When the Buddha achieved his enlightenment, it was after a week of sitting in continuous meditation, wrestling with his own demons. Immediately after his breakthrough he reached down with one hand to touch the earth, a pose that is reproduced in Buddhist sculptures all over Asia. The traditional stories suggest that the Buddha was calling the earth as witness to his enlightenment, but there is more to the posture than that. The Buddha, by his gesture, was suggesting that he had touched, and been touched by, the root of his being. He had passed through all illusions of identity and reached the far shore of pure awareness. But in touching the earth the Buddha was indicating something even more. He was demonstrating that the ground of his being was his interconnection with the world.
In order to reach this understanding, the Buddha had to find a way through himself. He had to leave all of his relationships and go deeply inside himself to confront his own separateness. In the Four Noble Truths, his first oral teachings after his enlightenment, the Buddha attempted to spell out what he had found. The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there. The Buddha had to leave his relationships in order to discover his capacity to relate. Explicitly using the metaphor of a path, he described the Eightfold Path as the key to uncovering this capacity.
In the centuries since this first teaching, it has become customary to speak of the spiritual path as if it were something like a well-marked highway with entrance ramps and speed limits and even rest stops or service stations. People speak of being “on the path” as if it were clear where it starts and stops. But if we look at what the Buddha actually taught, we see immediately that his Eightfold Path of Right Livelihood—Action, Speech, Mindfulness, Concentration, Effort, Understanding, and Thought—are really parameters rather than way stations on a journey. The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one. It is a very personal process, unique to each individual.
I was reminded of this not long ago when on vacation in Maine. My family shares a small piece of oceanfront property with a number of other families, and we had to have a path built through a common lot so that everyone could have access to the ocean. After much debate, some local contractors were engaged to build a path from the common driveway down a sloping and thickly wooded patch of stream- and root-filled forest to the beach. One option was to bulldoze a straight path from start to finish using heavy machinery, and the other was to respect the contours of the forest and to wind a path around boulders and large trees while gradually working toward the shore. This latter process, which mercifully was the chosen option, produced a lovely and varied, twisting and turning, delightful path through the forest. But it was a lot of work for the contractors who had to pick their way with relatively small tools through the unforgiving forest.
This work struck me as a perfect metaphor for the kind of path the Buddha had in mind. In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.
This is a difficult process because of how restricted our capacities for attention usually are. We do not suspend our judgments easily, nor do we generally have access to our childhood capacity for curiosity and exploration. Our attentional resources are hijacked early in our lives by our need to manage the intrusive or ignoring familial environments in which we are immersed. As a result, many of us end up in unreal states, stuck in our heads, unaware of our bodies, and unaware of being unaware.
In making a path like the Buddha, we discover our own capacities for relationship. Doing this is like feeling our way in the dark. We need a healthy appreciation for what kind of obstacles we are facing within ourselves, and we need a method for working our way around those obstacles. It is in this sense that the path is the goal—opening leads to further opening. The Buddha’s meditative teachings are about finding and incorporating a method around our obstacles. They are as relevant in today’s world of psychotherapy as they were when the Buddha first reached down and touched the earth.
When I first entered psychotherapy, some years into my embrace of Buddhism, it was still with a sense of wanting to break out of myself in some way. After my experience with Ram Dass and my immersion in meditation, I had decided to enter medical school as a prelude to becoming a psychiatrist. The more familiar I became with meditation, the more I was aware that progress on the spiritual path meant a willingness to explore my emotional life as the Buddha had indicated in his teachings on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Opening my attention to body, feelings, emotions, and mind did not have to be restricted to the meditation cushion. It was a process I could attempt in all aspects of my life and was certainly one I could pursue with a therapist. Despite my earlier unsatisfactory experience with therapy, I became interested in giving it another try.
Guided to a Gestalt therapist named Michael Vincent Miller by my housemate Francis (who was himself a meditator studying Gestalt therapy), I remember being asked in my first session what I wanted to get out of therapy. It was a simple question, but it shook me up. I had just arrived, after all. Wasn’t it enough that I was there? Couldn’t I just surrender and let therapy do its thing? Wasn’t he supposed to help me plumb the depths of my unconscious to find out what I was truly after? I did not really know what I wanted, but I was being asked by this somewhat mercurial man to take responsibility for wanting something. Wasn’t this awfully personal?
I was intrigued enough by my predicament to not flee precipitously. I must have known on some level that what I wanted was to be able to say what I wanted. I fumbled around for a while and said something about wishing that I could be more spontaneous, or more original, or more dynamic in my expression of myself Michael nodded sympathetically, at which I took offense. He then asked me if I was aware that I was sitting on the edge of my seat.
