Not long after the meditation retreat in which I questioned my advice not given, several of my patients, independently, asked if I would teach them to meditate. I was a bit taken aback by the synchronicity of it all. At least three people in rapid succession made the request. Each wanted to spend a fraction of their therapeutic hour in contemplation and each wanted me to guide them through it. I was happy to comply, although I did wonder if they were trying to avoid telling me something. But I decided to take their requests at face value and give it my best. In offering them meditation instruction, however, I found that it was necessary to speak clearly about Right View. Otherwise, it was too tempting for my patients to turn meditation into just another thing they were failing at.
Meditation is deceptively simple. There is really nothing to do. We sit still and know we are sitting. The mind wanders off and when we catch it wandering we use it as a reminder to continue paying attention. Right View asks us to remember why we are attempting such a peculiar thing. Much of our lives is spent thinking about the future or ruminating about the past, but this dislocation from the present contributes to an ongoing estrangement and a resulting sense of unease. When we are busy trying to manage our lives, our focus on past and future removes us from all we really have, which is the here and now. The Buddha had the rather paradoxical insight that it is difficult to remain comfortably in the moment because we are afraid of uncertainty and change. The present is not static, after all; it is constantly in motion and we can never be absolutely certain about what the next instant will bring. Past and future preoccupy us because we are trying to control things, while being in the present necessitates openness to the unexpected. Rather than resisting change by dwelling in the relative safety of our routine thoughts, as we tend to do in our regular lives, when meditating we practice going with the flow. We surrender to impermanence when we meditate. Wherever it may lead.
If we are doing concentration meditation, we try to restrict the attention to a single object like the breath. When the mind wanders, and we notice it wandering, we bring awareness back to the breath without berating ourselves. If we are doing mindfulness meditation, we try to be aware of things as they shift. When we are sitting, we know we are sitting, but when we are thinking we are aware of that, too. We might notice the sensations of the breath or the physical sensations of the body or the feelings of the mind or the act of thinking itself. The mind jumps around and we follow where it goes. Or we try. When it gets out of control, when we are lost in thought or caught up in emotion and unable to be mindfully aware, there is always an instant when we realize we are not paying attention. At that moment, we bring ourselves back to something simple like the breath and begin again.
Over time, the mind becomes accustomed to this way of paying attention. It learns how to settle back and accommodate. Leaving itself alone, it nevertheless stays present with whatever is going on as it is changing. And a kind of clarity emerges. Like adjusting a radio dial, you know when the signal is right. The mind tunes in to its own frequency and begins to resonate. For a long time there is only distraction, but then suddenly, with no warning, it shifts and things come into focus. It is something like those Where’s Waldo? books we looked at with our children when they were young. Waldo, in his red-and-white-striped shirt, Dr. Seuss hat, and glasses, is camouflaged in densely illustrated crowds that are spread out across two big pages. At first, it is impossible to find him: there is simply too much going on. But gradually, one learns to relax one’s gaze and the figures begin to emerge. Out of all the cacophony, suddenly—there’s Waldo!
Like looking at the picture book, meditation can be focused or it can be relaxed. It is even capable of being both at the same time. The mind can be at one with itself, humming along, soft, clear, and deep, and also able to catch a sudden movement: a bird’s wing in flight, an internal craving, the rustle of the wind, or the specific features of a character like Waldo. The mind is capable of so much. When we put it into a neutral gear, as happens in meditation, it does not shut down; it opens. It relaxes into itself while somehow maintaining its subjectivity, its critical ability, and its independence. Meditation is training in looking to the mind. Sometimes, inexplicably, it settles down quickly and makes meditation seem easy, but at other times it refuses to cooperate and gives umpteen reasons why the whole effort seems ridiculous. We have to both trust and mistrust the mind, often at the same time. This takes practice.
