Emboldened by the discovery, in my sixteenth year, of Samuel Beckett’s bleak view of the human landscape, I took an informal poll of all forty-seven members of my high school class and asked who among them was bothered by an inner sense of emptiness or insufficiency. Only the captain of the football team, a good-natured but decidedly unintellectual fellow, did not admit to harboring such a feeling. I felt empowered by my discovery. Excited even. Perhaps this troubling image of myself as not quite right was more universal than I had thought.
For years I had been haunted by this feeling. Sometimes I thought of it as an emptiness in my chest, sometimes as an impossible longing in my heart, and sometimes as a sense that other people were more real than I was. I had a recurring dream during that time of suddenly discovering, through a variety of means, a secret room in my house that was my one special place. I can still picture, or rather, feel, that room today. It was hidden behind a fake wall and was reached through a secret corridor or back staircase. Every time I came upon it in my dreams I felt relieved. It had the odd combination of seeming totally strange (the light was different, the furniture was different, even the air was different) and yet completely comfortable. In the rest of my life, however, with the notable exception of certain private moments in my nascent intimate life, this sense of comfort was absent.
I carried this feeling of insufficiency with me when I went off to college, but it was not until my sophomore year at Harvard that I went to the University Health Services and asked to see a therapist. I assured myself that things were really okay and that this foray into therapy would be an interesting diversion. In my heart I knew that I was still troubled by the emptiness I had approached in high school. I was searching for that secret room of my dreams. I had begun to take psychology courses, had read more of the popular literature of the times, and, encouraged by the results of my high school poll, I was now more open with my friends about such feelings. I figured there must be someone, provided by the university, who could help me understand them better. I was looking for a way to deal with my emptiness once and for all.
The therapist who was assigned to me was an impeccably dressed and elegantly appointed psychiatrist who was a practitioner, I later discovered, of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. He was a tall, fit man with a long, handsome face, long fingers folded carefully over his knees, and huge feet with polished leather shoes that shone like a bathroom sink. I had never seen such fabulous suits as he wore. I remember him nodding gravely as I described what I was feeling and as I gave him the requested details of my family upbringing. He seemed to take my emptiness very seriously. By the end of my second session he told me that I did not need to come back anymore. My problem was very simple, he said. It had to do with the pressure I was feeling to make certain career choices, which was a sign of my “Oedipus complex.” If I could just understand that, he explained, I would start to feel better.
I had taken a number of psychology courses by this time but had found Freud unreadable and could make no sense of this interpretation. I knew that the Oedipus complex had something to do with my father and that he was implying that my emptiness stemmed from a feeling of competition with him, but this explanation rolled off of me like a bead of sweat before I was out the door. I left reassured that my condition had a name but otherwise untouched by my encounter. I had come looking for an experience but left with only an explanation.
A year or so later, when meeting my first meditation instructors, I learned to interpret my emptiness in a completely different way. “Stop trying to understand what you are feeling and just feel,” they told me. “Absence or presence, it doesn’t matter. Just pay attention to everything exactly as it appears and don’t judge it.” They taught me to use awareness of my breathing as a model for attention to difficult emotional states. “Don’t try to control the breath,” they counselled. “Breathing happens on its own. Let the breath breathe you. Pay attention to whatever sensation, or lack of sensation, you can find.”
In meditation, I had stumbled upon a new way to be with myself. I did not have to make that disturbing feeling of emptiness disappear. I did not have to run away from my emptiness, or cure it, or eradicate it. I had only to see what was actually there. In fact, far from being “empty,” I found that emptiness was a rather “full” feeling. I discovered that emptiness was the canvas, or background, of my being. I did not understand it, but I was much less afraid. My condition had no name, but I could reach down into it.
There is a well-known story in the Buddhist tradition, the story of Kisagotami and the mustard seed, that illustrates how Buddhism uses the experience of emptiness to cultivate spiritual maturity.1 Like most good Buddhist stories, it can be understood on several levels. A young woman named Kisagotami lost her only child to illness around the time of his first birthday. Bereft, she went from house to house in her village, clasping the dead child to her breast and pleading for medicine to revive him. Her neighbors, thinking her mad, were frightened and did their best to avoid her entreaties. However, one man sought to help her by directing her to the Buddha, telling her that he had the medicine she was seeking. Kisagotami went to the Buddha, as we go to our psychotherapists, and begged him for the medicine.
“I know of some,” he promised, “but I will need a handful of mustard seed from a house where no child, husband, parent, or servant has died.”
