When I was in medical school, I sought out a professor of psychiatry named Robert Coles to supervise me in an independent study. Coles was an anomaly at Harvard Medical School, a humanist with an avowed interest in religion who was known for his prize-winning writings on the spiritual, emotional, and ethical lives of children. He taught electives in the medical humanities that were generally offered to medical students in January, when other more rigorous courses were in hibernation. Because I was one of the only students heading for a career in psychiatry, Coles was willing to supervise me. I wanted to read about the existential movement in psychotherapy. I was aware of the comments of Binswanger about the need for more spirit in psychoanalysis, and I was hoping that I might find links within existential thought to the psychology of Buddhism that had already captivated my interest.
I met with Coles in his book-lined study at Harvard College, across the river and a world away from the hospital-based medical school where I spent most of my time. It was an unusual and pleasant interlude for me. Coles was casual and informal in his manner; dressed in his trademark sweater and corduroys, he had the air of the rumpled intellectual, a onetime adviser to Bobby Kennedy. He was curious about me, and I could see how his ease and charm worked to his benefit as a psychotherapist. He drew out my family history, questioning me about my parents and their relationship to my spiritual interests. I could see him looking at me with a mix of fascination and suspicion. I was clearly the first medical student with an interest in Buddhism to cross his path.
Coles agreed to supervise me and was happy to let me do pretty much whatever I wanted. He was busy and I was self-directed, so we were a good match. But he did insist that I read some things he recommended that did not fall directly under the rubric of the existentialists. He wanted me to know some of the work of Freud’s daughter, Anna, especially her volume called War and Children, a record of her efforts during the Second World War to care for the emotional needs of displaced and traumatized British young people. I think he wanted me to see an engaged psychoanalyst, one capable of bringing her understanding to the sufferings of real life. He also was the first to mention Winnicott to me, although I did not follow up until some years later. And he told me to look at the writings of a psychoanalyst and social critic named Allen Wheelis, whose books, The Quest for Identity and How People Change, I managed to find. I believe Coles was responding to my psychological emptiness, as well as to my ambivalence about psychoanalysis, for Wheelis’s thesis seemed to be that accelerating social change had undermined traditional identities, leaving people lost and in search of themselves. Wheelis made the point that identity could not be uncovered through the analysis of instincts, only instincts could be uncovered that way. The contemporary self was not so much lost as outgrown, he felt, because of changing social mores and expectations. If identity was not lost, then it could not very well be found. It could only be created afresh. In this way he was very much of an existentialist, indeed.
Wheelis stressed how awareness of old patterns of reactivity created more choice for an individual. He even used the word “freedom.” He criticized psychoanalysis for proposing that people change simply by uncovering unconscious fears, impulses, defenses, and anxieties, and he recognized that this kind of analysis often leaves people feeling even more powerless, victims of forces over which they have no control. But Wheelis still sounded depressed. He seemed to have nothing else to fall back on, other than the hope that “man” could become more of his own creator. The radiant Buddha mind that underlies our conventional selves was nowhere to be found in his vision.
Somewhere in Wheelis’s book he made the startling statement that “freedom depends on awareness.”40 In this I could not be more in agreement. But Wheelis did not have an experience of how liberating awareness could actually be. He did not seem to know that awareness could be cultivated, nor that it could be deployed on feelings of nothingness and on the tendency to identify with thoughts. In my own investigation of Buddhist meditation, I have seen how it is possible to change, not by making my problems go away or even by exploring them more deeply, but by cultivating my capacity to accept things as they are. Unlike what Dr. Wheelis thought, my identity was lost, and social change was not the culprit. When I learned to restrain my own patterns of reactivity, my identity had a chance to reveal itself, not as a fixed entity but as flow and potential. Meditation has enabled me to take possession of myself, to inhabit myself, not through identification but through acceptance.
As I began to work as a psychotherapist, I knew that this was the key to change. The obstacles that prevent us from living in a fully aware state must be brought into consciousness. The most pernicious of these obstacles is the sense of psychological emptiness, self-estrangement that often takes the form of unworthiness, low self-esteem, feelings of unreality, dissociation, shame, or self-hatred. In the writings of D. W. Winnicott is a model consistent with Buddhist teachings, one that enables a translation of Buddhism into the language of psychology.
As Winnicott described it, the investigation of early childhood experience is important, not just as a window into unconscious drives, but as an explanation for how the reactive patterns that obscure our true selves were established. Children who are forced to cope with intrusive or ignoring parental figures develop a compensatory self that manages their parents’ needs or neglect. This self develops out of a need for survival, but the price that is paid is a high one. The child’s own going on being is sacrificed, and the child loses confidence in himself or herself. Falseness and unreality replace aliveness and vitality.
Meditation is the Buddha’s medicine. The mind is trained through restraint not to interfere or abandon. Patience, acceptance, and trust are encouraged, while the meditator is cautioned not to push away the unpleasant or hold on to the pleasant. The reactive mind gives way to a vast holding capacity out of which insight comes.
