By Isobel Gardner
A few days ago I had the great fortune of attending an 8-hour workshop in Oxford with the legendary trauma specialist and author of several bestsellers, Dr. Gabor Maté. You might have heard of his most recent book “The Myth of Normal“. I was kind of blown away by this legend as he appeared on stage. He is 80 years old and you wouldn’t know it. Physically he look more like 55. I am sure he will live to be a +100 or at least I hope so. We sure need some more men like him around. So what gave his age away if not for his youthful appearance? Perhaps not what you expect. I sure didn’t.
The structure of this 8-hour lecture/workshop included the audience being encouraged to ask questions on several occasions throughout the day. Nothing unusual with that, but what I didn’t expect and have never experienced before at a conference for professionals, was that most of the people lining up behind the microphone were not professionals like myself and most of the attendees, but just ordinary people sharing stories of their own personal traumas, injustices and suffering. These ordinary people seemed to have traveled from far away to meet with Dr. Maté in person, carrying hopes that somehow this would bring about some magical healing. When these ordinary people lined up behind the microphone and were given their time to speak they completely ignored that there wasn’t just the legend in front of them but also a massive audience witnessing the details of their very personal traumatic autobiographies. Such is the experience of suffering. It’s desperate. The whole scenery made me think of one of those travelling tent revivals in the American mid-west. You know, where Christian worshippers line up to enter the stage where some minister magically cures their ailment by touching their forehead and speaking in tongues. I understand that these ordinary people are desperately looking for a cure to end their great suffering but perhaps this is not how they will find it? I sat there feeling slightly embarrassed and sorry for the great Dr. Maté having to come up with some kind of magical answer that would satisfy a person desperate enough to think there is such a thing as a magical answer to anything in life. To my great surprise Dr. Maté actually did deliver some unexpected magic! He certainly had some wise tailor made answers for each and every one of these desperate ordinary people, but it wasn’t those answers that blew me away as much as this retired physician’s demeanour. His level of patience, compassion and mindfulness that he showered each and every one of these ordinary strangers is what really got me. How he met with them with his own authentic, loving self in their moment of desperate suffering that made them so vulnerable and childlike. Simply put, it was his level of it all that was the magic. Like I imagine the Buddha to have been. As a practicing Zen Buddhist myself, I’ve met many Zen Masters in my life, but none has even come close to what I saw in Dr. Maté. His level of compassion and mindfulness is rare. Very, very rare and it might even take 80 years to achieve it, if ever at all? The only other person I have ever seen operate on this level of Mindfulness, compassion and wisdom is the Dalai Lama himself, when I saw him in person in Los Angeles, over a decade ago. This gave me hope though, that maybe, just maybe, if I keep on cultivating Mindfulness, compassion, kindness and wisdom for another 22 years and continue facilitate for others to do the same, we can all reach this Buddha-Nature when we hopefully live to be 80…