Like most people, my teens and twenties have been confusing and not always the most fun. I’ve struggled to make friends. In high school and university, I didn’t have as many romantic relationships as I wanted. When I was 24, I met a beautiful, wonderful woman who became my wife, but I still feel like I have a lot of room to be a better husband. I lucked into a relatively stable and interesting career, but my day-to-day experience with work has involved a lot of emotional swings and occasional disillusionment. In general, I’ve struggled to feel consistently happy.
I haven’t really figured out what to do about all this. I’ve thought about talking to a mental health professional, but never ended up doing it. I’ve told my wife and my friends about some of my feelings, but I haven’t felt comfortable being honest about all of it.
About a month ago, Ben Congdon blogged about his favourite books of the past couple of years. I wasn’t reading as much as I wanted to, and wanted to give myself some more book options, so I downloaded some of his recommendations, including Already Free by Bruce Tift.
I’m really glad Ben recommended the book, and that I read it. I feel like it’s improved my thinking on some of the big questions I’ve had about myself and life over the last decade:
Bruce Tift is a therapist who’s also practiced Vajrayana Buddhism for 40 years. At the time of writing, he lived with his wife in Boulder, Colorado.
Tift studied at Naropa University, a private, Buddhist-inspired university founded by Chögyam Trungpa. Trungpa died in 1987, and the impression I get from Wikipedia is that he did a number of morally reprehensible things while alive. Tift doesn’t mention this, saying that it was “good fortune” to have been Trungpa’s student, and quoting Trungpa several times in the book.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I didn’t know about it until after I finished reading Already Free. Provisionally, I’m not going to discount what I’ve learned from the book, including the idea that being spiritually adept isn’t enough to make you a good person:
If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship. (106)
[I]f we want to live in society—if we’re going to be a parent, a partner, a teacher, or somebody trying to be of benefit to others—it’s very important to do the developmental work to process our “characterological” issues. Because even though we might not feel identified with those issues anymore, the people we relate to may still be profoundly affected by our unresolved reenactment behaviors. (125)
Many of Tift’s clients complain that something is missing from what, on the surface, seems like a happy life. To him, it seems like they’re describing a missing sense of freedom. They want to achieve a mental state of “embodied presence, spontaneity, openheartedness, alertness, humor, courage, clarity, resilience, equanimity, confidence.” (292)
Tift presents two views on this: the developmental and the fruitional.
The developmental view, based on developmental psychology, looks at how our parents treated us in childhood. As children, we were basically powerless in the face of the adults around us. We couldn’t simply leave and navigate the world by ourselves. And, our parents had their own issues, issues that came across in their relationships with us. Maybe they were overbearing. Maybe they were distant. Maybe they couldn’t be there for us because of illness or divorce. In Tift’s case, he says his parents rewarded him disproportionately for demonstrating his independence.
To make our relationships with our parents work, we suppressed the parts of ourselves that weren’t adapted to our circumstances. If our parents kept their distance, we might have become extremely independent and pushed down any desire to connect to them. Or, we might have constantly reached out to them for connection, suppressing the part of us that wanted to be separate.
Tift emphasizes that these techniques saved us emotional pain when we were children. But, he claims, people bring these techniques into their adult relationships without checking if they’re still useful. We continue to suppress our desire to connect to others, or our desire to be separate. This causes unnecessary suffering.
The developmental view of self-improvement is to notice situations where we habitually apply these behavioural patterns from our past. Instead, gradually, we can choose to apply new, adult techniques to these situations.
By contrast, the fruitional view cuts to the heart of the matter. Rather than spending a bunch of time working on our reactions to different situations, what if we just accepted our reactions for what they are? What if we paid attention to our experience of each moment? Is that experience actually going to hurt us, or is it, to use one of Tift’s favourite words, “workable”?
Tift’s major claim is that, even in moments of very strong emotion, you should expect to find that your experience is workable. It’s safe for you to be aware of those feelings. It won’t hurt you or kill you. It may feel like a “survival-level threat”, but it’s not.
Tift suggests first using the fruitional view to build a base of personal responsibility for our thoughts and feelings, and acceptance of both the positive and negative. Then, we can use the developmental view to look for concrete ways to improve our life circumstances: to have more positive thoughts and feelings, and fewer negative ones.
Tift spends two chapters applying these ideas to romantic relationships.
