Years ago, as I walked down a Brooklyn street, I spotted what has become one of my favorite sights anywhere in the world: discards from a stranger’s apartment.

It begins as a blurry lump of potential and hope whose offerings for a better life become clearer the closer I get.

When I spot random freebies on the street, I run to that pile as if it were my life’s calling, my soul’s purpose. As if someone else might get there first and claim the very thing meant only for me.

There is no high equal to scouring through the treasured gems of someone else’s abandoned past choices.

Underneath the fast fashion and Nas CDs in this particular pile was the pale green body of an unsullied book entitled Already Free by Bruce Tift.

I almost left it behind, but on a whim, I grabbed it. I am so grateful to my past self for this impulsive choice because this book would ultimately change my life forever.

A Western psychologist and longtime practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism based in Boulder, Colorado, Tift studied with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Lama who taught Buddhism to lay people in the United States.

Already Free explores how using these two opposing ideologies and practices—Western psychology and Buddhism—can help people who feel stuck, who keep repeating destructive patterns, who have trouble maintaining successful relationships, who feel disengaged, uninspired, or simply want a more satisfying life.

Many people believe that the freedom they seek lies somewhere in the future, outside of themselves, only to be felt once their suffering has been relieved.

But the premise of Tift’s book is that freedom is here, now, all around us, all the time.

This idea that we spend our lives trying to get somewhere and become something we already are was very appealing. I mean, talk about cutting the line! BRING ME TO THE FRONT, BRUCE!

But first, a bit about Western psychology and Buddhism.

Both provide freedom from suffering. Yet, both are predicated on divergent ideologies and take radically different approaches to arrive at the same place.

Westerners believe we are autonomous individuals and that each of us is a separate essence and identity; Buddhists believe the idea of a separate self is an illusion.

They believe in “Not-self” or “Anatta.”

No-self means, despite often feeling like we are an “I,” there is no permanent “I” carrying us through each moment or unchanging center-self that contains our conscious experience.

There is no tangible thing in any of us that makes us “me.” When and if we lose the sense that we are an “I,” our experience of the world becomes more faithful to what “actually is.”

Traditional Western therapy, or as Tift refers to it in his book, the “developmental view,” takes as a given that we are all separate and individual selves and that in order to be free from our suffering, we must first improve our life circumstances, work through all our issues from childhood, and grow ourselves up.

People go to therapy because they don’t feel free.

There is some sense that they are not whole.

People enter therapy believing they’re problematic and need improvement, solving, or repair.

The therapist works with the client to gain that freedom. With this process comes an implicit agreement between therapist and client that the client is imprisoned, either by neuroses or life circumstances, and that once they have resolved their issues in therapy, only then can they experience the freedom they desire.

But Buddhism, which Tift calls the “Fruitional view,” doesn’t believe in an individual self, so the idea that people can be “solved” is anathema. Therefore it is unnecessary to wait for something to happen or work toward some internal resolve before we can fully live our lives.

The Buddhists accept that there is no possibility of existing entirely free from suffering. They believe that freedom is the fullness of experiencing our humanity and that going toward our pain to discover that our confusion and despair have no essential nature will show us that we are already where we want to be.

Through time and experience, Tift realized that these two disparate views can co-exist; it just takes a shift in perspective.

Pain is a permanent part of life; instead of waiting for some future enlightenment or past wounds to heal in order to be fully present and available to life, we can emulate the Buddhists and feel our pain and still be free.

Freedom lies in how we relate to our experience of pain.

While it is true that the past has shaped our present selves and that recounting our childhood can dredge up painful feelings, the pain itself is not a problem. We just think it is because it doesn’t feel good.

In other words, the relationship we have at the moment with something that happened in our past is where our freedom lies. It is not the circumstances that keep us stuck but how we relate to our past circumstances.

We are always inside the present moment.

And because we are always inside the present moment, the state of mind we’re seeking is already here, regardless of our circumstances.

To contextualize this concept, we need to return to the past. Many of us believe that the experiences we have as children—mostly in our family of origin—profoundly affect us for the rest of our lives.

When we were kids, difficult circumstances often left us feeling like our survival was at stake. To stay alive, we created signature strategies and behavioral adaptations that helped us cope with threats that gave rise to feelings that seemed too big to handle.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Say a 7-year-old child, let’s call her Ida Fictional Character, found profound meaning in art and drawing and spent an entire week working on a self-portrait that she couldn’t wait to show her mother.

But when Ida Fictional Character proudly revealed the portrait she’d worked so hard on, her mother chastised her for wasting time drawing when she could have been doing something more helpful, like folding the laundry.

