by Mark Epstein
The instructor listened patiently to my report and then gave the simplest of replies.
“Don’t chase her. Let her find you,” he said with the faintest of smiles.
I was startled at the way he spoke. He had a bit of a German accent and I wondered if maybe I had heard him wrong, or if his English was not quite right. But at the same time I knew he was onto something. He gendered his comment that way on purpose. The concentrated feeling I was remembering and trying to refind was definitely a feminine one; it required a yielding, not a reaching. Whether this is simply because I am a man and the sensations evoked by one-pointed attention to the breath feel so “other” that I cannot help but eroticize them, I do not know. But there is a relationship between the spiritual and the erotic that Right Concentration helps to bring out. When the breath comes into focus, there is a settling that brings a retinue of relief. The traditional texts compare it to a healing jewel or to a medicinal balm, while secret esoteric works are more explicit about the erotic nature of what can happen. Neuroscientists talk about the brain’s endogenous opiate receptors being flooded. Whatever the explanation, I knew this teacher understood me. And I could not help but see as I talked with him that my straining after the breath had its correlates in my erotic life as well.
I followed the Swiss teacher’s advice for the next couple of days.
“Don’t chase her; let her find you.”
I went about my business with a little more aplomb thereafter. One afternoon, several days later, I was in the dining room in the late afternoon having tea. I was getting bored with the food (every day the same things were put out at five o’clock in lieu of an evening meal: rice crackers, tahini, peanut butter, raisins, sunflower seeds, and a big bowl of chilled fruit) and I began to wonder what would happen if I put the rice crackers in the toaster. Would they go snap, crackle, pop? I asked myself. One of the most common distractions on a retreat like this are old commercials or bits of songs that come floating out of the past like pulverized chunks of asteroids in the movie Gravity. Playing back old Rice Krispies jingles from my childhood gave me a rather pleasant feeling of nostalgia.
Amused by my musing, I suddenly felt something strange, something peculiar, something soft, cool and silky, sweet to the touch, hovering just out of reach. What was it? I had a moment of not knowing, like when the phone rings in the middle of a nap and you don’t know where you are or what the sound is that is pulling you awake. Then I knew. It was the breath. It had found me. By itself. Just as the Swiss ex-monk had said it would. It was clear and soft and intensely pleasurable. I quickly released myself from my toaster fantasy and settled into the sweetness of the breath. It was no longer difficult to concentrate and I relaxed in my seat in the dining hall only a little surprised at the next feeling to come welling up inside. Gratitude. It was a feeling of gratitude.
There are different ways to interpret meditation breakthroughs, different ways of giving them import. For some people, the sense of peace may be what they are seeking, and that is enough. But for me, my experience in the dining hall carried another message. My usual modus operandi is an effortful one. My father once told me that, after my first books were published, someone wanted to know what I was like when I was young. I think they had a false image of me as some kind of prodigy of relaxed awareness.
“Well,” said my father, trying to remember me as a child, reaching for something concrete he could say, “he always did his homework.”
This defined me as much as anything, and if I had to summarize myself I might give a similarly flavored response. I am identified with my striving and with the worries, responsibilities, and tensions that come with it. The retreat showed me that, however helpful this could be in the practice of meditation, to be overidentified with this aspect of myself obscured other, more mysterious, even erotic qualities I did not know were there. Getting out of my own way, letting her find me, opened me in a way I could not make happen through my own deliberateness. The paradox, of course, was that this non-doing was my own doing, too.
What is left when we are no longer identified with the personality we know? This is something the Zen tradition—indeed, all Buddhist traditions—is constantly seeking to convey. For me, on this retreat, the revelation was that I did not have to be the effortful person I thought I was. And when I wasn’t this person, I did not disappear. Something filled me. I was filled by something. An unconscious potential became conscious.
There is a tradition in Japan of Zen teachers writing a poem at the moment of death revealing the essence of their understanding. One of my favorites is by Kozan Ichikyo, written in 1360 when he was seventy-seven years old.
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going—
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
This empty-handed, barefoot feeling is what brushed up against me on the retreat. Right Concentration was the vehicle it rode in on. More than the relaxation it evoked, this feeling in the dining hall hinted at who I might be if I wasn’t who I thought I was. With my homework out of the way, I was free to dwell in its mystery.
