Possibilities & Limits Part 1: Healing and Practice as a Path to Liberation

I came to know Staci Haines as a powerful teacher and guide when I became a student in the Somatics and Trauma Practitioner Training offered by Staci and Generative Somatics. Coming from a background as both a meditation practitioner and a radical mental health activist, with a trauma-based analysis, I was deeply moved by Staci's work. Her approach locates healing from trauma and oppression as an embodied practice of transformation, deeply embedded in social and political context. In my first year of training, I met David Treleaven, a fellow practitioner who is also a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His research focuses on the limitations of North American Vipassana practice through the lens of Somatic Experiencing, a modality developed by Peter Levine. Update: David recently successfully defended his dissertation. You can watch the video, which is quite interesting, here.

(To read the second part of this conversation, click here.)

Jacks: Today we're going to talk a little bit about contemplative dissociation and the benefits and limitations of sitting meditation practice. I want to start out today by asking us each to speak a little bit about what brings us to this conversation on a personal level: our personal meditation background and where we may have felt the limits and benefits, and therefore why we are still here talking about this. Would you mind leading off Staci?

Staci: As you all know, I just got back from a six-day sit. And I realized sometime during those six days that it has now been 25 years since I was introduced to meditative practice, and at times I’ve been less consistent as a practitioner and at times been more consistent, but I was a little shocked with 25 years.So at my first Vipassana retreat I was 19, and I went to the Vipassana center in Massachusetts. It was an 11-day sit of total silence: no looking at each other, no touching, all of that. Dharma talks at the end of the night, Goenka [a root Vipassana teacher] speaking on videotape. Western teachers would hold the space, answer questions. And it was gendered out so that the men sat on one side of the hall and the females on the other, which was its own kind of trippy thing to me. But the biggest thing about this was that I mostly found it a very dissociative teaching. It was my first introduction to meditation, and I was pre-actively healing my own trauma. In my own spiritual resilience and my own survival strategy, feeling my body deeply was incredibly important to me. My guidance and my intuition always came through bodily senses and sometimes images. And I feel like I really survived my early life by following that intimately.Of course inside the Vipassana teaching one thing you're always practicing is tracking your body sensations but being equanimous, being nonreactive to whatever those sensations are, whether pain or pleasure. What did not actually get broken down is a deep bodily sense of intuition or a kind of guidance of survival … While dissociation was a strong part of my surviving my own trauma, bodily sensations were incredibly important to my survival and to getting me through. And so sitting 11 days without following the lead of those bodily sensations, without following the lead of my intuition, felt literally like my core way of surviving in the world and living was getting sawed down. With no conversation about it—no capacity to ask questions. All I knew was that this didn't seem right at all.And I think it’s true that it wasn't complicated enough, or that my location wasn't understood enough to know that becoming equanimous to all of my sensations was actually a bad idea. It was a bad idea for my survival and it wasn't a good idea for my spiritual path. And in that context there wasn't any room to have that conversation. So when I left that retreat, while there were definitely things I learned, I left that retreat thinking: “that was a week of promoting dissociation.” And I know I can't do that.Now, practice has continued to be a part of my path, including meditation practice, but I've developed a very different relationship to all of that now. It is central, and it was central for meditation to be a deeply embodied experience—not just an observing sensations experience. And I really hold a distinction between those two.

Jacks: Do you want to say anything, David, about what's personally bringing you to this topic?

