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Guided Meditation: Stabilizing; Compassion; Dharmette: Personality Disorder at the Individual and National Level - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 24, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Stabilizing; Compassion

Welcome. It is good to be with you. It is Wednesday, and I am happy to practice. It is a good time to practice.

Settle into your posture. Set yourself up as best you can—meaning comfortable, maybe even cozy, and alert.

For some part of our mind, it can feel neglectful to stop clinging or to stop worrying, as if it is our vigilance that keeps us safe. It might feel avoidant to relax into tranquility. But our agitation, vigilance, and clinging do less for our lives than we imagine. So, give yourself permission to relax.

Just let your breathing fill out your body. Sense your breath in the back of your body. It often feels like life is only in front of us, but life is everywhere. So, we breathe and sense the sensations of breathing in the back of our body.

Breathe some life into these zones of numbness—the areas of your body habitually neglected or forgotten. I am so familiar with my chest, but much less so with my belly. Unify your body with the breathing, breathing into the zones of flatness or numbness.

We breathe into the cold places, but also the hot places—the intensities and the swirls of energy or hyperarousal. It is the gentle, soothing quality of breathing as it unifies our body. Our body feels suspended in awareness.

Perhaps with our bodies suspended in awareness, it may feel skillful to turn the mind to compassion, beginning with a gentle tending to your own suffering. Just here, in this moment, wherever there is sorrow or pain, wherever there is grief, rage, or fear—tend lovingly to it.

In the gesture of compassion, we are becoming unintimidated by our pain. Of course it hurts; maybe it hurts a lot. Compassion is here. You are infusing that struggle and unease with this particular species of love: the love that tends and heals heartache.

I care about my pain. You might use words: "May I be free from suffering and my heart be at ease¹. May I be released from torment." We each find the words and images in their particularity that speak to our own heart, that remind us of the vastness of compassion that ties our suffering to all other suffering, meeting it all with love.

Compassion does not need to make pain go away; it is a very patient love in the face of suffering. Continually, compassion says, "I am here. I may not be able to do everything, but I am here." And sometimes, we find ourselves abiding in a kind of love.

Dharmette: Personality Disorder at the Individual and National Level

It is good to sit with you. I don’t say that just to put a nice Dharma bow on it; I really am sitting too, not just faking it. [Laughter] I appreciate being together this evening.

I was speaking recently with someone who is struggling with a personality disorder—a psychiatric designation I will say something about. I had the sense that the layers of their suffering were very thick. Not to be uncompassionate, but the sense of wrong view felt so visceral and multi-layered. It made me reflect on how the fruit of Dharma practice is often the diametric opposite of a personality disorder.

This condition is characterized by severe instability in emotion, identity, interpersonal relationships, and behavioral dysregulation. Borderline personality disorder—for which Marsha Linehan² developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a kind of mindfulness and Zen-based treatment—and narcissistic personality disorder are examples. Borderline personality affects roughly ten percent of psychiatric outpatients. The diagnosis is known to generate a lot of agony and chaos for the individual, and often a lot of collateral damage for others in their life.

It strikes me that, in some sense, personality pathology is almost like the logical conclusion of egoic life—egoic life taken to its destructive extreme. It is a kind of folly and tragedy of egoic life. That egoic fragility, which is almost infinite, is a cause of problems, but it is also an attempt to solve great problems. The fragility is not merely a problem, but a "bad solution." The rigid sense of self—and we are all somewhere on that spectrum—is an attempt to shore up our pain and manage it in some way.

In the clinical literature, personality disorders are sometimes characterized as a "disorder of the self." We know from Dharma practice that a hallmark of sakkāya-diṭṭhi³ (self-view) is its rigidity. "This is who I am. This is what's right. This is how we do things. This is what I believe. This is what makes me valuable." In personality disorders, patients persevere in rigid strategies that don't work. We have things that are important to us and we have to find ways of pursuing them, but one strategy is never enough. We have to be flexible, and our fluidity is dependent on some fluidity in the sense of self. If all we can ever do is maintain fidelity to a story of self, we can't be flexible. Part of our fluid, flexible coping means that we have to be fluid and flexible in relation to ourselves.

A hallmark of sakkāya-diṭṭhi is defensiveness. When we claim the territory of "self," we have a deeply emotionally charged connection to some aspect of self-view that guarantees defensiveness. The world of ego becomes split into groups of enemies and "VIPs." All information coming in goes into either the "pros of me" or the "cons of me" column.

Another hallmark of self-view is comparison and envy. So much of the way the self gets built up is through comparison, and comparison guarantees some measure of envy. We come to see that the ego tolerates no goodness outside itself. There is no muditā⁴ (sympathetic joy) in egoic processes. The ego must either align and acquire that goodness or vilify those who represent that goodness.

A hallmark of self-view is the capacity for cruelty. Ego is life, and so if you have to fight, you fight. Cruelty is an option that is very much on the table.

I am not in the clinical world anymore, but one of the hallmarks of personality pathology is how easily it gets under the clinician’s skin, into your bloodstream. Clinically, you enter a world deranged by the kilesas⁵—the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion. In fact, one of the diagnostic clues that a personality disorder is present is when the clinician exits the consulting room and has no idea what happened. There is often a kind of vicious counter-transference⁶—the experience of the clinician in relation to the patient can be very destructive. The symptoms and behaviors of personality disorder are often like heat-seeking missiles aimed precisely at the soft spots in one's own consciousness, the pain points in one’s own heart. Almost as if by magic, these behaviors infuse the mind of the clinician, who is then drawn into a disordered world of experience.

It is difficult to stay clear. It is difficult to remember the goodness of the patient, to remember one's own goodness. It is difficult to remember that hatred does not cease through hatred, but through non-hatred. It is difficult to remember that this person desperately needs help and compassion.

Why am I talking about this? [Laughter] That may be a frequent question you have. I am talking about this because it strikes me that personality disorder symptoms, while they constellate at the individual level, also constellate at the national and societal level. This country—and I know we have people from Switzerland and other countries here—but in the US, with its electoral politics, a decade of Donald Trump, and the social media environment, all of this is unfolding as a kind of personality disorder manifested at the national level. Greed, hatred, and delusion have been disguised, dignified, and have thoroughly colonized national consciousness. Good-hearted people everywhere are vulnerable to these symptoms, getting drawn into a vicious counter-transference.

If it feels like you are fighting for your moral sanity, it is because, a little bit, you are. I am trying to find balance to stay with my commitments—none of what I am saying is compatible with political quietism—but I am trying to find a pathway between frenzy and nihilism⁷. I am trying, in other words, to protect my love.

One stays morally sane only through some discipline, some softening, and through the Buddhist counsel: a mind not clinging to anything. One stays sane through action—planting wholesome seeds, even if it feels negligible. One stays sane through spiritual friendship, kalyāṇa-mittatā⁸. That is what we are doing here. And one stays sane through a very long view on justice and love.

I offer this for your consideration. May we be well. I will see you next week.