In Inner Alchemy

Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart
by Tara Bennett-Goleman

The Transformative Power of Mindfulness

Alchemists sought to transform lead into gold. In the same way, says Tara Bennett- Goleman, we all have the natural ability to turn our moments of confusion or emotional pain into insightful clarity.

Emotional Alchemy maps the mind and shows how, according to recent advances in cognitive therapy, most of what troubles us falls into ten basic emotional patterns, including fear of abandonment, social exclusion (the feeling that we don't belong), and vulnerability (the feeling that some catastrophe will occur). This remarkable book also teaches us how we can free ourselves of such patterns and replace them with empathy for ourselves and others through the simple practice of mindfulness, an awareness that lets us see things as they truly are without distortion or judgment. Emotional Alchemy provides an insightful explanation of how mindfulness can change not only our lives, but the very structure of our brains, giving us the freedom to be more creative and alive.

Here is a beautifully rendered work full of Buddhist wisdom and stories of how people have used mindfulness to conquer their self-defeating habits. The result is a whole new way of approaching our relationships, work, and internal lives.

From the window of my London hotel room Big Ben displays itself, a prominent, elegant presence amid the vista of river, billowing clouds, and spreading jumble of skyline. Big Ben has a grandeur as a piece of architecture, but I find my eye drawn more to the broad, open expanse of sky and river. The panorama above and below Big Ben's rounded bluntness includes a resplendence of steeples and bridges that occupy the central view from my window. I notice how my mind, at first glance, takes in the spaciousness of the cloud-filled sky and the soothing expanse of the river below like a regal oil painting by some turn-of-the-century landscape artist, or like a postcard-perfect snapshot. But as I gaze more carefully, with a sustained attention, I notice that the still snapshot-like rendering of this scene dissolves into a whirl of constant motion, a continuing series of tiny movements that add up to a vastly altered picture. There are tiny successive changes in the shape of clouds as they glide across the sky, sometimes opening up patches of sky through which rays of sunlight spill along the landscape, illuminating shadows into patches of light. There's the translucent shine of buildings and roads and bright red buses as they momentarily bathe in the glow. The scene before me shimmers with kinetic energy. And so it is with our inner landscapes. This shift in my perception mirrors how the mind works: the tendency to assume it has got the whole picture on first glance, to rush on without a closer look, and the sometimes startling fact that if one continues to look more carefully, there is always more to be discovered beyond those initial assumptions. Too often we take our first impressions, the conclusions from a first hasty glance, as the lasting truth of the moment. But if we keep looking and noticing, we become aware of greater detail and nuance, of changes and second thoughts, and much more. We can see things more as they actually are, rather than as they appear to be. We can bring a more precise understanding to the moment.

If we sustain our gaze within, sometimes our probe may detect pain behind the masks we wear. But if we continue to look, we can see how the patterns of pain hold that very mask in place, and as we investigate further we see even these patterns shift and rearrange themselves. We see how our reactions to our emotions can keep us at a distance from ourselves. And if we sustain our focus, allowing ourselves to open more honestly, our awareness penetrates further, unraveling and dissolving, peeling away the layers as we look still further. We begin to connect with more genuine parts of ourselves, at first in glimpses. Then, as we sustain our gaze, we connect with a source that breathes awareness into every layer of our being.

This book is about seeing ourselves as we genuinely are, not as we seem on first glance as viewed through the filters of our habitual assumptions and emotional patterns. We will explore how through the practice of mindfulness—a method for training the mind to expand the scope of awareness while refining its precision—we can reach beyond the limiting ways we see ourselves. We will see how to disengage from the emotional habits that undermine our lives and our relationships. We will discover how a precise mindfulness can investigate these emotional habits, bringing an insightful clarity to distinguish between the seeming and the actual.

The Power of Mindfulness I've seen the power of this distinction in the lives of my clients. One client found herself obsessed by self-recrimination for not having done something well enough. Thought highly successful in her career, she was her biggest critic. She told me, for example, "Last week I had to give a very important presentation-lots of people were going to be there whose opinions really matter to me. So I prepared more than usual and thought I had done a pretty good job. Afterward, several people complimented me. But one person said, 'You did a terrific job. It could have been a little shorter, though.' That was it. For the last several days that's all I can think about- how I went on too long. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about it."

This was no isolated event. The feeling that she never did things quite well enough haunted her-in her work, in her marriage, in caring for her children, even in her cooking. It was constant preoccupation, one that marred her closest relationships and made the smallest challenge an occasion for self-doubt or self-criticism.

A more systematic investigation led her to realize that at the root of this preoccupation was a hidden emotional pattern, the deep conviction that no matter how well she did something, it would never be quite up to her own impossibly high standards. This mistaken conviction distorted her perceptions, so she overlooked the evidence of how well she actually did accomplish things. And it let her to drive herself far too hard, so that she cheated herself of time for life's meaningful pleasures. Mindfulness helps us to identify such hidden emotional patterns, bringing them into the light of awareness so that we can begin to free ourselves from their hold.

Once couple had fights that threatened their relationship. A mutual mindful awareness allowed them to detect the hidden patterns that caused them to have essentially the same argument over and over. Whenever she started to feel insecure about his affection for her, she would become needy. He would feel that she was controlling him and withdraw in anger. The result; a stormy fight. By looking closely at what had happened after they both calmed down, they were able to see how his angry withdrawal and her anxious clinging were both emotional reactions to an underlying symbolic reality.

Their constant battles, on closer investigation, had little to do with the situation at hand, and much to do with the symbolic meanings of what had happened: his fear of being controlled and her oversensitivity to signs of rejection because of a deep feeling that she was being emotionally deprived. Learning to identify these habitual emotional reactions as they began to take hold allowed the couple to avoid fights and to communicate more skillfully.

A dedicated mediator who had tried to relieve the distress of her lifelong feelings of disconnection by going on long retreats found herself obsessing even more about these very feelings while meditating at a retreat center. As she put it, "Your madness follows you on you spiritual path." But learning how to see these seemingly formidable emotional reactions as transparent and temporary allowed her to use them as fuel for her practice, deepening her compassion for herself as well as for others.

This transformation beings with refocusing the lenses of your conditioning to see things more clearly, as they actually are. You might wonder, Who am I, if I am not my usual pattern of assumptions and self-definitions? This question can be asked from both a psychological and spiritual perspective-a process of inner discovery that hope this book will inspire.

From the Hardcover edition.

© 2001 by Tara Bennett-Goleman. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

M.A., a psychotherapist and teacher, has been offering workshops on the synthesis of Buddhism and psychotherapy for close to ten years with her husband, Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. She lives in Massachusetts.