Psychotherapy Networker: Spiritually Reconsidered

Spiritually Reconsidered
1990 Sept/Oct
By Katy Butler

One cold July evening two years ago, I stood on the steps of Most Holy Redeemer Church, two blocks from Castro Street in San Francisco, surrounded by men and women holding white, helium balloons in their hands. It was windy, and the balloons—symbolizing people from the neighborhood who had died that year, mostly of AIDS—kept bumping against tone another. Church bells tolled. A young woman with black spiky hair read out the names of more than 200 dead. The parish priest shook holy water over the balloons—it landed with a thwack—and then we released them into the foggy air.

I am not a Catholic, and except for an occasional wedding, I hadn’t been inside a church in 25 years. In fact, I thought of the Catholic Church as the home of authoritarianism and emotional repression. I was on the steps of the church that night not as a congregant, but as a reporter covering Most Holy redeemer’s annual Forty Hours of Devotion, a medieval ritual of incessant prayer, first used in times of plague and Turkish invasion, and now invoked as a plea for an end to the AIDS epidemic.

Six years ago, the priest of Most Holy Redeemer– then a dwindling, working class parish—had formed a Gay and Lesbian Outreach Committee, and welcomed 600 new members. The former convent across the street had been converted into an AIDS hospice, subsidized by bingo in the church basement. Each week, older women—whose own sons had long since moved away—prayed to Mary, visited the sick, drank from the communion cup, and made friends with gay men over bingo cards.

At Mass that evening, I watched a Polish-American widow in her seventies hold a black man, emaciated by AIDS, up by the belt to take communion. Later, a white –haired, Italian-American woman in thick, black, orthopedic shoes hobbled up the aisles, saying “Peace be with you”, to gay men wearing t-shirts, leather jackets, and business suits. For the next two nights, I watched relays of parishioners pray quietly before the communion bread that was for them the living body of Christ.

Just before dawn on Sunday morning, I sat in a back pew, almost alone. Votive candles, sputtering and clicking like tiny castanets, went out one by one. On the altar, a windowed, silver vessel, called a monstrance, held the white communion wafers. Struggling to translate this ancient Catholic symbol of Presence into language I could understand, I tried simply to be fully present with the Host, seeing “Christ’s body” as a window into here and now.

I stared at the monstrance, shining in the candle light. Silver rays shot out from it’s sides, like the sun embossed on a New Mexico lisence plate. I could not connect. I felt unacceptable. I realized for the first time the depth of my feelings of separation and shame. I cried quietly; my throat hurt.

What happened next was not dramatic. God did not speak to me as he spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus. No Buddhist enlightenment descended, nor did I see my separate self and my suffering as a fiction. The room did not blaze with light, as it did for Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, when he prayed for deliverance from alcohol while drying out in a hospital room. No great wind blew through me, nor were things quiet as prosaic as what William James called, in Varieties of Religious Experience, a sense of “a proper connection with the higher powers’.

But sitting in that human church, whose parishioners had adopted society’s outcasts, I had a small, spiritually healing experience 0 one of a handful that have punctuated my life, all impossible to full describe. I was aware of a presence emanating from the monstrance . In trying to describe its steady delicacy, I think of a line from an e.e. cummings poem: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”. For years I had felt so damaged that I thought I should hide myself. But the god I sensed glimmering from the monstrance included everything, even me. How could I hide from the universe when I was part of it? Connection was possible, even though I could only barely sense it. I did not need to hide any more; there was nowhere to hide, and nothing to hide. My shame was a delusion; it came from inside, not outside.

Late that Sunday, I walked out of the church into the sun. On Wednesday, I took my experience into that modern confessional, my therapist’s office. Like many educated upper-middle-class, urban and suburban people, I had nowhere else to go. I had no priest. My grandparents were dead, my friends didn’t think much of Catholicism, and my parents were thousands of miles away. For better or worse, my therapist had inherited the ancient robe of the priest or shaman who drew no distinction between spiritual and emotional healing. She did not reduce my experience to psychological terms. She told me she thought what had happened was powerful and important, that it had meaning , and that such experiences had been excluded from the therapeutic universe for far too long.

Then our psychological work began. The perception inside Most Holy Redeemer had radically shifted my view of myself. I no longer felt like a cripple fashioning a better set of crutches. I knew things could be different, and I also knew I would have to face my memories if I wished to deepen that fleeting vision into something I could live each day. The lid of shame was off. No human being, no therapist, no friend, no 12-step group, no self-help author, no Zen master had ever been able to convey this to me before. But the parishioners of Most Holy Redeemer had made Christ, in whom I did not believe, visible.

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES LIKE MINE—framed in archaic language, and challenging commonly-held paradigms of psychological change—make many therapists squirm.

“If a client mentions a religious interest, most psychologist will pass it over, or there’ll be a quiet lift of the eyebrow, with the assumption that the client is immature or neurotic, that religion is a symptom of something wrong” says John Tisdale, a former pastoral counselor and secretary of the American Psychological Association’s small division for psychologists interested in religion.

Not all of this queasiness is mere prejudice from the narrow-minded. “Spirituality is often misused,” says James Bugental, one of the founders and leading theorists of the existentialist humanist psychology movement, and no stranger to deeper questions of human meaning. “It can be a cop-out, away of not taking responsibility for one’s life, for not confronting that we die, that what we do hurts those we don’t want to hurt, that we don’t live up to our own potential and our own values.”