Making her rounds in the village, Kisagotami slowly came to realize that such a house was not to be found. Putting the body of her child down in the forest, she made her way back to where the Buddha was camped.
“Have you procured the handful of mustard seed?” he asked.
“I have not,” she replied. “The people of the village told me, ‘The living are few, but the dead are many.’ ”
“You thought that you alone had lost a son,” said the Buddha. “The law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence.”
Some time later, when Kisagotami had become a renunciate and follower of the Buddha, she was standing on a hillside engaged in a task when she looked out toward the village in the distance and saw the lights in the houses shining.
“My state is like those lamps,” she reflected, and the Buddha is said to have sent her a vision of himself at that moment confirming her vision.
“All living beings resemble the flame of these lamps,” he told her, “one moment lighted, the next extinguished; those only who have arrived at Nirvana are at rest.”2
While this story is first and foremost a parable about death and impermanence, it also is a vivid story about the questions of emptiness. Clutching her dead baby to her breast the way we hold on to our feelings of emotional deprivation, Kisagotami searched for a way to bring her emptiness back to life. Demanding of her fellow villagers the way we demand of our families and therapists that the problem be taken care of, she came to see that her individual problem was not unique, that it was universal. Redirecting her gaze from her own trauma to the flickering lights of the village, she achieved a breakthrough: She saw the more universal experience that her own particular misfortune obscured. It was only by facing, not denying, her personal tragedy that Kisagotami could uncover this greater reality. By struggling with and accepting her loss, she could understand the Buddha’s teachings. No longer striving to contain her grief and keep herself together, she nevertheless stopped falling apart. By appreciating that she could never have what she thought she deserved, she was able to relax. Her emptiness stopped overtaking her only when she stopped taking it personally.
By the time I began my clinical training as a psychiatrist, I had dug down further into my own feelings of emptiness through a combination of intensive meditation and further psychotherapy. I arrived at the psychiatric hospital where I was to work for the next four years not particularly surprised to find that the great bulk of my patients also suffered from some version of these now familiar feelings. I was unsure at first how to translate the Buddha’s insights into actual clinical practice and yielded to the generally prevailing climate at the hospital as I began my work as a therapist. It was the early eighties, and there was a kind of revolt going on against the caricature of the dour, silent psychotherapist. People need mirroring, the theory went, in order to become secure in their own reality, and so I tried, in accordance with this idea, to reflect back some warmth to my patients.
The model for this approach to therapy came from observations of infants and parents. When a child does a new task, it was noted, she will turn back quickly to check if her mother is watching. Catching the twinkle in her mother’s eye, she will be empowered to keep going, and she will take her mother’s approval, or affirmation, with her into the new activity. Self-esteem and self-assurance grow in proportion to how mirrored a child feels. When this process is inadequate, the child feels empty. The empty self needs a real relationship with a real person in order to discover its own reality.
This orientation did much to humanize the kind of teaching I received: It gave a theoretical justification to what many were already feeling and allowed skilled therapists to break down the self-conscious edifice that had alienated many a struggling patient. But this approach, while appealing, seemed sometimes to have serious flaws when put into practice. In my own early work as a therapist I hoped vigorously that my own “unconditional positive regard” would help my patients consolidate their selves and relieve their suffering. More often than not, however, I found that, from their point of view, I could not do enough. They wanted more and more of me, and I would find myself embroiled in their lives. Phone calls came between sessions, demands for attention escalated, and I began to feel exhausted and depleted, more like a beleaguered parent than a mirroring, supportive one.
In my final year of training as a psychiatrist, I found myself in the unenviable position of having the chief psychiatrist of the hospital, a psychoanalyst named Otto Kernberg, as my primary ongoing supervisor. Before entering the program, a sympathetic friend in the psychiatric community had taken me aside and warned me to keep my interests in meditation quiet while working for Kernberg.
“If he hears about it, he’ll eat you alive,” he warned me.
Austrian by birth but raised in Chile, Dr. Kernberg was the leading expert in the problem of emptiness in the psychoanalytic world. Kernberg taught that emptiness was the result of defects in self-development that interfered with a child’s ability to integrate the idea of one person having both good and bad qualities. In Kernberg’s view, the infant first keeps “all-good” and “all-bad” experiences separate; she has no idea that the mother who gratifies her hunger is the same person as the mother who is not there immediately when she cries. At some point, if the child’s frustration and anger are handled properly, she will have the realization that the gratifying and frustrating mother are one and the same person and will thus have the ability to relate to “real” people, not just to what he called “part-objects.” Feelings of emptiness, thought Kernberg, occurred when this ability to relate to “whole-objects” was lacking. Often masking a virulent rage or self-hatred, emptiness, for Kernberg, was a sign of lack of cohesiveness in the self, of an inability to tolerate conflicting feelings for the same person.
