Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy
Cushion
and
Couch
 
Winter 2018
park_snow.jpg
Top_of_page
In this issue:
Cushion and Couch  is IMP's quarterly e-journal, featuring articles, interviews, and book reviews written by and for members of the community. If you are interested in  contributing, or just want to give us feedback, please send us an  e-mail .

Inquiring Deeply About Emptiness a

by Marjorie Schuman, PhD

Marjorie Schuman, PhD is a clinical psychologist and certified psychoanalyst with four decades of experience practicing Buddhist insight meditation in the Theravadan tradition. In 1995 she co-founded the Center for Mindfulness and Psychotherapy in Santa Monica, CA. She teaches and does clinical consultation with a focus on deep inquiry and mindfulness-informed psychotherapy.

A member of the faculty at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Marjorie is the author of Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Inquiring Deeply (Routledge Press, 2017). Her monthly publication, Inquiring Deeply Newsletter, is freely offered at http://www.drmarjorieschuman.com/email-sign-up/

There is a not uncommon experience people allude to as "emptiness", meaning a deep sadness, yearning, or inner sense of something missing. It often connects to a felt sense of deep deficiency or unworthiness. This psychological emptiness is quite different in meaning from the Buddhist concept of the same name, which refers to the reality that things do not exist in the way we suppose that they do; that life is empty of anything which is inherently substantial or permanent enough for us to hold onto.

A good way to think about the psychological experience of emptiness is in terms of parts of us which have been lost from awareness. What has been lost from consciousness leaves a vacancy, a place which feels empty. Sometimes emptiness is a hole in our lives which comes from the loss of someone or something. It may arise in relation to something we want very badly but despair of ever finding/having. Psychic holes in the mind may also come about as a result of traumatic experience or something else barred from memory.

We can begin to explore emptiness by inquiring into the holes we find in our own lives. What is missing? In what way(s) do we feel insufficient? What emotions do we not want to feel? What in the balance of mind, body, and heart gets too little of our attention?

We can also explore emptiness by paying attention to what we do to "fill" the holes we feel within: our addictive attachments to substances, activities, and people. Ironically, our improvised "solutions" to pain most often result in new, worse problems! By exploring the strategies, we use to block the feeling of what is painful, we can deepen our awareness of the underlying feelings

When we turn our attention to exploring empty places within, often we may find memories of hurt feelings and conflicts that block our natural ability to connect to others. Our most habitual and powerful feelings and thoughts define the core of who we think we are. When we are caught up in a sense of being unworthy, the universal sense that "something is wrong" turns into the feeling that "something is wrong with me." This felt sense keeps us on the run, driven by desperate efforts to get away from these bad feelings.

In a different vein, the experience of emptiness can sometimes be illuminated by contrasting it with its psychological opposite, aliveness. We can inquire about the experiences in which we have felt most whole and complete, most authentic, most at peace with ourselves and with our world. What has blocked these channels of vitality and aliveness?

In my view, our empty places, our "holes", can ultimately only be filled by connection: both connection with others and better connection to ourselves. Healing relationships (including psychotherapy) help us through deep listening both to what we say and what we don't say (and may never even have thought!). Deep empathic listening connects us heart-to-heart and cultivates our ability to extend compassion and tenderness towards what is wounded within us.

Mindful awareness of the experience of emptiness is a useful place to begin on the path of healing. If we have the inclination and/or interest, we may also find it useful at some point to contemplate the emptiness itself. In a philosophical/spiritual sense, "emptiness" points to the Everything/Nothing from which all manifestation arises. From this perspective, paradoxically, emptiness is a vast reservoir of unrealized potential.

In the words of the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, it is the emptiness within the cup that makes it useful.

Reprinted from Inquiring Deeply Newsletter, November 2018. Newsletter published and freely offered once per month at http://www.drmarjorieschuman.com/email-sign-up/


Befriending the Breathbb

by Timothy Little, MA

Timothy Little is a master's level mental health clinician working with men and women at a long-term day treatment program outside of Boston, Massachusetts. His professional interests include the mental health applications of contemplative practices, and the development of social and emotional skills in adult learners. He is especially focused on psychoeducational approaches that integrate meditation and psychotherapy as a resource for psychological and social well-being.

Imagine a very good friend. She is the kind of friend with whom you easily reconnect: even after you have been long-separated it is as if no time has passed at all. And when the two of you are together, the passage of time seems to disappear completely. This friend is someone who always seems to be there to support you . . . even if you sometimes get busy, or distracted, or occasionally take her presence for granted. You experience her difficulties as if they were your own, and you feel genuine appreciation when things are going well for her. She is the kind of friend who, as you picture her in your mind's eye, brings you a sense of comfort and well-being.

Now imagine your breath as this very same friend, the one whose steady presence in your life is such a blessing. Take a moment to offer your undivided attention to your friend, greeting her with heartfelt affection and kind curiosity: "How do you feel today?" Take the time to listen patiently to her response. Perhaps you are aware of some discomfort or distress, a feeling that things are somehow out-of-sorts. Or perhaps there is a sense of peace and joy: all is well right here, right now. Either way, you continue to offer her your kind attention and wish for conditions that will support her happiness and ease-of-being.