To Ida, this reaction felt not just a rebuke to her artwork but to her entire soul, which felt unsurvivable.

If Ida’s mom rejected her soul, then, as logic would follow, she wouldn’t care whether her daughter lived or died.

This idea was so emotionally devastating to Ida that she became overwhelmed by panic and anxiety.

She scrambled to neatly fold the laundry, committing herself right there to doing anything that would prevent feeling the overwhelming dread of her mother’s rejection, a sensation she was convinced would snuff her out of existence if she had to feel it again.

And as a result, she stopped drawing, divorcing herself entirely from art, instead becoming a person who always accommodates and placates, eager to prove her indispensability (after all, you don’t abandon what you’ve come to rely upon).

It worked!

Her mother was pleased to see this new side of Ida, making her feel valuable—how she’d wanted her mother to react when she showed her artwork.

Ida’s new strategy ameliorated the pain elicited by her mother’s dismissal of her drawing. And so Ida comes to rely on people-pleasing as her sure-fire strategy for keeping rejection at bay.

What she’s too young to realize is that by closing off the artist inside her, she is sacrificing the most authentic part of herself. What’s worse: what she has shut down now feels dangerous and wrong because she believes her creativity makes her unlovable.

Ida rejects her heart’s true calling and promises never to visit or reveal that part of herself again.

In time, accommodation becomes how Ida engages with people, inadvertently shaping her entire personality around avoiding rejection.

Her maladaptive strategy to people-please follows her into adulthood, where she spends a decade in a no-growth, no-risk, no-reward position as the personal assistant to a cold and unwelcoming accountant, doing everything from tying his shoes to cleaning his office after hours—all tasks that do not risk exposing her to independent thought or creativity.

And her personal life is much the same, going from one unhealthy co-dependent relationship to another, often blaming her partner for the dynamic she sought out and helped to create, as she transfers her lifelong, albeit unconscious, feelings of being unworthy of love onto them.

For Ida to live the life she deserves, she does not need to work on what happened in the past. Instead, she needs to face the unconscious feelings running her life and see that she is operating from a manual she wrote herself when she was 7.

Therapist Bruce Tift does what many traditional therapists do—helps his clients understand that the patterns they are experiencing now are not actually about their current relationships or life circumstances.

The strategies we employ in our adult relationships are the ones we concocted as children in our best effort to protect ourselves from deep emotional pain.

The behavior that Ida adopted as a child met her needs and protected her—and then they became a part of her personality. She was unable to identify that she had internalized her mother’s unconscious issues, and it was those that influenced Ida’s survival strategy.

In other words, what Ida needed to survive then is not at all what she needs to survive now, yet, she continues to operate on this outdated model.

In this way, Ida Fictional Character, like so many of us, lives as if the past were the present. We have erected our strategies as a measure of protection from unbearable childhood hurt.

Our fear of confronting the dread, anxiety, and panic of our youth means that we have a real investment in maintaining these strategies; even as we yearn to resolve our long-standing issues, we are often unaware of the paradox in which we find ourselves.

It’s not until we investigate—in a very immediate, embodied way—whether these protective strategies are still required that we can hope to resolve them. And this is where the fruitional view comes into play because in order to change our patterns, we have to face the feelings we have spent our lives avoiding.

Tift helps his clients do this through “embodied immediacy.”

There is no chance to feel free when we have exiled a part of ourselves. If we want to be a whole, integrated, congruent, and undivided human being, then we need to have the capacity to sit with our unwanted and intense feeling-experiences.

The longer we put this off, the deeper our childhood belief becomes etched into the sense that our scary feelings will kill us.

We learn, acquire knowledge, and develop emotional calluses, enabling us to handle whatever experiences come our way and build a genuine sense of confidence.

Tift believes the best way to start changing our patterns is to bring awareness to our vulnerable feelings. This is a scary process, so we can and should reassure ourselves that we are safe.

We can take little risks and go toward the anxious feelings and then return to safety, finding solace in the knowledge that this practice is always available.

But there's one thing Tift said that blew my mind.

For those who do not know my backstory: I grew up with a panic disorder that went undiagnosed until I was 25. I have zero memories of life free from some accompanying sense of panic, terror, and dread.

The feelings of all-encompassing panic and sheer terror I experienced inside my small body as a child arose simply at the THOUGHT of having to leave my mother.

When I was 4, 5, or 6 years old, the thought alone provoked in me a sensation of imminent death that was so convincing I would sit frozen on my twin bed so as not to disturb my young little body from accidentally triggering something that might inadvertently release that specific internal vibrational doom that signaled I was about to be dragged by my ankles and discarded into a black tar pit of extinction.

