By Philip Chanin, Ed.D., ABPP, CGP

Board Certified Clinical Psychologist

Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

www.drphilchanin.com

philchanin@gmail.com

“I feel that therapy helps if there is a sprinkling of philosophy and spirituality added to it.  At the baseline, there needs to be calm which can weather the inevitable storms in the relationship.” (Nikhil Gupta, M.D., email communication, 5/21/2024)

“The psychological task in life is to build a self.  The spiritual task in life is to let go of self.  And these two tasks go on throughout our lives.” (Jack Kornfield, Ph.D.)

“Every spiritual life entails a succession of difficulties because every ordinary life also involves a succession of difficulties, what the Buddha described as the inevitable sufferings of existence.  In a spiritually informed life, however, these inevitable difficulties can be the source of our awakening, of deepening wisdom, patience, balance, and compassion.  Without this (spiritual) perspective, we simply bear our sufferings like an ox or a foot soldier under a heavy load.” (Jack Kornfield, Ph.D.  A Path With Heart:  A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, p. 71)

“Any occasion when a mature part of oneself cuts into an habitual, dysfunctional reaction is an instance of recovery.  It is an example of what (my wife) Belinda calls relational heroism, those moments when every muscle and nerve in your body is pulling you toward your old set of responses, and yet a new force lifts you up off the accustomed track toward deliberate, constructive action—toward repair.  Just an intimacy’s degenerative course is comprised of thousands of small moments of disconnection, relational recovery is comprised of such moments of grace.  They are the atoms of regeneration.”  (Terrence Real.  How Can I Get Through To You?:  Reconnecting Men and Women, pp. 243-244.)

“Therapies break the hold of past conditioning on present behavior.  Meditation tries to alter the process of conditioning per se.  As a result, the meditator realizes his or her role as writer-director of these inner dramas and discovers the element of choice in the cutting and editing of perceptions of reality.  This responsibility for choices becomes clear…The meditator is able to identify and abort the circular, conditioned mind habits that before had tended to linger and reverberate as ruminations and purposeless obsessions.  (“Meditation and Psychotherapy:  A Rationale for the Integration of Dynamic Psychotherapy, the Relaxation Response, and Mindfulness Meditation,” by Illan Kutz, M.D., Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., and Herbert Benson, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry, 142:1, January, 1985, pp. 5-6.)

Throughout my career as a Buddhist psychotherapist, I have been interested in how spirituality can inform good psychotherapy.  Most patients who enter psychotherapy have very busy minds.  Many are seeking relief from what they describe as “intrusive thoughts.”  Meditation is a wonderful spiritual practice.  Most Buddhist meditation utilizes the breath as the object of attention.  Inevitably thoughts enter one’s mind and one forgets all about the breath.  One doesn’t then judge oneself for being “a bad meditator.”  The mind simply drifted off—it’s what our minds do.  At this point the meditation instruction is to non-judgmentally bring one’s mind back to the breath.  It’s been said, “A thousand times the mind drifts off.  A thousand times one non-judgmentally brings one’s mind back to the breath.”

For several decades, there has been a growing awareness within the Western psychotherapeutic community of the substantial benefits of Eastern meditation practice.  For many patients, the mind is continually busy:  thinking and planning and worrying; calculating and talking; analyzing and criticizing and dreading; and imagining and preparing for the worst.  Concern with past and future take up an inordinate amount of time and energy.  Pain and other emotions are often focused on past events while fear, anxiety, and worry target the (imagined) future.  The present moment is often lost in all of this activity.  The value of mindfulness meditation is thus to bring one directly into the present.  The discipline of returning again and again to the present moment from the distractions of future and past is of immense help for the “busy mind.”

As the 2^nd quote at the beginning of this article states, “The spiritual task in life is to let go of self.”  Thus, in simplest terms, spiritual practice is essentially “letting go.”  The Buddha taught that much of our suffering is due to “attachment” and “aversion.”  Attachment is about the many things we hold onto, and aversion is about those things we try to push away.  We have a strong tendency to believe our thoughts and to hold onto our beliefs.  As Sengstan, the 3^rd Zen patriarch, has stated, “Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”  For most of us, this is a tall order!  Notice he doesn’t say to not have opinions, but to endeavor to not “cherish” them.  When we cherish them, we try to convince others that our opinions are the correct ones.  This is a good example of the “attachment” that brings us, and those around us, so much suffering.

