by Mark Epstein
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.