by Mark Epstein
“What is the unconscious?” Dr. Nemiah asked me. This was a central question for a young would-be psychiatrist in those days, and I sensed that his evaluation of me depended upon my answer.
I thought immediately of my retreat, of the curtains parting and the light shining through, of my understanding that the narrow world of my day-to-day preoccupations did not have to define me. In Dr. Nemiah’s world, the unconscious was mostly thought of as the dark and lurking place from which dreams emerge, but, as much as I would come to respect that point of view, this was not how I was thinking at the time.
“The unconscious is the repository of mystery,” I responded.
I remember how much Dr. Nemiah liked my answer despite being unaware of what I was actually thinking about. I was not about to tip my hand to him about my Buddhist leanings despite my admiration for his clinical acumen. Buddhism, at that time in my life, was not something I was talking about to my superiors, especially those who were going to give me an evaluation. But my answer worked just as well in his world as it did in my own. Mystery encompasses the dark as well as the light.
As an experienced and erudite psychiatrist, Dr. Nemiah was trying to give me a feel for how little we, as supposed experts, understand the recesses of the mind. The unconscious is a mystery and it remains one all these years later. In bringing Buddhism to a Western audience, I am in a similar situation. As much as I might talk to my friends and patients about how concentration opens doors into unexpected areas of the psyche, nothing beats experiencing it for oneself. Concentration is a channel into something we do not have exact words for. The unconscious? Mystery? The imagination? Love and light? It is tempting to turn whatever it is into something more concrete than we can actually apprehend.
Right Concentration argues against doing this. I think that is why it is saved for the last step instead of being talked about at the beginning. Right Concentration does not want us to get attached to it. It does not want us to turn it into an object of worship. Use it to free yourself, but don’t turn it into another thing. Allow it to remain unpredictable.
My Buddhist teachers, in making this point, chuckle at a story they often repeat. A man who successfully completed a three-month silent retreat came running down the street in its immediate aftermath screaming, “It didn’t work. It didn’t work.” Under the spell of developed concentration and enveloped within the silence of the retreat, this man had discovered a profound sense of inner peace. Mistakenly assuming that this achievement was permanent and that his mind had been transformed (and laboring under the conviction that absorption was the goal he was aiming for), he was naturally distressed to find this golden state evaporating as soon as conditions changed. He thought his mind would stay quiet forever and assumed he was finally rid of his neurotic tendencies. But his assumptions were unfounded and his attachment to a particular state of mind was revealed.
In a certain light, realizing his mistake was the real point of this man’s retreat. The desire to conquer impermanence by uniting the self with an idealized and unchanging “other” is very understandable. It manifests in love as well as in religion and is a persistent theme warned about in Buddhist psychology. Concentration meditations, deployed in the extreme, tend to take people away, akin to what happens when one is lost in music or transported during sex. The mind becomes focused, physical sensations are heightened, and feelings of serenity become strong. With diligent one-pointed practice, these feelings of absorption can be extended for prolonged periods of time, giving people the impression that all of their problems have disappeared forever. In his own version of advice not given, the Buddha was careful not to urge his followers too far in this direction. Clinging takes many forms, and the desire for inner peace can sometimes be just as neurotic as other, more obvious addictions. The wish to lose oneself, however well intentioned, masks a mind-set dominated by self-judgment and self-deprecation. It is often just another way of trying to find a safe place to hide, replacing a troubled self with something perfect and unassailable. Right Concentration steers in a different direction. It offers stillness, not just as respite, but as a way of entertaining uncertainty. In a world where impermanence and change are basic facts of life, the willingness to be surprised gives one a big advantage.
I have tried to communicate this to my patients by not promising too much from meditation. Suffice it to say, I know there are reassuring experiences lying in wait for people and I know that concentration is one avenue for their awakening. How it will manifest for any given individual, however, is anyone’s guess.
A good example of this comes from Dan Harris, a news anchor and journalist at ABC News, who has become a friend. Dan reached out to me after an unfortunate incident in which, while reading the news on Good Morning America, he suddenly and inexplicably dissolved into a puddle of nervous tics while mangling the words he was saying. One minute he was cogently presenting the news and the next minute he was blabbering incoherently as he grew more and more flustered. Dan came to understand that he had had a panic attack in front of millions of people on live TV, but in the moment he had no idea what the problem was. In his own way, he was exhibiting puzzling “conversion” symptoms like the ones Dr. Nemiah had taught me about. Some kind of unprocessed anxiety was resurfacing in the form of perplexing physical symptoms, embarrassing him on a national stage.