I was not aware of it. I was sitting the way I always sat when talking with someone. What was wrong with the way I was sitting, I wanted to ask. But I remained silent, feeling suddenly trapped and at the same time noticing a flicker of glee deep inside me. This man was going to help me: I could feel it.
Michael waited, as if to give me time to get over my sudden self-consciousness and to actually notice how I was sitting. He was right. I was perched like a bird on the edge of my chair. I was very uncomfortable there. “You give yourself no support,” he said softly.
I spent the rest of the session feeling what it was like to sit back in my chair, making use of my whole body as I spoke. It required a good deal of effort to not just float back up into my head, but I could feel already that I was forging a connection with the physical environment that I had been denying myself. My body was the unconscious that I was so interested in plumbing. For all of my meditation training, I still needed the help of a therapist to show me where I was holding back.
“Form is emptiness,” the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.
In my own way, I was dramatizing the scenario that Winnicott described so beautifully in his articles on excessive thinking. Distanced from my own body and lodged somewhere in my thinking mind, I was as estranged from my own creative abilities as I was removed from the support of my chair. There was a connection between inhabiting my body and opening up a creative mental space from which I could use words to articulate myself.
My therapist could just as easily have been a Zen master in the manner in which he related to me, only he was not. For me, his teaching did not in any way contradict what I had already put together for myself from my years of practicing meditation; it merely drove home the lesson on another front, in a particularly vivid and helpful way. The lesson about being more in my body was not particularly new, but it was presented to me in a new way. We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.
There was something about this therapy that was very different from what I had expected, and that has influenced me tremendously in my own work. Michael did not present himself as an authority figure who “analyzed” my psychic configurations. He did not interpret my Oedipal dilemma, at least not in so many words. He was not remote and silent. He was very available, quite humorous and playful, and he was always wondering where I was. He paid particular attention to what prevented me from being part of the relationship with him.
Intuitively, I recognized that his ongoing question, of where was I, was my own question as well. It had driven my interest in meditation and had propelled me into therapy. Through the power of therapy I started to see that I was most identified with who I was when I was anxious, yet I felt most myself when I could relate unself-consciously. This presented me with a bit of a paradox. Throughout the course of this therapy I would always arrive at a rather intimidating conclusion: The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.
This makes the process sound too passive, however. Getting out of the way was essential: Dislodging myself from my overindulgence in my thinking mind was a necessary precursor to any kind of satisfying encounter. But letting myself happen was not quite the voyeuristic process that it sounds. My therapist was asking something of me that was more on the order of improvisation. He was asking for meditation in action, not for a mere witnessing of psychic debris.
When I first discovered Buddhism I found that it authenticated a feeling of emptiness that I had long harbored. I had never felt as real as I thought I was supposed to feel, but with the wisdom of Buddhism behind me I stopped trying to feel more real than I did. My initial experiences in meditation taught me a receptive kind of surrender that gave me a sense of deepening, opening, and acceptance. This gave me back a tremendous freedom—the freedom to just be how I was. My therapy with Michael Vincent Miller worked in harmony with this discovery. Just as the Buddha taught that we should begin with mindfulness of the body, so did Michael direct my attention there. Just as the Buddha taught that giving up our premature notions of who or what we are leads to a more authentic feeling of self, so did Michael encourage me to improvise without being tripped up by my own self-consciousness. I came to see that this was an active aspect of surrender. Rather than opening into the unknown, this was more of a letting go into spontaneity and self-expression.
My most vivid memory of this period of therapy is of a time when I was completely unsure of what to talk about and anxiously casting about for a topic when I caught sight of an intensely blue turquoise ring on Michael’s finger. I had never seen it before, not because it was new, but because I had not yet been relaxed enough to look freely while in his office. I remember noticing how blue it was and asking about the ring, and seeing him smile before he told me about it, and feeling the warmth of our exchange. It was a small, and forgettable, moment, but one that I remember for its intimacy. I could never have orchestrated that interaction beforehand, as I often tried to do before going into his office, and that was the source of its power. I created the exchange out of what was available in that moment, and it was good. Therapy was like an infusion of that possibility into my life.
In the Buddha’s psychological teachings the major obstacle to this kind of spontaneous relating is called delusion. Delusion is the mind’s tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience. Delusion would have me believe that I was my anxiety and that I was forever isolated as a result. Motivated by fear and insecurity, delusion creates limitation by imposing boundaries. In an attempt to find safety, a mind of delusion succeeds only in walling itself off.
In the world of psychotherapy this deluded quality of mind has not gone unnoticed, although it has been given different names. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan pointed to it in his discussion of how the young child first catches sight of herself in the mirror and is enthralled by her image. The reflection becomes the ideal, thought Lacan. The British analyst D. W. Winnicott said much the same thing when he spoke of how the imposed coherence of the child’s reactive mind obscures the capacity for spontaneity. What is lost in such a scenario, said Winnicott, is the capacity to be.
