Buddha and the Borderline

by Kiera Van Gelder

  He asks if I understand the concept of karma and what happens when I harm others.

  I nod. I’ve studied this as a Buddhist, and DBT and CBT have reinforced this basic law of the universe: that every cause generates an effect, and harmful actions, even if they temporarily provide relief, always result in more pain.

  “So if you harm yourself, if you hate yourself, it’s the same as doing it to another. Self and other are the same; the karma is the same.”

  Late afternoon light begins to flood the room as I try to process all of this. Then it strikes me. “Rinpoche, is killing yourself the same as murdering someone else?”

  He doesn’t pause to think. “Yes.”

  “Even if it’s your choice?”

  He shakes his head. “If you understand that killing in any form results in great suffering, why would you choose to kill yourself? It’s like scratching an itch with a sword. Karmically speaking, there is no relief after death for those who kill, even those who kill themselves. They have to experience the consequences, as with every action, beneficial or harmful.”

  I show him my arms and say, “This is what I used to do to myself. I don’t do it anymore, but I find other ways to hurt myself. I don’t know how to get to bodhicitta. I’ve taken refuge. I try to do Chenrezig practice. I’m practicing transforming my mind by viewing people who harm me as my teachers. It’s that source of goodness and purity I can’t get to. Even though I’m living here, I still can’t find it.”

  Ontul Rinpoche leans toward me. “But you have. It’s always here. You’re learning now.”

  I’m about to ask him how to do that, and then I catch myself. It’s what he’s been teaching for the past two days, what all of this path is about.

  That night I don’t go to Matthew’s. I hole up in my room. Below me, rambunctious Buddhists sit in the kitchen, drinking chai and eating cookies. The Tibetan Lamas are on the floor above, doing whatever they do after a long day of teaching and trying to advise confused people like me—probably watching reality TV and laughing their asses off. I lie on my rug and breathe, and try to allow the intensity of the day to settle. I feel a little off-kilter, but realize that it’s more like a shift—more like a realization or the revision of a problematic belief I’ve harbored despite all of my recovery. In the back of my mind, somewhere to the left of where the little dark one hides, is the firefighter of last resort. She’s got a full bottle of pills hiding in her sock drawer, a package of razor blades in the bathroom, and a suicide plan up her sleeve, like a secret agent carrying a cyanide capsule in case the enemy captures her. I’ve still been holding on to killing myself as a legitimate option. And while it’s unthinkable that I would pour a bottle of pills down someone else’s throat or slice another person’s flesh with a razor blade, the relationship I have with myself allows this option to exist for me. In some ways, coming to terms with myself and working toward recovery has been like saying “I love you” to someone but keeping a loaded gun hidden in your back pocket, just in case that person pisses you off enough.

  The concept of karma has seemed so secondary to things like compassion and wisdom that I’ve paid little attention to it. But now that I do, I realize that, for someone who has been operating most of her life under the blindness of overwhelming emotions and impulses, it’s like being given a new set of eyes. When I first moved to the center, Lama Sonam gave me a little folded card with a picture of the Buddha. On one flap it reads:

  Do not commit any harmful action.

  Perfectly engage in virtue.

  Completely subdue your mind.

  This is the teaching of the Buddha.

  On the other flap is the refuge prayer, which he suggested I recite every day, morning and night. I haven’t exactly adhered to that schedule, but now I decide I will. So even though I live in a house filled with precious Tibetan manuscripts, paintings of enlightened beings, and consecrated statues, I sit down with my little card. I feel like a preschooler staring at the alphabet as I recite the prayer:

  In the Buddha, the Dharma, and Sangha most excellent,

  I take refuge until enlightenment is reached.

  By the merit of generosity and other good deeds,

  may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings.

  Then I hunker down in my bedroom and resist the urge to drive to Matthew’s. I decide to take another step, and join other members of my Sangha at the kitchen table. I explain what’s going on and say that it’s like being in the movie The Matrix: I’ve decided to take the red pill, the one that strips you of illusion, so you can never go back to the bliss of ignorance.

