communities of practice. In the dyad practice through which we learn Focusing, two spiritual friends sit together, and enter into a Self-Empathy / Empathy based relationship. One, the 'Focuser', is 'self-empathetic' – turning their Mindful attention inwardly and self-empathetically towards their bodily-felt experience and inner world. The other, the 'Companion', is empathetic – holding a dual attention in which they are both monitoring their own state of Presence, while primarily turning their attention outwardly towards the Focuser's process. The Companion undertakes to be with their friend, to find a quality of supportive Presence that, in Buddhist terms, may be characterised by the brahmavihāras, but especially by karunā, or Compassion – and ultimately also by the All-Accomplishing Wisdom and the other Wisdoms.

Once again, there is a clear correspondence between Buddhist wisdom and Gendlin's psychological method. A foundational element of his approach was to teach his Focusing students to attune to the 'life energy', or purpose, or 'life-forward direction' in their meditative process – to learn the skill of intuitively following the direction of our healing, our freedom, and our aliveness, in order to find the resolution of psychological conflict, rather than simply following the egoic mind's memetic desire and need for control. This way of addressing the real nature of the will – framing volition impersonally, as the energetic flow of necessity and Compassion in the processes of life – is extremely profound. This deeper understanding of the samskāras skandha, that we find embodied in the practice of Focusing, is extremely appropriate for Buddhists who are practicing in a Western context and wanting to avoid the internal conflict that is often generated by Eastern Buddhist cultural notions of self-conquest, self-overcoming, and self-sacrifice, or of celibacy and monasticism.

The fact that the volitional samskaras are multiple, gives us an important clue as to the nature of this skandha, and the dysfunctional way in which it functions within the egoic mind. From the perspective of Mindfulness, or Consciousness, we can acknowledge several different samskaras at a time – multiple components of the will expressing different needs and pulling us in different directions. We all notice how frequently a 'part of us' wants to do one thing and another 'part of us' wants to do something else. The egoic mind generally experiences this division of the will as 'conflict', or 'resistance', and tends to understand spiritual progress as an act of control, or dominance, or self-overcoming.

Meditation practitioners do not have to be psychoanalysts to recognise this dynamic – a dynamic in which the part of the will that is identified with, achieves dominance, while another part of the will that is dis-identified from, is dissociated, split off, and repressed. If the part that is dissociated from, is merely repressed and made unconscious rather than integrated, it will return to be wrestled with once again at a later time, however strong the will of the meditator may be. At worst it will arise as the deeply incongruous Shadow behaviours that we are all familiar with in ourselves and other spiritual practitioners. It is natural for groups in which there is general unconsciousness of the samskāras and their dynamics, to seek scapegoats onto which the group’s repressed psychological material can be projected. This is inherent in the mimetic cultural dynamic. At worst, we may even find this pattern in spiritual communities, a situation where novices are in effect told to deny their own authentic life-serving motivations and instead to copy the motivations of the community's leaders.

Such Shadow dynamics are clearly extremely damaging to spiritual friendships and spiritual communities. They create disillusionment and confusion and are extremely destructive of the sort of steady spiritual progress that we aspire to. In my view, one of the very best practices for Western Buddhists who want to avoid dysfunctional dynamics of this sort, is Focusing. Focusing offers an approach to meditative transformation that cultivates empathy and self-empathy, and specifically avoids repression and dissociation. It adopts the very opposite strategy – that of giving attention to that which is at the edge of, or on the threshold of, awareness – a compassionate strategy of welcoming fully into awareness, that which appears resistant to, or incongruous with, our conscious intention. This, for me, is a classic example of the sort of approach that Buddhism came to call the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

As I mentioned earlier in this series of articles, there are multiple perspectives within the Dharma – some of which only offer a partial perspective, and a more limited approach to Buddhist practice. In my experience, Focusing corresponds to the more comprehensive three-fold approach that may be called 'self-discovery'. Focusing provides us with a critical perspective from which we can see the limitations of the more partial perspectives within Buddhism that are frequently expressed. As Western practitioners, we need this discernment. We need to be wary of those Buddhist teachers who appear to be claiming that the approach of establishing an identification with a strong egoic will that can overcome what appears as moral resistance, is the core of the Buddha's teaching. It is a mistake to imagine that the application of the Buddha's notion of virya (usually understood to mean vigour, or determination), and of the Buddha's Four Right Efforts, inevitably involves the domination of one part of ourselves by another.

Both the All-Accomplishing Wisdom within Buddhism, and the practice of Focusing, serve to call us to a deeper awareness and a more subtle strategy – one that is more akin to the spirit of Tai Chi or Aikido, and is directed toward growth through processes of psycho-spiritual reconciliation rather than growth through domination. Importantly, the practice of Focusing teaches us to address apparent conflicts in our spiritual motivation by becoming deeply aware of all of the currents of volitional energy that are at play within the body-mind – and especially to become deeply and compassionately present with that in us that appears to be blocking our progress, or appears 'resistant'.

Photo by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash

© William Roy Parker 2025