Can the Resources of Zen Meditation Support Us Recover?

“It feels like much too considerably, it is never ever-ending and it is all at at the time. You know the film that just gained very best image? What is it referred to as yet again?” Almost everything, Everywhere you go and All at At the time? It was not my favored, but it describes my everyday living,” Margaret, my aged individual shook her head.

“My spouse has been suffering with heart issues for yrs, and now he has cancer as very well. I’ve experienced this knee surgical procedures, my broken ankle isn’t therapeutic, and now this horrible drop and concussion for months. My head is spinning and I’m constantly dizzy. I’m not allowed to go through or use a display screen. And no clinical cure appears to assist.”

I listened quietly as Margaret continued.

“I feel like we are just finding in excess of the impact of Covid. And these senseless shootings all in excess of the region. It is not just me, it feels like the full environment is sick,” she explained as she started to cry.

I puzzled how to respond. Two things arrived to brain. Just one was an essay in the New York Times on persistent agony in America by Nicholas Kristof. There is one particular line that keeps resonating in my mind, “Is this physical suffering a canary in the coal mine warning us of a more substantial dysfunction in our culture?” The link amongst private very well-remaining and the technique is not new. In truth, it is ancient. The Indian sage Vimalakirti once stated, “I’m ill and the complete earth is ill.”

“So, what do I do now?” Margaret demanded, offended and agitated at her situations.

I have been a practising medical psychologist for in excess of 35 yrs, but at this minute I did not know what I could say that would be useful. Margaret, who experienced been a hard, acquire-no-prisoners litigator for a long time would not have tolerated everything that was cliched. I did not want her to lash out.

I’d been studying psychiatrist Mark Epstein’s insightful guide The Zen of Therapy. I was intrigued by his dialogue of the work of psychotherapist and Zen trainer John Tarrant. In point, I was so intrigued I started out attending classes at the Pacific Zen Institute (PZI) and studying Zen Buddhism. There was one very inspiring class, taught by 1 of Tarrant’s colleagues, Jon Joseph Roshi, that helped me assume exterior of the regular psychotherapy box. The academics at PZI use koans as a way of receiving a contemporary point of view on our challenges. (A koan is a riddle for which there is no rational solution. They date from the origins of Zen Buddhism centuries ago). Epstein writes that “therapy alone is a koan. It modifications minds by bringing forth unfamiliar attributes that are even so intrinsic to our natures,” (p. 213).

In this class, one particular of my classmates, who has been dealing with debilitating vertigo, described how a specific koan resonated with his problem. Margaret had been a meditator for many years and I wondered if she might be open up to striving a little something distinct. We had been doing the job collectively for a long time it was a trusting and stable marriage. It appeared like a chance really worth taking. I informed Margaret about the class and my colleagues’s struggles (protecting confidentiality of system). Margaret is intellectually curious, a voracious reader, and was open to one thing new. I tailored this classic koan for her, which is attributed to Yinyuan Longqi.

“Don’t light a lamp—there’s no oil in the house…

Just feel your way together the wall.”

When Margaret is perfectly, she attends two ebook groups and a movie club. She was a pure at koan interpretation.

“Yes, no point in lights a lamp. It would be from doctor’s orders,” she quipped. “It would just give me a migraine headache. And we are surely out of oil! That is a superior metaphor. We have no assets now, soon after all our assorted health and fitness complications. And, I have to continue to be in the darkness. No screens, no Television set. I’ve been combating relentlessly from this. It’s bringing up all this anger, and nightmares about my mother and siblings. Probably I could cease battling so really hard,” she paused and smiled.

“I like the fact that there is somebody else dealing with this. I really feel a lot less alone. I can attempt to go action by phase, hand by hand, sensation my way. I truly feel like I have been doing work with a poem and it just presented me an perception.”

The following early morning, in my email box, there was a quote from author Ursula LeGuin that appeared as a estimate of the day: “We’re each of us by yourself. What can you do but keep out your hand in the dim?” I could not aid but smile.

Isn’t this the system of treatment? That we accompany every single other via darkish and difficult moments?

In actuality, it reminds me of just one of my favourite insights from Mark Epstein, that treatment can be a “two-person meditation.”