Going on Being

Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Mark Epstein

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780861719594
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Before he began training as a psychiatrist, Mark Epstein immersed himself in Buddhism through influential teachers such as Ram Dass, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield. Buddhism's positive outlook and the meditative principle of living in the moment profoundly influenced his study and practice of psychotherapy. Going on Being is an intimate chronicle of Epstein's formative years as well as a practical guide to how a Buddhist understanding of psychological problems can help anyone change for the better. Epstein gives readers a deeply personal look into his life, thoughts, fears, and hopes, while detailing the influences that have shaped his worldview. Inspiring in its honesty and humility, Going on Being is a compassionate, brilliant look at how uniting the worlds of psyche and spirit can lead to a new way of seeing reality.

PART ONE

THE CENTRAL WAY

I was like a mad child, long lost his old mother,

Never could find her, though she was with him always!

But now it seems I’m about to find that kind old Ama,

Since Big Brother Relativity hints where she hides,

I think, “Yes, yes!”—then, “No, no!”—then, “Could it be, really!”

These various subjects and objects are my Mother’s smiling face!

These births, deaths, and changes are my Mother’s lying words!

My undeceiving Mother has deceived me!

My only hope of refuge is Big Brother Relativity!

—Jankya Rolway Dorje, Discovery of Mother Voidness

(translated by Robert A. F. Thurman)

CHAPTER 1

GOING ON BEING

There is a story that has kept popping up in my work over the years that embodies much of what I have learned about how people change. It is a story that has served a number of different functions as I have wrestled with the sometimes competing worldviews of Buddhism and psychotherapy, but it ultimately points the way toward their integration. It is one of the tales of Nasruddin—a Sufi figure who lived around the thirteenth century, who was an amalgam of wise man and fool. I have sometimes identified with Nasruddin and sometimes been puzzled by him. He has the peculiar gift of acting out our basic confusion and at the same time opening us up to our deeper wisdom.

I first heard this story many years ago from one of my meditation teachers, Joseph Goldstein, who used it as an example of how people search for happiness in inherently fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory, pleasant feelings. The story is about how friends came upon Nasruddin, searching outside on the ground one night, crawling around on his hands and knees under a lamppost.

“What are you looking for?” they asked him.

“I’ve lost the key to my house,” he replied.

They all got down to help him look, but after a fruitless time of searching, someone thought to ask him where he had lost the key in the first place.

“In the house,” Nasruddin answered.

“Then why are you looking on the ground?” he is asked.

“Because there is more light here,” Nasruddin replied.

I suppose I must identify with Nasruddin to have quoted this story so often. Searching for my keys is something I can understand. It puts me in touch with a sense of estrangement, of yearning, that I’ve had quite a bit of in my life, a feeling that I used to equate with an old reggae song by Jimmy Cliff called “Sitting in Limbo.”

In my first book I used this parable as a way of talking about people’s attachment to psychotherapy and their fears of spirituality. Therapists are used to looking in certain familiar places for the key to people’s unhappiness, I maintained. They are like Nasruddin looking on the ground, when they might profit more from looking inside their own homes.

In my next book, I returned to this story obliquely when I described locking myself out of my running car while trying to leave a meditation retreat that I had just finished. I knew I had locked my keys in the car (it was idling away right in front of me, for goodness sake!), but I still felt compelled to look on the ground for them just in case I might somehow be miraculously saved. Being locked out of my car, with it running on without me, seemed like an apt metaphor for something akin to the title of my first book, Thoughts without a Thinker. Something like a car without a driver, or, in this case, a driver without his car. Humbled by my own ineptitude, I felt closer to Nasruddin in my second pass through his story. Rather than seeing him simply in his foolish mode, as a stand-in for psychotherapists looking in the wrong place for the key, I felt sympathy for Nasruddin, allied with him searching in vain for what he knew was not there.

But it was not until some time later, when I came upon the same story in someone else’s work, that I could appreciate it in yet another way. In a marvelous book entitled Ambivalent Zen, Lawrence Shainberg told how this same parable captivated his imagination for ten years. He, too, thought that he understood it. The moral, he concluded, is to look where the light is since darkness is the only threat. But he determined one day to ask his Japanese Zen master (a wonderfully engaging character as described by Shainberg) for his interpretation.

After Shainberg described the story to him, his master appeared to give it no thought, but sometime later the roshi brought it up again.

“So, Larry-san, what’s Nasruddin saying?” the Zen master asked.