From D. W. Winnicott’s perspective, “psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist.… The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.”1 Another way of saying this is that therapy is a means of bringing someone from a state of not being able to relate into a state of relating. When I caught sight of Michael’s ring and made mention of it, I was finally relating. It was a breakthrough for me, a recovery of a natural ability that had become dormant.
The relief that I felt at being able to engage in this way was nearly identical to the relief that I have at other times felt in meditation when making contact with my “big sky” mind. The two experiences have more than a superficial similarity. Both therapy and meditation, as disciplines, require the gentle coaxing and cajoling of the mind from a contracted state to a momentarily open and playful one.
When, in my first session, Michael made me aware of how little I was using my chair for support, he was trying to bring me into the state of being able to play. He had noticed one of the primary ways that I was restraining myself, one of the means by which I was keeping myself at bay. By sitting forward in my chair and giving myself no support, I was not in touch with my body. I was making a boundary between my mind and body that was limiting my experience. In the world of psychotherapy this is called a defense. I was trying to protect myself from anxiety by distancing myself from it.
As we work to bring the lessons of meditation and psychotherapy to life, we see that this second, more active, aspect of surrender is as crucial as its receptive counterpart. Without the ability to meditate in action, it is all too easy to use the mental training of Buddhism or the self-knowledge of therapy to reinforce defenses instead of cutting through them.
The psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, for example, described his work with a young man named Ken who managed to use meditation to control, rather than transform, his mind. Ken was a meditator, married with children, whose ability to bring about calming internal states served as a much-needed antidote to a chaotic upbringing and a correspondingly chaotic psyche. When meditating, Ken felt calm and clear, filled with “such a fresh, unbreakable, full emptiness” that he emerged from his sitting clean and refreshed. His family, however, was loud and messy and disrespectful of his calm center. Their tumultuousness was beyond Ken’s understanding or control.
“Part of Ken’s difficulty,” wrote Eigen, “was his hidden wish to control his family (perhaps life itself) with one mood.” He could not go back and forth between stillness and storminess, between his one-pointed meditation and family life. “An unconscious severity structured his tranquillity. Meditation centered him, yet masked a tyrannical demand that life not be life, his wife not be his wife, his child not be his child.”2 He used meditation to keep himself from being immersed in the flow—and sometimes chaos—of his family life. He was like Freud’s friends in the countryside in his inability to open to the tumultuous flow surrounding him. Having discovered his own still silent center, he was attempting to hold his family prisoner within his own quiet mind.
There is a story of the Abenaki Indians that my children like to listen to that parallels Ken’s attempts to take the chaos out of his family life. It is about a curious young warrior, an ancestor from mythical times and something of a mischievous trickster, who sets out one day to stop the wind. He had been trying to paddle his canoe across the river, but the wind kept blowing him back, making it impossible for him to get to the other side. He goes after the wind, determined to find its source, and heads into it, hiking over vast stretches of land. After a long search, he finds it high on a mountain in the Adirondacks, in the form of an old wind-eagle whom he calls Grandfather. He tricks Grandfather into falling into a crevice between two mountains and thereby takes all movement out of the world. The weather gets hot, the ponds dry up and fill with scum, the fish and animals die, and the people are miserable. Stopping the wind makes everyone very uncomfortable.
In Tibetan Buddhism, and especially in the Tibetan medical system, “wind” is used as a metaphor for mind because both are in constant motion. Anyone with what we would call an emotional illness is said to have a “wind” disorder. There is a prominent wind disorder that afflicts meditators like Ken who try too hard to calm the mind, to force it into submission. The mind squeezes and tightens and “rises up” in rebellion at the attempts to subdue it, and the meditator gets more and more anxious and frustrated.
For the Abenaki people, their story is about how impossible it is to eliminate any one aspect of the world, no matter how angry it is making us. Movement is a part of creation, the wise Grandmother tells the impatient young hero as she convinces him to restore the wind-eagle to its proper place atop the mountain. The story applies equally well in a Buddhist context, or in a contemporary relationship one. Just as wind is a part of creation, so are anger, thoughts, or family turmoil. Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them. If we can let anger rise and fall naturally, it becomes, in the Buddhist view, self-liberating. We get into trouble with anger if we try to eliminate it too precipitously, through denial or avoidance, or if we turn it into hatred.
As these stories suggest, using meditation or therapy to try to shut down parts of our experience is ultimately counterproductive. We do not have to be afraid of entering unfamiliar territory once we have learned how to meet experience with the gentleness of our own minds. Learning to transform obstacles into objects of meditation provides a much-needed bridge between the stillness of the concentrated mind and the movement of real life. As the practitioners of many martial arts often put it, we must learn to respond rather than react.