David: I started meditation when I was maybe 15, because of a girl… [laughter] a girl who invited me to a young adult sitting retreat, for a weekly sitting group. I had a deep sense of familiarity with the process; just feeling and being in a collective place of silence just spoke to me. The first sitting, I'll never forget it: just a sense of wow, I want this to be a part of my life. So over the next 10 years I started doing more sitting and then started taking retreats more seriously. I was around teachers who really presented mindfulness meditation as a comprehensive path, as a path that could really disentangle some of the feelings I was struggling with, in ways that I now, in retrospect, see as dissociative or freeze responses. So I'd sit and I'd get really tuned into my body and then things would start to happen like aches and I really didn't know how to be with it. I'd approach teachers and I'd say: here's what's happening and I'd report it. Then what would come back to me was, okay, take it back to the cushion. Take it back to the practice. So there was a certain level of complexity that Staci just named that was absent. There was something missing around having a trauma analysis, or a deeper analysis of transformation that would have really served me.So this was going on, and I was going on retreats, and after I met you [Staci] I read a book by Reggie Ray which was totally life-changing for me in terms of looking back on my practice. What I got from his book (it was Touching Enlightenment) is he was basically saying: “we've been meditating for 30 years and, well, particular teachers that he'd been studying with have been meditating for 30 years, and I'm going to take the risk of questioning whether we're actually doing a transformative practice. My thesis is that we're not embodying these practices. That we were actually doing a dissociative form of meditation." And the lights went on: oh I'm sitting and being mindful of sensations, but I'm not in them. And so there's just been this really rich conversation right now at the intersection of trauma, embodiment, and meditation and how these teachings could be woven beautifully into transformative work. I just think sometimes they're being put forth as the skill alone that one needs. And I would challenge that, and I'm excited to be in conversations with people who have practiced and are learning to weave it with different modalities. So yeah, it's deeply personal, and I haven't been sitting lately because I find it deeply triggering, but I want to come back to it. I just would need to come back to it in an embodied way.

Jacks: For me, I started out with Zen practice. I came to it after a period of my life when, well to be quite honest, when I was trying to stop drinking and stop using substances. A lot of how I dealt with my trauma was using a lot of substances and extreme experiences. I wanted to find a way to feel spiritually connected without using extreme experiences. And books that I read by the Beats, particularly Gary Snyder, led me to think that if I used Zen and practice I would find that. When I started Zen practice it was very helpful to me. But I was just going once a week. I wasn't doing long retreats. It really did help me start to have a capacity for self-witnessing and for learning to tolerate a much wider range of sensations. In the beginning, I don't feel like it was an override. It was really powerful for me to learn how to sit in half lotus even though my knees hurt and stay with it and that it would pass. So I got deeper and deeper into Zen: I did practice periods, I started to go for residential time. Although when I went for residential time, it was always as a work-study student. Which was really important for me. I didn't trust my own mental health enough to do 10 days of silence. I would go and I would do meditation, work, meditation, work and use my body, which was really helpful and grounding. And then after a lot of trauma erupted in my life—I witnessed my mother dying really brutally, and a lot of my personal childhood abuse memories were surfacing—I moved in to the San Francisco Zen Center. I did a practice period there and at the end of that time started to have a lot of these trauma symptoms; I was triggered by things we were doing there. I started having flashbacks, panic attacks, anxiety, nightmares, and like you said, was told to take it back to the cushion. Notice it, take it back to the cushion. Notice it, take it back to the cushion. And I experienced this real dissonance between what my body seemed to be telling me, which was that it was ready to let some stories out, and that it really wanted to move. I felt better when I moved, moving with mindfulness. But this was in the middle of a seven day sesshin in Zen, which is like our version of a seven-day silent retreat, and I wasn't supposed to talk or move very often. I lost it, and ended up moving out of the Zen Center. It was deeply disappointing to feel like this place that had been such a refuge didn't have the tools to meet me when I went into that place that was a huge part of why I sought that refuge out to begin with.

Staci: Thank you for that. I also want to ask, just because we’re going to be talking about social context in all of this, can we all name if we've mostly been taught by Western teachers?

All: Yes.

Staci: I have mostly been taught by Western teachers who were taught by Eastern teachers so it's the first generation translation.

David: I'm the same. It's mostly been Western Vipassana teachers who were affiliated with Spirit Rock and IMS. Most have been male, some female, predominantly white, and yes—they were first-generation, mostly taught in Thailand and Burma. I can say more about the lineage, but that's the lineage I come from.

