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.
Related Quotes
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.
Just as he had not urged me to jettison my sense of self, he was neither encouraging an empty mind nor recommending meditation simply as a form of rest and repose. He was asking us to use meditation to look into our minds and examine our behavior, to listen to the way we spoke to ourselves and thought about others, and to explore the attitudes we held in our most personal and private thoughts. From his perspective, inner peace is possible only when one has made peace with one’s own mind, when one’s own inner violence has been dealt with. This requires honesty and an internal ethic that is endlessly challenging. Inner peace comes not from turning off the mind, but from deliberately confronting one’s own innermost prejudices, expectations, habits, and inclinations.
One of the first things I discovered was that there was really no playbook for how to be a therapist. As with meditation, it had to be figured out from the inside. There was no script to
follow when sitting with a patient, no “right way” to handle things, only a set of ethical guidelines and a trust that listening “with a third ear” would help shape a useful response and serve a useful purpose. Each person, each visit, and each issue required an improvisatory spirit that kept me on my toes, much as I had felt when practicing mindfulness on my first silent retreats. I have had wonderful teachers, supervisors, and therapists, but, even in my first days, while still in training, once the door closed and I was alone with my patient, no one knew what I might do or say, least of all myself.
I challenged myself over the course of a single year to write down, as accurately as I could recall, the details of at least one session every week (or every other week) when something interesting caught my eye, when I had the sense that the Buddhist element was in play. Sometimes this influence was overt: people might ask me about meditation technique, or I might spontaneously bring something I had learned from Buddhism into the conversation. And sometimes it was only a feeling: I might find myself reaching beyond traditional analysis to help someone grasp an alternative perspective on whatever issue was troubling them.
The division between meditation and real life is artificial. Doing each thing with full attention turns everything into a meditation.