In Western society, “intimacy is only supposed to be positive and happy.” (228) But, in Tift’s eyes, relationships are also a source of disturbance. That includes his own marriage: “Just by being herself, my wife is almost guaranteed to touch some sore spot of mine. She’s not causing that sore spot. By her proximity, she pushes against my tender spots, my vulnerabilities.” (208)
Tift is a couple’s therapist. He’s seen hundreds or thousands of unhappy couples in his work, and many fewer happy couples in his life. Still, his experience is consistent with mine. I see acquaintances in a positive light, then get upset or frustrated with my loved ones, friends, and teammates at work. I’m more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error with the people closest to me than with a stranger.
Tift says that relationships tend to be composed of one person who wants to connect and one person who wants to be separate: a “distancer-pursuer” dynamic. These tendencies come from the way our families of origin treated us in childhood. In Tift’s view, each of us contains both a desire to connect and a desire to be separate, but we want to suppress the desire that was maladaptive in childhood. So, we choose partners that represents the parts of ourselves we’ve disowned.
I’ve noticed this in my own relationships. With one exception, I believe I’ve been the distancer, and my partner’s been the pursuer. During the honeymoon phase, this is exciting! The other person brings a fresh, new energy to your life. But, as the relationship goes on, you start to feel angry at the other person, just like you feel angry at that disowned part of yourself. Your “fundamental aggression toward that energy start[s] to come out” (234). If you don’t address the aggression, it can damage or kill the relationship.
What does Tift say to do about this?
First, I’ll say that Tift notes his techniques aren’t for everyone:
“No style of therapeutic work is a good fit for everybody, and the work I’m discussing is really best suited to those with at least neurotic levels of organization. It’s not particularly appropriate for people with preneurotic organization, those who would be called borderline or psychotic, or those with pervasive traumatic organization.” (187)
In other words, it’s for people who are generally in touch with reality and function well day-to-day, and who haven’t experienced a lot of trauma. Tift says that it can be quite overwhelming, even retraumatizing, to experience sensations that were suppressed because of trauma. To work with those sensations, he recommends seeing a therapist with relevant experience.
But for those problems that are less severe but still affect our quality of life? Tift recommends starting with the fruitional view. He asks his patients to say out loud to him, “I may live with this negative feeling, on and off, for the rest of my life.” He asks them to pay attention to the sensations they feel in their body when they say that. He wants them to check if those sensations are in fact a survival-level threat, or if they’re workable after all.
He also gives a couple of developmental-view techniques for handling relationship conflict more skillfully. He suggests taking breaks during arguments and other situations where we notice we’re getting overwhelmed. Instead of complaining about our partner’s behaviour, he recommends making specific requests for behavioural changes, in a neutral or friendly way. He gives the example of asking a partner to clean up after themselves for five minutes before dinner every day, instead of resenting them for not doing it of their own accord.
But, Tift’s description of unconditional practices stuck with me the most. Instead of, or in addition to, meditation and other timeboxed spiritual practices, Tift suggests building three habits that you can apply many times a day, and that you try to apply all the time. The first two are unconditional immediacy and kindness: paying attention to our immediate experience, no matter whether it’s positive or negative, and having an attitude of “kindness or even love” (90) towards it.
The third unconditional practice is unconditional embodiment.
When I lived in Canada, I was part of an awesome rationality meetup group. As the website says, we liked to talk about “becoming e m b o d i e d”. But, I didn’t really understand what embodiment was. Being more… in (em?) your body, I guess.
After reading Already Free, I feel like I understand embodiment well enough that I can try to practice it unconditionally, in my daily life.
Practicing embodiment is kind of like Gendlin’s Focusing, but it isn’t aimed at labelling or understanding sensations:
With some types of body-centered therapy, the invitation is to stay embodied and then listen to the message that our body is trying to give us. Such therapies are valuable work. But the fruitional practice of immediacy is different. We don’t listen for any sort of message. Maybe there is no message. Maybe it’s just immediate experience. We don’t necessarily need to be making meaning about it. (190)
Western therapy mostly analyzes emotions and thoughts. Tift prefers paying attention to sensations in the body. “Sensation is less distractive, less personal, and less fascinating. It’s more straightforward—cleaner, in a certain way.” (204) I believe this perspective is more Buddhist.
Tift sees emotions and thoughts as layers of interpretation on top of raw sensation. Sensation isn’t everything: “Concepts are very important. We need to be able to think conceptually in order to live more than biological lives. To recognize patterns, to plan for the future, to imagine possibilities—all require thinking.” (185) But:
“While perhaps less-literate societies would do well to take on a corrective practice of applying more interpretation to their experience, we in the Western world might want to do the corrective practice of embodied immediacy” (187)
(Not everyone, though. E.g. here and here.)
