Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy

Robert Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317771944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

In the midst of our busy activity, people often feel fragmented. We experience conflicting demands from our work, our personal relationships, our families, and our spiritual practice. In this book, the author, a practicing psychotherapist, explores the challenges and joys of making our life into a coherent whole. Psychotherapy addresses a sense of fragmentation in an effort to help us be uniquely ourselves. Zen Buddhist practice insists we find ourselves on every moment of our lives; it speaks to the basic connectedness of all things. This book attempts to integrate the two. Each chapter examines some aspect of sewing together the practice of Zen with the realization of psychotherapy, and its implications for daily life. Though there is a logical progression to the chapters, each chapter can be read on its own if the reader is interested in how a particular text might inform their psychotherapy or life circumstances. Through the stories of his clients' and his own difficulties and discoveries, the author invites each reader to actualize the fundamental point: to realize the joy and compassion that comes when we touch the basic ground of life, and put it into play in our everyday activity.

Chapter 1
Full Engagement: Dogen’s Rules for Zazen

Credo

Poets mapping pathways of the heart
Confess the lines by which they draw their charts
Catch the cartographers.
The fact is, the most apt articulation
Can never capture quite in art
The wonder of a plain, mundane sensation.

Sisters hoping to communicate
breathe in breathe out a poem we must translate
Linked by relationship.
We need a form, a raft, a joyful beacon
Compassion’s singing incarnate
Love’s language finding paths to meet and seek in.

In silence surprise speech; in speech find silence.
Accept the open gates of subtle guidance
Kind winds’ largesse: to navigate non-violence.

Dogen’s Rules for Zazen ¹

1

Practicing Zen is zazen. For zazen a quiet place is suitable. Lay out a thick mat. Do not let in drafts or smoke, rain or dew. Protect and maintain the place where you settle your body. There are examples from the past of sitting on a diamond seat and sitting on a flat stone covered with a thick layer of grass.

Day or night the place of sitting should not be dark; it should be kept warm in winter and cool in summer.

2

Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection.

Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire. On Mt. Huangmei the Fifth Ancestor practiced zazen to the exclusion of all other activities.

3

When sitting zazen, wear the kashaya and use a round cushion. The cushion should not be placed all the way under the legs, but only under the buttocks. In this way the crossed legs rest on the mat and the backbone is supported with the round cushion. This is the method used by all buddha ancestors for zazen.

Sit either in the half-lotus position or in the full-lotus position. For the full-lotus put the right foot on the left thigh and the left foot on the right thigh. The toes should lie along the thighs, not extending beyond. For the half-lotus position, simply put the left foot on the right thigh.

4

Loosen your robes and arrange them in an orderly way. Place the right hand on the left foot and the left hand on the right hand, lightly touching the ends of the thumbs together. With the hands in this position, place them next to the body so that the joined thumb-tips are at the navel.

Straighten your body and sit erect. Do not lean to the left or right; do not bend forward or backward. Your ears should be in line with your shoulders, and your nose in line with your navel.

Rest your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and breathe through your nose. Lips and teeth should be closed. Eyes should be open, neither too wide, nor too narrow. Having adjusted body and mind in this manner, take a breath and exhale fully.

Sit solidly in samadhi and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the art of zazen.

Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undefiled practice-enlightenment.

Introduction

Zazen is sitting quietly doing nothing. Sitting on a cushion, spine straight, legs crossed, eyes half-open, facing a wall: What could this possibly teach us about doing psychotherapy?

The short answer is that zazen teaches nothing at all beyond being itself. Sitting quietly, doing nothing is just sitting: There’s nothing more. It’s just sitting being itself, me being myself. There is no use to it at all: One Zen master said that when he died, he wanted people to say: “He wasted his whole life in zazen.”²

A forty-three-year-old man came to me in a deep depression. After many years of struggling with pain from back injuries, the discomfort had finally become unendurable. His physician had told him that he would no longer be able to perform his usual work, placed him on total disability, and referred him for vocational rehabilitation. He had previously taken pride in his ability to work hard at physical labor. Now, his back problems were severe enough his physician had told him he shouldn’t do any housework or even pick up his eleven-month-old son. While he was waiting for his rehabilitation program to begin, he was staying around the house doing nothing.

He couldn’t stand doing nothing. He ruminated about financial problems, despite the fact that his wife was successfully supporting the family. He became insecure in his relationship, worrying (despite his spouse’s supportive reassurances) that his wife would leave him because he wasn’t contributing enough to the family. Feeling guilty about doing nothing, he wouldn’t leave the house to do things he used to enjoy and which he still could do, such as take a walk or go fishing.

He acknowledged that other people with disabilities still had a right to live and be happy even if they couldn’t be conventionally productive or useful; however, he couldn’t apply this to himself. The therapy focused on his beliefs about what he “ought” to be able to do to justify his existence and give meaning to his life.

