When Freud gave his instructions to physicians practicing psychoanalysis, he compared the process to the newly invented telephone. Turn your unconscious toward that of the patient as one telephone receiver is attuned to another, he suggested. Only then can the vibrations that underlie the verbal communications be felt. As this process was clarified, it became clear that feeling states in particular pass across human boundaries with remarkable ease. Therapists first described this in people whose anger was so personally unacceptable that they seemed to be completely unaware of it. When sitting with such patients, the therapist would often find herself filled with an inexplicable rage that had to be decoded and reintroduced to the patient in order for there to be any progress in the therapy. Yet this process, which came to be called projective identification, is not limited to fury, nor is it always pathological. Sometimes it is simply necessary.
When my son was in kindergarten, about midway through the school year, he suddenly became extremely clingy whenever we dropped him off anywhere. At school, at gymnastics, at a friend’s house, at a birthday party: he became tearful and anxious at times that had previously not been at all difficult for him. At first we ignored the problem, hoping that it would disappear by itself. Then we tried to figure it out, which led to all kinds of theories but no improvement. Then we tried a confusing mix of talking to him, bribing him with Pez candy, and staying close to him at all times. Nothing worked.
Finally a friend of mine, a child analyst named Robbie Stein, was over for lunch and we discussed the problem (at my wife’s insistence). He suggested that we set aside a half hour every night to play with a specially chosen set of toys with our son. Nothing could interrupt us and we should just let the play take over. Ready to try anything, my wife gathered a number of assorted figures and objects and put them in a shoebox that we set in a special place and called “the box.” My son took to it at once, and thus we added a new element to our nightly bedtime ritual.
On the third night, my son and I were playing that two characters were having a playdate, and he kept saying, “Come on, my daddy will make you dinner, my daddy will make you pizza.” Proud as I am of my contribution to the home environment, I knew this scenario to be unusual.
“Your daddy?” I said, rousing myself from a rather inattentive and languorous state. “What about your mommy?”
“Oh,” he said matter-of-factly, “she’s dead. Or she’s not really dead, her mother’s dead. What’s that thing you die of, Daddy?”
“Cancer,” I said, slowly putting two and two together.
Several months earlier my mother-in-law had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, had been hospitalized for surgery, and was now receiving radiation treatments. We thought we had shielded the kids from all of this, but we were wrong. My son’s anxiety over death had turned a matter-of-fact good-bye embrace into a nightmare of clinging, and we retrieved this information only by letting him be in bits and pieces in his play.
As we sat there among the play figures, I was able to reassure him on a couple of different levels. Some people do die from cancer, I explained, but not everyone. Grandma was being treated, just like Grandpa had been, and she wasn’t feeling sick anymore. We all thought she was going to live until she was very old. I read to him a children’s book about an elderly Tibetan woodcarver who gets old and dies. I could feel my son grappling with the reality of not just Grandma’s death but of his and ours. Yet the feeling was not morose or depressing. He had his excitement and his energy back; he was completely engaged in his own inimitable and electric way. With the topic out in the open, he began to relax. After a short time he had had enough. The door to his room burst open and he was off. Death had entered into our vocabulary, and my son put an end to his clinging at routine separations.
This interaction with my son reminded me of some of the most surprising encounters of my early years as a therapist with hospitalized patients. It was not unusual for me to find myself sitting alone with a newly admitted patient who seemed in total crisis, embroiled in intense feelings over which she seemed to have little control. These young men or women (for they were usually young) would be filled with rage or sadness or fear, but upon getting to know them, I would discover that they were remarkably unaware of what they were feeling. They could act their feelings out, but they did not seem to know what they were. They were by no means crazy, in the conventional sense of the word, but they seemed to have no idea of what was happening to them, of why they were starving themselves or cutting themselves or threatening suicide if left alone by their boyfriends or girlfriends.
As I got to know these people even better, I began to see that not only did they not know what they were feeling, but they had remarkably little idea of what feelings even were. They had no vocabulary for their emotions. Reacting with fear every time certain physical or emotional sensations became prominent, it was as if they were phobic toward their own feelings. Only when they went back to the beginning and learned the basics of what emotions actually are—what we call “mad, sad, and glad”—could they develop the capacity to tolerate feelings.