Eighty percent of my childhood was organized around avoiding feeling that level of panic.

I worked as hard as possible to be with my mother, and if I had to leave, I almost always found my way back to her before the agreed-upon time to return home. These feelings have been with me for nearly my entire life. I can feel them now just writing this.

They’re still scary, and I know they’re still scary because I allow myself to feel them, knowing that feelings won’t kill me. And I can do this, in part because of this book (and 23 years in therapy).

And that particular bit of Tift’s wisdom made me feel so much safer from my fears. They weren’t circling my body waiting to attack; they were already inside me, I already felt them, which is how I knew that the feeling was scary in the first place.

Because I’d already felt it and survived it as a child, it meant that feeling it now would not kill me, that I would survive it because I already have.

Doesn’t this make it SO MUCH LESS DAUNTING to take a step forward and feel your feelings?

Tift believes (as I do) that this is the only way through.

While Western psychology seeks to repeatedly reinvestigate our childhood issues and the dynamics that gave rise to our present-day problems and then resolve them, Tift prefers to “clarify the reenactment and then investigate how we might be invested in maintaining it.”

We must experience the feelings we fear feeling, but first, we ease into it.

We go toward our scary feelings to discover that the experience of feeling them does not harm us and that it isn’t necessary to continue unconsciously organizing our lives around avoiding them.

The problem isn’t feeling the feelings but rather our interpretation of what the feelings mean.

When Ida Fictional Character experienced rejection, she believed she had to do everything and anything she could to appease her mother so she wouldn’t suffer like that again.

The feelings weren’t the problem; it was her interpretation and organization around not feeling the problematic feeling.

When we wall off untoward feelings, we send ourselves the message that our scary emotions are separate from us, that we have no control over them, and they have the power to harm us; we have disassembled them from our bodies.

And this willful disconnection often leads us to feel like something is missing in our lives, but what’s missing is us—that part of us that we’re afraid to feel. Embodied awareness helps close that gap.

So, how do we do this? How do we sit with the terrible discomfort we fear will devour and destroy us? Tift teaches his students and clients a practice called “embodied immediacy.” This is the practice of feeling our scary emotions.

First, we find a place we feel safe. Then, we find a time when we will not be distracted. Sit somewhere comfortable. Take a few deep breaths. Try to bring your attention to the present moment. If you can, consider a core vulnerability in your life—something that you’ve developed strategies around not feeling.

We can keep ourselves company as we go toward our more vulnerable feelings, reassuring ourselves that we are safe, and we can return to the room where we feel safe. We can take little risks like this: Going forward and then retreating.

When we are ready, we try to experience being in a relationship with our fear. How is it to hold that fear in our awareness? What do we feel in our bodies? Does it feel familiar? We can try to ignore the fear and feel what that’s like. What do we notice? We have no agenda. We are not here to resolve anything. We are simply sitting in awareness of what is already true.

We can notice where in our body we feel a sensation. Our esophagus, belly, or chest? What does it feel like? Is it tight, fluttering, or vibrating? Don’t apply stories to the sensation; just allow it to exist.

Ask if the feeling is harming you. Ask if the feeling is an accurate barometer that danger is imminent.

Ask if the feeling is going to kill you.

No, the feeling is not going to kill you.

Embodied Immediacy is a type of exposure therapy, and as we practice the experience of feeling our scary emotions, we may notice that the emotional charge has started to lessen.

As we begin to see first-hand that our feelings won’t kill us, we can slowly untether ourselves from unconsciously organizing our lives around avoiding this experience.

When we find ourselves being emotionally explosive, having overly strong feelings of jealousy or resentment, and ruminating endlessly, this is a call to practice asking ourselves what we feel that we don’t want to feel.

If we feel too overwhelmed by this, we can give ourselves permission to ignore the feelings of fear and return to it later, knowing that we felt it before and it did not harm us.

The more we practice feeling our sensations without analyzing or articulating them, the more we’ll see there is no real problem in feeling what we feel.

We’ll see that our feelings are not problems to be solved or avoided, and the better equipped we’ll be to handle whatever situation may give rise to these sensations in the future, without allowing our fear to hold us back from living fully, as Ida Fictional Character did.

The ebb and flow of these sensations are what it feels like to be alive.

The more we practice this, the more we’ll realize that we’re not at odds with ourselves; we are growing more open and available and present to be who we truly are and to feel the freedom that is already there.

I hope this book offers you something as fundamental and rich as it did for me.

Did this piece offer you anything you hadn’t thought of before? Let me know in the comments.

Until next week, I will remain...