Fix Me, Please

Right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness. - Howard Cutler in the Zen Calendar (February 23, 2006).

Day 176. I had lunch today with a friend who works as a nurse at an acute care facility. She told me she was "sore" after performing chest compressions on a dying patient for 45 minutes yesterday. Her comment gave me some perspective on the work I do each day. I was oddly, briefly jealous of the concrete physicality of her work. It is, literally, urgent and immediate and often a matter of life and death. Measurable and definitive to some degree, as gauged by heart monitors and pulse rates and brain waves. My work can be so abstract. I, too, feel sore sometimes after work, though it is difficult to garner empathy for performing compressions on a person's psyche.

Take today, for instance. It was a long one. Most of the time, my work is inspirational and deeply rewarding. Occasionally, however, it is depleting and demoralizing. Sometimes clients don't get better, but they don't necessarily get the release of my friend's patients when chest compressions don't work. There are impasses along some therapeutic journeys where we just hang out and hurt. Solutions elude us. So there we are: stuck and suffering. This is not a favorite point in therapy for most of my clients.

All afternoon I fought the urge to pour Zen Buddhism over my clients like salve. "Just this!" I wanted to shout. "Surrender, let go your hold, embrace nothingness, become empty, release your attachment, simplify, learn your mind, get your butt on your cushion!" While battling a forceful desire to impart these bits of "wisdom," I abstained from actually roaring the words. Indeed, I was avoiding an obvious ethical violation, and I also recognized that these platitudes, in the absence of actual cushion time, mean very little when spoken aloud.

I am in the infancy stage of ethically, effectively transferring my sitting practice to my psychology practice, though there are several books written on the application of Buddhist principles to western psychology (one of my favorites is "The Couch and The Tree"). It fascinates me to observe Americans' bizarre expectation that it is possible to avoid pain and suffering. Sidhartha couldn't pull it off, and he was an entitled prince. So many people actually believe that, if they search hard enough, there is a pill, a method, a strategy, a technique that will stave off emotional suffering. Sometimes there is, and when applicable, I try to offer it to my clients. They are usually eager and impatient to employ the "solution" and quickly restore happiness.

It is challenging to convince clients that sometimes sitting with our pain is the best way to alleviate it. Watching, attending to, learning from, accepting and honoring our emotional suffering may be the only option in some situations (I am thinking of a certain collegiate football player with an inoperable hand injury). It startles me to watch how dependent on external answers we have become in the last couple of decades. This reliance on outside sources makes us prematurely surrender personal authority to an "expert," and deprives us of opportunities to cultivate resiliency within. I watch for this tendency to relinquish internal strength in my clients. It is a titillating invitation to my ego to supply authoritative proclamations of psychological sagacity. I exercise restraint, and try to cultivate my client's autonomy by inviting an exploration of their intuitive solutions and conclusions. They usually come up with some pretty good stuff.

I know there are more subtle ways to integrate zazen with my clinical work than bellowing Zen Calendar quotes at my clients. Though I probably will mention that the basic equipment we need to achieve happiness can't be purchased on e-Bay.

Gassho,
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