  My housemate Sophie asks, “Have you ever found that your ignorance was blissful?”

  28

  Mirror of True Nature

  As fall arrives, the Drikung Meditation Center is showered in bright maple leaves. Prayer flags flap in the wind. Besides my work at the office, I have nothing to do but be a Buddhist. I’ve quit all of my advocacy work, and Matthew dumped me as soon as his divorce was finalized. And even though that’s what I’d wanted for quite some time, I still spent two weeks crying nonstop. The devastation is the same as always, despite my awareness that this was both necessary and inevitable. I feel both bereft and liberated, lost and found—and this time it isn’t all about a guy. It’s been almost six years since I discovered I have BPD. A lot has happened, not only to me, but to the diagnosis itself. New technology has shown that BPD has biological underpinnings, and more research is revealing hereditary components (Lis et al. 2007). Treatments other than DBT are being developed. I’m interested in all of this, but not the way I used to be. My concern is no longer what BPD is or whether I have it. My focus, and where I’m headed, is answering the question of how we finally transcend the illness and yet keep traveling along with our borderline nature—our intense, wildly loving, painfully clinging, impulsive selves. How do we internalize an image like the compassion of Chenrezig rather than grasping for some other person to fulfill us? How does the example of an awakened being take hold enough to inspire and motivate us toward new levels of mindfulness, where we can actually see reality and not be blindly caught up in those three poisons of attachment, aversion, and ignorance?

  Right now Buddhism is my answer. The more I immerse myself in it, the more it normalizes every aspect of my suffering and connects me to others. It’s slowly teaching me to work with the craziness in my head, no matter what side of the borderline I’m on. When I say Buddhism is teaching me, I mean more than intellectually. I’m surrounded by people who have lived and practiced the Dharma for years. The practices themselves are alive, not just a collection of images or rituals or books. Within this world, BPD isn’t an aberration; it’s simply a name for an experience I and many others have, where we live at the farthest end of the continuum of pain. The borderline symptoms are the core element of what Buddhism describes as dukkha (suffering): endless grasping, all-consuming intolerance, and complete ignorance of how our actions keep us trapped in this endless cycle.

  Buddhism holds that all beings are deluded, that we all want happiness but don’t know how to create the right conditions for it. So what are the conditions? For me, it’s being here, at the center. Some people might not need this total immersion, but I do. A lot of people aren’t able to get all of this in one place and will have to build up their village person by person, here and there. Some people might view my immersion at the center, indeed my growing identity as a Buddhist, as another borderline trait: shaping myself to the circumstances that I hope will redeem me. That’s understandable, but ultimately ironic, as I’m taking refuge in a practice that has no saviors. I’m adopting the identity of a Buddhist with the goal of dissolving my attachments to a solid self. Some might see my life today as a failure to reach true independence as it’s defined in our culture. But this is what I need, and more. I’m like a baby; I have to go through the mirroring stage again so that others can reflect back at me the innate nature I have but never knew existed. You can do a lot
of other things—say prayers of aspiration, read books, be mindful of all that happens, do deep breathing exercises, clear your chakras, feed the hungry, receive teachings—and yet all the effort in the world to generate an awakened mind is futile without that mirror: the person who can see the Buddha within you. For a long time, I thought that the eyes of a lover were what could reflect that back at me, so I clung to my lovers with my life hanging on their every word and perception. I have these mirrors all around me now, and they embody a different form of love entirely. The difficulty is in keeping my eyes open and allowing this new vision to take hold.

  For the rest of fall and winter and into spring, I cocoon at the center. I’m a bodhicitta seedling that’s in need of serious water and light. I plant myself in the midst of my Sangha and whine a lot. Lama Sonam and I take walks around the pond, and I tell him how much I crave a lover and how difficult it is to be with myself.

