What If The Buddha Had Tried Therapy?

I wonder if the great realizers like the Buddha were just bypassing their desires. I wonder if they had enormous amounts of trauma, as it was really difficult to be alive back then, and if the transcendent approach was one of trauma response. 

I mean...just go with me here for awhile. 

Perhaps the Buddha experienced early childhood trauma - not attaching properly to the mother. Wouldn’t one who didn’t attach properly to their mother struggle with healthy attachment? To people, to the world, to themselves?

Research knows this now. Attachment theory in psychology is a vital part of understanding why we relate the way we do and can help us to have healthy relationships as adults.  

The Buddha’s mom died about a week after giving birth to him. He had no experience of healthy attachment. So of course he worked to rid himself of attachment. 

I mean, RIGHT?!

Our first desire as humans is for our mother. Our mother’s nourishment, her gentleness, understanding, comfort, and love. If the Buddha didn’t experience this most fundamental human satiation of his early desires, wouldn’t he seek to eradicate them throughout his life?

We know he initially took the ascetic path for a good chunk of time. Ascetics deprived themselves of basic needs like food, water, human touch. Yup, some people though that was the way to find God, or to find what was Real.

To have no desires...well, it feels good.

This can be distorted, though. How many times has someone who didn’t get the proper nurturing in childhood say, “Hey, I don’t need anything!”? Ah, but co-dependence disguised as independence is not a fun game to play with people. 

Early in our spiritual path, when we encounter our True nature, we are free of earthly bindings...for an instant, for a moment. Maybe for a day. We are encouraged to keep going on our path. We seek transcendence. Then when desire emerges over and over again, by now we look at it as something that is not borne of truth, real truth, and so we may begin to dismiss it.

We may even shame ourselves for the return of desire. 

When an authentic awakening to our fundamental nature occurs, for a good long while it can seem as though we have no more desires. Hooray! Let the honeymoon with Reality begin!

We are free from lack, from identifying with our desires, from the painful gap between wanting and getting. But desire always returns. Always. Our relationship to it changes. Its fulfillment no longer shapes our happiness, and our foundational contentment doesn’t have much to do with whether our desires are fulfilled. 

But desire always arises.

So really...

What about being free in desire? To have desires and to be free within the wave of wanting? What is that like? To follow the desire and to flow with it. To be moved by desire without thinking it’s who we are. It’s just desire.

Aren’t we born for desire?

The Buddha was obsessed with being free of suffering,, and freedom from desire is what he found under the bodhi tree. 

But what if he had a good therapist who specialized in early childhood trauma? I mean...maybe his first teaching, which was the Four Noble Truths, would have been a little more fleshed out?

Hey, don’t throw stones at me, I’m just pondering and poking here, and being a little mischief with sacred cows.

To be fair, later Buddhist teachings did develop into ways we can work with our desires, our emotions, our very messy humanity. Vajrayana Buddhism might be more associated with the unification, or perpetual dance, of the masculine and the feminine principles. Down in the trenches, working with the world and its apparent trappings. The Mother is us, relating, emoting, and being fully human on this soil. The Father is the seed from which we originate. 

The marriage of our humanity and spirit is probably what the Buddha was going for. I mean, he seemed like a pretty awake dude. 

Buddhism and Hindu tantra might be a good path for those who think the whole let-go-of-desire thing, when taken as absolute, is a bit of a red herring.

It’s part of the path. But it’s not the whole. 

So maybe you just want to ease up on your own humanity a bit. That’s cool. I support this, baby! Maybe you want to be in the world but not of it. And I’m right with you. 

I don’t want to necessarily transcend my desires. But I do enjoy having a different relationship to them. I am always learning more about what I truly want — or tater, what wants to come through me, move me, be expressed and experienced. It seems to be a part of the adventure of being human.. 

Hey, I sure haven’t figured everything out. My desires led to my expressing this. And now...I want a cup of coffee. That’s all I know right now.