Spring Washam, 'What Was Creating All This Suffering?'
Spring Washam, author of "A Fierce Heart," shares her incredible journey through a difficult childhood, incarceration, and profound personal trauma. She discusses how meditation, including a pivotal "red phone" moment on retreat, helped her navigate suffering and cultivate deep compassion.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Introduction to Spring Washam and Listener Calls
Addressing Negative Press and Potential Harms of Meditation
Meditation's Impact on Focus and Career Fulfillment
Spring Washam's Challenging Childhood and Family Background
Understanding 'Blooming in the Mud' and Ultimate Reality
Underestimation and Blending Buddhist Wisdom with Shamanism
The 'Red Phone' Incident at Insight Meditation Society
Jhana and Metta Practice Leading to Psychological Difficulties
Meditation as a Path of Purification and Mind Training
Spring's Unresolved Trauma and Seeking Deeper Healing
The Five-Month Crestone Retreat and Encountering 'The Great Chief'
Limitations of Traditional Psychotherapy for Liberation
Embracing Bodhicitta: Living for the Benefit of Others
7 Key Concepts
Blooming in the Mud
This concept refers to the lotus flower, which can bloom for a thousand years in the muddiest waters. Archetypally, it signifies growing and thriving despite difficult, 'mucky' circumstances, suggesting that profound spiritual growth often emerges from deep suffering.
The Absolute
Referred to as ultimate reality or the quantum level, this concept suggests that what appears solid and real (like a water bottle or personal trauma stories) is, upon closer inspection, merely moving particles or a constellation of memory and emotion. Meditation serves as a 'microscope' to perceive this deeper, less solid reality.
The Dark Night
A phrase used to describe a difficult phase some meditators experience, characterized by psychological difficulties that may arise as a consequence of their practice. While rare, documented cases exist, often associated with intensive retreats, where individuals encounter adverse effects.
Jhana Practice
A concentration practice in meditation, where 'Jhana' means super concentration or absorption. It involves accessing interconnected 'rooms' or states in the mind through intense focus, often on the breath or loving-kindness, to achieve deep states of mental collection and happiness.
Metta Practice
Also known as loving-kindness meditation, this practice involves repeating phrases like 'May I be happy and peaceful' while envisioning oneself and a series of beings (benefactor, neutral person, difficult person, all beings). It is described as a powerful doorway to concentration, as a mind filled with love and happiness naturally collects itself.
Purification
Derived from ancient Buddhist texts, this term describes the process of cleaning or clearing the mind of its delusions and obscurations. It's about removing the 'thousand veils' that prevent individuals from seeing their true, innate goodness and moving towards greater peace, happiness, and compassion.
Bodhicitta
A Buddhist concept meaning the wish or intention that one's life and actions be for the benefit of others. It is described as an innate quality that can become clearer over time, and living with this motivation ultimately leads to greater personal happiness and joy.
8 Questions Answered
While generally beneficial, meditation can have detrimental effects, particularly during intensive retreats, where some individuals may experience psychological difficulties, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as 'the Dark Night.' However, such instances are considered rare.
Yes, there is significant evidence suggesting meditation can rewire parts of the brain related to attention regulation, thereby helping with focus. However, it is not a miraculous cure and should be considered part of a broader suite of habits for improving concentration.
In a Buddhist context, 'the absolute' refers to ultimate reality, or the quantum level, where what appears solid (like physical objects or personal stories) is understood as a constellation of moving particles, memory, and emotion, rather than a fixed, solid entity.
The 'red phone' is a specific phone at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, designated for meditators who are experiencing extreme psychological distress or 'freaking out' during a silent retreat, allowing them to call for immediate help.
Purification, as described in ancient Buddhist texts like the Vasuti Maga, refers to the process of cleansing the mind of delusions and obscurations. It is about clearing away the 'thousand veils' that prevent individuals from recognizing their innate goodness and true nature.
Spring's intensive practice, particularly with Metta as an absorption practice, acted like 'stepping on the gas pedal' for purification. Because she had significant unresolved trauma, the intense energy brought her to a 'breaking point,' causing her system to go haywire with physical and emotional symptoms, including a crippling sense of abandonment.
Spring Washam's mission is to better humanity and help people, driven by the concept of Bodhicitta. She aims to help others see themselves differently, find happiness, and understand that they can overcome suffering, even through the difficult process of writing her books.
Cultivating Bodhicitta is about recognizing that living altruistically and helping others ultimately feels better and brings more happiness than being stuck in selfish desires. The Dalai Lama reportedly said he practices altruism because it makes him happy, highlighting the 'selfish motivation' of finding joy through benefiting others.
22 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Altruism for Happiness
Adopt altruism as a ‘selfish’ motivation, recognizing that genuinely helping others and contributing to their well-being is a powerful and reliable path to your own happiness and fulfillment, as the Dalai Lama suggests.
2. Train Your Mind for Peace
Actively engage in training your mind to move away from unhelpful patterns like greed, hatred, and confusion, and towards beneficial qualities such as happiness, calm, patience, generosity, and compassion for greater inner peace.
3. Practice Real-World Kindness
Engage in actual acts of kindness and compassion in your daily life, as meditation alone is not sufficient to become a better person; it is a helpful tool that supports and enables real-world kind behavior.