Jacks: My lineage has also all been white, second-generation teachers. Mostly they were taught by Suzuki Roshi, who's a Japanese Soto Zen teacher who came over here from Japan. I think they were all white, a mixture of men and women, straight people and queer people, this being San Francisco. And one teacher, Ryumon Gutierrez Baldoquin, who led the only retreat I've been to that was specifically centered around social justice and meditation. It was incredibly helpful. I’ve also done some Shambhala meditation in New York with white teachers who have mostly been taught by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.I wonder if, before we talk more about the challenges of meditative practice, if we could talk a little bit about why we have found this useful. What are the skills and capacities that it is developing? Why are you still coming back 25 years later to have this conversation?

Staci: I really feel like I was exposed to meditation as a central path and practice first. Two things: I felt a very palpable path, even from being a kid, that had no religious structure around it, no dogma around it, and it had no practices that I was taught. But if I look at what I did as a kid, I had very still time in nature. There was guidance that would happen that I would follow again and again. A lot of that happened for me through imagery and bodily-intuited kinds of things. I got introduced to meditation practice before I got introduced to somatics, but the way I speak about myself is that somatics is really my path. And meditation feels like a very important practice, but I never took my vows, so the space I'm coming from is that I chose somatics as my path.Why it is useful—some of you said some of this before; it is very, very powerful to develop an observer and to know “I am not my reactions.” Although my reactions are very important—and I think that piece gets left out—my reactions are very valid and important, but I am not my reactions. I can be present with a wide range of sensations, a wide range of emotions. And I don’t necessarily have to enact them. Although, there are important times to enact them. There is something on the other side of what I call a contraction. So sitting through pain… wow something can drop and open and deepen. And I do feel that inherently embodied meditation practice, held by a good teacher, really gives a time and a space to deepen into the rings of being.When I ask: why am I going back to meditation practice, it's partly that in somatics I'm teaching so much that I just want someone else to hold the space. And also it's because I feel like I know my somatics/psychological/spiritual terrain so well that I can use meditation in a particular way. You know, linger with this contraction because I know what's inside of it. Or I'm actually going to drop really deep into what we all call three space: a very quieted, or non-dualistic space and to take guidance or teaching from that. And there's something very profound about being quiet for long periods of time. I don't know about being still for long periods of time. We were meditating 10 hours a day at this retreat, but it was sitting and then walking meditation and movement and then back to sitting. That works very well for me; the movement is really important for me also. And then the last thing I would say is I do feel like there is that yearning for the unnameable, right, that spiritual yearning. I do feel like meditation is one of the practices we can use to get closer to that and let ourselves fall into that more. That's beautiful. I don't think it's the only practice, but that spiritual aspect of it I think is very powerful.

David: I'm just getting to that point for the first time where being asked to sit in silence collectively in a space with a teacher I trust can be deeply transformative. And there's something about the form to me which expresses so much dignity, a willingness to just sit here in my life; I'm not going to try to change anything. I feel like in the Bay Area there's a lot said about transforming, forward action, and this is so radical to just sit still and say: I'm going to be with what's actually happening. I'm not going to try to change it. It's totally revolutionary for me. And yet at the same time if all of us just slowed down and sat down—to be with what is—I think that that could be totally transformative for our culture. So I see something of deep value that keeps bringing me back to this form. But at the same time it's the form on the other side of the deep relational work that I needed to do. There's something magical in the mystery of that form, in the lineage behind it. When I sit I feel a deep lineage of very confident, wise people behind me. And here we are, this is great, we're just unfolding our new circumstances in this reality. I want to be in this conversation; I just don't think it's something to be tossed out. It's really important, but when done well. When done with a lot of competency.