Psychoanalysis has some very interesting things to say about the origins of emotional experience and about how people end up in the situation of these patients. Especially in early life, feelings are generally not understood until they are taken up by another person and given back in more palatable form. A baby who is uncomfortable because her diaper needs changing does not think to herself, “I’m mad because Mommy isn’t paying attention.” She simply feels unpleasant physical sensations and then mounting internal frustration. When her mother notices what is going on and then interprets for her (“There, there, it’s okay, don’t be so mad. I’m here. Let’s get you changed.”), the baby gradually learns that those mounting internal feelings are called “mad.” Her mother contains the baby’s feelings and translates them back to her in a more digestible form.
In addition, a parent is faced early in a child’s life with the full intensity of the child’s ruthless pursuit of her own needs. Children have a single-minded and aggressive desire for contact that can often feel overwhelming to a parent who is expecting sweetness and light. A parent’s duty, in the face of this emotional assault, is not to withdraw or to retaliate. It is to survive. This survival sends a message to a young child that her emotions are not scary or destructive.1
I remember an exchange with my daughter when she was in kindergarten that confirmed this point for me. We had had a fight that morning that had escalated, and I had given her a “time-out,” requiring her to sit quietly for a minute by herself. A bit worried about how she had reacted to this, I walked her to school afterward and stood by in the playground as she went rushing up to several of her friends. Immediately, her conversation turned to the morning’s exchange.
“Do you know what my daddy does when I’m bad?” she asked her friends excitedly. “He gives me a time-out!”
I understood at once that my daughter was proud of my ability to withstand her feelings. She had not felt my reaction to be a retaliation, nor had she absorbed a message that she was dangerous. I had been able to contain her feelings, and she was not left with a sense that she had to repair anything in her relationship with me.
All of our intimate relationships, not just parent-child ones, have intense emotional exchanges that test our ability to know and bear feelings. When I first fell in love, in my adult years, I travelled with my future wife to a rocky point on the coast of Maine that had always been special to me. As I embraced her, with the surf pounding around us, we were both filled with a sense not just of love but of death, as if we were holding on tightly to each other while our lives passed before us, or as if we were mourning a dead child. We did not know where these feelings came from nor why we were both having them, but they seemed to have something to do with an implicit sense of the preciousness of our love. Just as my son needed us to take in his dread of death and make it make sense, so were we spontaneously making sense out of each other’s most intimate emotions.
As Freud discovered in his writings about the countryside, beauty carries with it the seed of mourning over its eventual demise. In our hug on the beach we were breathing each other’s emotions, making them make sense in a way we could only do with each other’s help. Lovers often inject breath into each other’s emotions, as parents do in a different way with their children, making those very feelings more tolerable by virtue of their being exchanged and known.
In a quite similar way, it is not uncommon for me to be sitting with a relatively new patient, listening to the details of a particular problem, and to suddenly feel, out of the blue, a sudden fear or sadness that always takes me by surprise. It is as if an unanticipated visitor has suddenly arrived and I am unsure of whose friend she is. “Who invited you?” I want to say. The more conventional approach to understanding this phenomenon is to assume that something in what the patient is saying is triggering an emotional response in me based on my own past, on my own unconscious material. But this is not the only possibility. There are times when the feeling proves to have come from the patient.
Both the ancient tradition of Buddhist psychology and the modern one of psychotherapy recognize that recovering the capacity to feel is crucial to their disciplines. There can be no wholeness without an integration of feelings. The paradox that both traditions have discovered is that, while we seek to integrate feelings, the only way to access them is through a state of unintegration. We need a state of reverie to know our emotions. This reverie both gives us space, as Winnicott described, and allows us to take in others’ feelings, as therapists have discovered. As the psychologist and writer Gregory Bateson used to say, “It takes two to know one.”2
Rather than learning how to be tolerant of difficult feelings, many of us have learned only to avoid them. As with my hospitalized patients, our inclination is often to run from our emotions because they carry with them the threat of destruction. Indulging ourselves in thinking as a protective alternative, we try to avoid our fear by staying aloof of our feelings.
