For it is only by observing the ego dispassionately, over and over and over again, that its nature can be significantly revealed. Without direct experience of how limiting its small-mindedness can be, there is no motivation to grow beyond it.

Each time I heard it, it seemed so profound! There is so much in life that we cannot control no matter how we try. Circumstances, events, feelings, even our own thoughts! But we can take responsibility for how we relate to what happens. We can grimace with our hands over our ears or we can lift one hand. By now, this has become a refrain in my mind, one that often returns to guide me in my life and in my work with patients.

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.

Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite

passages, he puts it like this:

If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.

Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, “holds” them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are

generally of two types.

On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply “being.” This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometimes occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another—“me” watching “myself”—the whole thing collapses and just “is.