Jacks: I've left sitting and come back to it so many times. I think one of the reasons it keeps calling me back is because it's so simple. Not that it's easy, but you know, there's a black zafu that lives in the middle of my bedroom floor to remind me; I have to walk over it when I do things. It's just sitting there, and when I don't know what else to do I can just sit on it. Something I've done for enough years now that it calls to me out of its familiarity and out of its simplicity. I could relate in some ways to what you were saying about having someone else hold the space when you do a lot of holding space for other people. For me the cushion holds a very simple space. And a very difficult space. [laughter]I think for me there's also a piece around how I was very attracted not only to the practice of sitting but also to the philosophy of Zen Buddhism around it. I was really drawn to the four noble truths and someone saying out loud that there is suffering and there is a way to end suffering. I have found that philosophy and all of the talking and thinking and feeling around it extremely helpful as I tried to navigate this crazy world we live in that is so full of complications. It feels like it tries to pull me away from truth at every moment of the day. I really related to what you said about the yearning for spiritual connection. There's something about sitting practice, and for me also more specifically in the larger frame of Buddhist practice, that does meet a piece of that yearning for spiritual connection. Particularly as someone who's really attuned to nature I feel like sitting meets a part of my need for spiritual connection that I can't necessarily get when I don't have access to mountains or vast spaces or the desert. It's something I can take with me in my small room in Oakland and still somewhat connect to that place of vastness if I'm doing it in a useful way.The last thing I want to name is the way it cultivates a certain quality of attention. The retreat I was just on with Joan Halifax—one of the things she said that was so helpful to me was about grounding, about stabilizing our attention. In a world dominated by Facebook and text messages, it is really useful to me to cultivate a quality of focused attention.

Staci: One thing I'm thinking is that as human beings there are so many different simultaneous aspects to us. We are biological beings, we are psychological beings, we are deep relational beings, we are social beings, we are spiritual beings. And often times those different aspects of this human experience actually have fairly different needs. There are very real psychological and developmental needs that when not addressed directly can run anything awry. Including meditation. Including paths of enlightenment. I have often said if we really look at these traditions and ask what was the promise of the meditation path, it was the cessation of suffering and seeing truth in a much finer and more profound way. I don't know how much of that translated to the West or how much should; I think there's a whole conversation to have about what are the goals of meditation schools in the West because we went from collectively-based cultures to an individual based culture.Jacks: And from seeking enlightenment to stress reduction.

Staci: That's not good. That's way too minimizing for what meditation can do. I’ve had these conversations with Richard Strozzi-Heckler [Staci's teacher], and one thing I find so compelling about how we are all using somatics is that we say there is a self. There are harms that need to be addressed and developed and transformed, and in some ways we do this psychological work or the somatic work so that we can move beyond the self. That seems essential, and it seems like in some ways one of the contributions that the West could make to transformative paths, not necessarily in the individualistic way as it's thought of by psychology, but sometimes I say: Okay, I know that person's been sitting for 25 years, but I can still tell they haven't even started their transformative work. Really their work, or their healing work, or their psychological work, or their collective work. I don't think meditation is going to get them there in this lifetime. There are faster ways. Fast isn't the goal, but efficiency in the cessation of suffering—I hold that as a goal. So there is this piece where I think meditation is really an essential form, and the teachings, too. If we couple that with how to really effectively transform trauma, and we couple that with understanding that we're in a social context which Western Buddhist schools are completely repeating, not interrupting. And we can look back to certain Eastern teachers who are key to bringing Buddhism here. Not all of them had really great behavior. [Laughter] So there's the complexity of that too, it's like what did meditation transform or what did enlightenment transform if a practitioner is still being violent or is still dismissing other people's humanity? It's that complexity of social context, psychological and trauma healing and development, and following this yearning toward non-dualistic space. Our oneness, or whatever we want to call it.The last thing I want to say is that I want us at some point to talk about spiritual bypass because I think that when we're talking about dissociation and meditation, I also—with all due respect—have met deep meditation practitioners where I cannot feel their humanity. I can't feel their warmth; I can't feel their love. They might be very nonreactive but how it looks to me is they have numbed, they have numbed to a point of nonreactivity almost by bypassing their human healing work by taking the route of the observer. What I notice is it's hard for them to build and sustain intimacy. There are certain things that I think are fundamental to being human that aren't happening, and that spiritual bypass doesn't serve us.

