Beavers are pests. They dam up streams, making it hard for canoes to paddle up and downstream. They build dams near culverts and flood roads. We need to relocate them or even get rid of them. This is a common sentiment among many Americans, and our hatred of beavers almost drove them to extinction in the US.
However, naturalists have realized that beavers created much of the important wetlands in the United States, and many forms of wildlife benefit from the wetlands that beaver dams create. Furthermore, these wetlands recharge aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches, they filter out sediment and pollutants and help reduce flooding after heavy rains. Many naturalists argue that many of our current problems with flooding and pollution are exacerbated by our seeing beavers as pests rather than understanding their function in the ecosystem.
I want to use beavers as a metaphor: we think about parts of ourselves that we don’t like in much the same way that our society thinks about beavers, and like society, we pay a price for this attitude.
Mindfulness and “I’m not good enough”
I struggled for years with a part that told me I was never good enough. No matter how hard I worked as a teacher, no matter how much praise I got, no matter how many papers I published, it was never enough. After taking up Buddhist meditation in 1979, I tried to meditate with these parts, with some success.
I frequently used the RAIN practice I described in an earlier blog. I would sometimes modify the standard loving kindness phrases to “May all my parts be happy, may all my parts be peaceful, may all my parts be free from suffering.” I once asked a meditation teacher what to do when I was not able to be curious and non-judgmental toward a recurring “negative” thought. His response, “You can only ‘work with’ those thoughts when you can be curious and compassionate toward them. If you can’t, that’s OK, but then go back to your breath.”
In 1989, Jack Kornfield wrote an article called “Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal” where he advocated for the value of therapy in conjunction with meditation practice. Kornfield was a monk for several years in Thailand and then became a psychologist and meditation teacher in the United States.
Internal Family Systems
While I have worked with therapists several times during my adult life, I had felt only limited value from that work. However, some years ago I heard about Internal Family Systems (IFS), which was developed by Richard Schwartz and which has amazing parallels to Buddhist psychology. Richard found many of his patients using language that many of us will recognize: “a part of me is still mad at him and a part of me wants to forgive him” or “a part of me really wants to go on this trip and a part of says it’s not the right time.” Richard realized that we all have a family of parts living inside us. He normalized the notion of multiplicity of mind, noting that at times some of these parts are in conflict with each other, i.e., we like some of these parts and don’t like others. However, they all have one goal in common: they want us to be happy. They just have different ideas about how to get there. Our parts try to help us stay “in control” to protect us from feeling hurt or rejected, often due to unresolved feelings from the past.
Working with an IFS therapist
About 10 years ago, I began to work with a therapist trained in IFS. During the therapy, we revisited memories from my childhood where I was either not praised by my father for doing well (e.g., 5 A’s and 1 A- on a report card) or yelled at for not doing things well enough (e.g., not repairing a model airplane perfectly).
I was amazed by the parallels between my therapy sessions and my meditation practice. When the ‘not good enough part’ came up, my therapist would ask me how I felt toward that part. If I said things like “I hate it” or “I wish it would go away,” he would ask if my feelings toward that part could soften. We would then spend time bringing curiosity and compassion to the fears that part held and to bring what Schwartz refers to as Self-led energy toward those parts.
A big breakthrough came near the end of a semester when the “I’m not good enough part” was micromanaging, making detailed schedules of how I would spend every minute of my time. My therapist asked me about other parts that could help me during this time. I had a part who said that after 40 years of teaching, I was skillful enough to intuit what I needed to do and could relax a bit.
During one session, the ‘not good enough’ part was able to see the negative consequences of my working 16+ hours every day and frequent irritation and outbursts of anger at home. It reluctantly agreed to a “power sharing” proposition with the intuitive part. And things shifted. While I was still busy, the last month of the semester had much more ease and less irritation than I had ever noticed, and that new attitude lasted beyond the semester.
Mindfulness and IFS
The meditation and the therapy proved to be complementary practices for me. Some of the commonalities between IFS and mindfulness practice include: bringing compassion and kindness to what we don’t like about ourselves, bringing curiosity instead of judgment toward those parts, not forcing parts to change, practicing patience, and a systems approach toward ourselves. I will talk more about systems in a future blog.
Revisiting beavers
We often treat those parts of ourselves that we don’t like the way our society thinks about beavers. In contract, both IFS and mindfulness view our unwanted parts more like how indigenous peoples view beavers: appreciating the gifts they bring and finding ways to live in harmony together.
Notes:
A delightful book on beavers is Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb.
Richard Schwartz and John Makransky, a leading Buddhist meditation teacher, recently led a workshop “Becoming Our Compassionate Self: Integrating Parts of Ourselves into the Process of Spiritual Awakening” in Cambridge, Ma where they talked about the parallels between IFS and Buddhist psychology. A videotape of that workshop is available online.
You can read Kornfield’s 1989 article online by Googling the title, and you can learn more about IFS at www.selfleadership.org