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.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

”All we do in successful psychoanalysis is to unhitch developmental hold-ups, and to release developmental processes and the inherited tendencies of the individual patient. In a peculiar way we can actually alter the patient’s past, so that a patient whose maternal development was not good enough can change into a person who has had a good-enough facilitating environment, and whose personal growth has therefore been able to take place, though late.” - Winnicott

Violette had a wonderful feeling for the joy of connection and the benefits of generosity. She was a selfless person in many regards. But her upbringing had not made enough room for healthy aggression, and this had made it difficult for her to balance the inevitable give-and-take of separation and connection. Beneath her compliant exterior lay an aggression that made her feel guilty and removed from the people she loved. Surrender was not going to be Violette’s rhinoceros. She knew about surrender already. Her rhinoceros was much more likely to look like a rhinoceros.

Mindfulness, if it resurrects anything, resurrects the holding environment of the good-enough parent so that our own still-primitive minds can grow out of their tendency to cling to their own misperceptions. In setting this up, mindfulness, like therapy, helps us make peace with our personal histories while encouraging us not to be overly defined by them. Holding this dual reality is what allows being to shine through. One does not experience this as a state of merger (in which one person or one thing dissolves into another) but rather as a state of clarity, as if the conceptual barriers of who we think we are have been lifted from the mind.