Jacks: I really appreciated the analysis of needing to meet the self and its aspects before we move beyond the self, and also when you spoke to people who've been meditating for a long time but still haven't necessarily done the work of healing psychologically. One of the things that makes this interview feel particularly timely for me is I was at a retreat about two months ago now on transforming anxiety and depression. One of the participants was someone who had lived at the San Francisco Zen Center for quite a few years. I knew him when I lived there. He came to the retreat and they were having us practice three-minute breathing pauses—stepping back and noticing your breath for three minutes, and then debriefing with the group. He was deeply depressed at the time and raised his hand and said: “What if, what if you can't feel your breath anymore?” Later, we were doing some exercises around self-care, and he couldn't think of any activities that made him feel better anymore. A week later he killed himself at the San Francisco Zen Center. They found him there. It was a really intense wake-up call and personal loss. Just to feel it. “Wow, this person's been practicing really earnestly, in the residential practice for years, and it was a huge gift to him, and he found community there, but there was something in the practice that wasn't enough to meet the level of suffering. I just want to call in that sometimes there is a real… I hesitate to use the word urgency, I think urgency can be a trap but… a really heightened sense of need around the skills and tools and competency to hold people's suffering.

David: Can I jump in on that? This is really relevant right now I think. There is a sense of urgency I think because as we speak there are people on retreat right now who are completely dissociated and not being held. Are falling through the cracks because the instructions are being rolled out as they have been for 2,600 years but aren't necessarily being given in the context of how people are showing up to these retreats.I'll just use a personal example. If ten years ago when I was sitting someone had noticed that actually I was completely checked out on the retreat, it would have interrupted a lot of suffering. And so actually to me there is a lot of urgency in bringing a trauma analysis to meditation and teachings. There are a bunch of different threads that you spoke about and one of the ones that I find really compelling is around people who have experienced trauma and are going to retreat and are moving towards Buddhist teachings as a way to check out, a way to freeze. It may actually blend really well with their own survival strategy. It doesn't actually get interrupted or move or shift.And then there's that example, it's such a tragic example, of someone who could fall through the cracks, and that's where there is a lot of urgency in this discussion for me. And so the technical components of what are we looking for on retreat, what are teachers who are offering these teachings looking for, and how would they work with someone who comes and asks that question: "I can't feel my breath." What's the responsibility of Western Buddhist teachers to know how to respond or to have the resources to be able to refer in that moment, to go: “Oh, there's someone on this retreat who you can talk to,” not just: “Here's a number for a therapist.” What's the responsibility of the collectives and the institutions? That's really urgent to me to start asking these questions.

Jacks: Something that I want to mention quickly because I feel it's important is that just because of the work the three of us do, I feel like we are a bit biased towards putting everything in terms of a trauma-based analysis. With the person I was just speaking of, for example, I don't know if he had any trauma history. I want us to sometimes enlarge our definition of hurt or reasons why people are struggling psychologically and also acknowledge that depression and anxiety and things that get labeled as psychiatric illnesses may be much wider than individual or developmental trauma in their sources. Or may be informed by collective forms of oppression. I just don't want us to pigeonhole ourselves into saying every form of suffering that isn't met is caused by trauma.

Staci: We are along with that for sure. I'm glad you said that. So David there's the question you just asked: “What is the competency and the responsibility of the center and the teachers to meet the cessation of suffering with all the competency and tools that we can?” Being accountable. Next, something we can riff on a little bit more is the social context piece. We live in social conditions that, because of inequity, because of environmental degradation, because of profound individualistic and commodifying practices of our culture, create very, very difficult social conditions. We don't have to call them traumatizing, we could call them traumatizing, but they are impactful. They are deeply impactful. No matter what, we know that folks who are seeking practice are coming out of social conditions that have that effect. These conditions have, at least, a deep separating effect.Also I was caught, David, when you said it's been taught this way for 2,600 years. We have no idea if that's true or not. We do know that there was a massive translation that had to happen when these practices came from Eastern cultures into Western cultures. One of the stories that Richard tells that I really appreciate is about his teacher, who comes from a whole orientation, not just Vipassana, out of India. Richard was in the first wave of Westerners who went over, and he's often who I sit with now. He said that one of the things that struck him is that this core concept of nonattachment or detachment as it often gets translated, he said what was so funny is that in his teacher it showed up as loving, generous, totally taking care of the social needs: hospitals and eye clinics, getting dental work for people; that form of nonattachment showed up as this wave of love through him that went into action. And Richard said he would sit there and watch the people who were training really deeply as Western teachers and their version of nonattachment was so cold and detached and not in action but rather, that's not mine to deal with because I'm not attached. We were just talking about this at that retreat. He's looked for a long time; he’s asked what was the social context interface, the translation or mistranslation, that happened in even this concept of nonattachment.

