This shift from unworthiness to going on being was one of the most important adjustments I could have made. As the Buddha taught, feelings of nothingness are just as destructive as those of self-centered pride. The need to see myself as having intrinsic or absolute reality could make me think I was the center of the universe or that I did not matter at all. Both were deeply engrained but limiting habits. Yet the more I was able to uncover how I was affected by this need to define myself, the more I began to open up.
This fundamental strategy of Buddhism is not something that is easily understood. I remember one early conference on Buddhism and psychotherapy in the latter part of the 1980s that a friend of mine, a psychologist named Mark Finn, organized. Buddhist masters and accomplished therapists shared their thoughts on the relevance of the two disciplines for each other. The difficulties that each side had in understanding the goals of the other became apparent very quickly. After several long presentations from the Buddhist side on the nature of emptiness and the causes of clinging, a disgruntled participant rose from the audience. “I don’t care how many Zen masters can fit on the head of a pin,” she began. “I want to know about shitting and pissing and fucking.” There were murmurs in the crowd. Some people found her comments in bad taste, but many others essentially agreed with her. How relevant was Buddhist thought to our daily lives, to our everyday problems? Let’s talk about things the way they really are! Let’s get back down to basics, to the instincts and drives of Freudian theory that we all share.
One of the Tibetan lamas at the podium asked for a translation, and Mark relayed the comments through an interpreter. “She wants to know about shitting and pissing and fucking,” he said, trusting that the lama would appreciate the true Zen wisdom of her comment. When hungry eat and when thirsty drink, as it were.
The lama seemed momentarily taken aback but then replied without further hesitation, “But how has she managed up until this point?”22
In the Buddhist view, freedom does not mean a return to a childlike simplicity, nor does it mean becoming uninhibited or spontaneous, the way we sometimes romanticize it. Freedom comes when the mind can recognize its own nature, beyond clinging, infusing the everyday with wisdom. The questioner in the audience wanted to go backward, toward an imaginary freedom that she positioned in the raw material of earthy bodily functions. Other people imagine freedom to be in some kind of transcendental realm, apart from the here-and-now of the everyday world, removed from the body and its urges.
But the Buddhist notion of freedom is different from both of these views. Recognizing that we are often estranged from our experience and detached from the moment-to-moment reality of the here-and-now, the Buddha suggested a way to cure ourselves. This did not involve exploration of the sexual and aggressive instincts per se, as Freud suggested, but instead involved the uncovering of the instinct for self-certainty.
In the ancient Buddhist literature there is a story about a conversation between a monk named Khemaka and a group of bhikkhus who quizzed him about his attainments. “Do you see within the Five Aggregates any self or anything that pertains to a self?” they asked him, referring to the five “heaps” of matter, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness that traditionally are seen as the vehicles of identity. Khemaka answered that he did not. “Then why are you not fully enlightened?” they asked him, attempting to catch him in the Buddhist equivalent of false modesty.
“Because I have a feeling ‘I am,’ ” said Khemaka, “but I do not see clearly ‘This is I am.’ ” He knew that his feeling could not be defined precisely by classical Buddhist psychology, and yet he was aware of its influence. “It is like the smell of a flower,” he continued, that is not the smell of the petals, the pollen, or the color, but of the flower, itself.23 Even in early stages of realization, Khemaka explained, this vague sense of “I am” persists. Perhaps it is like the smell of freshly washed clothes, he suggested, and it will fade with time.
Unlike Khemaka, many of us suffer from a different kind of feeling, one that is more pernicious than that of “I am.” This is the feeling of “I am not,” which is extraordinarily prevalent in our time and place. The Buddha referred to this feeling in his descriptions of yearning for nonbeing, and psychoanalysis has been able to use a model of early childhood experience to explain its etiology. As theoretical as this model may seem, its implications for therapy and relevance for meditation are straightforward. When awareness is hijacked early in life by the need to react to or manage environmental insufficiencies, this hijacking leaves holes in a person’s sense of self.