In an ancient Buddhist sutra called the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha extolled the value of what he called the “tamed heart,” while warning against the dangers of not being touched in this way. “I know nothing which is as intractable as an untamed heart,…” he declared. “I know nothing which brings suffering as does an untamed, uncontrolled, unattended, and unrestrained heart.… I know nothing which brings joy as does a tamed, controlled, attended, and restrained heart.3
For a child, the taming of the heart occurs when a parent survives the onslaught of the child’s emotions. In psychotherapy, the prototype for the taming of the heart is the reciprocal exchange of feelings like that which occurred when we played “the box” with my son. In meditation, the taming of the heart takes place through the gradual cultivation of mindfulness, in which nonjudgmental awareness is extended from the body to feelings, emotions, and states of mind. In its interpersonal method, psychotherapy has created a unique situation in which the flow of feelings between people can be tapped and acknowledged. In its cultivation of awareness, meditation seeks to create an inner holding environment in which the raw material of emotional experience can be reintroduced and made use of. While the methods may differ, the intent is the same: to recover a capacity for feelings that we are all somewhat afraid of.
Many of us come to psychotherapy or meditation or other avenues of personal transformation because our lives are restricted by our own unacknowledged feelings. We carry with us a feeling of falseness, or an excessive intellectuality, that wraps around and obscures our hidden emotional capacity. I was given a good example of this in my work when a university professor named Olivia managed to evoke in me an intense feeling of frustration, despite being one of the kindest and most intelligent people I had ever treated. Olivia did not know that she was making me feel frustrated, and it took me a while to figure out that this frustration I was feeling actually belonged to Olivia.
In session after session I would feel myself reaching to understand what she was saying and falling just short. She would describe power struggles at work with just enough vagueness that I would never be quite sure of who was who or of where the difficulty lay. When I would try to clarify the picture by asking questions, her answers would lead me further astray. She told me ornate dreams that involved labyrinthine passageways with endless numbers of doorways, vistas, and characters such that I could never be sure where to focus. We had wonderful intellectual discussions that served as a kind of reassurance to us both that we could understand each other, but time and again I would return to a feeling of frustrated confusion coupled with a recurrent wish that I could be of more help to her.
Finally I had enough sense to focus both of our attention on the feeling of frustration that I was experiencing. Our attention to this frustration elicited a series of associations for Olivia that culminated in a story of how she had been hospitalized with a life-threatening infection when six months old and kept in isolation for a month. This was a story that Olivia had been told, but it was not one that she had ever actually remembered. Her hands and arms had been wrapped and padded, Olivia told me, to prevent her from chafing the skin off of them as she thrashed about her bed in frustration. For weeks on end, Olivia had been kept in a sterile chamber in the hospital. Her frustration from that time seemed to still be alive in her.
By being so vague in our sessions, Olivia was managing to re-create this un-worked-through frustration in me. It was as if it were too dangerous for her to experience it all by herself. As she began to take it back from me—to connect up the feeling with the story—Olivia became much less vague in her sessions. She also became more able to tolerate frustration whenever she was left in the lurch by her coworkers or was not supported adequately by her boss. These situations lost some of their mysterious force once she understood how vulnerable she was to any kind of frustrating circumstances. Rather than just acting her feelings out, as my son was doing in his clinging and as Olivia was doing in her vagueness, she actually learned how to feel them.
In his description of the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness,” the Buddha taught the method by which we can reestablish rapport with ourselves. In certain ways, his approach is very similar to that which occurs in psychotherapy as well, but he was able to outline it in an almost cookbook-like manner. First and foremost comes mindfulness of the body, in which the direct physical sensations of breathing and bodily experience are made the objects of meditation. When I first began to practice meditation intensively, I found that my sense of myself in my body was dramatically increased. This is the foundation of any successful meditation practice and the source of much of its power. As I also discovered, this can be as frustrating as it is rewarding because of the mind’s inevitable tendency to pull itself away from the body. Mindfulness of the body is a lesson in how much time we spend in obsessive and repetitive thought. One of my patients, back from his first ten-day silent retreat, described it as “circling endlessly in the eddies of my mind.”