Months after the event, after seeking professional help and at the urging of his wife, who had once read one of my books, he came kicking and screaming to meditation. He called me out of the blue, told me he was a reporter, and asked if we could meet up. I agreed, we had a series of meals together over the next year during which he asked good questions that made me think, and we became friends. I had the sense, despite his hesitations, that he would get a lot out of meditation and that it might be useful in dealing with his anxiety. The panic attack made him realize that he did not really know himself very well. I urged him, after a series of conversations, to go on a retreat to see what might happen. I thought it might give him another way of probing the unconscious.
Dan had an experience of Right Concentration on his first retreat. After five days of intermittent difficulty in which he often questioned taking my advice, Dan took a chair from his small bedroom and sat out on the balcony at the end of his hallway. The retreat was in Northern California, and I imagine it was a beautiful day. Sitting outside was a little easier for Dan, I think, than sitting in the meditation hall. He was a bit more relaxed and not quite as judgmental as he usually was: about the place, the practice, the other people, and the vaguely New Age language that was being thrown about by the instructors. For whatever reason, Dan’s concentration kicked in while he sat on the porch. He did not see light or feel love, as I had, but he felt as if something had clicked, as if he had finally tuned in to the right frequency. He had the same kind of effortless experience that I had had in my first retreat, in which I was able to stay focused at will. “I’m not trying, it’s just happening,” he later wrote. “It’s so easy it feels like I’m cheating. Everything’s coming at me and I’m playing it all like jazz. And I don’t even like jazz.”
Dan spoke to me about all this when he returned. He was very moved by what happened next. Sitting there in concentration on the balcony, settling into his breath, he suddenly heard a loud rumble approaching. It began to increase in intensity, as he later put it, “like the fleet of choppers coming over the horizon in that scene from Apocalypse Now.” His focus was strong, and Dan remained still as the rumble intensified. When he eventually opened his eyes, the roar crashing all about him, a hummingbird was hovering just in front of his face.
In Dan’s book, this moment with the hummingbird is incidental. He had other powerful experiences on his retreat that he has described in 10% Happier—experiences that fit more closely with traditional descriptions of what happens under the spell of concentration—but for me his encounter with the hummingbird, as a harbinger of what concentration was capable of del
ivering, is special. I do not think Dan’s mind had ever been so still. This stillness enabled him to drop his guard and his filters, to open and relax in a way I’m not sure he ever had before. It gave him momentary freedom from his chronic coping posture: a defensive and wary tension, peppered by sarcasm, which had contributed to his panic attack on air. And the hummingbird was like a confirmation of his opening. It was as if the external world had recognized his attunement and touched him with a bit of its grace.
This is one of the great gifts of Right Concentration. We think we know things so well, but all it takes is a few days of watching one’s breath to show us what we don’t know. I could never have anticipated that a hummingbird would have been the vehicle for Dan’s breakthrough; he had to check himself into the retreat for the mystery to unfold. But I knew that if he got himself there something interesting would eventually happen and that he would be taken by surprise. Right Concentration has given me that confidence.
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In my time as a psychiatrist, I have seen the fruits of concentration take many forms, few of which I could ever anticipate. One interesting example comes from a depressed patient of mine who was drawn to meditation but did not feel able to do it alone. An accomplished cellist, Eric’s difficulty was not that he lacked discipline. When he had to learn scores for a performance, he was able to apply himself like the professional he had become. He never quite articulated what his problem was with meditation, but somehow I thought I understood. Eric did not feel safe with himself. He was afraid of falling apart. He came to several public talks and workshops and found that meditation was fine when he was part of a group. Although he liked it and thought it could help him, he would not do it alone. He tried a couple of times but never really gave it a chance. When his mind began to wander after the first five minutes, he would give up.
I kept this information filed away and continued with Eric’s treatment. His depression improved and he began to see friends, read, and work again. But there were still times when he was turned inside out by his feelings, when for long stretches of time he felt empty, cold, unmotivated, and uncomfortable. One day, we had a session in which he told me he had no appetite, that the mere thought of cooking or buying food made him disgusted. The idea of handling a piece of chicken or a raw piece of fish turned his stomach. He had gone through his refrigerator and thrown out everything that was there: the onions, celery, and carrots he was saving for chicken soup. He wasn’t hungry. Black coffee, cigarettes, and whiskey were enough for him.
I was concerned. I often talked to Eric about food, inquired what he was eating for dinner, asked where he was going to eat with his friends. He was divorced and lived alone and he worked a lot; if no one was preparing dinner for him, he was unlikely to think about what he might eat beforehand. Usually, if I talked about it enough, I could get him to lighten up a little. He had an artist’s sensibility and most artists I know appreciate food, enjoy cooking, and are good at it. He was no exception. If I set the table, eventually he would join me for the meal. But on this day, I could not really get a spark going. At the height of his depression, he had compared it to dragging around a dead horse. That was the feeling of the session. The dead horse was back in town.