“Doc,” he frequently said, “being like this doesn’t fit my image of what it means to be a man. It’s not me. I just don’t feel like myself. How can I be myself if I can’t lift anything?”

How can I be myself when I can’t do the things that maintain my image of myself? How can 1 be truly myself? This is the root problem behind all our individual lives, the thrust that brings clients and therapists to the practice of psychotherapy and students to the Zendo. The issue is reflected in every client’s questioning; it comes up in condensed form in the following Zen anecdote:³

A monk named Hui Chao asked Fa Yen, “Hui Chao asks the Teacher, what is Buddha?”

Fa Yen said, “You are Hui Chao.”

The Zen student strives to realize Buddhahood; the psychotherapy client tries to realize psychological health. Fa Yen reminds us that the answer to our quest is not something outside ourselves, but a matter of realizing who we are, of understanding our own true being.

How can I be truly myself? Is there something special I have to do? That can’t be right: I must admit I am myself all the time, no matter what I’m doing. We get into difficulties, in part, because we mistake our ideas about who we think we ought to be with what we are actually experiencing. Often under the pressure of life events, what I’m going through will not match the image of who I want to be or who I think I am. If I try to hold on to my image of what I “really ought” to be, I may be in for a struggle.

On the other hand, if I make no special effort to improve or actualize myself, that doesn’t feel right either. Then I’m just passively waiting while my time on earth elapses in a slothful slow dying. Surely I must express myself in my activity. But I cannot solve the problem of being myself just through thinking about who I am. I cannot “be myself” without engaging in activity, without being myself. Thinking about being myself is not the same (although it is a part of) being myself; thinking about doing something is not the same as doing it. Thought is not the same as experience. I cannot be a therapist without doing psychotherapy, no matter how many books I may read on the subject. Therapists cannot fully understand clients by thinking about them; no matter how much of their history we may read from chart notes, our theories about our clients will be different from the clients themselves. We must personally engage with our clients in an active relationship if we wish to teach and be taught.

We cannot understand ourselves without understanding others. There is no way we can understand anything fully—not even a stone, let alone a person—by observing it “from the outside.” But how can I get “inside” another person? For that matter, how can I get “inside” myself without twisting myself into knots?

Zazen is undivided activity in which there is neither “outside” nor “inside.” Zazen is manifesting my true self intertwined with all being. Just as we cannot understand clients without interacting with them, trying to understand zazen by reading a book is fruitless unless we actually do zazen. It’s possible to become intrigued or curious, but it is not possible to understand sitting zazen without sitting zazen.

To do zazen, we only need to lay aside all our preconceived notions, all our thoughts/feelings/sensations/desires, open up to each moment as we breathe in, and let go of each moment as we breathe out. Then sitting quietly, doing nothing, far beyond teaching and learning, thinking, or not-thinking, we find ourselves face-to-face with our most intimate selves. We discover all the thoughts, judgments, and feelings that rise up from all our old habits. We discover how our personality tries to assert itself in the barest circumstances; we learn how we are always separating ourselves from ourselves and the world around us. We discover that ultimately there is no thing that makes me more or less special than you or any other thing in the entire universe, no thing that stands between our selves and our fundamental true nature.

Learning how we separate ourselves from ourselves, we learn to be more perceptive of how our clients separate themselves from themselves. Learning how we separate ourselves from others, we learn compassion for how our clients erect walls between themselves and the people and circumstances of their lives. Practicing zazen we practice just being alive and just dying; these are the basic activities of being human, the rest is superstructure. Discovering that ultimately there is nothing between our selves and our experience, we discover the blossom that unfolds when client and therapist touch each other in the immediacy of each moment.

Why Meditate?

Most mornings I get up early out of bed, shake off my sleep, and then go wake up by sitting down and meditating for an hour. A friend of mine, a psychotherapist in the clinic where I work who is even more “type A” than I am, can’t understand spending an hour a day sitting quietly doing nothing. He asks me, “Why do you do this?”

My friend will not understand, I think, if I explain that it is just my foolishness at work. He thinks I should get something out of doing this: There must at least be some physical health benefit or psychological insight to come out of it. But zazen doesn’t work quite this way.

I still cling to the idea, a bit, that I will get something out of doing zazen—if nothing else, I have hoped I will get freedom from the idea that I will get something out of it. Over the years, I have learned how attached I am to getting something out of what I do: Being aware of my hopes for personal gain eases their pressure a bit and makes me less a prisoner of my desires.

Still, the issue of what motivates my sitting zazen remains. Recently I read a helpful book by David Brazier,⁴ in which he suggests that Buddhism is about “a willingness to lay down one’s life for the Truth all the time.” I read this and was very impressed. This seemed like a good motivation I could appropriate to myself: I could tell my friend that I sit down on my cushion every morning to seek for Truth!

