Lawrence wrote the poem in conventional everyday language, describing a brief sighting of a golden snake while he was fetching water from his backyard well. But he had a poet’s self-awareness, similar (if not identical to) that which is cultivated in meditation. He observed not just the serpent but also his own mind.
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He was talking about the mind revealing itself, about the vivid and transparent thing
hidden within the twisted shards of our individual personalities. Did I see that freedom in my patients?
While it took Ram Dass to express it for me, I recognized the truth in what he was saying. I do see my patients as already free. The seed is in them already, just as the Buddha’s joy under the rose-apple tree was there within him. My challenge in being a therapist has been to stay true to this vision even when my patients, like my mother, object.
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.
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.
Could he echo, at the close of his week’s vacation, the eighteenth-century Zen poet Bakusui’s haiku in which he wrote sparingly but utterly succinctly of the surprise of coming home to himself one fine spring day?
Returning
by an unused path—
violets.
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.