We all cling in one way or another, but as Hakuin reminds us, if we are searching for freedom, we must learn to lift up our hands. Early trauma like Jack’s cannot be healed by simply pointing out its origins. Understanding that he was not the cause of his parents’ anguish will not relieve him of the burden of it. But by working diligently to offset his mind’s tendency to repeat itself, Jack can become compassionate toward his childhood predicament rather than identifying exclusively with the pain of it. This was the deeper message I was trying to convey.

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.

Jean had no doubts about who she was. Not only was she wrong to have written the forbidden prescriptions, she couldn’t even focus on her medical records. Nothing was working out the way she hoped. The fan in her life was definitely broken. Were I to focus

only on what was broken, I would be pulled into her suffering instead of pointing the way out. I wanted more uncertainty for Jean, more of that Zen doubt. Whatever conclusion she aggressively threw at me, I parried it back at her until we reached a truce. Surrender was Jean’s rhinoceros. It went against everything she thought.

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.