In talking about the annihilation that comes when going on being is interrupted, Winnicott evoked the sense of disconnection that often plagues people in the modern world. His model always focused on the need for “good-enough mothering,” but it is not too much of a stretch to expand his vision to a broader cultural critique. The intense pressure in our culture for individual attainment affects parents and children alike. All too often, at least in situations where children are not simply being ignored, from very early in life everyone worries about what will become of a child, about who (or what) he or she is going to be. There is little trust in the natural unfolding of the individual. The pressure is there from the beginning and is transmitted at all the landmarks of development, with parents who are insecure about their own achievements conditioning their children’s approach to life. Sitting up, standing, going to the bathroom, walking, and talking (events that happen, miraculously, virtually on their own) become benchmarks of progress, ways of showing off, or means of assuaging parental anxiety. The result is often a sense of personal insecurity, for if we are only performers it is difficult to feel real.
Winnicott had different ways of describing this feeling of insecurity, but he always traced it to the same hypothetical failures. At one time he described it as a residual sense of absence, as the psychological remnant of nothing happening when something might have. At another point he wrote of a “fear of breakdown” that was actually an unmetabolized memory of trauma that occurred long ago but is still feared because it was never properly worked through. And at other times he evoked a feeling of being “infinitely dropped,” which he attributed to failures in the “holding environment,” analogous to the bubble imagery of his early case study, in which a child’s being is not supported in its own right. In each of these scenarios Winnicott described how a child’s reactivity eats up, or monopolizes, awareness, making it less available for the here-and-now. Therapy, said Winnicott, is a way of giving a person a new experience in a specialized setting, of letting her accommodate to the strong emotions that were too dangerous to feel in childhood, of relaxing the inhibitions that have structured the personality.
For many of my contemporaries, especially those without a lot of experience in psychotherapy, meditation could unexpectedly trigger intense and unusual emotional experiences. In the traditional schema of Buddhism it is recognized that strong emotions like anger, greed, worry, and agitation can disturb early efforts at concentration, but these experiences were much more frightening and strange. They could be difficult to describe yet they seemed evocative of the kind of emptiness that Winnicott knew so intimately. It was as if people fell into the gaps of their going on being under the spell of meditation and found themselves immersed, on a visceral level, in the feelings that Winnicott associated with early trauma. They seemed to recover preverbal memories, memories that could not be “known” or “understood” because they dated from a time before the onset of the conceptual or linguistic maturity that makes intellectual processing possible. These were memories that could only be felt.
It is unnerving enough to have these kinds of experiences in therapy, but to have them come up in the context of a silent meditation retreat proved challenging for many people. It was difficult to work with such feelings in the classic manner of dispassionate self-observation because of their intensity, yet in order to progress on the path of meditation it was clear that they needed to be dealt with. But how? Khemaka saw rightly that his own enlightenment depended on his ability to see “This is I am” clearly and distinctly. Yet this situation was somewhat different. We needed to do something even more difficult, to allow the feeling of “I am not” and to see it clearly and distinctly.
There are several interesting things about this feeling of “I am not.” According to the Buddha, it is actually an insidious variation on “I am,” and a more intransigent one to work with. There is clinging involved, and a sense of identity, but it is centered on nothingness instead of on something. There are any number of insights into this particular phenomenon in the Buddhist literature, one of most famous being that of the third-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who remarked about the Buddhist insight into the emptiness of self, “Emptiness has been said . . . to be the relinquishment of views, but . . . those who hold to the view of emptiness are incurable.”24 Incurable is a strong word, especially for something that is turning out to be, two thousand years later, so prevalent. But Nagarjuna’s warning is worth attending to. The feeling of “I am not” cannot even be compared to the smell of a flower. There is nothing so positive about it. As Winnicott noted, it’s more like the feeling of being infinitely dropped.
Much of my work in psychotherapy consists in working with this feeling of “I am not” in one form or another. It is a major psychological block to spiritual attainment. I was lucky enough to confront my own version of this problem through both meditation and therapy. Each one seemed to empower the other. Meditation showed me that awareness has a place of primacy versus the ego and whatever sense of unworthiness might fill my consciousness. But psychotherapy helped me to see how I perpetuated my own sense of isolation by restricting that very awareness. It showed me how I was afraid of other people and what could be done to change that. It did this by engaging me in a relationship that eased me through my fears and blind spots.