Dr. Kernberg (or “Otto,” as we all called him behind his back) was much feared in my milieu, having cultivated a rather aggressive and unforgiving persona to go along with his theory (or vice versa), but much to my relief, I found him generous, patient, and quite forthcoming in a personal way, more relaxed within the privacy of his own office than I would have expected. Yet on one point he was very focused. My problems with my demanding patients lay, he felt, in my failure to deal with their aggression. Unable to see me as a real, and therefore limited, person, they were expecting me to be “all-good,” and at the same time, they were completely furious with me.
“Tell them you don’t think they are aware of how much they want to destroy you,” he would say. “Show them this pattern in their lives, how they ruin that which they most need.”
Indeed, these interpretations were extremely helpful when I put them into my own words and found ways of communicating their essence to my patients. They were able to settle down and make real progress in their lives. Their disturbing complaints of unreality and depersonalization went away. But even as these same patients matured psychologically, their core feeling of emptiness did not disappear. I began to wonder to myself what was wrong. What was I learning from my meditation teachers that I was not communicating to my patients?
At about this time, I was invited to a small colloquium of therapists and meditation instructors designed to stimulate discussion of links between psychotherapy and Buddhism. Preoccupied with my patients’ problem, I asked one of the Tibetan lamas if he could clarify the relationship between my kind of emptiness (and that which I was trying to treat in my patients) and the emptiness that is extolled in Buddhist teachings. I had come to the conclusion myself that the two emptinesses could not have much in common except the sharing of a name. And yet I knew from my own experience that there was a connection between the two, one that I did not yet completely understand.
I knew that emptiness (or sunyata), from a Buddhist perspective, was an understanding of one’s true nature, an intuition of the absence of inherent identity in people or in things. It was the core psychological truth of Buddhism. Emptiness, from a Western perspective, seemed to me to be a tortured feeling of distress, an absence of vitality, a sense of being not quite real enough, of disconnection. I put my question to Gelek Rinpoche (“Rinpoche” being an honorific title like “doctor” or “professor”), a Cambridge-educated lama who now teaches at the University of Michigan, but I was fairly confident of my own formulation and was not quite paying full attention as he began to reply.
With an uncharacteristically serious expression, the lama was making what looked like a hammering motion with his hands over and over again, as if waiting for me to tune in to what he was saying. “It is like a blacksmith,” he was saying, “striking on a … what do you call it in English?… striking on an anvil.” I could not follow what he was getting at; I had trouble even understanding his words. “These are like sparks of emptiness,” he went on, making upward motions with his fingers to show the sparks flying off of the anvil. “These are minds striking against emptiness, like a blacksmith strikes against his anvil. The hollowness you describe, the deficiency and distress, these are like sparks of emptiness, untrained minds trying to grasp emptiness.”
The implications of Gelek’s statement for the psychotherapy profession leaped out at me. “Stop trying to eliminate emptiness!” he was saying. This is where Western therapy was going wrong. Like their patients, psychotherapists were intimidated by emptiness. They were struggling to take those feelings of insufficiency that I had struggled with since high school and eradicate them. They tried to “get to the roots” of the problem, to solve the puzzle, to uncover the hidden dynamics and come up with a plausible explanation, much as my first therapist had handed me my Oedipus complex and expected it to cure me. Therapists were trying to get rid of emptiness by uncovering its cause. From Freud and his followers on down, therapists had identified all kinds of plausible causes.
Psychotherapy was holding out for a cure. Buddhism, as I was learning, sought to turn the Western experience of emptiness around. “Don’t be so afraid of it,” Gelek was saying. “You can never understand what the Buddhists mean if you are so afraid of your personal emptiness.” The problem with the Western experience of emptiness was that it was mixed with so much fear.
I thought at once of a disturbing trend I had witnessed at the psychiatric hospital where I worked. The patients, many of whom were struggling with intense versions of just these feelings, were kept at arms’ length by the staff, disparaged as “borderline,” and talked about as if they needed a “cure,” while the staff, in their sometimes internecine dealings with each other and in their private supervisions, were every bit as borderline as the patients they were looking down on. They were as confused about themselves as the patients were, and they acted out in similar, if not quite so blatant, ways. They alternately idealized and devalued their authority figures, crossed ego boundaries with their patients and with each other, and were just as sensitive to abandonment and criticism as were the people in their care.
