I've found that liberation simultaneously unfolds in practice on two interconnected tracks, represented in this blog by psychotherapy and Zen. Although they contain elements of each other and address similar concerns, psychotherapy and Zen are distinctive paths that challenge and, by virtue of their differences, enrich one another. Zen practice helps us to cut through the subject-object and self-other dichotomies that are such entrenched characteristics of our experience and to open to, realize, and put ourselves in accord with our essential nature. Psychotherapy promotes emotional growth, integration, resilience, and psychological freedom.
Each of these paths - each set of principles and practices - is a full partner in the evolution of a broader, more inclusive narrative. "Similarities with a difference" characterizes their relationship: same and different and interpenetrating. They potentiate one another and, taken together, they help us think in a truly integral way about our human potential. Zen and psychotherapy each bring to this dialogue its own vision, dream, purpose, gifts, flavors, implicit values, privileged elements, and blind spots.
The fruits of their interplay enrich each without compromising their distinctiveness. Through their intimate conversation, each changes gradually and is enriched without compromising its integrity. Their interplay evolves, deepens, expands, and refines, benefitting each practice as it benefits the people who walk each path. It makes each better at its own project: variations on the theme of healing and transforming human suffering and liberating the deepest human potentials.
How? By creating a more experience-near, deeper, comprehensive, and representative framework that helps people become freer, wiser, more peaceful, more alive, and more compassionate. While new blueprints are a dime a dozen and guarantee nothing - one must still walk the land and build the house - the integrative vision that I will trace may open up the realm of the possible in new ways.
Let's begin to look at the integration of the universal and personal dimensions and why they each need the other. I want to walk the talk: So in this blog I will weave stories from my own personal, professional, and spiritual development as I trace the major themes. I learn best when information is personally and affectively embedded, and the same holds true for many bloggers. In sharing my own experience, I also want to help dispel two notions: that a Zen master has transcended, once and for all, and that enlightenment, as pivotal an experience as it is, provides a lifetime exemption from human suffering and growth. The experience of kensho (satori, enlightenment, awakening) conveys by direct experience that all beings by nature are awakened from the beginning and the other is none other than oneself. It brings in its wake a deep sense of compassion for all beings. In Zen, it is a beginning, a glimpse, described as standing in a glassed-in room with windows so steamed we cannot see out and wiping clear a little spot from one part of one window. Zen is a lifetime path of deepening, tempering, refining, and personalizing. Likewise, the therapeutic process is not just about isolated insights, but growing the capacities for full, rich, integrated living. It's impacts are more extensive and longer lasting than the duration of our visits to the consulting room.
I look forward to hearing from YOU and to a vibrant and vigorous dialogue, as "partners in liberation."