  “Of the three poisons that obstruct the mind’s clarity,” he says, “attachment is the most difficult of the afflictions. You have to be constantly vigilant, or it will take over your mind.”

  “Will I ever be able to love someone without attachment? And also have sex?”

  He smiles. “One thing at a time. First, practice. Then, see what happens.”

  Alexis is more practical. “I’m not going to let any man near you,” she says. And she means it. I have to sneak out of the house and lurk around Starbucks just to catch sight of FILFs (fathers I’d like to fuck). Every time I want physical love or touch, I go down to the shrine room to do prostrations and recite refuge prayers, taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Or I find Alexis and climb into her lap. She’s like a reset button, a touchstone. She won’t sleep with me, but she promises that if she were bisexual, I’d be at the top of her list.

  I still find it impossible to sit through an entire meditation practice, and sometimes I avoid going for weeks. At first I’m afraid I might be kicked out for not doing the practices, so I hide in my room. Sometimes there’s a timid knock on the door, and it will be Marianne or Sophie, with a cup of tea, coming to check in on me when I’ve been hiding for too long. I understand that my absence and the guilt around it are my own, yet I still find myself projecting it onto the others. For a while, I think they don’t consider me a real Buddhist. But what is a real Buddhist? I don’t know if even the Buddha could answer that question.

  I do know that as the winter progresses, a shift in my understanding occurs, the same way it did in DBT. After being exposed to so many confusing words and ideas and practices, a foundation of understanding appears. And while putting myself in this hotbed of compassion doesn’t immediately dissolve my anger, self-hatred, and self-absorption, it does shape me and orient me toward a new way of seeing things. I’m getting the mind training I so badly wanted, and I have to admit that it’s vaguely annoying, like when Marianne puts signs in the kitchen that read, “Please do not cook or bring meat into this house. We do not eat our sentient mother beings.” Sometimes it feels like I’m basically being brainwashed into thinking of others every time I do something for myself. When bugs come into the house, we form a rescue brigade and take them back out. But it works both ways, and when I arrive home in pain, crying, and in need of care, I don’t have to hide or pretend. In fact, needing compassion from others gives them the opportunity to share it. It’s win-win, except when it comes to sharing the last pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. In the realm of desserts, the afflictions are deeply rooted.

  In early spring, ten gigantic wooden crates arrive from Nepal. Together they hold a statue Lama Sonam commissioned for the center. When put together, the ten-foot-high statue of a golden Buddha shines with jeweled ornaments, brocade, and silk. It’s a replica of the most famous statue in Tibet, the Jowo Rinpoche, kept in Lhasa. For Tibetans, just seeing the statue brings them one step closer to enlightenment. Some make pilgrimages to the Jowo over hundreds of miles, doing a prostration every step of the way, each prostration affirming the three jewels: the reality of Buddha’s accomplishment, the truth of his teachings, and the community of those who practice.

  Lama Sonam made two journeys across the Himalayas just to get out of Tibet, and both times he was caught, put into prison, and beaten. Yet this has never stopped him from practicing and teaching us a core tenet of Buddhism—that no matter how much suffering you endure, it ultimately can be transformed into a greater good. So when I sit in front of the statue, I think about how many footsteps it took for him to arrive here—and Alexis, and myself. I think of that endurance and how the transformation of suffering is never over. For me, it’s no longer a question of arriving, or of having to escape. These days, when people ask if I’ve recovered from BPD, I don’t say yes. Despite my current sense that the symptoms have shifted back over the border into the normal range of human suffering, I am aware of the potential for its reemergence—not as a pathology that needs to be cured, but a set of problems that make my life feel unbearable. And yet without a name for it, I never would have been able to learn how to transcend it. Indeed, without BPD, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to awaken. So while it’s undeniable that BPD destroys people, it can also open us to an entirely new way of relating to ourselves and the world—both for those of us who have it, and for those who know us. Look at my mother, whose capacity for being present to pain grows daily as we are finally able to share it with each other, and my father, who listens to me now with the attention of a doting parent and offers insights because he is capable of understanding me beyond his own definitions. BPD has been our teacher. Maybe not in the prescribed ways of family therapy or self-help books, but the journey itself and the bonds between us have accomplished the seemingly impossible: We are there for each other.