Jacks: That's really profound.

Staci: Nonattachment in an individualist culture is I think so different than nonattachment in a collective-based culture. So I often ask, here we are in this context; this is what is happening, and what translated and what didn't?

Jacks: So speaking to the notion that is put out about how practice, particularly sitting practice is complete, how it is a complete practice for enlightenment and transformation, and then that notion that a lot of us get: If I could just do this well enough, if I could just do the practice correctly enough, then I would transform, then I would get it.

David: As an example, if you signed up for a Goenka or—I'm not sure about Zen retreats as much—or if in a Vipassana retreat, what are the conditions that you would end up encountering on retreat? At least in the traditions I know, there is an emphasis on silence, on mindfulness practice, and very, very close attention to what's arising in the field of consciousness. That's the transformative arc that you're on. I have had the experience a couple times of feeling that the next developmental step in my healing as a person would be to have some kind of trusting contact with another person. So much of the hurt from the people that I've met in Vipassana has been that a lot of us were running away from contact because it was terrifying. I think that the next step that a lot of people are making on their path has to do with people. I don't just mean one-on-one or in a family, I'm talking about the different ways that oppression and trauma can impact at institutional levels, at the community level. We need to open to the collective.But I had the experience on retreat that if I look up, I look around, and no one's looking at me, I don't feel that safe. My nervous system isn't able to make contact with other people even though I know that they are trusting each other. We've made agreements to be there. So on some level my brain understands that this is safe but my nervous system isn't registering that I'm okay. And then I look to the front of the room, to the teacher who I'm going to have interviews with once every two days for 15 minutes. What if this person isn't someone who understands my social context? This is where social context comes in: Is this room safe?And then we have traditions asking why don't we have more diverse groups of people coming to these teachings? People asking: Why is it predominantly middle and upper class white folks who are coming to these retreats? When we're offering the teachings in a genuine way, why isn't it more diverse? These are the hard questions that I think certain schools of Vipassana are starting to ask. I think that looking at the actual conditions and the context that is being set up for people to heal and transform is questionable. Again, it doesn't take away from the power of the practice; the practice can be super powerful, but I think there are just some questions to be asked about how it's being given to the community. Or, questions about who are we attempting to connect with in these teachings, who are we serving, how are we offering these teachings, in the service of what?

Jacks: I found that to be a really helpful analysis, particularly your retreat experience where you may or may not feel safe. One thing I want to highlight is that I think it's a particularly Western interaction with Buddhism to interact mainly through 10 day retreats and then go back to whatever your home life is. One of the things I've appreciated when I've been more deeply involved with Zen is the focus on building sangha, on building a community of people who are in the spiritual path together, and who you talk with and interact with and work with and sweep floors with and complain with and eat with. Rather than this individualized Western notion of: now I am taking myself off to go do my retreat that is good for me. And not engage in the practice as part of a larger community working towards collective action. So I just wanted to name that because I think that's not the only way to experience Western Buddhism.