This is always the deeper meditative teaching. Rather than making a division between sacred and profane or between the spiritual and the everyday, the lesson of meditation is to bring awareness to bear on the (so-called) disturbances of everyday life. In Ken’s case, this meant learning to be with his family’s noisy messiness the same way one learns to incorporate street noise into the quiet of a concentrated mind. Rather than getting all worked up about how “that noise is disturbing my meditation,” as I have done on many an occasion, I have learned to simply listen to the sounds of the garbage truck rising and falling in the space of my mind. Meditation can be practiced anywhere.
Thoughts do not have to be terminated through meditation; they can be simply observed. Disturbing emotions do not have to be excluded; they can be doorways into an aliveness that is as vivid as a moment of spontaneous laughter, or irritation. By learning to be with these emotions in a new way, we can, in fact, energize our lives and enrich our personal relationships. They give us access to ourselves, precisely because they challenge our attempts to keep ourselves together.
A longtime patient of mine, a woman in her mid-thirties named Alix, illustrated for me how important this understanding can be. When she was a young girl, Alix remembered, she taught herself how to blot out the sound of her parents’ incessant fighting. She deliberately concentrated her mind “away” from the sound of their voices in the rough equivalent of a trance state. Like the young boy in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, she managed to harness the power of her mind to eradicate that which she could not tolerate. The consequence of this maneuver, however, was that Alix had to recurrently rise above whatever emotional experience was taking place in her body into an isolated and safe haven in her mind. Her body was never really her own, and she was slow to develop a comfortable sexuality.
Alix’s work in therapy was a restoration of her capacity for emotional experience. She needed to get her body back, and that meant (among other things) accepting how violently she could be repulsed by some things. She was not the “nice” person she had made herself out to be. When she could admit to her own negative reactions and could more easily tolerate being in her body, she was free to have a new experience there. Permitting herself the worst she could imagine, Alix opened up the possibility of going beyond it.
For Alix, therapy hinged on her ability to remember blotting out her parents’ fighting. She had to look to the past in order to find out how it was that she prevented herself from being present. In finding out how uncomfortable she was with her own feelings, Alix became much less insulated. She discovered how she was perpetuating a method of adaptation (zoning out) that had in itself become a prison. This happened not through any interpretation on my part but through awareness of what she was doing to herself. Therapy created an environment, and a state of mind, in which Alix could discover that awareness on her own.
A friend of mine, the writer Stephen Batchelor, whose books on Buddhism, inspired by his years as a Tibetan and Zen monk, have done much to bring Buddhist thought to the West, described something similar to me about his own insulation. During his years as a Buddhist monk in Switzerland, he explained, he also entered into a form of Jungian therapy, called “Sandplay,” with a noted Swiss analyst named Dora Kalff. He was drawn into therapy, he remembered, because he was still searching, even while being a monk, for a sense of personal authenticity that included creative self-expression. Within the monastic environment, Stephen found, this quality was rarely if ever encouraged.
Stephen came to therapy with “absolutely no idea what it was all about.” Using a tableau of figurines, he constructed imaginative scenes in which he could act out all kinds of interpersonal and intrapsychic narratives. He was moved, he remembered, by the “combination of freedom and safety” that his therapist was able to provide.
Although Stephen could appreciate that this combination of freedom and safety was linked to the state of mind cultivated in meditation, he found its expression in the psychotherapy office to be uncontaminated by the hierarchical dynamics that prevailed in the monasteries he had known. Batchelor found that in its emphasis on freeing his mind from the constraints of his day-to-day thought, psychotherapy’s function, like that of meditation, was, for him, the activation of his imagination.3 Psychotherapy helped him break through a layer of defensiveness that his monastic training had not touched. With his imagination so liberated, he found an aliveness that had otherwise escaped him.
The here and now of the psychotherapy ritual enabled Stephen to recover his mind’s imaginative capacity. He had found himself to be unduly affected by the hierarchical restrictions prevailing in the monasteries that perhaps mimicked some early restrictive elements in his own childhood. All of us suffer from some kind of parallel limitations on our abilities to relate openly. As we discover these elements and learn to wend our way around them, we have the opportunity of touching the boundless expanse of our own minds and hearts.
There is a famous Tibetan story about a woman named Manibhadra4 who attained enlightenment while carrying water from the village well back to her home. Dropping her pitcher one day and seeing the water gush out of the broken gourd, her consciousness was suddenly liberated. It flowed out of her and encompassed all of reality, revealing to Manibhadra how inseparable she was from her universe. This jarring loose, or breaking free, is what we are all seeking.
Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way. In making a path through our own wilderness, we can discover what the Buddha called the “sure heart’s release.” No longer fearing isolation, we can surrender our need to be insulated. Like Manibhadra, we can discover how inexhaustible our hearts are when we let our unneeded defenses go to pieces.