4. Cultivate Compassion in Adversity
When facing overwhelming fear or grief, actively invoke and cultivate compassion through prayer, visualization, or seeking its energy, as it is a powerful means to endure and purify intense emotional states.
5. Concentrate with Happiness, Not Force
Cultivate happiness and love in your mind to naturally enhance concentration, rather than forcing focus through strenuous effort, because a happy mind naturally collects itself and settles more easily.
6. Avoid Forceful Meditation
Refrain from a ‘bearing down’ or forceful approach in your meditation practice, as this can lead to suffering and agitation rather than genuine calm and concentration.
7. Recognize Trauma as a Story
View personal trauma and past experiences as ‘just a story’ or ‘one chapter,’ understanding that your identity is more expansive than your suffering and that these experiences are a constellation of memory and emotion.
8. View Difficulties as Growth
Recognize that difficult experiences, metaphorically referred to as ‘mud,’ are essential for growth and transformation, as ’no mud, no lotus’ implies that challenges are necessary for profound development.
9. Utilize Meditation as Microscope
Employ meditation as a ‘microscope’ to look beyond the surface level of your stories and experiences, penetrating deeper to see them as transient constellations of memory and emotion rather than solid, fixed realities.
10. Assess Meditation’s Personal Benefit
If meditation is personally beneficial and showing positive effects in your own mind, continue practicing it regardless of external scientific debates, as your direct experience is the ultimate measure of its value for you.
11. Seek External Help for Trauma
If you encounter profound psychological difficulties during intensive meditation that exceed the available support, seek external help beyond traditional meditation practices to address underlying trauma and fundamental issues.
12. Integrate Meditation for Focus
Use meditation as one tool among several to improve focus, acknowledging that while it can help rewire the brain for attention regulation, it is not a miraculous standalone cure.
13. Cultivate Interest for Focus
Enhance your focus by actively bringing interest, curiosity, and investigation to whatever you are doing or experiencing, as this mental factor can be harnessed to your benefit.
14. Explore Fulfilling Career Changes
If your job is ‘dead boring’ and causes unhappiness, investigate the possibility of safely switching careers to find more fulfilling work, while ensuring family financial stability remains the top priority.
15. Understand Meditation as Purification
Approach meditation as a process of ‘purification’ to clear away mental delusions and obscurations, which helps reveal your innate enlightened nature.
16. Re-ground After Intense Practice
If experiencing disassociation or instability from intense meditation, consider grounding practices such as eating solid foods or engaging in physical activities like running to restore a sense of solidity and connection to the body.
17. Address Meditation Plateaus
Be aware that meditation practice can lead to plateaus where progress feels stalled, indicating a need to explore deeper layers of purification or different approaches to continue growing.
18. Break Generational Patterns
Actively work to identify and break negative generational patterns of behavior or belief systems that have been passed down in your family, contributing to your own and future generations’ well-being.
19. Combine Ancient Wisdom & Buddhism
Explore the integration of ancient medicine practices (such as Amazonian shamanism) with Buddhist wisdom to create a holistic path for healing, understanding, and personal development.
20. Psychotherapy for Understanding, Meditation for Liberation
Use traditional psychotherapy to gain understanding of your trauma and patterns, but recognize that meditation and spiritual practices may be necessary for deeper liberation from suffering.
21. Cultivate Daily Bodhicitta
Cultivate the intention of Bodhicitta daily, dedicating your moments, life, and day to the benefit of others, as this can be a profound source of happiness and purpose.
22. Read ‘Focus’ by Daniel Goleman
Consult the book ‘Focus’ by Daniel Goleman to glean actionable advice and insights on improving concentration and attention.
7 Key Quotes
No mud, no lotus, though.
Spring Washam
The point of meditation isn't to become, as Sharon Salzberg always says, a better meditator. The point is to become a better human.
Dan Harris
The measure is are you less of a jerk to yourself and others.
Dan Harris
I'm more than the trauma. And I teach this a lot in Oakland because people, I have huge classes there and people come and there's all this trauma and suffering. And I always just look at people and say, yes, all this is one level of reality. Yes, abuse, abandonment, betrayals of the worst kind, you know, and we are more than that.
Spring Washam
The cause of concentration is happiness. It's not this bearing down, you know, image that we have like, okay, it's actually the when the mind is happy, filled with love and happiness, things happen. The mind naturally collects itself. It's a natural radiance, natural collectability.
Spring Washam
Psychotherapy brings understanding without relief.
Dan Harris (quoting an unnamed source)
It's so great to be selfish because he said, altruism makes me happy. So that's why I practice it.
Spring Washam (quoting the Dalai Lama)
2 Protocols
Tibetan Style Purification Practices
Spring Washam- Perform 100,000 prostrations (like sun salutations).
- Recite 100,000 mantras.
- Take refuge in your Buddha nature, the teachings (Dharma), and the community (Sangha).
- Engage in very intense compassion practice, using certain images and practices to evoke the quality of compassion.
Metta (Loving-Kindness) Meditation Practice
Spring Washam (and Dan Harris describing what Spring taught him)- Start by sending loving-kindness to yourself (e.g., 'May I be happy and peaceful, may I be safe and protected, may I be healthy and strong, may I live with ease and wellbeing').
- Move to a benefactor or dear friend (e.g., visualizing them and sending the same phrases).
- Include a neutral person (someone you see but often ignore).
- Include a difficult person, sometimes referred to as the enemy.
- Finally, extend loving-kindness to all beings.