I’m very much a typical Western dude here. Probably since I was a preteen, I’ve lived mostly on the level of thoughts. High school, university, knowledge work, and reading thousands of words a day from Twitter and my RSS reader all require a lot of shape rotation and wordcellery. My other hobbies, like watching YouTube videos, are often a way to dissociate. I haven’t spent much time paying attention to raw sensation.
Tift thinks that becoming embodied is necessary, but not sufficient, to dissolve the patterns of emotional suppression that the developmental view focuses on. To form these patterns, we had to suppress parts of ourselves, and the sensations they caused in our bodies. Before we can start using more adult techniques, we have to learn to pay attention to those sensations again.
These sensations might give rise to anxiety and even panic. It takes discipline to pay attention to them. In any given moment, it’s easier to ignore them. Who wants to feel a ball of anxiety in the pit of their stomach, pain in their heart, or their eyes tearing up? To help with this, Tift “often suggest[s] that [his] clients take this practice of embodied immediacy into their daily lives, ideally finding some structure to remind themselves to practice.” (183)
And, wouldn’t you know it, he does one better and basically suggests installing a TAP. In fact, it sounds a lot like summoning sapience, with a trigger of noticing strong sensations in our body. “[W]e may find that our habitual patterns may actually serve as a reminder to direct our attention to the experience of openness.” (166) “Why not just train ourselves to use our disturbance as a signal to wake up and pay attention?” (184)
I love how Already Free emphasizes the value of working with the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are already there, instead of wishing they were different:
It’s difficult to acknowledge the truth of separateness. It feels like we’re risking loss of the relationship. But the separateness is already there; it’s actually nothing new. What’s new is that we’re starting to work with it consciously. (230)
Tift is constantly telling the reader to investigate what is “most true in the moment”. Rather than deferring to him, he recommends everyone find out for themselves if their own experiences are threatening or manageable. Very rationalist of him. It makes me want to propose the Litany of Tift:
If my feelings are workable, I desire to believe that my feelings are workable. If my feelings are not workable, I desire to believe that my feelings are not workable. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Another theme I love is taking personal responsibility for my own experience. For too long, I’ve been at least somewhat blaming other people for my negative emotions. In particular, I’d like to take Tift’s suggestion of viewing personal relationships as playgrounds for spiritual growth. If I’m going to experience disruption in my relationships, on and off, for the rest of my life, I might as well get some benefit out of it!
I also appreciate the idea of unconditional practices. A few years ago, I had a daily meditation practice, but eventually I stopped. Unconditional embodiment feels easier to me than spending X minutes a day meditating. Frequency matters: “[I]f we can remember to do the practice twenty times a day, things will probably move along quite a bit faster than if we remember to do it once a week.” (183)
I’m less sure about the parts of the book with stronger Buddhist influences. Tift talks about progressing on a spiritual path towards enlightenment, the self being an illusion, and how awareness is fundamental to our experience and always present. I’m not planning to lean into these ideas right now. I do think Already Free is quite useful, even discounting these parts of it.
I’m a bit concerned that, if I train myself to tolerate intense sensations, I’ll lose my ability to detect subtle ones. I’m not too concerned, though. I’m already pretty disembodied. I don’t think it can get much worse!
Another concern is that, by paying attention to sensation, I might accidentally train myself to suppress thoughts. In my experience with mindfulness meditation, I’ve had trouble just letting my thoughts rise and fall. I tend to really try to get in there and prevent myself from thinking anything. I could see that carrying over to unconditional embodiment.
My biggest source of frustration with Already Free is Tift saying that the developmental and fruitional views “create a rich friction that’s never resolvable”, and how, similarly, you can’t resolve two concepts like connection and separateness, or have one without the other. These parts of the book feel like mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
In 2020, I blogged about “a small mindfulness win”. Unfortunately, I think that was the only situation in the past six years where I successfully applied embodied immediacy. In 2026, I’m going to change that.
In the past week, I’ve been paying more attention to my moment-to-moment experience and… it’s been more workable than I expected. To be fair, I haven’t felt any particularly disturbing feelings. But, I have been able to pay attention to the smaller, day-to-day feelings of disturbance. They don’t feel as bad as, maybe, I’ve been building them up to be.
My plan for February is to install the following TAP:
When I have strong sensations in my body, I’ll pay attention to those sensations with a feeling of kindness.
To do that, I’m going to bring some unhappy or embarrassing memories to mind, and see for myself if the feelings that come along with them are actually problematic. I expect they won’t be, but I’m going to try to be open to proving myself wrong.