  Am I recovered? I no longer struggle with the urge to hurt or kill myself, but other symptoms persist: my impulsivity, my sensitivity, my shifting moods, and my inherent fragility when I’m under stress or begin to feel connected to someone. I still have difficulty being alone, a deep need for security, and a gnawing dissatisfaction with what is. Is recovery the absence of symptoms, the eradication of pain? If so, then I’m not in recovery. Then again, those things that are often touted as “real” signs of progress—like having a solid sense of self or being independent—can actually be seen as illusions. As I and the other women established back at Project Transition with Dr. Crabtree, we need a different way of formulating our emergence and integration. We have to create communities and a language that can accommodate the borderline nature and experience. That is a task many of us are just now beginning.

  Tonight, as people show up for the Wednesday evening meditation practice, I don’t look anything like an enlightened being. I’ve taken a mental health day from work and have been sleeping most of the day. I come downstairs after a shower, wearing a green mud mask, totally forgetting that the center is in use and accidentally disrupting a practice. I forage the fridge for food and wish I could cook up a nice big steak. Then I check out the men who are meditating. Hmm… The windows are partially open and there’s the scent of warm dirt conspiring with the flower bulbs to raise petals into the air. Soon I’ll probably be rising up again too, testing the air, uncurling, and sensing.

  I know my six-year-old has more to say. And Kiki is still with me, putting on costumes and changing her accents. I decide that from now on I’ll give her many masks to play with and more exciting roles to explore, and that I’ll never call her a fake. This part of me, so capable of shifting and remaking herself, is a precious tool of the Vajrayana, as is this body, the vehicle carrying an energy I barely know how to direct.

  There are many uncertainties regarding BPD recovery, but by now I’m quite sure that I’ll never look for another savior to deliver me to myself. If any training of my mind has taken hold, it’s to turn toward the teachings and the relationships that keep me on the path.

  Ironically, the word “borderline” has become the most perfect expression of my experience—the experience
of being in two places at once: disordered and perfect. The Buddha and the borderline are not separate—without one, the other could not emerge. How I approach these opposing forces continues to be the key, together with help and support from people in my life: Ethan, sitting across from me and channeling Socrates; Alexis, who tells me one evening that she’s having a borderline moment, and could I please reassure her that I love her; the Drikung Sangha; the coworkers in my office, where I’m now known as the office goddess who lives in an ashram.

  The path to discovering Buddha-nature is found within suffering and our relationship to it, not by escaping it. And BPD has become my teacher. I no longer want to deny it or disassociate myself from it. Neither do I identify myself with it. My work now is to allow the bright seed within me to crack its sheath and grow, no longer ashamed and hiding. Turning toward you, Buddhas-to-be, I will try to mirror your true nature and share your pain.

  Acknowledgments

  This book could never have been written without the incredible dedication, kindness, and generosity of so many people. My deepest thanks to my editors Catharine Sutker, Heather Garnos, and Jess Beebe, and all those at New Harbinger who believed in the vision of this book and brought it to fruition, and to Jasmine Star, copyeditor extraordinaire, for the clarity and grace she gave my writing despite my howls of protest, and for her dedication and gentle hand along the way.

  I am also grateful for the friendship, encouragement, and collaboration of so many extraordinary clinicians, in particular Dr. Blaise Aguirre, Dr. Seth Axelrod, Dr. Loren Crabtree, and Dr. Roy Krawitz. Thanks as well to the New England Personality Disorder Association (NEPDA), the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder (NEABPD), the NAMI Greater Boston Consumer Advocacy Network (NAMI GB CAN), and the Transformation Center (and especially Howard Trachtman and Moe Armstrong), for all your support and guidance.