Samuel Beckett’s refusal to be intimidated by his depression was very Buddhist. Rather than directing his energy toward getting rid of his dark side, he found a way to let it inspire him. This is the key connection between Right Speech and Right Action. Both involve mobilizing the power of restraint. Before his revelation, Beckett was like a person new to therapy hoping to get rid of whatever was troubling him. After his realization, he was operating on another level. No longer trying to eliminate a part of himself, and no longer propelled by a false image of perfection, he was able to modify his expectations while probing more deeply into himself, ultimately using his explorations for the purposes of making art.
Right Action classically means not acting destructively. Killing, stealing, hurtful sexual activity, and intoxication “to the point of heedlessness” form the nucleus of the traditional ethical prohibitions. Monks take vows about these kinds of things, and these vows confer a double benefit. They protect the community by instilling a strong and shared moral code, and they protect the individual from the internal disquiet that such actions bring in their wake. Buddhism seeks mental ease. If one’s actions create dis-ease, they are obviously counterproductive.
But not acting impulsively is not the same as doing nothing. Think of the difference between eating compulsively and preparing a real meal. In the former, there is a blur that often leaves a feeling of disgust in its wake. Large quantities of food are ingested, but there is often little attention to its taste. In the latter, there is restraint but no lack of activity. Right Action means shopping for the proper ingredients, chopping the vegetables, making the meal, and setting the table. An enormous amount of restraint is required even while there is much to be done. Postponing the ego’s need for immediate gratification is the core principle of this aspect of the Eightfold Path.
Psychotherapy is fertile terrain for the deployment of Right Action. Because people come to therapy in all kinds of distress with hope for immediate relief, the burden on the therapist is significant. It is wonderful when there is a pill I can give that will quickly alleviate someone’s symptoms, but this is the case only a fraction of the time. When I cannot help someone immediately, I have to wait. I have to stop my anxiety, my need to assist, from interfering with the treatment. Therapy is often a long, slow process that centers on building a trusting relationship. As trust develops, there is more and more room for me to act—or speak or relate—provocatively: in a manner that hopefully upsets my patients’ preconceived ideas about their problems. This involves edging people gently into discomfort and away from their fixed, and often exaggerated, notions of what is wrong with them. It involves getting them to question stories they have been telling themselves for a very long time. “Acceptance of not knowing,” wrote Winnicott, “produces tremendous relief.”
This is one of the most exciting aspects of being a therapist, although there are many countervailing forces within the field that seek to tamp down its improvisational nature and replace it with one that is more circumscribed and operational, in which a therapist follows a prescribed plan of action from the start. Right Action encourages therapists not to let their wishes for cure interfere with the treatment, not to let their professionalism become a defense, but to use the rapport that is possible when people trust each other as a therapeutic tool. It is easy to see how the ethical restraint of Right Action dovetails with this. If a therapist takes sexual advantage of his or her patients, for example, the freedom and trust enabled by the relationship are immediately shut down. But it is not just in such grossly violating ways that therapists can undermine their treatments. If they are too focused on being right, too insistent that their advice be adhered to, they run the risk of short-circuiting the help they are trying to give.
When I am able to use Right Action to capture my patients’ interest, there is a potential for change. Old patterns can be exposed and new possibilities can emerge. The history of Buddhism is replete with examples of teachers using such trust to undermine students’ restrictive notions of who they are supposed to be. Psychotherapy is not far behind. When we can help people see their repetitive thoughts as mere thoughts rather than as true stories, there is a whiff of freedom. Our narratives need not be as sure of themselves as we have led ourselves to believe. The more we examine them in an open way, the less convinced we tend to be about them.
While Right Action can help therapists with their own perfectionism, it can also be extremely useful on the patient side. Above all else, people want to know what they can do to feel better. This is, for me, where Right Action is most helpful. Many people who are drawn to Buddhism—and many who come for therapy—think that the answer lies in letting go. “Teach me to let go,” they ask. “If I learn to meditate properly, will that help me?” Their most common assumption is that letting go means giving up the thing that is bothering them. If they are angry with someone, they tell themselves to let go of their anger. If they are anxious, they try to let go of their anxiety. If they are having disturbing thoughts, they endeavor to dispatch them. If they are sad and upset with themselves, they try to surrender their unhappy feelings.
