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.

The mention of Kuan Yin was spontaneous; I did not know whether Jack was familiar with her, and, when he was not, I needed to explain her to him. This took some time and threatened to overwhelm the session, taking him away from his feelings and into his intellect. But I wanted to turn around Jack’s long-standing sentiments of never having been enough. If he could imagine himself, even for a moment, as the healer, I hoped this would begin to offset his unquestioning identity as someone who needed to be healed. His slightly off-balance reaction to our interchange suggested some degree of success. Instability is sometimes a sign of new possibilities.

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 have such a hard time relaxing,” she says. “With men especially, and if I’m attracted to them it’s worse.” There is a longing in April to be known, to be reached, and to be seen, but she is frightened of it at the same time and cannot help but throw up obstacles seemingly in spite of herself. She might spill something in such a situation, for instance. When immersed in her work, April is the opposite. She can be funny, irreverent, spontaneous, innovative, and free. We talk about the paradox. When she loses herself, she is being herself.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.