The Inner Work Fiction : Why the Gaze Trains Outward

What we can't face looks for us anyways. — John Trudell

High achievers typically build their lives around financial, athletic and relationship success. They are a rare breed, and often through a combination of grit, intelligence and timing they build amazing things in the world.

And often, not always, they hit a moment in their thirties, forties or even early fifties when an internal knowing starts to grow. Something is just a bit off, or a lot off, and it is not entirely clear what to do about it.

In many cases, and it may very well just be a neurophysiological absolute with many people, the internal voice that has been a constant companion all along becomes increasingly harder to deal with through exercise, wins and sessions with coaches.

We start to really notice that a familiar voice, or chorus of voices, is always hanging out, auditing each decision before the decision gets made, doubting moves, replaying each conversation after it is done. The voice arrives in the car, the shower, later in the evening, often with a fury immediately after waking. To say this internal voice can be unkind is an understatement. The traditions call the voice The Watcher.

Modern culture speaks about the voice a lot too, and almost always comes up with the same answer. Inner work has been neglected. Achievement was built on ground left untended, and now the way forward needs to run through the interior world the achiever has been avoiding.

Thousands of books, teachers and communities have constellated around an ever expanding industry built on the proposition that what ails the high achiever is unfinished business living in the achiever's 'inner world.'

The answer is partly true and largely backwards. The pull to turn inward and resolve what hurts is one of the oldest and most legitimate instincts a person can follow, and it deserves to be honored as such. The trouble is that the turn inward, when made the central practice of a life, ends up feeding the very thing it set out to release.

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Logic

The inner work philosophy rests on a particular story about the person, and the story has held the Western imagination for more than a century. We carry a hidden inner world, the story tells us, and the hidden world can be brought to light through sustained examination, emotional work and spiritual experience.

The picture holds at the level of intuition and falls apart at the level of mechanism. A nervous system does not contain hidden chambers waiting for inspection. A nervous system reads the world and reports back what it finds. The interior life we have been taught to treat as a private chamber is in fact the report of an outward-facing instrument. The source of what we feel and notice and replay lives in the world outside us, in the body's reading of that world.

Inner work, as it is commonly practiced, treats the report as if the report were the source. Attention pours into the report, the report grows under attention, because reports always grow under attention. The examination produces more material to examine. The deeper the examiner travels into the material, the further from the source the examiner travels.

As Nietzsche warned, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.

. . . . 

A Historical Confusion

The picture of the interior did not arrive from nowhere. Two men set this story into the foundations of Western thought more than a century ago, and the story has held ever since.

Freud practiced medicine in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, trained in neurology, committed to the proposition that the human mind could be understood as natural science rather than as the province of priests and mystics.

Women came to his practice who had been declared hysterical by other doctors. Freud listened to these women where the other doctors had not, and listened long enough to recognize what they were telling him. Fathers and uncles and older brothers had sexually assaulted them, most of them in childhood, and the assaults were happening at a scale that pointed at something running through the bourgeois Viennese family as an institution.

Freud wrote up the findings in 1896 and presented them to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in a paper titled The Aetiology of Hysteria. He believed he was bringing his profession a discovery of the first order. He believed the natural-scientific origin of hysteria had been found at last, and that medicine would now know how to address it.

The colleagues received him with ice. Krafft-Ebing, who chaired the session, called the paper a scientific fairy tale. The hall emptied of the conversation Freud had expected, no invitations followed and the referrals dried up.

Within a few years Freud abandoned the seduction theory and replaced it with an account in which the women had not been assaulted but had fantasized about being assaulted, and the fantasy expressed an unconscious desire arising from inside the patient herself. The wound moved out of the social world into the unconscious.

Jung extended the inner world / unconscious project across a wider terrain. He read the Gospels, Gnostic texts, alchemical writings, I Ching, the cosmologies of peoples who had survived five centuries of colonization, and into each of these traditions he placed the same interior drama he had inherited from Vienna.