But letting go does not mean releasing the thing that is bothering you. Trying to get rid of it only makes it stronger. Letting go has more to do with patience than it does with release. There is a difference in direction, in valence, and in spin from how we commonly think of it. There is a famous phrase in Japanese Buddhism that tries to explain this. “Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self,” it suggests. Then “body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.” This backward step is another way of describing Right Action. You settle into yourself rather than trying to make the troubling thing go away. If anything drops away, it does so by itself. You cannot make it happen directly.
—
In working with my patients, I have found this basic approach to be extremely helpful. When people come for the first time, it is rare that they can explain exactly what the problem is. Often, they do not know, or if they think they know, it doesn’t make complete sense.
“Why, when I see a pretty girl coming down the street, do I have fantasies of strangling her?” one seventy-year-old man asks me, deeply upset at his own mind, tormented by these unwelcome, disturbing, and uninvited thoughts. “Why, when you say something helpful to me, do I have images of sucking your balls?”
Such sentences are not uttered easily; there is much anxiety bound up in these obsessive, uncomfortable, unwanted, and usually unspoken thoughts. Ralph is worried that he will not be able to control his actions, that his impulses will get the better of him, although he has never acted on any of his obsessional thoughts. It is a big deal that these thoughts are being spoken and confessed, but do I know why they are happening? Is there a magic word I can say that will relieve him of his torment and make them go away? I encourage his free associations. Perhaps we can find the childhood links that gave such obsessive thoughts their life. Or perhaps not. Will doing so make things better? Or is there another way?
Although Ralph’s symptoms are unusual, his bewilderment about them is not. My second therapist, Isadore From, whom I worked with when I began to see patients privately, seemed to know this very well. He would start every one of our sessions with the phrase “What’s with you today, Mark?” I always felt anxious under his gaze, never sure exactly what was with me that day, or what was with him! I asked him once about this opening gambit and he told me, in a forthcoming manner, that he began every session that way, not just the ones with me. He liked it better than the conventional “How are you feeling?” or “How are you doing?” Isadore did not like pleasantries. He liked to play the edge, putting me in touch with my anxiety right away if I could handle it. He knew I would have preferred something a little less jarring, but that would have played into my defenses rather than helping me out of them.
Often, people arrive in therapy living a scripted life that has not gone as planned. Slowly and steadily, through the process of talking things out, they may come to a greater, but still limited, understanding of what is stifling them. Conversations with Ralph yielded many tantalizing sources of his symptoms. Maybe he could not tolerate feeling attracted to younger women. Maybe he feared rejection, sought preemptive revenge on good-looking women, and could only express his aggression in an obsessional way. Or maybe his thoughts were rooted in that time forty years earlier when he got stoned with his girlfriend and suddenly, out of nowhere, staring at the thinness and fragility of her neck, imagined choking her and went running out of the room in fear. Maybe feeling attracted, or grateful, made him dependent in a way he found too threatening. He grew up in a tough part of town and was always picked on by gangs of bigger boys. Too much dependency would have made him even more of a target. Did any of this conjecture make him feel better? Possibly. But the conclusions themselves did not help as much as the open-ended collaborative questioning we engaged in together.
The most useful thing I ever said to Ralph was that he was not looking carefully enough at the pretty women he was passing on the street. He was allowed to look discreetly, I said—that’s what men do. He was choking himself, strangling his instincts, interrupting his looking, and inhibiting his desire. He did something similar with me too, I pointed out. When I said or did something helpful, for which he felt the stirrings of gratitude, he would disconnect from his feelings with an unwanted sexual thought. The forbidden thought would then become the focus of his attention and he would become preoccupied with trying not to have it again. This became a loop, an obsessional loop that was very difficult to get out of. Trying not to have the thought only made it more pronounced and more threatening.
“What’s really going on with you?” I wondered. “You bring me these strangulated bits of frightening thoughts, but that is not the real you.
