A student approached the master in his zendo, bowed and reverently asked, “Master, what is Zen?”

The master replied, “Zen is eating when you eat, working when you work, and resting when you rest.”

The student was astonished. “But master, that is so simple!”

“Yes,” said the master. “But so few people seem to be able to do it.

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.

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 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.

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.