None of my three patients felt they were doing it right. One wanted to know how long to do it for, as if the length of time were the important thing. She had heard that twenty minutes twice a day was the minimum to get a good effect. She was sure she couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes, so I told her five minutes was fine and we figured out how to set the timer on her iPhone so she would not have to peek at the clock. Another person felt defeated by how tense her neck felt. She wanted the relaxation benefits right away, the stress reduction, and she was frustrated when the meditation did not provide it. She felt her tension more acutely when meditating and became convinced she was a bad meditator. Although I told her there was no such thing as a bad meditator, I do not think she believed me. The third person dropped into a peaceful and quiet state initially and then could not reproduce it in the following sessions. She saw no value in periods that were not of the sublime character she had first tasted and began to disparage herself. I was familiar with all of these reactions, having had them myself, and worked as patiently as I could to counter my patients’ newfound convictions. I wanted the meditation experience to support, not to erode, their self-esteem.
In thinking about my patients’ requests in light of these experiences, I began to understand one reason for my long-standing reluctance to introduce meditation directly into therapy. People often hope that meditation will be the answer to their problems. They look to it as a kind of home improvement project, as a way of fixing a broken aspect of themselves. They let their regrets about the past and their hopes for the future condition their approach to the present moment. In therapy, we have developed ways of countering these kinds of unrealistic expectations. Therapy is hard work and the payoff does not come immediately. Therapists guard against promising too much and become skilled at showing people how their hopes for a magical cure can obstruct their investigation of themselves. Many people become frustrated with the slow pace of therapy and leave. But those who stay are rewarded by what can become a deep and meaningful relationship. People do not have to pretend to be other than who they are in therapy. They do not have to apologize for themselves but can be honest and revealing in an ongoing way. This can be a great gift and is at the heart of what turns out to be therapeutic for many people.
Right View was the Buddha’s way of proposing something similar, his way of encouraging people to be realistic about themselves and the nature of things. Right View asks us to focus on the incontrovertible truth of impermanence rather than trying to shore up a flawed and insecure self. Turning meditation into another thing to strive for is counterproductive. Setting up too concrete a goal for oneself—even a worthwhile goal, such as to be more relaxed, less stressed, more peaceful, less attached, more happy, less reactive—is to subvert the purpose of the meditative process.
When the Buddha taught Right View, he was trying to help with the most painful aspects of life. The microcosm echoes the macrocosm, he said. When we observe the moment-to-moment nature of our experience, the way it is constantly changing, we are also seeing a reflection of the transience and uncertainty of the greater whole. In this world, there is no escaping old age, illness, and death; no way to avoid eventual separation from those we love; and no way of insulating ourselves from time’s arrows. Right View is a kind of inoculation against these inevitabilities, a way of preparing the mind by using its own intelligence so that it does not need to defend itself in the usual ways. The Buddha found that a simple acknowledgment of the reality of things could help life become more bearable. Acknowledging impermanence is a paradoxical injunction; it is counter to most of our instinctive habits. Ordinarily, we look away. We do not want to see death, we resist change, and we pull ourselves away from the traumatic undercurrents of life. We use what therapists call “dissociation” to protect ourselves. In dissociation the ego pushes away that which threatens to undo it. We banish what we cannot handle and soldier on as if we are not as fragile as we actually are.
But the Buddha was like a contemporary behaviorist who teaches people to carefully go toward the things they fear the most. What we face in meditation is a mini version, or a magnified version, of what we do not want to face in life. A brief experiment with meditation can make this clear. Try closing your eyes. Let your attention go where it chooses. Make no effort to direct it. Most likely, before too long, you will find yourself lost in thought. Pay attention to what those thoughts are, though, even if this is difficult. It is rare that we are having new and important thoughts; most often we are just repeating things to ourselves we already know. What will we do later? What will we have to eat next? What tasks do we have to take care of? Who are we angry with now? Who has hurt our feelings lately? We just repeat these thoughts endlessly, with a minimum of variation. All too often, the present moment slips away from us without our even noticing. We are divorced from it, just as we are separated much of the time from our own bodies. We live primarily in a disembodied mental universe, interrupted periodically—these days—by a need to check our phones to see if we have any messages. As in touch as we might want to be with others, we are very practiced at being at a slight remove from ourselves. But if we try to counter these habitual tendencies, the mind’s ability to drop its defensive and dissociated posture can be a real surprise.