“Stay more with your actual experience,” I would say to him in as many different ways as I could muster. “Your breath, your body, what you are actually seeing and feeling. We don’t need to make your symptoms go away; we just need to change the way you relate to them. With less aversion to your thoughts, their hold on you will lessen. You could be less preoccupied and more open to what you are seeing around you.”
I think I was onto something with him. Ralph liked my advice and found it helpful. His thoughts of choking women did not entirely go away, but he found the encouragement, and permission, to look at the women he passed on the street to be surprisingly useful. Instead of focusing so much on his unwanted thoughts, he started to look around.
“Where do you want to look?” I remember asking him.
He was bashful at first at mentioning women’s breasts. Ralph was the kind of person who did not remember faces, who would not notice if there was a change in the decor of a room, who was not attentive to visual cues. There was a visual world, and, I suspected, an emotional and erotic world, he was not living in. He enjoyed the challenge of discreetly returning to his visual field, to the bodies and faces of the women he passed on the street, even when his thoughts intruded; and he found that, as a result, he spent less time dwelling on his obsessional thoughts when they arose. They would still come, but they did not squeeze the life out of him in quite the same way. He began to see his disturbing thoughts as mere thoughts, and not as the last word on his moral fiber.
Some might say that, from a Buddhist perspective, encouraging Ralph’s voyeurism was counterproductive. Craving is at the root of suffering, the Buddha taught, and desires are endless. Indulging them keeps us in their grip and traps us in a never-ending cycle of brief satisfactions followed by the relentless pursuit of more. Loosening the grip of the instincts is one of the hallmarks of the Buddhist approach. But in order to loosen their grip, we must first know what they are. Ralph was so at odds with his desires there was no way he could work with them. As he began to relax with himself, however, he came to see that there was more to the male gaze than simple lust. Erotic desire often masks a longing for emotional intimacy. His obsessional response to the genuine moments of connection in my office opened a window onto this. He told me one day that such thoughts also happened when he was watching a sunset. This had always been a mystery to him. There was something so tender and heartbreaking in the sunset, he realized, that his mind jumped away to avoid its poignancy.
There is a famous Zen story that describes an ancient version of therapy with patients like Ralph. It is about Bodhidharma, the man who brought Buddhism from India to China and then spent nine years in a cave staring at a wall. Bodhidharma, a legendary figure who lived in the fifth or sixth century, did not like to be bothered. He lived alone in his cave and stared at the wall all day. When people trekked to his outpost to solicit teachings from him, he sent them away. One man, who went on to become his dharma heir, was particularly persistent. Huike stood obstinately in the snow outside the mouth of the cave and would not leave. Eventually, so it is said, he cut off his left arm and presented it to Bodhidharma as proof of his dedication and sincerity. This part of the story is often used as an example of the tenacity one needs to practice Buddhism successfully. I do not think his effortful striving is the point of the story, however, nor is it a description of Right Action I would support. Bodhidharma’s intervention, in fact, helps Huike to let go of his striving.
The heart of the story is as follows:
Huike says to Bodhidharma, when finally given a chance to speak to him directly, “My mind is anxious. Please pacify it.”
To which Bodhidharma replies, “Bring me your mind, and I will pacify it.”
Huike says, “Although I’ve sought it, I cannot find it.”
Bodhidharma then says, “There, I have pacified your mind.”
Huike, in his desire to be freed from his anxiety, was very similar to Ralph. And Bodhidharma, in a paradoxical move, helped him therapeutically. In asking his visitor to find the mind that was troubling him, Bodhidharma got his attention. In creatively moving Huike out of his comfort zone, away from his fixation on his anxiety, Bodhidharma was deploying Right Action. He managed to get Huike to change his focus and acknowledge that the mind he was convinced was at the root of his problem was not there in the way he imagined. His non-finding was the finding, most Buddhist teachers insist. The mind’s empty, aware nature was there all along, already pacified. This skillful exchange made Huike aware of it.
—
There is something of this in a successful psychotherapy. People come with their symptoms, and, while they may not be as aggressively demanding as Huike, they are essentially asking their therapists to pacify their minds. If I only had to repeat a Zen story to them, life would be beautiful. But the challenge is to be as resourceful as Bodhidharma, not to imitate him. He elicited the story Huike was telling himself and playfully undercut it. He gave him a different way of understanding himself not by instructing him, but by making it come alive in their interaction.