Buddhism offers a rather paradoxical message about all of this. While asserting, over and over again, that “all is mind,” Buddhist teachers also emphasize the defensive, or avoidant, nature of much of our thinking activity. “If we are not our thoughts,” I have often questioned, “then what are we?” In emphasizing the importance of mind, Buddhism is clearly pointing to something other than the brain or the thinking apparatus. Mind is not localized in the head in Buddhism; indeed, the same word is often used interchangeably for mind and heart. Healing, in Buddhism, means opening up a connection to this mind through the practice of meditation.
One of my patients, a mother of three young children, had a sincere interest in learning about such meditation but absolutely no free time to meditate. Like many parents, Abbie felt obligated to her family but oppressed by their constant demands and frustrated by her inability to make time for herself. I explained to her that meditation need not be done exclusively in a silent environment or in a cross-legged position, that the Buddha had taught meditation in four postures: sitting, lying down, walking, and standing. The idea was to develop awareness of bodily experience or, at first, to develop awareness of how little awareness there was of bodily experience.
Abbie decided, after some experimentation, that she could use her time in the kitchen to practice. “As long as I’m in the kitchen, everyone leaves me alone,” she laughed. Standing at the sink washing dishes, Abbie began to consciously focus on her posture, on how she held her body, and on how she shifted her weight. She was incredulous of how much tension she had. She found that she was holding her body in all kinds of unnatural positions which only served to exacerbate the feelings of strain that she was struggling against.
Abbie felt chagrined by this discovery and as if this too was a sign of how messed up she was, but I congratulated her for her accomplishment in meditation. She had discovered the chronic state in which most of us spend most of our time. Lost in thought, cut off from our bodies, nursing a grievance or two, with physical and emotional tension accumulating outside of awareness, we perpetuate the very sense of frustration that we struggle against. Mindfulness of the body opens this up so that we can begin the process of getting to know ourselves.
Contact with the body develops the ability to be with feelings. The physical tension that Abbie discovered was the perfect vehicle for the exploration of her psyche. Rather than walling herself off from difficult feelings, she learned to literally breathe in and out of her anxiety-ridden states, using her body as the forum to learn about her feelings.
Mindfulness of feelings, which involves meditation on the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of bodily experience, is the next foundation of mindfulness. Since feeling states are experienced primarily in the body, the ability to maintain a continuous state of physical awareness gives an enormous boost to the capacity to bear feelings. This is fortunate because one of the most common occurrences in beginning meditation involves the reexperiencing of terrifying feelings. These are the core states that were often impossible to process in childhood because of parental absence or interference. Even in meditation, these feelings can still seem intolerable, but the entire thrust of meditation practice is designed to increase their tolerability. This can be a frightening experience, as many of my patients have discovered.
Because mindfulness of feelings involves the careful attention to the flow of pleasant and unpleasant sensation in the body, there is none of the usual picking and choosing that otherwise colors our experience. When I was instructed in this method, I was taught to simply note whatever I was feeling: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. My observing mind functioned almost as another person, watching the flow of sensation with relative ease. This created a very different relationship with my internal world than the one I was used to. My chronic tendency was to shrink from the unpleasant and reach for the pleasant. Mindfulness of feelings encouraged a dispassionate acceptance of both.
This becomes very interesting as meditation progresses because, as we pay more attention to our bodily experience, we inevitably come upon those early traumas that we have shied away from. It seems as if they are stored in our bodies, waiting for us to stumble upon them. A patient of mine named Dale, for example, came back from an intensive meditation retreat and described how a pain in her neck had become the principal focus of her nine-day retreat. As she tried to experience the flow of unpleasant sensations emanating from this pain, she became intolerably anxious. Her mind produced waves of catastrophic imagery. For many days she took this anxiety to be some kind of failure on her part rather than trusting that it was part of her process of unfolding.