Working with personal emptiness required a kind of interpersonal meditation, where the therapist’s own attentional skills were brought to bear on my self’s “bubble.”
In much the same way that my therapist challenged my use of the phrase “parts of me” or demanded that I speak directly to him, he would also ask me to rephrase my words whenever I spoke in the passive voice.
“Anger is coming up in me,” I would sometimes say, conditioned as I was by meditation to objectify my inner experience. “Say that again but start your sentence with ‘I,’ ” Isadore would reply, forcing me to speak from the inside, instead of looking in on myself from the periphery. For a long time I wondered if this was in some way anti-Buddhist. “Why should I start my sentences with ‘I’ if the I does not exist?” I would wonder, but I think such questioning was more a sign of my clinging to emptiness than a true reading of Buddhism. Speaking from the inside required me to be at one with my experience, instead of operating at a protective distance. It forced me to experience myself more directly, to improvise, and to take chances in my expression of myself.
I was eager for this shift but also hesitant, unsure what I would talk about in therapy and secretly afraid that I could not come up with anything interesting enough. I always hoped to remember a dream from the night before so that I would have something to begin my session with, and I would rehearse what I was going to say, as I used to do in high school before going on my first dates. The feeling of discomfort when I ran out of material was excruciating. There was something about dropping into those moments of intense anxiety that felt utterly familiar and completely dreadful, like being caught in a whirlpool or spun down a drain. Yet out of those situations would often come moments of true relating that soothed and relieved me. I could feel myself exhale.
Through such experiences things began to make sense to me. Psychological emptiness masks an agony, or a conglomeration of agonies, that are too difficult to bear at the time of their genesis. These agonies live inside of us but outside of our awareness, as if waiting for the opportunity to be known.25 Knowing them means experiencing them in all of their horror, but this can only be done in a particular context, one that is safe enough to hold them. The isolation of a meditation retreat is not always most conducive to the processing of such material.
People come to therapy plagued with a sense of personal unworthiness but propelled by a movement toward wholeness. They reproduce, in their relationship with the therapist, all of their reactive coping mechanisms, all of the ways in which they successfully manage to avoid their own particular agonies, and yet, if the therapy is done skillfully, they start to process the feelings they have never allowed themselves to know. A patient of mine says to me out of the blue, “You must think I’m the most boring person in the world.” Another woman tells me, startled and embarrassed, that she has the feeling that I want to slap her across the face because she is so annoying. These are momentary realities for my patients, and I know I am not feeling anything of the sort. To me, these sudden confessions are signs of the klesha “I am not,” but (as Khemaka would say) they do not see clearly this “I am not.” If therapy is to be useful, these patients will begin to see it all too clearly. The agony of being held too tightly, of being left too alone, or of feeling somehow wrong can start to be digested. As these feelings are owned, the gaps in going on being are metabolized. The person can emerge. The reactive, caretaker self that papers over the empty, unworthy one loses its primacy of place. Something new can start to happen. Going on being dusts itself off, and awareness starts to find itself.
When the klesha of “I am not” is particularly tenacious, a personal relationship seems to be most effective in getting back on track. In spiritual communities this function may be served by the senior teachers or by the group, but in our secular society there is often no one to assume this role—no one but a therapist, that is. The Buddha was able to leapfrog this stage by remembering back to his joy under the rose-apple tree while watching his father work, but many of us do not have his ability for self-analysis. When the capacity for awareness has been hijacked, a therapeutic relationship is often an important intermediate step. Looking may be the key, as the Sufi Nasruddin taught, but sometimes we need to be seen as well.
A recent interaction with a patient reinforced this for me. Jan is a writer, but one who consistently destroyed what she wrote. Either she threw it away before anyone else could see it, or she erased it through endless and perfectionistic rewriting in an effort to (supposedly) improve it. The night before our session she had a dream, in which a man from work whom she admired offered her a lot of cash for her essays. I felt immediately that, in some ways, I was that man. I was always encouraging her efforts, despite her protestations. She took the cash but then proceeded to shit all over it, feeling a familiar sense of humiliation and shame as she sat in a pile of cast-off newspapers surrounded by the soiled money.