This kind of approach is not alien to psychotherapy. There is a long history of experienced therapists doing whatever they can to shake their patients out of their comfort—or should we say discomfort—zones. Once when I was teaching a three-day workshop on Buddhism and psychotherapy, I had a conversation at lunch with a woman twenty or thirty years my senior who had seen Wilhelm Reich for a consultation when she was in college in the late 1940s. Her encounter with him reminded me of Huike’s with Bodhidharma. For me, hearing her story was akin to meeting someone who had been in treatment with Sigmund Freud himself. To hear it in the context of a workshop on Buddhism and therapy was particularly delightful.
Reich was one of Freud’s younger disciples. He met Freud in 1919 when he was twenty-two years old and not yet out of medical school. He quickly rose in prominence in the Viennese psychoanalytic circles and developed his own theories of character analysis and the function of the sexual orgasm before becoming increasingly erratic and controversial in his later years. Reich’s central idea, for which he was both praised and ridiculed, was “orgastic potency.” He was an early precursor of the body-centered therapists who have become much more established in our own time, and in the 1920s he was a teacher of Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, who was therapist to my own Isadore From.
Reich felt that conflicted emotions were stored as muscular tensions and that people’s “characters” could be read via these chronic inhibitions. The orgasm, which Freud called Reich’s “hobby-horse,” was, for Reich, the most critical vehicle of release. Not only could one’s muscular tensions dissolve, but the ego itself could temporarily lose its rigidity under the spell of sexual intercourse and the surprise of orgasm. These ideas, while no longer so arcane, were quite controversial in Reich’s time. Freud felt that they were something of a one-liner, that both the psyche and neurosis were more complex than Reich envisioned. But Reich’s ideas, and his personality, had power, and his influence stretched over several continents.
In 1939, Reich came to New York City and set up an office in Forest Hills, Queens, where he saw patients for the next ten years until he moved permanently to Maine in 1950. The woman in my workshop must have seen him sometime in that interval. She told a table full of people from the workshop her story over lunch, and I am sorry I did not take notes immediately so that I could get the details correct. But I remember the basics. She was returning home from college for a vacation and had some kind of intense anxiety at the train station in New York City that paralyzed her. In today’s jargon we would probably say she had a panic attack. She could not go home and could not go back to school, and she must have managed to contact a friend. I cannot remember how, but somehow someone got her to go see Dr. Reich. As he apparently did with all his patients, he asked her first to undress and lie naked on a table in the back room so that he could observe her. She complied. Then he asked her to get dressed and come talk with him in his consulting room in the front of his office suite.
“Your problem,” Reich said to her, “is that you don’t know how to flirt. I’m going to teach you how.”
Reich had her pretend she was on the subway. He was sitting across from her and reading the paper, and she had to make eye contact with him and flirt. They role-played for the better part of the session and something in her gave way. She enjoyed herself and she believed him that her anxiety was a function of her sexual timidity. As an older woman at the weekend workshop sixty years later, she was confident, charismatic, and vivacious. My twenty-year-old son was there at the table and she teased him with gusto as she recounted her tale. She obviously felt that he would be able to relate to her story. Reich’s intervention all that time ago had started her on her way. This woman told me this story in the light of connections I was trying to make between therapy and Buddhism. Reich’s intervention opened her: to her needs, her desire, her body, her attractiveness, and her capacity to reach others. But his intervention also had a spiritual component in that it helped her reach outside of her ego—outside of her known self. It held out the promise of less isolation and more connection. And it gave her permission as a young woman to assert herself in a manner she must have felt was forbidden.
“Flirtation,” writes therapist Michael Vincent Miller, “as a social art form, is a mode of play, specifically, the play of the imagination. It involves two people playing with fantasy together about what could happen between them without either insisting that he or she knows exactly what the other has in mind. Flirting is an absorbing means of making contact, sometimes fleeting, sometimes prolonged, that leaves the mysterious unknowability of the other intact. It is at once provocative and respectful.”