In our zeal to eliminate the ghosts of our childhood, to nourish the empty places of emotional insufficiency, and to achieve that pinnacle of psychological development that the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called “feeling real,” we were treating feelings of emptiness as something that needed to be fixed and cured and therefore losing the ground upon which we rest. Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become expert at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. Thus, Western psychotherapists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone’s emotional upbringing, a defect in character, a defense against overwhelming feelings of aggression, or as a stand-in for feelings of inadequacy. Since most of us share one or more of these traits, it becomes all too easy to pathologize a feeling that in Buddhism serves as a starting place for self-exploration.
As Gelek Rinpoche indicated, emptiness can never be eliminated, although the experience of it can be transformed. Like sparks flying off of the blacksmith’s anvil, experiences of emptiness are part of the fabric of our being. Emptiness appears first as the dark side of our attempts to create a separate and self-sufficient self. Any therapy that tries to explain it away, or cure it with a corrective emotional experience, is destined to produce frustration and disappointment. Only when we stop fighting with our personal emptiness can we begin to appreciate the transformation that is possible. The most psychological of the world’s religions, and the most spiritual of the world’s psychologies, Buddhism authenticates a feeling that nearly all Westerners seek to deny, that psychotherapy endeavors, unsuccessfully, to eradicate.
As I reflected on my encounter with Gelek, I pondered my own experiences of meditation. I knew I felt better when I stopped distancing myself from my own emptiness. Meditation had taught me how to separate out the fear of emptiness from my experience of it. Emptiness did not have to mean annihilation, I had realized, nor did it have to mean nothingness. By looking into my own emptiness, I had paradoxically discovered more of my own voice. If therapy could target the fear of emptiness instead of trying to wipe out the entire feeling, perhaps it would be more effective. What was this feeling, really, but the sense that I did not know who I was? Why should that be so objectionable? What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.
This line of reasoning led me directly to a potent undercurrent in the writings of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Winnicott taught that to go willingly into unknowing was the key to living a full life. Only if a parent provides what he called “good-enough ego coverage” can a child go without fear into the unknown. As he explained it, a child needs to develop the capacity to be alone: a faith or trust in the relationship with the parent such that it is possible to explore the world outside of it.
From the beginning, suggested Winnicott, the mother’s task is greater than just satisfying her baby’s physical needs, greater even than mirroring. She must also be able to leave her child alone. This leaving alone does not mean ignoring, nor does it necessarily mean physically, or literally, looking away. An infant, after all, has to be attended to almost constantly. Leaving alone means allowing a child to have her own experience, whether alone or when feeding, bathing, or being held. When suspended in the matrix of the parent-child relationship, a child is free to explore, to venture into new territory, both within herself and without. This freedom to explore while held within the safety net of the parent’s benign presence develops into the capacity to be alone.
I was reminded of this when on vacation in Maine with my family recently. I came upstairs one evening to find my seven-year-old son alone in his darkening room with his nose pressed against the screen of the open window in his bedroom. “The air smells so sweet here,” he said dreamily. Alone in his room, he was having a new, and unexpected, experience. His senses were expanding his reality.
Of all the therapists whom I had read or studied with, Winnicott seemed to me the most attuned to the issue of emptiness. With too much interference from the parents, or too much absence, a child is forced to spend her mental energy coping with her parents’ intrusiveness or unavailability instead of exploring herself. This mental energy then takes over, leading to a situation in which the child’s thinking mind becomes the locus of her existence and the child feels empty. If my son had been worried over where I was, or how I was doing, he could not have smelled the air. When the relationship with a parent is too fragile, a child naturally tries to compensate. This leads to the development of a precocious “caretaker self” that is tinged with a feeling of falsity. Besides feeling empty, a person in this predicament also fears emptiness. The fear of emptiness is really a sign of the fragility of the bond with the parent. We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt. This fear, taught Winnicott, is of being “infinitely dropped,” or, perhaps, of being infinitely reminded.