Staci: I appreciate what you said too. It raises a couple of things for me. It takes me back to this notion that there are different aspects of human experience: the collective human experience, which is what we are having. We might need different things as different tools. It was so beautiful once we broke silence at this retreat, people spoke whatever they wanted to into the space. We never had a conversation about safety the entire time. That wasn't the conversation, but there was this woman and she had a profound thing to say about her sitting here in silence and movement and contact (we were doing aikido in silence with each other at this retreat to so it wasn't just sitting.) She said that for the first time I viscerally felt that human contact could be nourishing. Human contact could be nourishing and safe. And that particular leap of healing could happen for her out of that context, but since I know her I can also see it's because she's been doing a ton of her own transformative work through somatics, and then she could leverage all that silence and look around and feel all the other people. Feeling the other people and having contact that way. It was beautiful; it's going to be beautiful, a marker and a moment when a whole world is opening to her.But also, David, when you say, there's this opening of asking the question: why is it mostly middle and upper class white folks who come to these retreats? What's funny to me about the question is that it's completely predictable. I think, oh it's because the folks who were learning and bringing Buddhism to the West didn't have a social analysis. If they had a social analysis around power, around race, around gender, they would have actually structured the bringing of Buddhism to the West in a totally different way. The assumptions would've been different if they had a social analysis, and now it's 2011. Enough people have been pushing back on their lack of social analysis that they're starting to realize: oh, what can we do differently, and it's the privileged position beginning to question itself for the first time. The privileged position doesn't know what it doesn't know because it hasn't had to know that. It's part of the privilege. So if you look at who went over there, it was mostly a bunch of privileged heterosexual white males. That's what they built. It's inevitable, it's predictable that they built something that was mostly accessible to people like them. And I really think it will primarily be probably folks of color, queer folks, gender variant folks, who do something radically different because they're coming with a social analysis and the insight to see that this tool is incredibly powerful. And I trust that more Buddhist centers will get diversified but that's also different than deeply integrating a social analysis that asks: for the sake of what are we practicing? We're practicing for collective liberation. And on one level we are practicing for that but I'm talking collective social liberation, and what action that calls us to. I don't think that's been deeply integrated. So I'm glad the question's being asked, and I’m also saying to myself, that's how it rolls. Over and over again. Sadly.

Jacks: Also, if you look at the question of “Who?”, if you look at when a lot of Western Buddhism was established in America and ask: who had the time to not be working, or providing for a family, to go sit with some Japanese or Tibetan or Korean or Indian master from another country? Who had the privilege to be able to do that? To take that time out of their day?

Staci: And then bring it back, and have enough access to start establishing things.

Jacks: To start establishing centers, and buying land, to situate monasteries. I feel like that's an important piece in addition to social analysis. I think it's unfair to say they did not have social analysis. I would say perhaps they had limited social analysis like we all do based on positions of power and privilege that we come from, and access or lack of access. Many of them thought that they were doing their best in the context of 1960s revolutions or whatever was going on; they thought they were doing their best to start something that was really going to be helpful. But they did also have a lot of blind spots around what was missing, who was not there, who did not have access, how to structure things differently.

Staci: I think what I mean by a lack of social analysis is that unless we have purposefully learned our ways out of the positions we inherited, unless we proactively name white privilege, unless we say: I have totally embodied white privilege and benefited from it and will continue to unless I study and learn and be proactively understanding white supremacy and racism…. Unless I do that, I'll just keep perpetuating it, totally with good intentions, but I'll just keep perpetuating it. We don't know what we don't know. So it's the proactive piece of that. And I also feel like what's important about the context you're setting, and we talk about this too in our lineage [in Generative Somatics]: There's a big split in the 50s and 60s about who is a political revolutionary and who is doing a spiritual path. There was a strong pushing apart from each other happening from those two worlds and not a lot of integration.

Staci: I want to say one more thing. Can we talk about healing? So it's interesting to me as I do still have the question, is the core intent of meditation paths healing? I don't think it is. If we look historically, and I'm totally willing to be wrong and dissuaded from this, but I don't think the core intent was healing, I think it was enlightenment. Now we all might say they’re the same, you gotta have one to have the other, but I don't know.

Jacks: We live in California… [lots of laughter]

Staci: I don't know if everyone would say they're the same. It's interesting when we ask, is it a transformative path? Well, was it meant to be transformative and how are we measuring it right now? OR was it, as Buddhist teaching would say, the fastest path to enlightenment? And then of course there's a long conversation about: what is enlightenment? That's what I've been asking all of my meditation teachers. What is enlightenment, and do you know someone [who has attained it], and what are they like? Because I've never personally met anyone who is enlightened. Other people say they have.So if it's healing I go: okay we are committed to healing. To me I'm committed to holistic, somatic transformative healing—because it's the path that seems to work really efficiently—so that people are more free, more liberated, more able to be interdependent, more liberatory in the actions that they take and the relationships they build. I’m not very explicit about this inside my teaching of somatics, and I probably need to be more explicit. But to me as people deepen inside their healing and get more deeply embodied, what is inherently there is a spiritual path.