It is the knowledge of this ability to retrain the mind that has been lacking in Western psychology. There is no reason that the interpersonal vehicle of psychotherapy cannot be as effective in encouraging it as the intrapersonal one of meditation, but we have to recognize the potential. Psychotherapy can be enormously helpful in pointing out a person’s habitual reactive patterns as they occur in the here-and-now. The therapeutic relationship itself is a powerful vehicle because of its intrinsic non-intrusive and non-abandoning nature. But the most important element, as the Buddha discovered, is the healing power of awareness. In the ancient Buddhist psychology of Abhidharma there are a host of odd-sounding “mental factors” that become strengthened by meditative absorption. They have such names as buoyancy, pliancy, adaptability, and proficiency. As a meditator reclaims the platform of joy and rapture, these abilities start to assert themselves. They are enablers of the capacity to go on being, balm for the mind, since they permit an individual to find balance in a sea of change. No longer struggling to find certainty in an endlessly shifting reality, a person grounded in awareness is free to discover and declare herself afresh as life unfolds. In the somewhat awkward language of psychodynamics, we call this the ability to live in an uninterrupted flow of authentic self.
I had an experience not long ago in the unlikely venue of a neighborhood yoga class that seemed to wrap all of this up for me. The yoga class was just beginning, and I had not been coming for very long. I was pretty much in my own world and concerned with getting myself set up properly. The class was a little late getting started, and we were all lined up expectantly, if a bit restlessly, on our sticky blue mats, like overgrown preschoolers at nap time. Ready with blocks, blankets, and belts, we waited for the new teacher to gather himself into his leading role. I was fond of this before-the-beginning beginning; it was a between state, a bardo, a passageway from one world to the next. Dressed in our yoga clothes we could be anybody, or nobody, but we were unmistakably ourselves. I could not even see very well, having left my glasses and keys carefully askew in my shoes at the back of the dusty Manhattan studio where the yoga class takes place.
The feeling in the room was anxious but cautiously optimistic, as it is in the therapy office when a new but eager patient has just come in, before she has told me much of her story. I liked this period because of how brief but unstructured it was; it never went on long enough for me get too uncomfortable but it gave me a needed respite from the rest of my busy day. As when flying between cities in an airplane, I was suspended for a time. The remnants of my outside life could settle down before the tasks of this inside practice took over.
I do not intend this to be mean, but I was taken aback by what happened next. (The unconscious knows no negatives, I was taught when studying Freud. If someone tells me they are not upset, I know they probably are.) Actually, nothing out of the ordinary really happened. The new yoga teacher sat down in the front of the class and took a deep breath. He told us to sit up straight and close our eyes. He sang a simple Sanskrit mantra and asked us to chant it back to him. It was not an unfamiliar mantra, but something in his tone disturbed my reverie. What was it, I wondered? He was only chanting “Om,” for goodness sake. But something else was coming through the sound, an insistent quality, not quite a demand but an expectation. I felt a wall going up around me, and noticed that he got a tepid response from the class. We were no longer in the between but were suddenly somewhere that no one seemed motivated to be. “It’s not just me,” I consoled myself; other people had also contracted. He continued, bravely, but his song had more of that unrelenting tone. He wanted something from us, all right. It was there in his voice. It was like being with a mother who was too anxious for us to eat. Our own going on being was interrupted as we mobilized to deal with the teacher’s needs.
He only repeated the mantra three times; the whole thing was not a big deal. It would have been nice if we had all come around and started to sing and turned it into something positive, a big exhalation, but we did not do so. A few people ventured a response. I did not give much of one. I thought back to another teacher’s chanting, though. Her class was the first I ever attended, and her singing, too, caught me off-guard; it had never occurred to me that there would be chanting before a lunchtime yoga class. But Julie’s voice had astonished me. She sang quietly and beautifully as if to herself, very briefly at the start of class, a prayer or an invocation to let us begin. If my mind were a candle, her chanting would not have caused a flutter. Julie was pregnant, I found out subsequently, so perhaps she was not singing just to herself after all. Nevertheless, whomever she was singing to, it did not cause waves in the class.
This teacher was a different story. Were my mind a candle, it would have been blown out. His agenda filled the room, and we were suddenly pulled inside of it, as if a big vacuum had opened and sucked us all up. Like a stowaway in a packing crate in the hold of an ocean freighter, I was trapped in the bubble of another’s desire.
I thought right away of a patient of mine, a psychologist-in-training who was doing his internship while seeing me in therapy. Jim was a brilliant therapist, but all too eager to share his insights with his patients. A student of meditation, he was aware of how his eagerness interfered with his effectiveness. His patients tended to experience him as telling them what to think instead of helping them come to their senses. “I feel like I’m always trying too hard to be effective, like I’m doing some sort of a job,” he would say, well aware of the irony of his words. He was doing a job, of course, but it was not a job that required action. (A Taoist might say it was a job that required non-action.) With his typical therapeutic acumen, he was able to see where his zeal came from. “I’m trying to overcome a core sense of inadequacy,” he told me off-handedly one day. His enthusiasm had a compensatory quality that turned his patients off, even when what he had to say was technically correct. There was something of this in my yoga teacher, as well. We all knew that he wanted a rousing introduction to his class, that he wanted to take us higher. But in reaching for it his personality became all figure and no ground.
As I continue to take classes with my yoga teacher, I can see how much he wants to create a spiritual environment for us. While his intention is noble, our yoga postures are burdened by his desire for them to be special. His class provides a special challenge, one that I did not bargain for at the beginning. It recapitulates an all-too-familiar childhood drama, in which parental expectations can overwhelm a child’s burgeoning self-expression. But I have come to look forward to it as a unique form of therapy, one in which I can practice being free while restrained by the mind of another. It is the converse of what I try to do as a therapist, but it is the true test of what I have learned.