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.

One of the first things I discovered was that there was really no playbook for how to be a therapist. As with meditation, it had to be figured out from the inside. There was no script to

follow when sitting with a patient, no “right way” to handle things, only a set of ethical guidelines and a trust that listening “with a third ear” would help shape a useful response and serve a useful purpose. Each person, each visit, and each issue required an improvisatory spirit that kept me on my toes, much as I had felt when practicing mindfulness on my first silent retreats. I have had wonderful teachers, supervisors, and therapists, but, even in my first days, while still in training, once the door closed and I was alone with my patient, no one knew what I might do or say, least of all myself.

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.

Dr. Kernberg was kind to me and helped me to see that, while their deprivation may have been real, these patients had lots of internal conflict around anger that was holding them back. In showing me this, he also, without having to say it directly, made me see that I, too, was pushing anger away. He gave me language to use. “You might not be aware of how angry you are,” he suggested I say. “But you are in danger of destroying the very support you need the most.” By beginning my communication with “you might not be aware” rather than confronting my patients’ anger directly, I could encourage them to reflect upon something they were otherwise just acting out unawares. My skills as a therapist improved dramatically as a result. Kindness without the proper intelligence to back it up was of little use, but the use of kindness in the service of therapy’s insights was very helpful.

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.