EPILOGUE
Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and one of the first ambassadors of Buddhism to the United States, had a very helpful way of describing the relief that comes from getting over yourself. He used the expression “mind waves” to describe the turmoil of the ego’s struggle with everyday life. Waves, he would always insist, are part of the ocean. If you are trying to find the peace of the ocean by eliminating the waves, you will never succeed. But if you learn to see the waves as part of the whole, to not be bothered by the ego’s endless fluctuations, your sense of yourself as cut off, separate, less than, or unworthy will shift. This is a very particular way of dealing with the human sense of personal inadequacy, one that is strikingly different from the Western psychotherapeutic approach that seeks to uncover neurotic emotional patterns and excavate early childhood experience. In the Buddhist system, change comes by learning to shift one’s perspective. Self-preoccupation, after enough practice, gives way to something more open. The ego’s instinctive favoring of itself is eroded by a sense of the infinite.
Suzuki’s point is that, know it or not, we are already equipped to meet whatever befalls us. Life’s challenges are challenging, but there is room for faith, for confidence, even for optimism. The Western approach, seeking to strengthen the ego, focuses exclusively on the wave. Suzuki was always favoring the ocean. Buddhism often counsels meditation practice as the primary vehicle for awakening this shift in perspective, but at some point it becomes clear what is meant by the word “practice.” Meditation is not an end in itself. It is not a quick fix. It is practice for life.
After forty-plus years, I can say for sure that I am not cured, nor am I enlightened. People continue to complain at times about my coldness, my aloofness, and my irritability. I still have to deal with the various kinds of suffering that plague me, with my own tensions and anxieties, with my own need to be right and my own need to be liked, issues that have been with me for as long as I can remember. And now, in my sixties, there are things to face I have never experienced previously. But I do have something I did not have before. It is not exactly inner peace. Nor am I really any happier than I ever was. Happiness, to me, seems to have a set point, like a thermostat, around which we hover, no matter what we do. But I now have the means, thanks to both Buddhism and psychotherapy, to face whatever life throws at me.
While in many ways I have remained the same—my personality is much as it ever was—I am not the prisoner of my ego that I once was. When the most difficult aspects of my character surface, I know there is something I can do to not be at their mercy. While my three-year-old, seven-year-old, or twelve-year-old selves may not have given up the ghost, I do not have to be their helpless victim. Years of engagement with both psychiatry and Buddhism have shown me
where I have control over my own mind and where I do not. And I do not have to be cured to be hopeful. It is this optimism that I most want to make possible for my patients.
Buddhism is all about releasing oneself from the unnecessary constraints of the ego. Every aspect of the Eightfold Path is a counterweight to selfish preoccupation. But the Buddhist reprieve is accomplished not by leapfrogging over the ego’s needs or demands, but by zeroing in on them: acknowledging and accepting them while learning to hold them with a lighter, more questioning, and more forgiving touch.
As I bring Buddhism more directly into my clinical work, this is the aspect I find most helpful. From my own experience, I know that even the most disturbing material loses its hold when successfully observed without attachment or aversion. The more I can be present with the entire range of my own and my patients’ thoughts and feelings, the less we have to be run out of the room by them. In empowering the mind’s ability to observe dispassionately, the Buddha found a hidden mental resource, one that a successful psychotherapy also taps. In working with this understanding, I know that in encouraging my patients to be real with themselves I can also help them to be free.
What I try to convey to my patients is that they can meet the challenges life throws at them by changing the way they relate to them. This is advice I now feel free to offer. The goal is to meet the challenges with equanimity, not to make them go away. When Suzuki Roshi said not to be bothered by the waves’ fluctuations, he meant it. And one thing we can say for sure. Life gives us endless opportunity to practice. Mostly we fail. Who can say they are not bothered by anything, really? But when we make the effort, the results can be astonishing. In an insecure world, we can become our own refuge. Our egos do not have to have the last word.
Acknowledgments
To Ann Godoff, for advice freely given, cheerful encouragement, support, clear ideas, and the willingness to steer me through the writing of this work. To my patients, who have trekked to my office week in and week out and trusted me with the intricacies of their inner lives. To those friends and patients who generously reviewed and approved the case material presented herein. To Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg, for inspiring me when we teach together. To Anne Edelstein, my literary agent, for bringing this book to the right publisher. To Sherrie Epstein, my mother, for allowing me to report on our always enlivening weekly conversations. To the founders, teachers, and staff of the Forest Refuge in Barre, Massachusetts, for creating a space for the silent retreats described in this book. To Dan Harris, for making me think, and Andrew Fierberg, for listening. To Casey Denis, for her extremely helpful notes. To Sonia and Will, for their humor, energy, enthusiasm, and love. To Sheila Mangyal, for taking care of all of us. And to Arlene, who makes everything possible and fills our lives with an ever-expanding sense of possibility. I love you.
Notes
Introduction
“bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), chapter 21.
“Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom”: For more on this, see Yamada Mumon Roshi, Lectures on the Ten Oxherding Pictures, trans. Victor Sōgen Hori (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 5.