The crucifixion became a passage of individuation. The kingdom of heaven became a Self with a capital letter. A teacher who walked into an occupied territory under imperial military rule and named the apparatus that was eating his people became a private myth playing out inside the modern reader. The exterior world of empire and opposition was no longer a crucial character in the text, what really mattered was the interior self unfolding.

These two moves, three decades apart, set the pattern that still governs how we are taught to understand our suffering. The wound sits inside and the work does too. In this mathematics, the world recedes from view, and the interior fills the space the world has left behind

. . . . 

Science

A century after Freud's retraction, researchers began arriving at a different finding, and they arrived by a wide variety of routes. Where they arrived would have been quite familiar to the traditions Jung had once examined.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema held the chair of psychology at Yale until her death in 2013. She spent three decades studying what happens to people who turn attention inward and keep it there. She gave the practice a name. She called it rumination.

She measured what rumination produced across thousands of subjects in many populations, and the findings ran in one direction. Depression, anxiety, grief that did not resolve, problem-solving capacity that degraded under the pressure of sustained self-examination. The findings replicated and continue to replicate. Rumination is the laboratory form of inner work, and rumination makes people worse.

Judson Brewer at Yale and now at Brown University traced the same finding into the brain itself. Brewer used functional imaging to watch what happens when experienced meditators meditate, and the imaging showed a clear pattern.

A network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network, which lights up during rumination about the self, the self's story and the self's troubles, goes quiet in practitioners who have trained their attention outward for many years. Tibetan practitioners went quiet in those scans, the Theravadans and Zen practitioners as well. 

And clearly one may respond with a little surprise, After all, I thought these practices were all about dissolving the self.  It turns out, sustained contemplative practice, done in the old way, operate differently from what we may think. A beginner sits with closed eyes and assumes the work is happening inside. The teacher allows the assumption because the assumption is part of the early shape of the practice.

In time, the  practitioner who has stayed with the practice arrives at a certain kind of clarity. The world comes into focus. The bird outside the window, the texture of the floor under the knees, the quality of the light through the room, all of it grows more vivid, more present, and available than the practitioner had ever known. Yet this is still very much a beginner state and is most often presented as the destination. 

The work then requires leaving the relative purity of that kind of peaceful calm in order to enter into the turbulent waters of a world filled with violence, war, pain, all sorts of power games and predations. Chögyam Trungpa closes “Journey Without Goal” on exactly this recognition. The world is workable, he writes. Training  gives the practitioner a relationship to reality. Crazy wisdom is the name he gives to the mature practitioner's capacity to act inside what is actually there with conviction and bluntness, free of the confusion that ordinarily clouds perception and action. 

Trauma research arrived at the same conclusion from another direction altogether. Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University, Stephen Porges at Indiana and the University of North Carolina, Pat Ogden through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, and Peter Levine through Somatic Experiencing International spent four decades watching what actually heals traumatized people.

Talking did not heal them, and excavating the interior did not heal them. The interventions that worked were movement, sensation, contact, engagement with the actual world. The body learned to read its surroundings again and as a consequence the trauma injury loosened its hold.

Robert Schleip at Ulm and the Technical University of Munich, and Carla Stecco at the University of Padova in Italy, opened the tissue and looked at what was actually there. They found that the connective network running through every muscle and organ, the fascia, is laced with sensors that read pressure, position, vibration, and the body's relationship to gravity.

The body perceives outward through this network all the time, whether the mind is paying attention or not. Health is the body reading the world accurately, organizing itself around what it finds there.

What we learn, from the deeper training traditions and modern science, is that the body was built to read the world. Health follows when the reading is accurate. Sickness gathers when the gaze turns inward and refuses to come back out.

Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever — every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we're depriving the political world of something.

— James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse

 . . . 

Reciprocity

The Hebrew philosophical tradition has been working on the puzzle of the self and the other for a very long time, and two thinkers in the twentieth century took the work as far as it has been taken in modern times.

