We all cling in one way or another, but as Hakuin reminds us, if we are searching for freedom, we must learn to lift up our hands. Early trauma like Jack’s cannot be healed by simply pointing out its origins. Understanding that he was not the cause of his parents’ anguish will not relieve him of the burden of it. But by working diligently to offset his mind’s tendency to repeat itself, Jack can become compassionate toward his childhood predicament rather than identifying exclusively with the pain of it. This was the deeper message I was trying to convey.

I was pleased with this session because I managed to get David to feel behind all of his accrued self-doubt and into his heart. For an instant, when his tears began to flow, I knew he was connecting to a neglected but super-important part of himself. We had gotten to this place through a discussion of mindfulness, but our conversation did not stop at the intellectual level. David’s memory had led us deeper into his personal history and straight to the defenses he had built around his mother’s unavailability. By allowing himself to follow his affect rather than dwelling in his story, David was able to discover something true: the love he had always doubted was alive inside him.

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.

As is evident in my write-ups, I do not model this sensibility by resting calmly in a meditative state while my patients free-associate. I engage actively. But I am very quiet inside when I am working; all of my concentration, all of my attention, goes to the person I am with. And I want to know everything, from the television shows they are watching to the food they are eating to their most dreadful thoughts and reflections. I believe in the power of awareness to heal. I want my patients to see how and when and where their egos, or superegos, are getting the

best of them, because I know that if and when they can see this clearly, something in them will release. And their best chance of seeing it comes when my mind is quiet. Somehow, my inner silence resonates in them and feeds their awareness. Each person is like a koan I cannot solve with my rational mind.

He [Winnicott] was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and

wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making

interpretations. . . . It appals me to think how much deep change I

have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If

only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively

and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to

enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let

the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is

that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We

may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or

become aware of it with acceptance.