What connected me even more assuredly to Winnicott’s explanation of emptiness was his insistence that overcoming the fear of emptiness requires “a new experience in a specialized setting.”3 This was precisely what I had found in meditation. Without the counselling of my meditation teachers, and without the method of nonjudgmental awareness, I could never have done the unimaginable thing of looking into my own emptiness. I could not have tolerated that degree of aloneness nor would I have been willing to drop my compensatory mind. Meditation gave me the faith that there were other techniques of self-exploration than the analysis of my thinking mind. It gave me a way of getting back to the secret room of my dreams. I became convinced that therapy could function for people in a similar manner.
The Buddhist way of working with the mind has profound implications for how we as individuals think about change. In Western theories, the hope is always that emptiness can be healed, that if the character is developed or the trauma resolved that the background feelings will diminish. If we can make the ego stronger, the expectation is that emptiness will go away. In Buddhism, the approach is reversed. Focus on the emptiness, the dissatisfaction, and the feelings of imperfection, and the character will get stronger. Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest. Psychotherapy tends to focus on the personal melodrama, exploring its origins and trying to clean up its mess. Buddhism seeks, instead, to purify the insight of emptiness.
Emptiness is vast and astonishing, the Buddhist approach insists; it does not have to be toxic. When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way. But without a method of looking into emptiness, most of us are at risk of becoming overwhelmed by fear. In meditation, there is such a method for looking into emptiness without being overtaken by the fear of the disconnections of the past.
This is a lesson that I have had to apply again and again in my work as a therapist because this fear is precisely what troubles many of the people who come to me for help. People are afraid to face the old sadnesses that lurk in their bodies and psyches and that date from failures in their past. They are afraid to face them, but they are plagued by a sense of falseness if they do not, and so they feel stuck. They actually come to therapy not just because they are afraid, but because somewhere within themselves they are searching for a way to go more deeply into those painful places. It is part of our drive for wholeness that we need to connect up with the agonies of the past. The emphasis in Buddhism on acceptance and meditation rather than talking and analyzing is something that Western therapy can learn from.
Meditation has taught me that people can tolerate more than they think. I often find myself in the position of a coach, teaching people how to venture into their own unexperienced feelings. Psychotherapy, while conventionally seeking to eradicate the debilitating sense of emptiness, can also serve as a forum for authenticating and encouraging a capacity to bear the unknowability of the self. When a patient says to me, as a frustrated and anxious young woman named Betsy did the other day, “I just want to be somewhere where I’m not,” I do not automatically rush to judgment.
“I know what you mean,” I answered. “Let’s talk about how you could actually have that experience.” I explained to Betsy that there were healthy ways as well as unhealthy ways of dropping the oppressive feeling of the self. While people tend to turn first to the unhealthy ways, such as using drugs or alcohol, there are actually much more fulfilling ways of losing oneself, of which meditation is a good example.
At the same time as Betsy was trying to get away from hated aspects of herself, or internalized remnants of her intrusive mother, or (more to the point) the pain and pressure of her own anger, she was also reaching for a new experience. She needed to know that her urge was not merely pathological. As she began to explore around the edge of her recurrent worries, she discovered an anxiety in her chest that seemed to run through her like a hollow core.
At first she was deeply afraid of that place. With some encouragement, though, Betsy learned to rest her attention in the hollow core, and she saw that it was a rich source of mysterious feeling, sometimes sad and lonely but at other times filled with the energy and inquisitiveness of a young child. The hollow space became an enriching space as well as a scary one, filled with unanticipated qualities that expanded her sense of her own reality.
Like my son smelling the night air, Betsy began to use her senses to break through her self-limiting conceptions. She was not just a “bad” girl who could not “make nice” with her mother, she was a passionate young woman whose love and imagination had been stifled by her difficulties getting along in her family. Although Betsy had fought with her mother to preserve herself from her mother’s criticisms, she emerged from those long years with an identity that was forged completely in reaction to her mother. Needless to say, this was very limiting. Only by going into the hollow core could Betsy retrieve the rest of herself.4
In a similar vein, after breaking up his ten-year marriage a good friend of mine, complaining of intolerable emptiness, sought psychotherapy at a local mental health clinic. His only wish, he told his new therapist in their first meeting, was to be free from what he was feeling, and he implored his therapist to take his pain away. His therapist, however, had just left a Zen community where she had been in residence for three years. She was assigned to be my friend’s therapist completely by chance since he was by no means seeking a therapist with a meditative orientation. When he approached her with his complaints, she urged him to stay with his feelings, no matter how intolerable they seemed. She did not attempt to reassure him nor to help him change what he was feeling, but complimented him on being in touch with such an essential truth. When he would complain of his anxiety or his loneliness, she would encourage him to feel them more intensely, and she confronted him repeatedly when he tried to flee from her injunctions. While my friend did not feel any better, he was intrigued by his therapist’s approach, and he began to practice a beginning form of daily meditation that he learned outside of the therapeutic setting.
