What Unites Buddhism and Psychotherapy? One Therapist Has the Answer.
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By Oliver BurkemanJan. 11, 2022
THE ZEN OF THERAPY
Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life
By Mark Epstein
Despite often being lumped together these days in what gratingly gets called the “wellness sector,” psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation might be seen as almost opposite approaches to the search for peace of mind. Show up on the couch of a traditional American shrink, and you’ll be encouraged to delve deep into your personal history and emotional life — to ask how your parents’ anxieties imprinted themselves on your childhood, say, or why the way your spouse loads the dishwasher makes you so disproportionately angry. Show up at a meditation center, by contrast, and you’ll be encouraged to see all those thoughts and emotions as mere passing emotional weather, and the self to which they’re happening as an illusion.
These differences also help explain the characteristic ways in which each approach goes wrong — as in the case of the lifelong therapy patient who’s fascinated by his own problems, yet still as neurotic as ever; or the moony meditator engaged in what’s been termed “spiritual bypassing,” attempting to transcend all earthly concerns so that she needn’t look too closely at her own pain.
Attempts to bridge the two philosophies are liable to devolve into mere intellectual exercises, or else to peter out in the banal advice that therapy sessions ought to begin with a period of concentrating on the breath. (For anyone who’s ever paid out of pocket for a therapeutic “hour,” the idea of using valuable minutes that way may evoke strong feelings.) But in “The Zen of Therapy,” a warm, profound and cleareyed memoir of a year in his consulting room prior to the pandemic, the psychiatrist and author — and practicing Buddhist — Mark Epstein aims at something meatier. He seeks to uncover the fundamental wisdom both worldviews share, and to show, as a practical matter, how it might help us wriggle free from the places we get stuck on the road to fulfillment.
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Mark EpsteinCredit...Larry BercowEpstein, whose earlier books on related themes include “Advice Not Given” and “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” is adamant that psychotherapy is right to emphasize the importance of our personal stories — the history and texture of what it feels like to be, uniquely, ourselves — as against the meditator’s tendency to disdain the realm of emotions, seeing them “as indulgent at best and as an impediment at worst.” It’s clear from early in the book that Epstein won’t be romanticizing the ascetic life when he describes a pivotal moment in the story of the historical Buddha, in which he walked out on his wife and child to seek spiritual enlightenment, not as an act of courage, but as a rather obvious case of emotional avoidance.
Buddhism’s critical insight, though, is that those personal stories are just stories, as opposed to nonnegotiable, objective reality; that the selves to which they occur are much less substantial than we tend to assume — and that freedom lies ultimately not in understanding what happened to us, but in loosening our grip on it all, so that “things that feel fixed, set, permanent and unchanging” can start to shift. The goal, in a refreshing counterpoint to the excesses of a certain way of thinking about therapy, isn’t to reach the state of feeling glowingly positive about yourself and your life. It’s to become less entangled with that whole question, so that you get to spend your time on more meaningful things instead.
Much of the appeal of therapists’ memoirs lies, naturally enough, in the opportunity for readers to satisfy their prurient interest in other people’s problems — and in the relief of learning that they’re at least as screwed up as we are. So it’s fitting that Epstein devotes only a relatively short introductory section to setting the stage, chronicling his growing frustration with Western scientists’ attempts to isolate the “active ingredient” in meditation, rather than embracing its spiritual depths. (Recalling his role as an assistant on a narrowly conceived research trip to northern India, he laments: “I had an unparalleled opportunity to probe these monks’ minds, not just their rectal temperatures.”)
Most of the book is spent, instead, in the company of his (pseudonymous) patients, such as Debby, the humanitarian volunteer who finds it easy to appreciate the shining souls of the dispossessed people among whom she works, but has a harder time when it comes to her grouchy and withdrawing husband; and Jack, the son of Holocaust survivors, who “remembers the unbearable and unreachable sadness of his parents. ‘Was I a good boy today?’ he would ask them repeatedly, as if his behavior were the cause of the suffering he intuited but could never reach.” There’s more benefit, for the patients and for the reader, in simply allowing such stories to be told than in attempting to derive generic life lessons from them, and Epstein by and large leaves space for that to happen.
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The mantra of the Buddhism-inclined therapist, he writes, is to “find the clinging” — to detect where a patient is holding tightly to certain stories or feelings on which they’ve come to believe their happiness depends (or, alternatively, those they seek at all costs to keep at bay — since aversion, for a Buddhist, is just an inverted kind of clinging). The point isn’t to stop feeling or thinking them, but to change one’s relationship to them. The “ultimate Buddhist therapeutic maneuver,” he explains, is “not to ignore the emotion but to leave it alone, allowing it to appear in its own way, appreciating it for what it seems to be without getting taken in by it.” Talking with one patient, a stepmother bitter about her stepchildren’s lack of appreciation, he makes the fine distinction that her expectations are “valid” but “not realistic.” It’s perfectly OK to have expectations; just don’t make your happiness dependent on their ever being fulfilled.