Meditation begins by asking us to rest our minds in our bodies, as we rest our bodies on a cushion or in a comfortable chair, and to pay deliberate attention to, rather than ignore, the shifting sensations of the physical organism. These sensations can be subtle, but by spending time with them we start to see two important things. First, the inner experience is changing incessantly. When we are lost in thought, we are protected from this knowledge, but when we dislodge ourselves from our usual mental preoccupations we cannot help but see. Second, it becomes clear how easily we are driven out of the present moment by our own likes and dislikes. When something uncomfortable happens, we move away. When something pleasurable comes, we try to enhance it. We do not let the moments pass easily; we are subconsciously engaged in an endless tug-of-war with the way things are.
To get a sense of how meditation works with this, close your eyes again. Just listen to whatever surrounds you. Sound is a good object of meditation because we generally do not try to control it as much as we do other things. People often have a more difficult time settling into their bodies than they do paying attention to the sounds that appear naturally. Just listen and try to let whatever sounds are around pass through you. Listen in 360 degrees, to the sounds and to the silences that interrupt them. Notice when your mind identifies the sound as a car or a baby or a bird or the television, when the concept of what is making the sound replaces the actual physical sensation of the sound striking your eardrum. Notice when you like something and when you do not and how this changes the way you listen. We tend to move away from a continuous direct experience of our senses into a mental reaction to, or representation of, them. This is one of the things Right View is meant to illuminate. In our day-to-day lives, this shortcut is a big help. If someone honks his horn at us, we don’t listen to its sound waves rise and fall; we react and look to see what the problem is. As helpful as this involuntary reaction can be, we use it more than is necessary. It is as if we are constantly on guard. Right View asks us to explore this in the relative calm of meditation. When we see how much it drives us in the micro universe, we get some sense of how it might be conditioning us in the macro one.
Each new loss, each disappointment, each unanticipated difficulty presents a new challenge. The Buddha made Right View the first branch of the Eightfold Path in order to remind us that a willingness to engage with such challenges is the most important thing of all. The aging of our parents, the deaths of our pets, and the travails of our children or other loved ones often feel like more than we can bear. These days, even getting from one place to another can seem overwhelming. The line through airport security takes forever; the plane sits on the runway while the cabin temperature rises or the flight is inexplicably canceled. And when you finally do arrive at your destination, someone’s luggage is lost. Daily life is filled with such obstructions. Things break. People hurt our feelings. Ticks carry Lyme disease. Friends get sick and even die.
“They’re shooting at our regiment now,” a sixty-year-old friend of mine said the other day as he recounted the various illnesses of his closest acquaintances. “We’re the ones coming over the next hill.”
He was right, but the uncertain underpinnings of life are not specific to any single generation. The first day of school and the first day in an assisted living facility are remarkably similar. Separation and loss touch everyone.
The Eightfold Path begins with Right View in order to address this at the outset. There is a famous saying in Tibetan Buddhism that a person who tries to meditate without a clear idea of its purpose is like a blind man wandering about in open country with no idea of which direction to go. Right View states that the fundamental purpose of Buddhist meditation is not to create a comfortable hiding place for oneself; it is to acquaint the mind, on a moment-to-moment basis, with impermanence. When the Dalai Lama told the Nepalese hermit to get a life after his years of solitary contemplation, he was invoking this very principle. Enter the flow, he was saying; don’t pretend you are above it all. While meditation can be used to temporarily quiet the mind, from the perspective of the Eightfold Path this is done in the service of a keener and more pronounced observation, not as an end in itself. Just as it is hard to watch a movie in a noisy room where people are talking all of the time, it is difficult to pay attention to the shifting flux of experience when we are distracted by thought. Concentration meditations, in centering the attention on a single object like the breath, still the mind. But mindfulness emphasizes impermanence. When the mind is settled, the underlying ephemeral nature of things can be more clearly perceived. Resistance diminishes, the flight to past and future recedes, and the sense that it might be possible to respond consciously rather than react blindly to events begins to emerge.
