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.It was good to feel thefreedom to choose, she said.But she realized that perhaps if the trauma hadnever occurred, for all she knew she still would be a single professional woman.The chain of the past led through trauma, but it also led to her marrying herhusband and having her daughter; she would not exchange this love for anything,and would not allow anything to stain it.The final few sessions of the therapy involved some painful work aroundtermination.We altered the treatment contract so that she could feel control overhow many sessions we would meet: she chose to stick to the original 12 sessions.She subsequently contacted me and told me that the anniversary of the traumaand the parole hearing came and went accompanied by normal emotions butwithout any recurrence of her depressive or PTSD symptoms.She was even ableto feel some pity for her assailant, rather than pure horror and hatred (though shewas relieved to have his parole denied and have him still behind bars).She was able to fully enjoy celebrating her daughter s birthday, to love and beloved by her husband, and was also doing some personally meaningful part-time work.She had been raped, threatened, and nearly killed, she said: this didn tmean that her assailant could have a hold on her.She had decided that herpersonal identity was not just what came to her, but what she made of it.She saidthat now, instead of feeling lost in the past, she felt re-connected to what wasgoing on now in the world around her and the people she loved and who lovedher.Most psychotherapies suggest that after a trauma a person needs to process it to eitheraccommodate their self-schemas to the trauma or to assimilate the traumatic event into their self-schemas.This kind of therapeutic strategy can be helpful, but it does not fully address the coreincorrect belief: that both self and world are things.If the self is a thing, it may be lost, damaged,or hurt.If the world is a thing, it can be quite threatening: it can rape us, invade us, disappoint usor overwhelm us.When self and world are things, our life experience consists of photographs ofour past we carry in the albums that define our selves.The snapshots of our experiences, though, are not the experiences themselves; photographsalways lie.Life is always moving.Time is not linear, but lived.Our lives occur in the choosingplace of this moment, where we exist in relationship to all the empty potentiality of being time.Our histories are not our fates.Zen practice opens a window to a different view of history thanwe are used to, a view in which we are not statues molded from our pasts, but rather livingorganisms in constant development.If we think we are the sum of what we have experienced in the past, we have an idea of self-development which is essentially one of self-by-accretion.In this view, we do something or havesomething done to us; we then encode it in some form of representation we remember later, andour self gradually becomes an accumulation of all that we have previously thought, felt, anddone.We think we have residues of the past that lie within us and determine how we will reactto new experiences.We say I am the adult child of an alcoholic or I am a good son. This isan edited version of ourselves which leaves out much of our past: it also leaves out all of thepresent.If we see ourselves as the products of our past, we confuse who we are with who we ve been.This closes many of the possible doors to who we may become.In contrast, the Heart Sutra sdescription of no origination and no stopping reminds us that our self is not an accrual of experiencebut an ongoing, ever-changing manifestation of potentiality.As we develop, we are constantly changing and transforming.Our pasts are not back there behind a boundary and our futures are not ahead of us across some gulf.Our personal historyis not bounded in this way.We do not touch our pasts and future: we live them, now
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