When the breath feels free and relaxed, and things are going smoothly, it can be relatively simple to stay in touch. In these moments, can you invite yourself to just go with the flow of the breath? Can you enjoy being with her natural rhythm without becoming complacent or distracted? And when you do find your attention wandering, can you return your focus to her - gently and kindly, of course - without feeling too guilty? You friend has been there all along, of course, and she understands.

However, when the breath encounters some sort of difficulty, it captures your attention in a different way, does it not? At first you may focus on the discomfort, but before long your mind is carried off by a stream of fears and frustrations and you may find yourself far, far away from the breath herself. But then again, the breath has been your constant companion, and she has never truly been far from your side. As you bear witness to her distress, what kindness can you offer her - and yourself - in this very moment?

Whenever it is that you come back to the breath, what token of gratitude can you offer her? She who has been with you through thick and thin over all these many years, offering you the comfort of her steady presence. Take a moment now, if you will, to acknowledge your appreciation for her. Some small souvenir, perhaps, of your mind's wanderings? A bow? A kind smile? It does not matter much to her, of course. All that she needs is to know that you have her in mind. After all, where would you be without her?

Top of page

Freedom Through Meditation andc Psychotherapy

by Edward Ryan, PhD

Edward Ryan, PhD is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Yale Psychiatry Department, a training and supervising psychologist in the Yale Long-Term Care Clinic, and a clinician in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Ryan has practiced insight meditation for thirty years, and has served on the Board of Directors of the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts. With his wife, the poet Sylvia Forges-Ryan, he published Take A Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace.

Recently, a colleague said to me that as therapists we give people permission to be free, and he expressed amazement that successful, accomplished adults need that permission. I thought about what he said and realized that I don't give people permission to be free. Rather, I try to create and maintain an opportunity and situation for my clients to find and experience freedom. Why, he asked, do accomplished adults need that?

I think it's because as children, with children's minds, we come to conclusions about life based on childhood experiences and responses. We insist that that's the way life is, so that this way of seeing things shapes the way we experience our adolescence and adulthood-even if we become successful and accomplished. Therapy is a way of becoming free of those childhood myths we still live by.

For example, a boy is the firstborn, and is very happy to be in a world comprised only of his mother, father and him. This is the world as he knows it and he likes it. Then one day, he is sitting at the window watching his mother and father drive away-from him. They are driving to the hospital, so his mother can deliver his sister. When they return, everything has changed. Things are not the way they should be. For the boy something is missing. His mother's undivided attention is gone forever. There are not three in his world now but four. Things are not the way he thinks they should be. He now sees the world this way, as an experience in which something is missing, in which things are not as they should be, and he wonders whether he or someone else has done something wrong. This worldview becomes his enduring worldview, so that even when he excels as a teenager and adult, something seems missing. Things are not as they should be, nothing is ever perfect and completely satisfying. As an adult, he often withdraws from friendships because there is something missing with the friend. The friend is not exclusively interested in him and him alone. Life, no matter how well it goes, is never satisfying.

Another therapist may see him as depressed and needing medications, or perhaps as thinking about things incorrectly and in need of cognitive retraining. But through therapy as I understand it, he has an opportunity to discover the roots of this feeling of something missing, of the world not being as it should be. In the process, he will discover his resistance to knowing what those roots are, because we all have this child's mind, which is the mind of a tyrant, insisting that this way of seeing the world is true and will not yield. Even the mature adult and the accomplished professional will not accept that nothing is missing, that things just naturally changed. "No," the child's or tyrant's mind says, "No! That's not what happened. Something is missing, and the world is not what it should be!" Then, there is an opportunity to allow the unconscious to become conscious. It's not that something is missing, and that the world is not as it should be. Rather, it is that the person is still raging about this horrible betrayal by his parents, and raging about the existence of his sister, the interloper. What might appear to another therapist as depression or cognitive incorrectness is actually a rage against reality and a refusal to accept reality. Then the person has choices: First, whether or not to see this long-held rage as part of a natural mourning process, and second, whether to go on raging and as a result limit his current life opportunities, or to accept reality and to complete his mourning of the world he enjoyed before the birth of his sister. It was, and is, a good world-just not the world that once was, and that he has insisted on all his life. This last step often involves a transference to the therapist of the rage that things are not the way they should be in the therapeutic relationship and with the therapist-and if things go well, of realizing that this is the child's mind repeating the same story, the same worldview-that the therapy and the therapist are good, not perfect, not imagined, but real and good.