My patients’ attraction to meditation and their subsequent difficulties with it have something to do with the way it has been marketed in our culture and something to do with human psychology. Promoted as a method of stress reduction, as a means of evoking the relaxation response, lowering blood pressure, countering the fight-or-flight response, and increasing cognitive efficiency, meditation has entered Western culture as a practical tool to help people cope. Increasingly, it is being offered not only as an adjunct to psychotherapy, but as a replacement for it. In my view, this is unfortunate. Unfortunate in the same way an overenthusiasm for Prozac was unfortunate. People want there to be a magic bullet. They want something quick and easy that will work. When Prozac first became available, a lot of people who did not need it took it, hoping that it would change them. It helped some people enormously and an enormous number of people not at all. But the placebo effect is very powerful. When people are invested in the possibility of a cure, they will convince themselves, at least for a while, that things are better.
From a public relations point of view, meditation has benefited from this tendency, but I am suspicious of this. As I have experienced on many retreats, nice things can happen when you meditate. Peaceful feelings can emerge. They do emerge. A concentrated mind is a quiet mind in which the pressures of having to be somebody recede. Artists, writers, mathematicians, chess players, actors, musicians, and athletes, to name a few, know this very well. The self disappears when the mind is concentrated, and there is genuine, if temporary, relief when this happens. In meditation, the feelings of flow that are common in creative pursuits can be accessed, harnessed, and stabilized, sometimes for extended periods of time. But most artists, writers, mathematicians, chess players, actors, musicians, and athletes are no happier, and no more together, than the rest of humanity. If the temporary dissolution of self were all that was needed, problems would not be so tenacious. Even watching television would be therapeutic.
—
My wife is a sculptor who understands the joy that immersion in creative process can bring. She spends long and laborious hours in her studio but generally emerges enlivened and clear. Through her, I have met and worked with numerous artists whose experiences in their studios, where the sense of self is temporarily suspended under the spell of one’s creative pursuits, parallel what can happen in meditation. But working with these artists has reinforced my sense that familiarity with flow, by itself, is not ordinarily enough to help with the deepest challenges life throws at us. Something akin to the Buddha’s Right View is also needed.
Arlene and I had a very meaningful demonstration of this a couple of years after we were married. We were visiting with Joseph Goldstein, one of my earliest Buddhist teachers, whom she did not yet know very well. Arlene received a piece of advice from Joseph that day that had a huge impact on her. It was not meditation advice per se, but it did seem to contain the essence of Right View. We both remember the interaction vividly, although when we saw Joseph recently and reminded him of it he seemed to have no recollection of it at all. In fact, he seemed slightly surprised, even sheepish, to hear what he had told her.
“That was very bold of me,” he said with some embarrassment, after she recounted the story to him.
—
Shortly after our first child was born, in the mid-1980s, Arlene’s best friend from art school was diagnosed with cancer. Her friend was an amazing person: brilliant, energetic, ambitious, and full of life. She and my wife shared a spacious loft in downtown Boston for several years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design and she was the maid of honor at our wedding. When we moved to New York, she remained in Boston, and when she got sick my wife traveled back and forth to see her as much as she possibly could. Her physicians at first thought she had ovarian cancer, but when the tumors failed to respond to any of the standard treatments, they investigated further and changed their diagnosis to a cancer of the connective tissue called a leiomyosarcoma, a rare, mysterious, aggressive, and, in this case, fatal disease.
Arlene was terribly upset when she spoke with Joseph. The news had gone from bad to worse, to worse than she could possibly imagine, and it was hard for her to hold the twin realities of our infant daughter’s aliveness and her friend’s illness. We did not see Joseph often, but she had gotten to know him a little and she knew how much I trusted him. Joseph and I had already been friends for twelve years. I had met him while I was still in college and first interested in Buddhism. He had just returned from seven years in India and I was one of his first students in the West. I had traveled with him in Asia to meet his Buddhist teachers there and had done a number of silent retreats under his auspices. I am sure this bond made the subsequent conversation possible. Joseph was like family to me and this must have put both of them at ease with each other. Arlene tearfully explained the situation to him.