Martin Buber, writing in I and Thou in 1923, named two fundamental modes of relating to the world. The first he called I-It, the mode in which the other appears as object, function, resource, something to be measured and managed and moved around. The second he called I-Thou, the mode in which the other arrives as whole presence, irreducible to use, addressing me as fully as I might address the other. Both modes are necessary for life, and Buber was clear about this, while the danger comes when the first mode takes over a life entirely and the second mode disappears from view.

Emmanuel Levinas expanded the structure further into ethical philosophy a generation later. His central claim was that the face of the other carries an infinite demand on me, prior to all calculation and prior to all reciprocity in the transactional sense, and the face addresses me before I have decided whether I want to be addressed. 

The self for Levinas is not a contained interior that then encounters others. We come into vitality and into life when we are addressed by the other. In that moment where I am called to attention, I become responsible. I can now respond coherently to the world around me. 

The world becomes workable when I am called into being by the face of the other. 

The high achiever lives in a world that demands the I-It mode at industrial scale. Companies, markets and schedules require it, and the achievement itself depends on the capacity to treat the world as a system of resources, opportunities, and obstacles to be navigated. The achiever becomes very good at this mode of relating, which is part of what produces the achievement, while the very capacity that builds the achievement starves the achiever of the other mode, the meeting that feeds the self.

The Watcher voice grows loud in exactly this depleted condition. The voice is not the sound of unfinished inner work. The voice is the sound of a self that has been starved of the I-Thou meeting, the face that addresses, the encounter that constitutes the self by calling forth response. Turning inward to address the voice deepens the very deprivation that produced the voice in the first place, because the interior cannot supply what only the outward meeting can give.

Paradoxically the depletion stays invisible, and it stays invisible for a particular reason. A person can point to all the giving — the companies built, the children raised, the trades learned, the responsibilities carried — and assume that the giving constitutes a full life, until finally the Watcher becomes too loud to ignore.

Generosity in the I-It mode builds the world we live in. It does not feed the one who is doing the giving. The mode that feeds the giver requires being met, addressed, received by another being who is also fully present, which requires training enough to stay reachable and seen.

The inner-work apparatus arrives at this moment of depletion with exactly the wrong intervention. Go further inward, the apparatus says, examine the interior, work with the contents of the self and sit with what arises in the chamber of self-examination. Too often, the achiever ends up doing to the interior what the world has been requiring at industrial scale, treating everything, including the self, as a system of objects to be navigated, mapped, processed, and optimized.

The cure becomes the disease. The depletion deepens because the very pattern that has been crowding out the meeting is now turned on the interior itself, and the practitioner is worn further by the operation that was supposed to restore.

. . . . 

On the Other Side

The world the outward gaze meets is hard, at times brutally hard, and entering into it fully requires more than most people are ever asked to give. Since the seventies when the inner work paradigm first took root, the difficulty has only intensified, by orders of magnitude.

A practitioner could not ask for a better training ground. The world as it now stands challenges, overwhelms, demands every increment of capacity a body can develop. The world is the dojo. The world has always been the dojo, and the conditions of the present have only sharpened the demands life makes on those who enter it.

In this context, risk runs high. A practitioner who faces what the world actually contains may dissolve into fear, dissociate, and collapse back into the inner-work apparatus this essay has been describing.

Something else can also happen. A capacity arrives to face up to what is actually there. The world reveals itself as both terrible and luminous, unforgiving and incredible, and the practitioner finds inside the maelstrom the courage to stay with all of it.

A great accomplishment arrives through this kind of training. The practitioner becomes difficult to move because awareness has grown stable. True north steadies, navigation through peril becomes possible because the instrument of navigation can finally be trusted. Bluntness and fearlessness arrive together with the capacity to save what calls for saving and to destroy what calls for destruction.

Magic arrives with wonder. The world reveals itself as stranger and more alive than we ever suspected.