“I asked you, Roshi.”

“Easy,” he said. “Looking is the key.”¹

There was something eminently satisfying about this answer; besides having the pithiness that we expect from Zen, it made me look at the entire situation in a fresh way. Shainberg’s roshi hit the nail on the head. Nasruddin’s activity was not in vain after all; he was demonstrating something more fundamental than initially was apparent. The key was just a pretext for an activity that had its own rationale.

Freud evolved one way of looking; the Buddha discovered another. They had important similarities and distinctive differences, but they were each motivated by the need to find a more authentic way of being, a truer self.

SOMEBODY VS. NOBODY

I had the sense very early of feeling lost and cut off from myself. This feeling motivated my spiritual and psychological search, but it also had the potential to make me feel terrible about myself. In my discovery of Buddhism, I found a method of cutting through the self-estrangement that so bothered me. I found a new way to look at myself.

In the 1970s, there was a saying in Buddhist circles, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” This was a popular statement because of how clearly it summed up a very obvious phenomenon. Many of the people who were drawn to Buddhism were attracted by the ideas of “no-self” and “emptiness” that are central to the Buddha’s psychology. But these are subtle concepts, difficult to understand correctly; in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, for example, monks often study the scriptures that explain them for years and years before even starting to meditate. In the West, people who were suffering from alienation or from spiritual and psychological distress often mistook the Buddhist descriptions for an affirmation of their psychological emptiness. “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody” was a way of telling them that their psychological work of raising self-esteem or creating an integrated or cohesive self had to precede efforts at seeing through the ego. In many cases, this was indeed sound advice; but the categorization of people into the two categories of “somebody” and “nobody” created another set of misunderstandings.

When the Buddha taught, he asserted both “somebody” and “nobody” were mistakes; that the true vision of who and what we are involves looking without resorting to the instinct of intrinsic reality. “Somebody” was the equivalent of clinging to being, while “nobody” was the same as clinging to nonbeing. In either case, the mind’s need for certainty was shortchanging reality. The correct view, the Buddha perceived, lies somewhere in between. The self-centered attitude is as much of a problem as the self-abnegating one. We can be proud or empty; in either case the problem lies in our sense of self-certainty.

Rather than blaming my upbringing, or other people, or instincts beyond my control, this view offered an approach that taught me to work first and foremost with my own reactions to things. When I thought I was somebody I reacted one way, and when I thought I was nobody I reacted another. In either case I was obscuring my own awareness. Removing these obstacles opened me to myself—not as something or nothing, but as a unique, singular, and relational process. I learned to live more in the moment—not putting up a false front and not focusing only on what was expected of me, but in touch with a more spontaneous, creative, and responsive self. Like Nasruddin, I was indeed searching for something. Learning to be, instead of react, turned out to be the key.

Meditation was the vehicle that opened me up to myself, but psychotherapy, in the right hands, has similar potential. It was actually through my own therapy and my own studies of Western psychoanalytic thought that I began to understand what meditation made possible. As compelling as the language of Buddhism was for me, I needed to figure things out in Western language as well. Psychotherapy came after meditation in my life, but it reinforced what meditation had shown me. Change did not come from trying to get rid of my problems or from going into them more deeply. It came from accepting what was true about myself and working from there. In exposing my chronic ways of reacting, psychotherapy showed me where my blind spots were. It sometimes took the interaction with another person to reveal them to me, but the results were similar to what I had glimpsed from sitting on the cushion: As I learned to question my own identifications, I came to be able to live more fully in the moment, and I felt closer to who I really was.

THE HERE-AND-NOW

My own experiences in psychotherapy were with two Gestalt therapists in rapid succession, one in Boston when I was going to medical school, and one in New York where I moved after my internship. They were friends, the former having been a student of the latter, and my work with one merged into my work with the other. I used to ask my Boston therapist, Michael Vincent Miller, where he had learned his craft. He seemed so adept at using whatever was happening in the moment to show me how anxiety caused me to clamp down on just the quality of self-awareness that the Buddha harnessed in his process of liberation. He used to tell me about his teacher in New York, Isadore From, whom he said had taught him most of what he knew about Gestalt.