Only when she learned to apply mindfulness of feelings to her cascades of worry and anxious thought did she discover the true power of her meditation. By not backing away from those unpleasant feelings, she was able to see how anxiety had colored her experience since early childhood and how scared she was by it. Seeing her anxiety as a sign of failure was not a new reaction for Dale; it was one that she had had for as long as she could remember. Once she was reassured that her upsurge of anxiety did not disqualify her as a meditator, she was able to continue with her practice, discovering, for the first time in her life, that she was able to bear more anxiety than she had thought. As her fears settled down, Dale was able to relax around her pain and, as is often the case, the unpleasant sensations in her neck began to ease.
In just this way, mindfulness of feelings merges into mindfulness of thoughts and emotions, the third of the four foundations of mindfulness. Beginning with the body, extending first to feelings and then to more complex states of mind, mindfulness allows us to explore those aspects of our experience, like our day-to-day thoughts, that we usually take for granted. As Dale discovered, once we are able to breathe in and out of difficult feeling states, we observe how much of our routine thinking is rooted in avoidance of these very emotions. This is precisely what those psychotherapists in the tradition of D. W. Winnicott have discovered in treating people who complain of feeling estranged from life.
When children’s emotional states are not accepted by their parents, the children’s own thinking has to step in and try to manage the situation. Unable to process feelings by themselves, such children begin talking to themselves, trying to protect against the onslaught of their own emotional states. It was easy to imagine Dale as an anxious child, for instance, with parents who were too frightened of anxiety themselves to help her with her own. Much of the endless circling of thought that we discover in meditation seems to serve this compensatory and protective function.
The most basic fear experienced by people coming to see me for therapy is of being overwhelmed by the force of their own emotions if they relax the grip of their egos. They fear that if they give up control, they will lose control, that their unconscious will, if given a chance, rise up and inundate them. In some way, this reflects the classic view of the unconscious as a seething cauldron of demonic forces that have to be tamed by the light of reason and analysis. While respecting the power and complexity of the Freudian unconscious, my Buddhist understanding has made me suspicious of my patients’ fears. It is my experience that emotions, no matter how powerful, are not overwhelming if given room to breathe. Contained within the vastness of awareness, our emotions have the power to connect us with each other rather than driving us apart. Mindfulness can serve as a vehicle for desensitizing ourselves to our fears of our own feelings, breaking down the self-imposed barriers that keep us at a distance, not just from each other, but from ourselves.
When one of the first Japanese Zen masters to teach in the West, Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, taught his students how to pay attention to their thoughts, he instructed them to trace them back to their roots. “Thoughts are like weeds,” he stressed, and they can be pulled up by their roots and used to fertilize the garden of mind. I think Suzuki Roshi was pointing to just this compensatory activity of thought in his instructions. If we can establish a rapport with the emotional experience that takes place primarily in our bodies, we do not need to think so much. Thought is not the enemy in meditation as so many people would like to believe. Thinking is quite useful when there is something to ponder. But defensive thinking just makes us feel cut off.
Thinking quiets down in meditation because the excessive mental activity is no longer necessary once these connections are made. When emotional states are experienced in their entirety, rather than as fleeting shadows in the recesses of the mind, thinking is not quite so important. In tracing thoughts back to their roots, back to the original feeling states, we get out of our heads and return to our senses. A different experience of mind is then possible, one that the Buddha points to in his fourth foundation of mindfulness.
After we have established a rapport with the body, with feelings, and with mental and emotional states, the Buddha suggested that we could have a new relationship with our minds. This is the fourth foundation: mindfulness of mind. In speaking of mind the Buddha was not referring to thought, or even to the thinker of thoughts. He was referring to something closer to the Western notion of psyche.4 Psyche is more like the container in which thoughts and feelings happen. It is like the underlying nervous system that connects the mind-body process. In Buddhism it is compared to clear space—the big blue sky of mind.
