The Buddha’s teachings run counter to this tendency to find fault. He normalized feelings of inadequacy and threw responsibility back onto the individual to sort them out. He taught mindfulness as a method of probing the self and found that impartial attention to moment-to-moment experience yields surprising but predictable insights into the self’s

contingent and relational nature. These insights, which precipitate spontaneously out of concentrated attention and mindful reflection, make abundantly clear that our habitual efforts to defend ourselves against our intrinsic groundlessness make things even worse.

In some way, this is what I want to convey to April. We all wish we could just eliminate the dysfunctional parts of us. In pushing against what we do not like in ourselves, we get more knotted up. The shame, discomfort, embarrassment, and pain just reinforce the hold the whole thing has over us, and, in the process, we over-identify with an aspect of ourselves that does not need to define us so completely. Seeing this overidentification clearly is what I think of as insight.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, “holds” them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are

generally of two types.

On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply “being.” This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometimes occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another—“me” watching “myself”—the whole thing collapses and just “is.