Looked at from this perspective, there is a direct parallel with Buddhism. Flirting is an exercise in creating and maintaining uncertainty. Bodhidharma, in asking for the impossible, used flirtation to loosen Huike’s anxiety just as Wilhelm Reich did thousands of years later in his office in Forest Hills. While it is not often talked about in such stark terms, psychotherapy, to this day, does not shy away from flirtation’s potential to unleash therapeutic change.
Louise Glück, in a poem entitled “The Sword in the Stone,” gives a vivid and personal account of just this kind of flirtation. There is none of Bodhidharma’s samurai energy in her report, and little of Wilhelm Reich’s extravagant role-playing; the poet in this case speaks sparingly from her analyst’s couch. Yet the underlying feeling is unmistakably similar.
My analyst looked up briefly.
Naturally I couldn’t see him
but I had learned, in our years together,
to intuit these movements. As usual,
he refused to acknowledge
whether or not I was right. My ingenuity versus
his evasiveness: our little game.
At such moments, I felt the analysis
was flourishing: it seemed to bring out in me
a sly vivaciousness I was
inclined to repress. My analyst’s
indifference to my performances
was now immensely soothing. An intimacy
had grown up between us
like a forest around a castle.
Glück’s description of intimacy as a forest surrounding a castle is very moving. The Buddha, of course, left his castle for the surrounding forest in search of unconstrained freedom. The forest was where he discovered himself, where his ingenuity and exuberance were brought to full flower. It was where he freed his sword from its stone.
—
I reflected upon this in a series of conversations with an elderly former teacher of mine named Tori. Tori lives in a suburban independent living facility not far from the house she shared with her husband for many years. She has a very nice apartment within this facility, but it is like being in college or living in a monastery. As beneficial as this place has been, it is not what Tori had in mind for herself. Tori tried to stay in her home after her husband died, but it was too difficult to manage. Against her will, but in line with her children’s pleas, she moved outside of her comfort zone. The social aspect of this new living situation has not been easy, however. Married for more than fifty years, Tori now has to navigate a slew of new relationships by herself. She is always pleased when I call or visit, and many of our talks have centered on this unanticipated challenge. Tori is a good sport about it and she has not let her anxiety stop her from reaching out to new people. But she has had to deal with one unexpected event as a result, one that led her to her own understanding of Right Action.
At the peak of her husband’s career, he was the dean of the university he had spent his career at. He ran into political problems, though, as happens often in academia, and was forced out of his position as dean. A committee of three people—the vice chancellor of the university, the chairman of the history department, and one other administrator—had recommended that he step down. This was a big disappointment for him and an embarrassment for Tori. Her husband, characteristically, did not say much to anyone about his feelings, but Tori was very hurt and angry. She blamed the vice chancellor in particular for the unceremonious and ungracious way her husband was informed. It had come as a complete surprise. It was as if a storm blew through their lives and left them in the wreckage. Tori’s husband stayed on at the university and carved out a respected place for himself, working until he became ill at eighty-one and passed away. He seemed to make his peace with it all, but Tori harbored bitter feelings for both of them.
As chance would have it, Tori’s residence was full of elderly professors. The head of that history department lived down the hall when she first took her apartment. And now, a couple of years later, the former vice chancellor moved into the community as well. He was someone Tori and her husband had known well, until they stopped talking in the aftermath of her husband’s dismissal. For Tori, this was like a horror movie, the return of the repressed. Here she was, locked into this place, with no way of avoiding the uncomfortable reminder of one of the most painful aspects of her past. Right away, she was asked to a dinner at which he was included.
Dinners at a retirement complex are important social events, much like lunches in high school or suppers in college. Residents make plans to eat with one another. There is a whole etiquette to work out. Those who do not participate socially are left on the margins. They have to eat by themselves or are put at tables with people with incipient dementias. Tori, after chafing against this new reality, had become adept at scheduling her meals with people she liked. Were she to try to avoid the vice chancellor she would suffer socially. Her daughter urged her to swallow her pride.
“Be polite and go to dinner with him,” she advised.
Tori agreed, and, much to her relief, the first evening with him went fine. They did not talk beyond exchanging pleasantries, but it felt like a hurdle had been crossed.
