He was talking about the mind revealing itself, about the vivid and transparent thing

hidden within the twisted shards of our individual personalities. Did I see that freedom in my patients?

While it took Ram Dass to express it for me, I recognized the truth in what he was saying. I do see my patients as already free. The seed is in them already, just as the Buddha’s joy under the rose-apple tree was there within him. My challenge in being a therapist has been to stay true to this vision even when my patients, like my mother, object.

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.

But I have never felt that I was an expert in either tradition, nor have I been motivated to formulate, let alone trademark, a hybrid between the two. I reacted with horror at the advent of “mindful psychotherapy” and have always been careful neither to cloak myself in spiritual garb nor to dismiss the accumulated wisdom of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Mindfulness as a substitute for traditional psychotherapy strikes me as shortsighted, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and blending the two traditions, just as they are getting to know each other, has always seemed premature. Most such attempts have cobbled together superficial elements of each to the detriment of both.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

That evening, I had dinner with my former therapist and current friend, Michael Vincent Miller. I told him about the two sessions, about how it can take so many years for certain things to come out. I have enormous respect for Michael’s therapeutic acumen. He helped me a lot as my therapist and has guided me for years while becoming a real friend, and I have referred many patients to him. In the past fifteen years, he has begun to meditate, and we now share an interest in how seamlessly the two disciplines of Buddhism and psychotherapy can fit together. “You know what makes Buddhism and therapy similar?” he asked me. I waited for him to tell me. “They both aim for the restoration of innocence after experience.