May 2023
As my previous articles have been documenting, I am making a conscious effort to explore the bardo, the “between spaces” in my life. I first became interested in the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo many years ago, stumbling upon it in relation to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is where the most common understanding of it is attributed. The more I studied, the more subtle I realized the idea represents. It isn’t just that state between being alive and dead, or between death and rebirth, it’s every moment, from this to this to this. It’s in here that we populate our experiences with psychological noise, much of which is quite unconscious.The bardo is a thick space, as the writings on the matter in Tibetan Buddhism demonstrates, where figments of the imagination, of fears, of dread, of desires, of neediness, of habitual responses, of hungry ghosts loom to the surface: matters of psychological and emotional distress. Figments, nevertheless, of one’s psyche. The what, the why, the which triggers are interesting, I think. Putting one’s focus of attention on these inner fabrications is really useful in stopping habitual reactions and behaviours before they take hold and interfere with one’s life. Too much of our behaviour is unconscious conditioned responses that may, or may not, be actually terribly helpful in our day to day life. Just because this reaction is familiar to us, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate right now. Too much of our conditioned responses give rise to high levels of anxiety, which we probably don’t need.
The exploration of my conditioned responses gave rise to the experiments I’ve been practicing on myself in recent months. I put my Lismore house on the market (it’s sold now), I set off for Western Australia without a home and stayed with friends, I travelled overseas to the Shetland Islands and swam in the freezing Atlantic (fantastic!), I returned and had to face not having anywhere to stay as my friends needed the space for other people, and I came back really ill from a virus (not covid) picked up in one of the aeroplanes I flew in. I contemplated sleeping in my car, airbnbs, hotels, even flying back to Lismore to stay in a friend’s flat. I was really scared. I’ve never done anything remotely as unsafe as this in my life. I’ve always been very security/safety conscious, and yet here I was potentially homeless. All the terrors of my childhood (and nightmares) welled up in horrible forms. This was exploring the absolute edge of existence for me. And there, in the midst of all this, the settlement on my house came through and on that very same day, within minutes, I’m contacted by a relative of someone I know well saying they have a flat in Fremantle they wish to sell and that they’d be happy if I stayed there while the process of buying the unit was happening. So here I am, writing of the generosity of people, as well as my own extreme feelings of terror in a quiet, lovely home in a place I have wanted to settle all my life. Beneficence!
I have resumed daily swimming in the Indian Ocean and I can feel my body/mind recovering. I notice that the undoing of anxiety knots is happening as I recover my equilibrium. Dreaming is starting to happen again. It was as though even dreams were put on hold as I stumbled from feelings of terror to the conjuring up of horrific what ifs.
Interesting times, these, and interesting to me how all this has played out. This experiment on myself is useful in helping me understand better how others explore and overcome their existential terrors. We are all vulnerable creatures on the way to healthy conscious life and bringing awareness to this process is helpful for all of us. As a therapist, I can only be effective if I too know this process inside out.
