Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that âbeingâ precedes âdoing,â and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that âbeingâ is everyoneâs 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. âBe here now,â my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.