At my best, I see psychotherapy in the same light. Many people who come to therapy are disgusted with themselves for one reason or another, much as the Buddha was in his own time and in his own way. This disgust can take many forms: shame, fear, anxiety, or feelings of unworthiness are common expressions of it, but the possibilities are endless. Some people even develop what is called a “reaction formation” and seem the opposite of disgusted. They come across as prideful or conceited and unwilling to admit their faults or self-doubts. But these individuals are often just propping themselves up, creating a false front to mask their vulnerabilities, and somewhere inside they are troubled because they know they are not being real.

Just as he had not urged me to jettison my sense of self, he was neither encouraging an empty mind nor recommending meditation simply as a form of rest and repose. He was asking us to use meditation to look into our minds and examine our behavior, to listen to the way we spoke to ourselves and thought about others, and to explore the attitudes we held in our most personal and private thoughts. From his perspective, inner peace is possible only when one has made peace with one’s own mind, when one’s own inner violence has been dealt with. This requires honesty and an internal ethic that is endlessly challenging. Inner peace comes not from turning off the mind, but from deliberately confronting one’s own innermost prejudices, expectations, habits, and inclinations.

If I had gathered anything from studying mindfulness, it was this: don’t push away the unpleasant and don’t cling to the pleasant, but give impartial attention to everything there is to observe.

One of the things Buddhist psychology is best at is itemizing which emotional tendencies are the most ingrained. They are listed as the “ten fetters,” and this tendency to measure oneself is said to be one of the most subtle and difficult to uproot. Even lust and anger are easier to deal with than conceit.

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.