As we talked about the dream, several things became clear. The dream mirrored Jan’s creative process. She would often begin with a burst of inspiration, but her reworking would render her words lifeless and dull. It was as if she were coloring them over with darker and darker hues, the way she smeared feces on the money in her dream. But there was another element to the mirroring as well. In her writing, Jan reproduced a process that had happened in her life—any kind of bold, bright declaration of her own energy had to be turned into humiliation, just as any interest from another person had to be denigrated. She was replicating in her behavior something that she had already experienced but had not completely dealt with—the shaming of her own self-expression by her creative, competitive, and insecure parents. Compulsively destroying any vestige of spontaneity in her work, she did not believe that she was capable of making anything worthwhile.
This dream emerged after years of therapy, in the context of a therapeutic relationship that had already developed its own history. I had no way of knowing if it would prove transformative or if the dream and the subsequent realizations would fade away and be forgotten. But I believed that the potential was there for Jan to both know her shame and to come through it. Her most secret identifications were being brought into awareness through the vehicle of our relationship. She had the opportunity to know them as nothing but thoughts and feelings, as that curious conglomeration of mind and body that Buddhists call kleshas. Bringing them forward through her dream and privileging me with their content gave her the chance to complete something. She was humiliated by her young and inexperienced parents—it was not an illusion—and this had scarred her perception of herself. She had the chance now to do something different instead of simply acting it out in semidisguised form. Going on being might yet come to the fore.
Some weeks later Jan came to see me with another dream. She did not tell me about it until well into the session, but we still had time to talk about some of its implications. She was in a huge and cavernous hall, something like a cross between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Grand Central Station, and she was clutching an important valise that contained all of her important papers, her writing as well as the deed to her house. Suddenly, the valise was lost and she was in a panic, looking everywhere for it. Her friend was by her side, a vain and superficial woman who kept telling her to forget about it, to come join her at a party she was going to. Jan did not want to go to the party; she needed to find her valise. The scene shifted to the basement of the museum, an endless corridor filled with lockers. Jan reached for a flashlight to look for her papers, and she woke up as she was on her hands and knees in the dirt searching for them.
Jan’s associations came fast and furious. “That’s what I have to do in my writing,” she said first, as she talked about what it was like on her hands and knees peering under the basement lockers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Looking in the dirt—I was happy doing that, like a pig in shit.” I told her the story of Nasruddin, looking under the lamppost for his keys. Therapy was opening up the process of looking: searching for her voice, or, as Winnicott would have it, for her true self. Her friend was calling to her to forget about it, to come to the party and put on her false front, but Jan would have none of it. She wanted the flashlight, and she wanted to look around.
Then Jan remembered her first confession. The priest asked her if she had sinned, and she cast about for something to tell him. As she recalled, “I was seven or eight, what could I have done that was so bad?” But she remembered one thing to tell the waiting priest. Some days before, she was on her hands and knees looking under the radiators in her house, just as she was in the dream. She found a penny glistening there in the dust and wondered whether to tell her mother about it or keep it for herself. The decision to keep the penny became her first sin. Even then, her obligation to her priest/mother overshadowed the pleasure of discovery. The brightness of the penny, like the cash in her first dream, was soiled.
Jan’s dreams and her subsequent memory beautifully illustrate Winnicott’s concept of going on being. As the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has written, “The spontaneous sense of going on being provides the home-base feeling of self, a basis of normal feeling and feeling normal. . . .”26 Jan did not feel normal, as a person or as a writer. That is why she sought therapy. From as far back as the incident with the penny, her joy of spontaneous discovery was contaminated. Like the valise of her dream, this nugget of self-confidence was lost to her. When it leaked out into her writing, she felt compelled to destroy it, repeating over and over again the pattern that had conditioned her mind. But through the therapy relationship Jan began to reawaken. She made contact with her inherent sense of all-rightness, what Michael Eigen calls normality or aliveness and which Winnicott called going on being. Her exclusive identification with “I am not” was challenged, and she could proceed.