As a couple’s therapist, I work with many couples whose conflicts often stem from each partner insisting that he or she is “right.”  This is a great example of “attachment.”  In his book, The New Rules of Marriage, Terrence Real describes “needing to be right” as the foremost “losing strategy” in marriage.  Describing the conflict between a husband and wife, Real writes, “They each feel the need to be right, marshalling their evidence and arguing their case, two lawyers before the court…Like many couples, they try to resolve their differences by eradicating them.  Faced with contrasting views…the way to end the argument, they think, is to determine which version is the more accurate.  They are in an objectivity battle…Instead of being a battle for the relationship, it is a constant war about who is right and who is wrong.”  (pp. 38-39)

In what may sound like a radical proposition, Real goes on to write, “Objective reality has no place in close personal relationships…From a relationship-savvy point of view, the only sensible answer to the question ‘Who’s right and who’s wrong is ‘Who cares?’…you can be right or you can be married.  What’s more important to you?”  John Gottman, in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, takes the same stand.  Gottman writes, “Another important lesson I have learned is that in all arguments, both solvable and perpetual, no one is ever right.  There is no absolute reality in marital conflict, only two subjective realities.” (p. 150)

One of the most effective strategies for “letting go” and not reacting defensively or offensively in our relationships is to develop and practice what Terrence Real calls “an internal boundary.” The internal boundary is an invisible psychic shield, similar to Hermione’s “invisibility cloak” in the Harry Potter books.  Real states, “Over the years, I have found that this one skill of defining boundaries, all on its own…can radically transform a relationship.”

This invisible shield that I psychically construct protects me from anything that my partner says or does that might invoke my anger or defensive reactions.  With an internal boundary in place, Real proposes, “the nastiest comment, the most raw feeling—an emotional atom bomb could go off and you would remain unfazed.  Inside your circle you can afford to be open, spacious, curious, relaxed.”

Real states, “The lack of an internal boundary inevitable leads to control or withdrawal.  If there is no membrane between you and whatever external stimulus gets thrown at you, then you attempt to regulate your own level of comfort or discomfort by managing the stimulus. (‘I could be happy, if only you were less angry.’). When control fails, the only other option is withdrawal.”  (pp. 239-241)

Most of us enter psychotherapy in part to deal with an inner sense of “something’s wrong with me.”  And what keeps this inner feeling of shame in place is our own inner voice of judgment and criticism—our “inner critic.”  Mindfulness meditation provides a method for dislodging and uprooting the inner critic.  Through regular meditation practice, as we non-judgmentally bring our wandering mind back to the breath, over and over, the mind develops a kind of non-judging muscle.  “We discover a remarkable truth:  much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.”  (Jack Kornfield in A Path with Heart, p. 47)

Thomas Merton was a Trappest monk who lived is silence for almost 30 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  Merton is known for having built a bridge between mystical Catholicism and Buddhism, in his writings and in his dialogues with such Buddhists as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn.  One of my favorites of Merton’s many books is titled The Wisdom of the Desert.  It is about the words of the Desert Fathers, who were monks who lived in caves in Palestine in the 4^th century.

In his introduction to their words, Merton gives a wonderful view of what “non-attachment” in marriage looks like.  He writes, “Love takes one’s neighbor as one’s other self, and loves him with all the immense humility and discretion and reserve and reverence without which no one can presume to enter into the sanctuary of another’s subjectivity.  From such love, all authoritarian brutality, all exploitation, domineering and condescension must necessarily be absent…The charity of the Desert Fathers is not set before us in unconvincing effusions.  The full difficulty and magnitude of the task of loving others is recognized everywhere and never minimized.”

“It is hard to really love others if love is to be taken in the full sense of the word.  Love demands a complete inner transformation—for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with the other.  We have to become, in some sense, the person we love.  And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self.  No matter how hard we try, we resist this death:  we fight back with anger, with recriminations, with demands, with ultimatums.  We seek any convenient excuse to break off and give up the difficult task.”  (pp. 18-19)