“Stop making such a big deal out of it,” he replied upon hearing her sorrowful account. “Life is like this. Like fireworks.” He gestured with one hand as if to mimic the fleeting nature of things. “Vibrant and alive,” he continued, “and then gone.”
Arlene felt what Joseph was saying very deeply. There was warmth to his words that may not come through on the page. He was being realistic; he wasn’t being unkind, nor was he coddling her; and she appreciated it. But he was also giving her very specific advice.
“Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”
I am not sure she had ever considered that as a possibility.
I can see why Joseph seemed taken aback when reminded of this. Were I not to know the circumstances of the conversation so intimately, and the parties involved so well, I might think that Joseph sounded callous or my wife naive. But I can attest to the impact his advice had on her, as well as to her lack of naiveté. The conversation came at just the right moment and was given with all the care, confrontation, and clarification that the best psychotherapists seek to cultivate when offering counsel to their patients. Joseph helped Arlene at a very difficult moment in a way that has had a lasting effect on both her life and her work. But his words were nothing I could ever imagine saying to a patient or a friend. Talk about advice not given! Yet, somehow, Joseph must have felt that Arlene could handle it. She remains grateful to him to this day.
There are various ways to understand what Joseph was trying to communicate and why it was so helpful. From one perspective, he was simply being a Buddhist teacher and pointing out the inevitability of change. One of the most fundamental principles of Buddhism, after all, is that impermanence is the inescapable flavor of worldly life. In using the metaphor of the fireworks, Joseph was undoubtedly evoking the Buddha’s fire sermon, one of the first that he gave after his enlightenment, in which he famously declared, “Everything is burning,” capturing the reality of transience in one devastating image. My wife understood the Buddhist reference, but she was touched on more than a conceptual level. Her mind was engaged by Joseph’s admonition and she took the ball and ran with it.
“When he said that,” she said later, “I realized he was completely right. Everybody is going to die—don’t be too dramatic about it. I had come to the realization, for the first time, that I was going to die, which should have been no surprise but was a huge surprise inside of me. So to honor my friend, I basically threw out everything in my studio and started anew. Instead of being one of those New Yorkers saying, ‘I don’t have enough time,’ I said, ‘Whatever time I have is exactly the time I need!’”
Arlene did not take umbrage at Joseph’s comment; she understood intuitively what he was getting at. She had been doing something extra with her grief that threatened to become an obstruction rather than a pure expression of her pain. The story was taking over, as stories tend to do, but she did not have to be its vehicle. She realized there was something more important for her to do in the light of her friend’s impending death than just reacting to its horror. In remembering it twenty-five years later, when describing to a museum curator how her work had changed as a result, she put it like this:
“It shook me and woke me up. ‘Get used to it,’ he was saying. Death is part of life, a reality for me and everybody else. I was gripped by the need to pay attention, to do everything as an embrace of life, and to be alive in every possible way. I was already vulnerable and raw and I saw that celebrating life meant including full-on sadness along with the exhilaration of being alive.”
Her friend died in 1990 at the age of thirty-seven, and Arlene, feeling she owed it to her, resolved to live and work more fearlessly. She had just given birth to our second child, and she began to work in a different way in her studio. With two small children, she did not have much personal time, but she resolved to use the time she had gratefully. Out of the simplest of materials, wet plaster and skins of paint, she sculpted works that, much to her surprise, began to resemble Buddhas. It was as if her resolve to live more in the moment were taking direct physical form, without her intending it to. She had never made figurative or iconic work before and she was somewhat embarrassed by it, at least at first.