The next day, however, while picking up her mail, the vice chancellor came up behind her. His post box was right beneath hers.
“Tori,” he said, as she tensed up at the sound of his voice. “I wanted to talk to you about Joe.”
It was good of him to say something to her, I thought when I heard the story, good of him to break the ice. Tori had gone to dinner with him and now he was reaching out to speak to her about her husband.
“He was a good man in the wrong job,” he said.
They had a conversation there in the mailroom, a conversation that never would have happened but for the coincidence of the two of them ending up in the same residence. Tori was shaken but also relieved. She finally had a chance to say something to this man about what had happened. She told him how unfair it had been to not give Joe more of a chance. His dismissal had come so suddenly; it had been such a shock. There was no warning; her husband had assumed he was doing a decent job.
The vice chancellor was taken aback by Tori’s words.
“We had at least three prior conversations about it,” he told her. “I told Joe it wasn’t going well. There were political problems. He had a real chance to turn it around.”
Tori then realized that her husband had kept all this from her. Even after he’d lost the deanship, he did not tell her of the earlier warnings he had received. Tori was disoriented by this information. Her prior version of events—the one that had defined both her and, in her mind, her husband—was now open to question. She had been telling herself this particular story for years, holding the grudge for Joe’s sake, but now the story had a big hole in it. Relieved of her explanation, a feeling of humility arose to take its place. I thought she might be angry with her husband for keeping the truth from her, but she seemed to feel only compassion. He had not wanted to let her see his shame.
“A good man in the wrong job,” the vice chancellor had said.
She could see his point.
Tori’s embrace of the vice chancellor’s overture reminds me of a Buddhist story of two monks crossing a river. The two men come upon a young woman who is having trouble getting to the opposite shore. One of the monks, despite his vows to never touch a woman, picks her up and deposits her on the other side of the water. As they continue on their way, the other monk, the one who has kept his vows and not touched her, can’t stop chastising his overly benevolent friend.
“How could you do that?” he asks. “You know touching a woman is against our vows. And you were holding her.”
“I put her down long ago,” replies the first monk. “You are still carrying her.”
I have always loved this story. The monk who picked up the woman, while breaking his vows, did what was required in the moment. He responded sympathetically to the person in need and exhibited Right Action. The other monk, holier than thou, while adhering to the letter of the law, was the more attached of the two. Playing by the rules, he was looking for safety rather than paying attention to what the situation called for. His unconscious severity was structuring his response and, we can infer, masking his envy of his friend’s serendipitous contact with the stranded woman. Even after his friend had put her down, the second monk was still obsessing over her. While endeavoring to be a good Buddhist, he was inadvertently revealing just how difficult it was for him to let go.
Buddhist tales make this point over and over again. Our lives are made dull by our efforts to overcontrol things. The joy of creative expression arises out of surprise. If we live our lives like the overly severe monk thinking only about the rules, we walk through life with blinders on. If we can be open, like the first monk, we find that life’s unpredictability is full of interesting and invigorating challenges. These challenges engage us in unexpected and unanticipated ways and allow for the freedom of unscripted responsiveness. Right Action is more than just reaction. It springs from an attunement to the moment that the confines of convention obscure.
Tori’s willingness to speak with the vice chancellor was like the monk carrying the woman across the stream. It was against her vows but she did it anyway. Rather than holding fast to her resentment, she stretched herself as the moment demanded. She took a step back and the unnecessary burden of being an aggrieved spouse dropped away. Something in her exhaled. Her mind, which had been carrying this anxiety for such a long time, was at least momentarily pacified. Her relationship with her husband, which had apparently come to an end, was suddenly alive again. Right Action, in this situation, meant restraining her initial impulses and engaging with the vice chancellor. While I would not define her intimate conversation with him as a flirtation, she was definitely flirting with disaster in talking with him. Her own internal proscriptions were strongly against it and her loyalty to her husband might well have prevented it. But she did not let her hesitation prevail. Having taken her daughter’s advice, she had a surprisingly open conversation with someone she did not know as well as she thought she did. The forest inched a little closer to the castle walls.