Jacks: I always wish you would talk about that more.

Staci:Okay, I'll start talking about it more. Deep in the body is a spiritual path. The cosmos lives deep in our bodies. I both think the spiritual path pushes our healing forward, and I think healing path brings us to spiritual path. But I ask, is that the goal of meditation? I don't know whether it is in those schools. I think we probably all agree that it needs to be because I don't think we're separable, that we can pull ourselves apart like that without ending up pretty dissociated in meditation practice. [Laughter] It's like, I think I'm feeling enlightened… [laughter] Of course I think also what we share is [a focus towards] collective liberation: I am not free unless we are free. It means action. It means liberation-based action in the world. Those are all intersecting paths, but I don't know…

Jacks: It's interesting though, because that brings up a few things—Mahayana Buddhism vs. Theravada Buddhism. It brings up the model of the bodhisattva who will not be free until all beings are free and chooses to return to the cycle of life and death. It also brings up for me the questions: Is it about healing? Is it about enlightenment? Is enlightenment the same as healing, or is it something else? Something that's come up for me a lot is this piece in the path of transformation that takes as a fundamental premise that there is something wrong with us that needs to change. And I remember how helpful it was to me—I've done a lot of reading of female Buddhist teachers from the West, Pema Chodron and Tara Brach, etc— and in one of Pema Chodron's books she talks about not starting with the fundamental premise of I need to change, but starting with accepting who you are now—you know, start where you are, pop psychology here we go—so starting with the premise of accepting what is right now and how does that emphasis of Buddhism on loving-kindness towards the self and acceptance of the present, how does that intersect with the desire for transformation and collective liberation and the arc of change?

Staci: Yes! Both and, both and, both and. All of the above…In this retreat they brought in a lot of poetry, especially mystical Sufi poetry—Hafiz, and those people. They were amazing. One of the pieces we kept coming back to is: nothing exists, in that tradition, that isn't Shiva, isn't God. In one of the talks we got in this very engaged conversation and these questions came up: Well is white supremacy God? And is rape God?

Jacks: Wow.

Staci: It was deep, because… I am not taking a New Age approach to everything being Shiva; I will not take a New Age approach on that. If we are going to get real, we're going to get real, you know. We are holding a prism where of course white supremacy and rape are not a core expression of life affirming presence. They're not. They are harming, deeply harming. And from another prism, physics will say everything is light, energy, and sound. But what's the and/and. Something calls us to more, something calls us to harmony, to cooperation, and we have the capacity to do horrible things. So, you know, in deep spiritual wisdom how does that keep getting applied to the complexity and contradiction of human experience? What are we trying to cultivate in ourselves, what are we trying to cultivate in our society through practice?

Staci Haines is the developer of Generative Somatics and the Somatics and Trauma courses. Her work emerges from the Somatics tradition of Richard Strozzi Heckler integrating Polarity Therapy, Gestalt, Vipassana meditation and Aikido. Staci integrates her extensive study in personal and social change, trauma and recovery and Neuro-Linguistic Programming into this unique and powerful work. She is a senior teacher in the field of Somatics and leads courses in Somatics and Leadership, Somatics and Trauma, and Social Leadership. She has been working and teaching in the field of Somatics for the last 15 years. Staci is the author of The Survivor's Guide to Sex (Cleis 1999), a how-to book offering a somatic approach to recovery from sexual trauma and developing healthy sexual and intimate relationships. Her book has been nationally recognized and translated into German, Japanese and Spanish. Lastly, Staci is also a founder of Generation Five, a social justice organization whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within 5 generations through survivor leadership, community organizing, transformative justice approaches and movement building.

David Treleaven is a somatic coach and PhD candidate in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. His writing on the relationship between meditation and trauma has appeared in Somatics and the US Association for Body Psychotherapy Journal. You can contact David at datreleavenATgmail.com.

Jacks McNamara is co-editor of Turning Wheel Media. She is an artist, activist, writer, and healer based out of Oakland, Ca. Jacks is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a student of Generative Somatics. You can find out more about her on her website.