In healthy development, it seems, the mind does not have to take over prematurely and organize a person’s experience; the environment (in the form of parental activity) can be trusted to do this. This frees the mind up for another activity, which the child analyst D. W. Winnicott delicately described as understanding. No parent can be perfect, he pointed out, but they need only be good enough. When they are good enough, the child learns to make use of the parents’ “relative failure” rather than compensating for an absolute failure with excessive mental activity. In “making use of” their parents’ failures, children germinate the capacity for empathy. The function of the mind, implied Winnicott, is not thinking. It is tolerance.5
When a child is raised in a holding environment that is good enough, that child’s mind gradually takes on the character of her parent’s acceptance. When difficult feelings arise, the child trusts that they can be filtered through the parent or borne in the psyche in the interim. When the parents inevitably fail to be present at a time of need, the mind develops the capacity to not take their failure personally and to be tolerant of their absence. “What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant’s understanding,6 said Winnicott. The child gradually develops the knowledge of her parents as separate beings and is not catastrophically threatened by their separateness. We do not really need perfection, implied Winnicott, we only need a mind that is capable of generosity.
For most of us, this optimal path of development does not proceed so smoothly. Rather than minds of tolerance, we are more likely to have minds of judgment that we experience as beyond our voluntary control. Much of the time, our minds seem to have minds of their own. When the Buddha gave his original teachings on meditation, he did so in a way that was meant to counter this condition. He laid out a process designed to heal the split that we feel from our own minds. The four foundations of mindfulness permit the mind to take on its inherent capacity for tolerance.
I had an experience on a recent meditation retreat that illuminated much of this for me. I had been looking forward to the retreat, eight days away from all of my responsibilities as a parent and a therapist, and to being in the country, free to take long walks and explore the outdoors. I arrived at the meditation center in the late evening, began my retreat with a brief meditation before bed, and awoke in the early morning with chills and a scratchy throat. It was pouring outside and windy and cold, and despite my firmest intent, I was unable to go outside without feeling absolutely awful.
In addition to my struggle with the flu, a number of other minor inconveniences, such as the quality of the food and the banging of the heating pipes at night, began to bother me. The weather eventually cleared up, but as it turns out, it was hunting season and the still country air was routinely punctuated by shotgun blasts. Long walks in the woods suddenly seemed much less attractive. Through all of this, I engaged myself in my meditation practice, dutifully noting my reactions and returning to my breathing and bodily experience. I took Tylenol and naps and sat through much of my illness.
My mind became quite still, but I had the uncomfortable sense of hanging back just a bit, of being at a slight remove from all that was happening within and around me. After about five days I had my first interview with Joseph Goldstein, my teacher at the retreat. I described my sense of remove to him and gradually admitted to all of the little dissatisfactions that I was struggling with. My cold, the rain, the food, my inability to exercise—one by one I confessed to how, underneath my stillness of mind, I was still unhappy with the general tenor of things.
“Oh, I’ve spent a lot of time in that place,” said Joseph. “It’s not the way you wanted it to be, is it?”
I felt silly to be falling into such an obvious trap of letting my expectations interfere with what was actually happening, but I also felt an all-too-familiar sadness creeping up from my chest to my eyes. In the stillness of the retreat I saw how I did this a lot: envisioning how something, or someone, had to be perfect, and then being disappointed when they failed, pulling myself back into a sullen remove. Here I was doing it again.
“You know what I sometimes do?” said Joseph, referring in particular to my cold and discomfort. “I pretend that I’m dying and that there’s nothing to be done. Rather than judging it, take no position in your mind. Stop leaning into circumstances,” he continued, “and rest in your own awareness.”
Joseph’s words resonated and helped me immeasurably in my retreat. Unknowingly, he was paraphrasing Winnicott’s observation that the infant’s understanding releases the mother from perfection. Only by developing the ability of my mind to take no position could I begin to do that. In recovering my sadness at the impossibility of my demands, but in not treating that sadness as special, I was learning a lesson that Buddhism teaches over and over again: Uncovering difficult feelings does not make them go away but does enable us to practice tolerance and understanding with the entirety of our being. As Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.