“I could work with plaster in a short amount of time, and it was riveting. One day I was making something blobby and it looked, I thought amusedly, like a Buddha. In a different state of mind it would have looked like a pile of shit. Despite the fact that I had never had interest in making representational work, suddenly it made sense to use this as a sign of my resolve to embrace aliveness. I became aware that having the physical presence of an icon functioned as a reminder to stay awake, in the broadest way one could use that word. Having the Buddhas in my studio became a source of comfort.”
Why should Joseph’s comment have affected Arlene so deeply? And what was there in his Buddhist sensibility that led him to make such a blatant intervention? As his reticence all those years later plainly indicated, it is not as if he is in the habit of saying such things to people in the grip of their most intense grief. But there was an opening between them, an opening for a direct communication about Right View. Joseph was not criticizing Arlene for making a big deal out of her friend’s illness. It was a big deal. But my wife saw that, in her attachment to the story, in her dramatization of the unfairness of her friend’s illness, she was resisting a bigger truth. Death is a fact of life. We hide from it, not only by avoiding it, but also by making too big a deal out of it. Right View was the Buddha’s method of describing a realistic way of responding to the truth of impermanence. Arlene’s embrace of life, and the need she felt to pay attention to each moment of it as a result, was her spontaneous response to, and expression of, this wisdom.
—
In talking with my three patients about their beginning attempts at meditation, I thought back to this pivotal encounter between Joseph and Arlene. He had managed to show her that there was another way to approach her grief than she had thought. I wanted to do something similar for my patients as they approached meditation. I was struck by how each of my patients wanted to be meditating the “right” way and how each of them considered their own way to be “wrong.” In thinking about how to help them, this notion of “right” and “wrong” rose urgently to the surface. The Eightfold Path advises that certain “right” qualities can be cultivated. When talking about “Right this” and “Right that,” however, Buddhism does not mean to imply that all other approaches to life are mistaken. The word “right” means something to us that the original term (sammā) did not mean. When we hear “right,” we automatically think “wrong.” But the word, as the Buddha used it, had other primary connotations. Some translators use “realistic” to convey its sense; others use “complete.” To my mind, “right” means balanced, attuned, or fitting. When something is twisted, we set it right. If it is crooked, we right it. The Eightfold Path “is not a recipe for a pious Buddhist existence in which you do everything right and get nothing wrong,” says one contemporary Buddhist commentator; it is a means of orienting yourself so that your fears and habits do not tip the balance of your existence.
It would have been inappropriate to try to speak to my patients the way Joseph spoke with Arlene—I try to be watchful of my desires to imitate my teachers—but I did think of two vignettes to relate to them. One came from a serendipitous conversation with someone I barely knew twenty-five years into my exploration of Buddhism. The other came from my college days when I was first learning about meditation in the context of two-week silent retreats. They each clarified something for me about the beauty and utility of the concept of Right View and asked me to give up a preconceived notion of what a “good” Buddhist might look like and of how a “real” Buddhist might act. I wanted my patients to have the same freedom in approaching their meditations as these encounters had afforded me.
The first event happened when I was traveling in the Midwest on a book tour about fifteen years ago. A young woman from a local Buddhist organization met me at the airport. While driving me into town, she told me about something that had been bothering her for a long time, something that had shaken her faith in the dharma. An important teacher of hers had come to stay with her after completing a three-year Buddhist retreat. He was a very accomplished man, a longtime student of Buddhism, and a respected professional in his own right who had made the study of Buddhism his first priority in his later years. While at the retreat, unbeknownst to him, he had come down with colon cancer. He had ignored his mild symptoms until the retreat was over, but by that time the cancer had spread and when he came to live with his former student he was suddenly close to death. She took care of him through his final weeks and was there with him when he died. His last words, on his deathbed, had surprised and frightened her, though.
“No, no, no. Help, help,” he had cried.
Wasn’t meditation meant to be preparation for death? Weren’t you supposed to be able to accept change and die peacefully? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Eightfold Path and of his three-year retreat? The young woman took her teacher’s fear to mean that his Buddhist studies had been to no avail.
