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.

I think I came closer in this session than in many of the previous ones to encouraging the kind of shift I am after for my patients. It did not come through my explanation of the concept of conceit but from the surprise of suggesting that Zach simply be a friend to his friend. The element of surprise was important. Startled by my comment, Zach had a glimpse of another way of relating. It made sense to him in the moment, not just conceptually but personally. The Zen poem connotes a similar feeling, returning by an unused path. Could that also be mindfulness, coming back via an intrinsic but unfamiliar resource to find the unexpected? But when I read the poem to Zach at a later date, instead of hearing “violets,” he heard the final word as “violence.” A Freudian slip, we might conclude.

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.

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.

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.