Gestalt therapy is an adaptation of psychoanalysis that focuses on the “here-and-now” of the therapy encounter rather than a probing of the past. Many of its ideas have influenced mainstream analytic thought by now, but its great expertise is in working with the nuts and bolts of the personal relationship between therapist and patient. As developed most precisely in the writings of the sociologist-turned-therapist Paul Goodman in the 1950s, Gestalt therapy focuses on the deficits in ego-functioning that keep a person estranged from both herself and other people. While the emphasis on “ego” at first glance appears to be the antithesis of Buddhism, in actuality this approach requires a kind of meditation in action.

In Gestalt therapy the natural or satisfying thing is thought to be “contact”—contact between one person and another, between an individual and her environment, or a person and his inner world. Life unfolds in a series of meetings between an individual and his surroundings, which take place at what Gestalt therapy has called the “contact-boundary” of experience. This meeting is sometimes disturbed and sometimes not. When it is disturbed, it is usually through some kind of chronic inhibition or restriction that the person puts on herself without knowing that she is doing so. The therapist’s job is to slow things down enough so that it becomes obvious how someone is getting in her own way, in order that she may learn to lift the restriction, if she so desires.

When I was in treatment my therapist often stopped me in mid-stream to ask me to repeat what I was saying and tell it to him. I was always offended to be interrupted, and often felt he was not really listening if he could stop me like that, but over time I came to respect what he was after. Talking to him directly made me more anxious but revealed how difficult it was to relate openly. The point of stopping and doing it over again was to discover how I got in my own way, how I shut myself down without being aware. Once I could see what I was doing to myself, I could start to change. I would not have known how I was avoiding him, or even that I was avoiding him, if he had not stopped me to request that I start over; I would have continued to be caught up in my story and restricted by anxiety without knowing that I was so restricted. Whatever I was saying always turned out to be less important than how I was having trouble saying it.

FREEING THE EGO

This is how meditation and therapy began to come together for me. My own therapists were not students of meditation, but this did not stop them from being able to focus on the here-and-now with a precision and discipline that I both admired and envied. They engaged in a way that I was hungry for. Here was a psychotherapy that was not so much a probing of the past as it was a probing of the present. What was getting in the way of my ability to be open, of my ability to communicate, of my presence in the here-and-now? What was stopping me from being myself? Usually, it would turn out to be some notion of how I should be, some image of perfection, some protective sense of embarrassment or shame that caused me to react against the way things actually were. These feelings had led to coping strategies that had taken on a life of their own. It was like assuming a posture that becomes so habitual that it is no longer noticed. I had developed ways of dealing with my anxiety that now ran on without me.

When I would speak to Isadore about something that was bothering me, for example, I would often preface it with a phrase such as, “You know, part of me wishes that I could try that again.”

“You don’t have parts,” he would invariably reply, again skipping over the content of whatever I was talking about to focus on the way in which I was expressing myself.

At first, this sort of comment made no sense to me. I was not even aware of having prefaced my remarks in such a way. “What are you talking about?” I would wonder. “Did I say anything about having parts?” But gradually I began to see how regularly I made use of this kind of language. My tendency to divide myself up into conflicting “parts” was a sign of a distancing maneuver that I was engaged in with my own self. By saying “part of me,” I was subtly pushing away whatever I was feeling, reducing it to a subset or a fraction of myself and endowing it with an absolute identity. In the midst of these subsets I felt unsure and at times unreal. “You are a whole person,” my therapist was trying to tell me, “not a fragment of one.” Being a whole person did not mean having no inconsistencies, but it did mean being able to take responsibility for all of what I was feeling. I could want things that conflicted with each other, but then it was up to me to reach a conclusion about what to do. Splitting myself into parts that were in conflict with each other did not do anything to further my situation, it only tended to paralyze me.

My chronic ways of reacting to new situations came in patterns that had a history dating from childhood. I tended to read situations for signs of rejection and then close myself up to forestall it. I could reach out, but then withdraw very quickly if I thought I would be disappointed. I was an expert at figuring out what was expected of me and giving people what they wanted, but I did not always acknowledge what I wanted. As I began to take possession of myself, exposing those coping mechanisms to the light of awareness, pivotal memories naturally arose that showed where some of that behavior had originated. Anxiety, I discovered, “is a dread of one’s own daring.”² But these insights into my past came from attention to the present; they were inadvertent byproducts of a willingness to examine my own fears of engagement. Their recovery, by themselves, was not what seemed to be healing. They were more like icing on the cake, affirmations of an ability to relate with less fear and reactivity.

I remember once trying to explain the Buddhist view of self to Isadore. In Buddhism, there is s...