He describes one pivotal moment in his meditation as a turning point. Terribly uncomfortable with the itchings, burnings, pressures, and pains of his practice and unable to simply stay with the sensations, he remembers finally watching the entire crescendo of an itch. Seeing it develop, crest, and disappear while not making any move to scratch it, he suddenly realized what his therapist had meant when she counselled him to stay with his emotional state, and from that moment on his depression began to lift. Rather than trying to strengthen his ego by eliminating his emptiness, my friend’s therapist had done the reverse. By encouraging his capacity to stay with emptiness, she helped his ego become stronger. His feelings began to change only when he dropped the desire to change them.5
My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, tells a story about one of his most profound spiritual experiences that, to my mind, illustrates a similar point about the value of learning to bear emptiness. Joseph was doing a retreat, called a sesshin, with a very powerful Zen teacher named Sasaki Roshi and was working with a form of meditation known as koan practice, in which he was forced to struggle with a problem, or riddle, that has no rational answer. The sesshin is structured very tightly and Joseph saw the roshi, or teacher, four times a day to give him his koan answers. But each time he answered, the roshi would ring his bell very quickly and dismiss him, saying things like, “Oh, very stupid,” or “Okay, but not Zen,” leading Joseph to feel more and more frustrated, demeaned, and tense. Finally the roshi seemed to relent a bit, and he gave Joseph a new, simpler koan, “How do you manifest the Buddha while chanting a sutra?” Joseph understood that the point was to come in and just chant a bit, rather than to try to give some kind of rational explanation, but there was one problem that made the exercise much more complicated.
As Joseph describes it, “I do not think Sasaki Roshi knew, although he might have known, that this koan plugged in exactly to some very deep conditioning in me going back to the third grade. Our singing teacher back then had said, ‘Goldstein, just mouth the words.’ From then on I have had a tremendous inhibition about singing, and now here I was, having to perform in a very charged situation. I was a total wreck. In the pressure cooker of the sesshin, which is held in silence except for the interviews, everything becomes magnified so much.
“I rehearsed and rehearsed two lines of chant, all the while getting more and more tight, more and more tense. The bell rang for the interview, I went in, I started chanting, and I messed up the entire thing. I got all the words wrong; I felt completely exposed and vulnerable and raw. And Roshi just looked at me and with great feeling said, ‘Very good.’ ”6
Joseph had been hiding this particular inadequacy, and yet, as the intensity of his feelings revealed, he had remained much identified with it. Sasaki Roshi helped him open up to the very vulnerability that Joseph was struggling to avoid. He helped him to be: open and vulnerable and insecure, not confident, controlled, and coherent. By making Joseph’s own childhood emptiness accessible to him once again, and by focusing on it, Roshi unleashed the power of Joseph’s mature mind to be empty. Relieved of the associated shame and humiliation, he no longer feared, in Huang Po’s words, an infinite drop through the Void. Uncontaminated, his own personal emptiness became his ticket to ride.
Joseph’s story reminds me of an experience I had hearing Tibetan monks from the Namgyal Monastery doing their ritual harmonic chanting. When listening to the monks, at first all I could hear were their low guttural rumblings, just as all that I hear at first in meditation are my own obsessive worries and fears. But then, off in the distance, comes a sweet, eerie, high note rising above the fray, hovering there, its existence dependent on the simultaneous appearance of the rumbling lower octaves. The monks are actually producing a new note, an overtone, that is one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. In the same way in meditation, I have experienced clearings in my mind just when I seemed the most stuck.7
Our personal feelings of emptiness are like the low, guttural rumblings of the Tibetan monks chanting. At first they are all we can hear. But then, slowly, or sometimes suddenly, something sweet emerges out of the depths of our own minds. Gradually, the overtone fills our consciousness and we cannot believe what we are hearing. Our own personal and self-centered emptiness yields to something more universal. The sparks of emptiness return to their source.
This is the task that faces nearly all of us. We must learn how to be with our feelings of emptiness without rushing to change them. Only then can we have access to the still, silent center of our own awareness that has been hiding, unbeknownst to our caretaker selves, behind our own embarrassment and shame. When we tap in to this secret storehouse, we begin to appreciate the two-faced nature of emptiness—it fills us with dissatisfaction as it opens us to our own mystery. As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again.