“Was the whole thing a waste?” she wanted to know.
I have thought of this many times in the years that have since passed. The young woman’s expectations were certainly in line with Joseph’s conversation with Arlene. Death need not be a surprise, and one of the main fruits of meditation practice is to familiarize us with the inevitability of change and the uncertainty of the next moment. But this man, familiar as he was with meditation, was still expressing fear. Perhaps he was just being honest as he faced his final moments. Who says death is not scary, even for someone skilled in meditation? I always think the closest thing to death is birth, and having seen several births, I can definitely say that, as amazing as it can be, it is also very frightening. I have come to believe that this man was modeling something for his friend, showing her that there are no rules when it comes to facing death. The Buddha’s agenda for Right View—to face impermanence—extends all the way to the moment of death, and all we can do is to be with it without pretense. I find, when I think of this story, that it does not diminish my own faith; in fact, it gives me comfort.
“No, no, no. Help, help,” is a different mantra from the ones Buddhist teachers usually propose, but it is one I can relate to, one that strikes me as universal. To look death in the face and respond truthfully may be the best we can do.
One of the things I have always appreciated about the Buddhism I have known is the way it has urged me to circumvent my own expectations about what an “enlightened” response might be in any given situation. This suggestion runs counter to my own ingrained habits of striving. That is probably why I find the above story so satisfying. Do I have to be worrying for my whole life about how I will be at the moment of death? Will someone be grading me on how I do? Or can I take what I have learned about facing change and let myself deal with it as best as I can? Do I have to be putting on a false front even at the moment of death? Or can I trust myself not to? I could feel how my patients, in their initial attempts at meditation, were held back by their own particular versions of this striving. Wanting to do it for the right amount of time, wanting to make the tension disappear, and wanting to have the next meditation be as good as the last one all represented different versions of it. My patients’ wishes to “do it right” reminded me of how I felt after one of the earliest silent retreats I ever did. This was the second vignette I relayed to them.
The retreat was in the countryside north of Mendocino, California, and was taught by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, another of my earliest teachers. I had met both of them at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college and was quite enamored of them. I was twenty-one years old and awash in the exhilaration of discovering a discipline, and a community, that made sense to me. Joseph and Jack were probably both just thirty years old. There was enough of an age difference between us at that point to make them seem like real elders, however, although when I look back at it now it is hard to believe how young we all were. The two weeks of silent reflection took place at an old camp in a wooded landscape studded with waterfalls and sun-soaked flat rocks perfect for sunbathing after quick dips in the roaring stream. I was visiting California for the express purpose of the retreat, and when it was over I got a ride back to San Francisco with Joseph and Jack. I did not yet know them well and it felt special to be in their company. We stopped in Mendocino for lunch before making the long drive. The food at the retreat had been fine, all that I expected, vegetarian with an emphasis on inexpensive grains that could feed the hundred participants, but we were hungry. I was ready to embrace a vegetarian diet if that was what was called for and was mostly focused on becoming an accepted part of this new group.
Much to my surprise, Jack Kornfield ordered a hamburger. I did a double take. A hamburger? After a retreat? A Buddhist teacher? I felt suddenly lighter. I was ready to superimpose a set of expectations on myself that went all the way down to what I could have for lunch. Right View, Right Speech, Right Livelihood, Right Action, and Right Lunch.
I did not even want a hamburger. But if I did, I could decide for myself. I have always been grateful to Kornfield for this moment—one I am sure he has long forgotten, one that solidified my sense of Right View. The lesson I took from it was that my Buddhist leanings did not mean I had to cloak myself in a false identity. Even as I was pursuing Buddhism, I could be myself. This left me free to investigate more easily. The Eightfold Path was relevant just as I was, no matter what my diet was or how I might act at the time of death. It was offered in a way that encouraged me to figure things out for myself. I did not have to let my expectations rule my experience and I did not have to follow anyone blindly. I might be wandering in open country, but I had a sense of direction. This path, as Right View made clear, was designed to help me be real with myself.