I asked Eric if he would like to meditate with me.
“Oh, yes,” he responded.
Eric knew that I did not usually mix meditation with therapy and he thanked me for stretching myself. I asked Eric to be aware of the in breath at the tip of the nose and to say the word “in” when he breathed in, to notice the out breath when he exhaled and to say the word “out,” and to feel the sensation of his two lips touching, repeating the phrase “touching, touching” after the out breath during the pause that is usually there before the next inhalation. Whenever his mind wandered, or rather whenever he noticed his mind wandering, I asked him to bring his attention back to the raw physical sensations of the breath. We did this together for about ten minutes, eyes closed, and when we stopped he had a bit of a smile on his face.
“I feel a little hungry,” he said. “A few rumblings.”
Of course, there was the possibility that Eric was just responding to suggestion. He knew I was concerned about his lack of appetite. Patients often want to please their therapists—there is a phrase for this in therapy: “flight into health.” But I had the feeling his feeling was real.
The next day Eric did it at home. I think the clarity and simplicity of my instructions and the successful practice in my office made it seem possible. Eric understood that he could touch his depressed feelings lightly but take refuge in the breath. He described his experience to me in detail at our next session.
At first, Eric said, he began to weep. He sat down in his chair and began to weep. It did not stop and he did not understand what he was weeping about. It just poured out of him. Painfully. But he worked with the breath as best he could and maintained his resolve. Eventually the weeping subsided. In his mind’s eye, Eric saw his sadness congeal into a dense black disc or ball. The ball had a faint aura of light around it, but its general feeling was bleak: a mixture of self-loathing and disgust, it had the flavor of the session the day before when the thought of eating made him sick, when he was dragging around the dead horse. As he moved his attention back to the breath, the black disc began to break up. It dispersed into many tiny pieces and seemed to disappear. He settled into the breath for a while with a sense of relief, but then, as he was coming out of the meditation, he saw the whole thing come back together again in a succession of magnetic jerks.
“Not so fast,” Eric thought to himself, as he watched his pain reestablish itself.
But then he had a flash. He thought of two upcoming pieces he had agreed to play. Meaningful pieces, in which he was being asked to play new music with other dedicated and accomplished performers.
“How lucky I am to be able to do such a thing,” he thought to himself, and he felt a temporary brightening of his mood.
When he relayed all this to me during the next session, he had a further inkling.
“The black disc,” he said, “is desire. It’s what I’ve done to it. Hopeless.”
Eric was in his early fifties and was without an intimate relationship. Somewhere within, after his divorce, Eric had decided to eliminate desire. If he was not going to find someone to be with, there was no point in having it. This was protecting him from further disappointment but was also deadening him. We spoke of how his enthusiasm for his work contained the seeds of his desire, of how meditation had spontaneously shown that to be the case. This was important because it was a new thought. To feel desire still operating through his work—in a productive way, no less—was good. His desire was good. There was a trace here of something he needed. A neglected aspect of the self was now reestablished in his mind’s eye.
For Eric, Right Concentration did not make his depression go away (for that we needed antidepressants); it helped him get underneath it. Eric’s emotional range was narrowed and compressed by the aversion he had toward his feelings. First desire, and then depression itself, had made him shut down. There was an element of dissociation in Eric’s depression, just as there was in Dan Harris’s panic attacks and in Dr. Nemiah’s patients with conversion hysteria. The unbearable nature of his unfulfilled desire had caused him to disconnect, creating new symptoms. When Eric began to shift his focus to a neutral object, however, things opened up. Concentration allowed him to see that the black disc of depression was not just depression. There was a light in it he had never seen before. If I had suggested this to Eric beforehand, he might well have rejected it out of hand. But when he came upon it himself, out of the simple task of watching his breath, it was as astonishing as the hummingbird had been to Dan Harris.
In my own experience, this tendency of Right Concentration to foster a sense of connection is something I have always treasured. I was reminded of this on a recent retreat where I was fortunate to have an experienced teacher
, a Swiss man who had once been a monk in the Thai forest tradition. I met with him for ten minutes after two or three days of meditation and confessed to him that I was straining in my attempt to find the breath. It was subtle, but I knew this tendency and could not always help myself. I was trying a little too hard. Breath by breath, I was out in front of my experience, pulling at the in breath and forcing the out breath in an effort to capture them fully. I was not practicing with Right Effort—some kind of insecurity was making me strain and, in so doing, I was missing the point.