The unifying stance Epstein identifies in Buddhism and in therapy at its best — such as in the work of the British child analyst D. W. Winnicott, champion of the “good-enough mother” — is the willingness to pay attention, while letting people and feelings be as they are. He finds it, too, in the creative approach of another of his heroes, the composer John Cage, who sought to “let the sounds be themselves.” “Kindness is the thread that runs through the work of Winnicott, Cage and the Buddha,” Epstein writes, “each of whom discovered that noninterfering attentiveness — in a mother, an artist, a meditator or a therapist — is, by its very nature, transformative.”
This is where a certain kind of Buddhism-inspired advice book typically comes adrift, vaguely exhorting the reader to cultivate an all-purpose compassionate attitude that’s as impossible to practice (for me, at least) as it is irritating to read about. Mercifully, what Epstein means by kindness includes a large component of humor. Developing the capacity to laugh at ourselves — especially at the self-important, righteously indignant facades we construct as a matter of emotional self-defense — is a sublime expression of non-clinging, an act of inner-directed kindness that soon spreads outward too. One of his patients, a financial executive, starts off full of wounded pride, but his growing capacity to laugh at that trait is heartwarming: “The only change he wanted me to make in my account,” Epstein writes, “was to describe him as bearing a striking resemblance to the young Antonio Banderas.”
The effort to straddle Buddhism and therapy leads Epstein sometimes to lapse into the technical jargon of both, with discussions of the “object-mother,” “mind objects,” the “punitive superego” and the like; while references to his own spiritual journey have the I-guess-you-had-to-be-there quality that often afflicts such accounts. But this wise and sympathetic book’s lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories. “What is your method, anyway?” one patient asks Epstein, in an affectionate dig. “It’s like ‘friendly conversation’ with occasional moments of illumination, is that it?” He’s obliged to concede that she’s right. It doesn’t sound like much. But then again, since neither therapy nor meditation is going to solve the human predicament — none of us are getting out of this alive — perhaps nothing could possibly be worth more.
Oliver Burkeman is the author, most recently, of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”
THE ZEN OF THERAPY
Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life
By Mark Epstein
320 pp. Penguin Press. $27.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 23, 2022, Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Of Two Minds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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When a Therapist Puts Buddhism Into Practice
Jan. 18, 2018
When a Therapist Puts Buddhism Into Practice
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Mark Epstein, whose books explore the intersection of Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, at his home in Manhattan.
Mark Epstein, whose books explore the intersection of Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, at his home in Manhattan.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
By John Williams
Jan. 18, 2018
The psychotherapist Mark Epstein is known for lucidly mapping the ways in which Buddhism can enrich Western approaches to psychology. In his books, starting with the publication of “Thoughts Without a Thinker” in 1995, the philosophies and practices of those worlds are in fruitful conversation.
In his private practice, until recently, Mr. Epstein consciously kept the two apart.
“I always felt that it would be a real mistake to lay any kind of ideology on my patients, even one that I believed in,” he said of his Buddhism. “I didn’t want to be pushing anybody toward something that they didn’t want.”
As Mr. Epstein’s books gained him visibility, some new patients would come to him specifically looking for some of that Buddhist ideology, but still he remained wary of providing it. If anything, he enjoyed puncturing people’s preconceptions about the Eastern tradition. “No one really understands emptiness or ‘no-self’ the way they might,” he said. “I can’t say I do either. But it’s fun to try to find where people are misunderstanding and then tweak it a little bit.”
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Mr. Epstein’s latest book, “Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself,” was published this week. It is concerned with the “untrammeled ego,” which Freud and the Buddha both identified as “the limiting factor in our well-being,” Mr. Epstein writes.
While it’s in keeping with his previous work, tonally and substantively, it holds a distinct place in the author’s mind. It was inspired, in part, by the 2008 death of his father, Franklin H. Epstein, an academic physician, from brain cancer at 84.
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Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
In the weeks after his father’s disease had been diagnosed, Mr. Epstein said, “I realized that I had never had a direct conversation with him about any of what I had learned from Buddhism. He was proud of me as a doctor and liked my books, but he wasn’t drawn to it. But then I thought, ‘Oh no, he’s going to die and I’ve never even really tried to convey what’s helped me about anticipating death from meditation, from Buddhism.’ ”
That worry drove Mr. Epstein to pick up the phone and call his father. It was also the first germ for the contents and the title of “Advice Not Given,” in which he offers counsel that he might previously have kept to himself. “This stuff has helped me so much, I don’t want to be withholding it” from patients “out of some sense of not being too pushy,” he said.