Mara remained a force: Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil (New York: Riverhead, 2004), pp. 16–28.
After the ecstasy: Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (New York: Bantam, 2001).
An aged Chinese monk: Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 154.
Path is there to be cultivated: Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 83.
Chapter One: Right View
“Don’t make such a big deal”: All unattributed quotations from Arlene Shechet are from her correspondence with Jenelle Porter, December 22, 2014, in preparation for Jenelle Porter’s Arlene Shechet: All at Once (Munich/London/New York: Delmonico Books–Prestel and The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2015), pp. 12–31.
Some translators use “realistic”: See Robert A. F. Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
“not a recipe for a pious Buddhist existence”: Batchelor, After Buddhism, p. 127.
Chapter Two: Right Motivation
Engler, has a story: Engler’s story about Munindra was relayed to me in personal correspondence. It was reproduced in my Open to Desire (New York: Gotham, 2005).
“dharma means living the life fully”: For more on Munindra, see Mirka Knaster’s Living the Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2010).
“Oral rage”: I presented a truncated version of this episode in Thoughts without a Thinker (New York: Basic, 1995), pp. 170–72.
Winnicott wrote of how inevitable failures: See, for instance, Donald W. Winnicott, Babies and Their Mothers (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988).
a famous paper of Winnicott’s: Donald W. Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30 (1949), pp. 69–74.
“However much he loves his patients”: Ibid., p. 69.
“A mother has to be able”: Ibid., p. 73.
Chapter Three: Right Speech
“Each of us tells ourselves”: Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience (New York: Riverhead, 2002), p. 1.
“an ambient, opaque silence”: Ibid., p. 3.
“The story I was telling myself”: Ibid., p. 3.
“You know what your problem is”: Ibid., p. 5.
“Just showing up”: Ibid., p. 16.
“participate, engage,” and “link up”: Ibid., p. 16.
“For when all is said and done”: Sigmund Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1958), p. 108.
“You can do anything you want to do”: Amy Schmidt, Knee Deep in Grace: The Extraordinary Life and Teaching of Dipa Ma (Lake Junaluska, NC: Present Perfect, 2003), p. 58.
“Amid the howling wind”: Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Knopf, 2013), pp. 90–91.
talking with my eighty-eight-year-old mother: This discussion was first published in my article “The Trauma of Being Alive,” New York Times, August 3, 2013.
Chapter Four: Right Action
“Acceptance of not knowing”: Donald W. Winnicott, “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma” (1949), in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1975), p. 137.
“Learn the backward step”: Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History; Volume 2: Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 79.
Huike says to Bodhidharma: Andre Ferguson, Zen’s Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings (Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2011), p. 20.
The mind’s empty, aware nature: Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2013), p. 314.
“Flirtation, . . . as a social art form”: Michael Vincent Miller, Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt: The Poetics of Gestalt Therapy (Gouldsboro, ME: Gestalt Journal Press, 2011), p. 116.
“My analyst looked up briefly”: Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 38.
Chapter Five: Right Livelihood
four kinds of happiness: Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker, Great Disciples of the Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy (Boston: Wisdom, 2003), p. 352.
“Right Livelihood is not only about”: Goldstein, Mindfulness, p. 387.
a murderer named Angulimala: For more on this story, see my Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart (New York: Broadway, 1998), p. 56.
Chapter Six: Right Effort
“Tell me, Sona”: Nyanaponika Thera, Aṅguttara Nikāya: Discourses of the Buddha (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1975), p. 155.
“The rule for the doctor”: Sigmund Freud, “Recommen
dations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1958), p. 112.
“It must not be forgotten”: Ibid., p. 112.
“To put it in a formula”: Ibid., p. 115.
“The basis of the treatment”: Donald W. Winnicott, “Two Notes on the Use of Silence” (1963), in Psycho-analytic Explorations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 81.
“a child, an invalid, one in the flush of youth”: Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 64.
Chapter Seven: Right Mindfulness
“With excessive thinking and pondering”: “Dvedhāvitakka Sutta” (chapter 19), The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), p. 208.
Chapter Eight: Right Concentration
good example of this comes from Dan Harris: See Dan Harris, 10% Happier (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).
“I’m not trying, it’s just happening”: Ibid., p. 138.
“like the fleet of choppers”: Ibid., p. 138.
“Empty-handed I entered the world”: Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems (Boston: Tuttle, 1986), p. 108.
Epilogue
describing the relief that comes from getting over yourself: Shunryū Suzuki (Suzuki Roshi), Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 1970, 2006).
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
abandonment, 47, 50, 51, 67
absentmindedness, 152