Once, on a lovingkindness meditation retreat I found myself becoming very cranky. Meeting with my teacher and a small group of retreatants was agonizing. How inane they all seemed as they talked about bliss and kindness and compassion. Rather than going along with what seemed stupid, when I was my turn to say something to the group, I expressed my cynicism and unhappiness. My fellows looked at me like I was a lost soul or at least a cranky old man. Later one of my teachers asked me how I was, and I was completely open and honest about what I was thinking and feeling. He suggested that this was an opportunity, and that I should keep paying attention. That night I had a terrifying dream. When I saw my other teacher the next day and told her, she said that lovingkindness meditation is powerful, and as it develops, we drop deeper into our hearts and discover what is really there. As I came to understand my dream, I came to realize how anger and fear from my own childhood were interfering with opening my heart to myself and others.

Similarly, near the end of my analysis, it occurred to me the therapy was not as good as it could have been. I told that to my therapist and he asked how. I said it was not as good as it would have been if I had seen Freud. "But Ed," he said, "Freud is dead." I realized then that I was trying to hold out, trying to resist accepting how good the therapy was, and trying to avoid the feeling of deep satisfaction for all we had done together, all we had been to each other, along with the deep sadness that it was now ending.

Top of page
We are All Just, Only Trees: The Second d
Noble Truth on a Winter's Day

by Lauri Klein, LICSW

Lauri Klein has been teaching MBSR for 15 years. She frequently facilitates Mindfulness Based Interventions for researchers and is currently offering MBCT groups in the Outpatient Psychiatry Department at Cambridge Health Alliance. She has had a private practice in Hingham, MA. for 30 years.

I was on a seven-day silent retreat at IMS in the wintertime a few years ago. There was a lot on my mind, as minds go. I was worrying about my relationships, finances and the usual everyday difficulties, but mainly, what was troubling me was my sense of worth as a person. I was focused on how a friend had let me down and I kept revisiting the loop of the story over and over again in my mind.

During the lunch break, I bundled up and set off along one of the many trails at the meditation center. Tromping through the snow, I was still thinking, thinking, thinking, and frustrated that this mind of mine wouldn't stop. Each time I noticed this, I tried returning to my breath or my body, but the unrelenting inner voice would not let go until, in one moment, I came to a clearing where there was a frozen pond. The bright sun was creating little diamonds on the surface of the snow.

The wind was blowing gently. I stood and watched the breeze rustling the leaves, and noticed some of the trees and branches yielding and swaying back and forth. The sky was that gorgeous blue that cannot be captured, the color we think of when we say, "sky blue." There were perfect fluffy, clouds floating in the blue.

I asked myself, "Does that tree feel angry with the wind for blowing?" "Is the sun going to melt the ice on the pond, and if so, will the pond hold a grudge?" Immersed in the wonder of nature, it occurred to me that trees, ponds and the sky don't think at all. They simply exist as they are, abiding by each other. They are not striving to be better or different.

The trees lose their leaves, and in the spring, grow them again. The pond freezes over and melts again in the spring. The sky changes from moment to moment, day in and day out, cloudy, clear, full of fluffy clouds or stratified clouds or no clouds at all. When there is interaction between the wind and the water, when the leaves fall onto the ground or onto the surface of the pond, there is no complaining.

That's when I realized that I am only, just a tree. I am a living, breathing feature of nature. I am born, and I grow and change just the same as a tree or a flower. The difference between me and a tree or a pond is that I have a mind and a brain, and I have the ability to think. This is a root of suffering. This is where it all started.

It wasn't Adam sharing the apple with Eve. It was the expectations he had and her reaction that started the problems in paradise. The apple probably tasted fine, but who knows what they might have been thinking: "Does he like me?" "Is she trying to poison me?" "Why would anyone give me an apple?" "Does he know that I like him?"

We worry and fret and feel anxious over the stories we tell ourselves. Our comparing minds go into overdrive. Our primitive brains still see dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers when less dangerous things are afoot. I need more, I need more money, I need to be successful, I need to do better. And then we judge ourselves for having these thoughts. Why can't I be satisfied with just being me?

The simple fact is that we are enough just as we are.

One of the most appreciated practices in MBCT and MBSR is the Mountain Meditation. Participants imagine a beautiful mountain and all the characteristics it embodies: stillness, solidity, majesty and steadiness. They are instructed to bring that image into their bodies and to "borrow" these qualities. So, in the midst of stormy weather and the changing seasons, the mountain just sits. Like the mountain, the trees that the wind blows through, and the pond that freezes over, we can learn to sit with the changing "weather" of our lives. We can allow the ruminations to ripple through the mind and in the midst of it, we can shift our focus to the larger world inside and outside of our bodies. We can bring friendly curiosity to how we are in each moment and accept ourselves exactly as we are.

This, from Thich Nhat Hanh:

"To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life."

Top of page
About the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy

The Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy (IMP)  is a non-profit organization dedicated to the education and training of mental health professionals in the integration of mindfulness meditation and psychotherapy. 

The vision of IMP is practice-based, and all teaching faculty have extensive personal and professional experience in the practice of mindfulness meditation or other mindfulness practices. Most educational programs offer CE credit for psychologists, social workers, licensed mental health counselors, licensed marital and family therapists, and nurses. Secondary activities of IMP include psychological consultation to meditation centers, clinical supervision, psychotherapy referrals, and networking for interested clinicians.