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Mr. Epstein, 64, lives in TriBeCa with his wife, the sculptor Arlene Shechet, and he sees patients in the same building, in the unassuming basement office in which we spoke on a frigid afternoon in late December. The office’s walls, a pale blue, are unadorned. Mr. Epstein’s desk and the books that surround it are tucked away from the uncluttered space in which he sits with patients.
Mr. Epstein, who has had his private practice since 1986, was in his teens when he first felt drawn to the spiritual and professional paths he would pursue.
Some young men join rock bands to meet young women. Mr. Epstein took an introduction to world religions class. His romantic interest in one particular classmate at Harvard didn’t last, but he fell for some lines in a book of Buddhist scripture called the Dhammapada. “There was a verse, something like: ‘Look to your mind, wise man — it is subtle, invisible, treacherous,’ ” he said.
There were “little bits of Buddhism floating around” at Harvard in those days, Mr. Epstein said, as the age of psychedelia gave way to the age of consciousness studies. He befriended fellow travelers, including Daniel Goleman, later a science writer for The Times who was then a graduate student and teaching fellow. Mr. Goleman had visited India to study meditation. “I knew he knew something that I wanted to know,” Mr. Epstein said. “Mostly, he was wearing these purple bell-bottom pants that I thought were really cool.”
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Mr. Epstein at home in Manhattan.
Mr. Epstein at home in Manhattan.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
Mr. Epstein flashes a sense of humor with some frequency in person, one that mischievously cuts against the soberly reflective presence you might expect from the books (and that you also get). He has the wiry frame of a regular yoga practitioner, and an enviable thicket of gray hair. You might feel torn, sitting across from him, between asking for advice on how to cope with the transient nature of reality and for advice on high-quality conditioning products.
“In person he is gentle and insightful in a quiet and humorous way,” said Robert Thurman, an expert on Tibetan Buddhism and a professor at Columbia University, in an email interview. Mr. Thurman is a longtime friend of Mr. Epstein, and has taught and lectured alongside him. “People are automatically drawn to him, wishing they had a shrink like that. Other shrinks also seek him out in personal workshops, and I think tend to emulate him.”
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Despite his gentle disposition, Mr. Epstein is tough-minded. “People expect too much from meditation,” he said. He doesn’t peddle a version of Buddhist insight for Westerners eager to utilize it for quick-acting self-help or self-actualization. As he wrote in “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart” (1998): “What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.”
The problem with the ego, according to Mr. Epstein, is that it wants so badly to know. “The ego comes into being when we’re two or three or four years old,” he said, “just feeling our own separateness and how difficult it is to navigate the external pressures from parents and teachers, and the internal pressures of one’s biology, one’s drives and so on. The ego wants security and stability and coherence. It’s rooted in the intellect, so it tells stories. It fastens on to the first stories that start to make sense, both positive and negative.”
We then incessantly repeat these stories to ourselves “under our breath,” as Mr. Epstein writes in the new book. The classic stubborn story dealt with in therapy, he said, can be summarized in four words: “The problem is me.” And the low self-esteem reinforced by such stories “is as much ego as the puffed-up, ‘I’m the best,’ competitive, American way we ordinarily think of the ego.”
Despite his good shape (and his good genes; his mother, Sherrie Epstein, is 93), Mr. Epstein, in the middle of his seventh decade, is not far from the phase of life about which he counseled his father. Asked how he feels about the prospect of his own ultimate impermanence — death, to the rest of us — Mr. Epstein said with a laugh: “I feel frightened about ultimate impermanence. But with a little bit of a sense of humor, somehow. There’s something a little bit exciting, even within all the fear, about literally not knowing what’s going to come next.”
And what did he tell his father about what comes next?
“ ‘I don’t know if you want to hear this or not, but I don’t want to keep it from you either,’ ” Mr. Epstein recalls saying. “ ‘You know that place in yourself that hasn’t really changed subjectively from when you were a young man, or 20, 40, 60, 80? You still sort of feel the same to yourself inside, but if you try to find that place you can’t really put your finger on it?’ ” He then told his father what he believed he had learned about how to relax the mind into that “invisible space where you are who you’ve always been” as the body fades away. “He was very nice. He said, ‘O.K., darling. I’ll try.’ ”
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
ADVICE NOT GIVEN
A Guide to Getting Over Yourself
By Mark Epstein
204 pages. Penguin Press. $26.
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