For me, meditation had come to mean being with my own mind no matter what state it was in. In this way, it was closer to psychotherapy than I had initially thought.

In learning to meditate, albeit from some of the best teachers I could find, I came to appreciate that once I understood the basics, I had to teach myself how to do it. I had to take what I had learned, in terms of the formal techniques, and then make it real from the inside. Only then could I begin to appreciate what meditation could and could not accomplish.

As a therapist, I have been taught to pay close attention to the intimate details of people’s lives in order to help them decipher the mystery of who and what they have become. But as a meditator, I have learned that experience isn’t everything. It can just as easily obscure one’s truth as reveal it. This is the paradox I have faced in bringing these two worlds together. Traditional therapy unpacks in order to make sense. Meditation asks us to stop making sense so that we can find where happiness truly abides. Therapy examines the accumulated self, the one that is shaped by all the defenses we have used to get through life. Meditation asks us to divest ourselves of those very defenses so that we can recapture the original and intrinsic vitality we were born with.

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.