I think this is tempting but dangerous. Brazier says, “Everyone is willing to lay down their life for something. When we find out what we are willing to lay down our life for, then we know what our religion is.” So I asked myself, “What is my religion and my Truth? For what am I willing to lay down my life?” I came up with various images: Like many people, I immediately thought of laying down my life while rescuing my children from a burning building.

I think I’d do that. Maybe I’d have some selfish hesitation for a moment, maybe I wouldn’t. But just because I would rescue my children from a burning building, does this make them my truth and my religion? There is something disturbing about the idea of making any one object—even the love I bear for my children—the repository of the meaning of my life. To do so can burden them and entrap me. If I am doing zazen and searching for some particular truth, I may be ensnared by a circumscribed vision of enlightenment. If I am doing psychotherapy with a client with some preconceived idea of what a truly ideal outcome should look like, both the client and I may get ensnared by a limited vision of what “psychological health” should be, however much that image may not fit that client.

If I fashion truth into some particular image and place it in some graspable thing, there is a danger that I will turn it into an idol to be worshipped. The problem with worshipping idols—whether they be a god, a person, or a political idea—is that we tend to get attached to them and make them into our personal possessions. If someone threatens them we can become fearful and angry. If I am attached to a particular Truth I may be willing to lay down my life for it, but this impulse to sacrifice all to some religious Truth rather easily seems to turn into a willingness to wage a holy war to force others to lay their lives down for the Truth.

So I get nervous when I see Truth with a capital “T.” I get nervous when anyone says they know what Truth is: This seems to lead to the Crusades. I get nervous when someone tells me they know what kind of therapy works for what kind of diagnosis. I feel more comfortable not having a preformed therapy that is the answer for every patient who comes in with a diagnosable complaint, and I prefer being unsure but curious about what therapy will emerge from the mysterious process of meeting a particular client at a particular time. I feel more comfortable not knowing what Truth is. I feel more comfortable not knowing why I sit down and meditate every day.

When I first began meditating I thought I would meditate and learn the Truth, and that knowing the Truth I would become powerful and wise. Gradually, meditating taught me how much I did not know. I was willing to accept that humbling experience as the ticket of admission to learn the Real Truth. Then, gradually, meditating taught me not just how much I did not know, but how much I could not and never would know. This was painful but curiously liberating, this not-knowing. For a while I thought if I could just become innocent enough, pure enough, silent and still and not-knowing enough, Truth would reveal itself to me.

Sometimes gradually, sometimes with occasional flashes of insight, it became clear that I had been making a fundamental mistake: I had been thinking Truth was somehow separate from me, separate from my search for it. I thought perhaps it existed outside of me, somewhere in the universe, or perhaps it was hidden deep inside of me: Either way, I had thought Truth was an unchanging thing which I could reach out and grasp. Meditating, it becomes clearer and clearer that Truth is not graspable; Truth is, like meditation, always changing even as it stays the same; Truth is not something to be reached, but something to practice.

It’s important to devote oneself not to Truth but to practicing being truthful. So I think I sit down on my cushion to meditate every day for practice in entering the burning building, no matter what it may hold. Feeling the flames that threaten to engulf me, I get some practice for how to stay calm and not be afraid to enter the bonfires of suffering that clients bring to my office.

I sit down on the cushion for the practice it affords in laying my life down. When I lay my life down to just sit, I learn something about how to acknowledge all my selfish desires and something about how to set them aside; I learn something about how to bring myself to practice some activity that carries me along so that I forget about myself. Sitting on the cushion, carried by the currents of truth into just sitting, I learn something about how to let go of my favorite ideas when I meet a client in the burning building of psychotherapy.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Meal Chant
• “Credo”
• Dogen’s Rules for Zazen
• CHAPTER 1 Full Engagement: Dogen’s Rules for Zazen
• “Awakening the Thought of Enlightenment”
• Dogen’s Guidelines for Practicing the Way
• CHAPTER 2 Building the Sanctuary: Dogen’s Guidelines for Practicing the Way
• “Evolution”
• The Metta Sutta
• CHAPTER 3 Happiness, Suffering, and Psychotherapy: The Metta Sutta
• “Tides”
• The Sandokai of Sekito Kisen Daiosho
• CHAPTER 4 Intimate Relationship: The Sandokai of Sekito Kisen Daiosho
• “Dust”
• Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom Heart Sutra
• CHAPTER 5 Empty Self, Connected Self: Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom Heart Sutra
• “Freedom”
• The “Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi” by Tozan Ryokai
• CHAPTER 6 Host and Guest: The “Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi” by Tozan Ryokai
• ‘For Fran Tribe’
• CHAPTER 7 Actualizing the Fundamental Point
• Notes