Ever since modem psychotherapy first challenged religion’s ancient monopoly on methods for human transformation, each realm has looked upon the other with some suspicion. In the late 1970s, a bioenergetics therapist bluntly told me that meditation “ungrounded” me. When I seriously considered spending six months in a Buddhist monastery, he blew up like a man discovering a secret rival, “Then what are we doing here?” he asked, and after that, I left an Important part of myself outside his office door.

At the same time, the Buddhist meditation teachers I met were equally arrogant. Psychotherapy, they thought, increased preoccupation with a “self’ that they believed was a fiction. I remember a popular Tibetan Buddhist teacher—who later died of alcoholism—saying that psychotherapy taught you to unpack your knapsack item by item, while Buddhism let you drop the whole thing.

Like children shouting gained messages across a lake at twilight, the whole conversation seemed to be at cross-purposes. Each vocation seemed so sure of its superior ability to engineer human development and change, and at the same time unwilling to admit to any common ground. The result was an underground rivalry. “Psychotherapy and religion are in direct ideological competition,” says long-time critic of psychiatry Thomas Szasz. “Psychotherapy is not different in any way from religion. Psychotherapy deals with how one should live, with family life, sexual behavior, and the purpose of life—and that’s ithat religion is about. Freud was a rabbi in disguise. For some, psychotherapy is a god that failed, and for others, it’s a god that still works.”

Given the climate of mutual antipathy it’s hardly surprising that religious questions have long been taboo in most therapists’ offices, But recently, some therapists—reflecting an inchoate, barely understood, national, spiritual renaissance—are exploring the once-hostile borderline between the spiritual and the psychological.

“Something’s cooking,” said professor Allan Bergin of Brigham Young University, who has studied the spiritual interests of psychologists for a decade. “Therapists are coming out of the closet with their religiosity. Some are religious people who never used to say anything about it, and others have changed their minds about religion. There is apparently a blend of humanistic philosophy and spirituality out there among therapists that has not been well articulated.”

In a 1986 survey of 425 mental health professionals across the country, Bergin and fellow BYIJ psychologist Jay P. Jensen found that even though some therapists remain actively hostile to organized religion, a sizable majority are deeply interested in a vaguely defined non- institutional spirituality. Sixty-eight percent of the family therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists surveyed said they sought “a spiritual understanding of the universe and one’s place in it,” even though only 40 percent—about the same proportion as the rest of the population—regularly attended church services.

A key factor in therapist& new spiritual openness is the enormous growth, not of old-fashioned religion, but of the informal spirituality promulgated by Alcoholics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and other 12-step programs. In the late 1980s, in a grass-roots explosion that took both psychologists and theologians by surprise, hundreds of thousands of ACOA’s entered the self-help groups as atheists, and stayed to follow the “12 Steps” —a deceptively simple recipe for psychological and spiritual transformation, involving surrender to a loosely defined “higher power.” When many ACOAs also entered therapy, they took the common-sense language of 1 2-step programs with them, and helped bridge the two worlds,

“The ACOA movement has made spirituality user-friendly for therapists,” says family therapist and addiction specialist Jo-Ann Krestan, coauthor of Too Good for Her Own Good and other books lending family systems theory with the insights of 12-step programs. “Therapists who. used to dismiss the spiritual can’t any more. They have investigated the ACOA movement out of economic necessity of appealing to prospective clients and have come to recognize the profound significance of the spiritual. One finds, in the 12-step groups, an experience of community that can be the first step along the road of recognizing that one is part of a larger system.”

In another expression of the national hunger for abridging of the psychological and spiritual realms, more than three million people have bought psychiatrist M. Scott Pecks The Road Less Traveled’ A New Psychology of Love, traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth and kept it on the best-seller list for a record- breaking six years. The surprise bestseller, which probably would have gone nowhere if it been written by a minister, rehabilitates once out-of-date subjects like discipline, love, and sin by recasting them in psychological terms. The hook sold well even though Peck made none of the facile promises found in most psychological self-help books. Its first sentence— “Life is difficult” —challenges the American myth that anything is possible and unhappiness is always remediable. The book seeks instead to give human pain and sacrifice a broader meaning.

And in 1988, in a further display of spiritual yearning expressed in psychological terms, hundreds of thousands of families, each alone in its house, turned public television into a flickering, electronic, shaman’s cave presided over by anthropologist Joseph Campbell. The unexpectedly popular slit-part interview with Bill Moyers touched a nerve, and the shows were expanded and repeatedly rebroadcast. Campbell, a scholar with impeccable establishment credentials, lifted the world’s mythic traditions out of the hands of museum curators. He popularized Jung’s theories of pan- cultural archetypes, and supported Jung’s view that the psychotherapeutic journey was a version g humankind’s “one great story” f spiritual quest and awakening. By implication, Campbell gave respectability to the spiritual-psychological quest itself, even in modern-times. But he could not restore to such quests the sense of community, ritual and ethics that keeps them from degenerating into empty consumer commodities.

AS THE INTERVIEWS WITH CAMPBELL illustrated, a clear division between the spiritual and psychological is a relatively new phenomenon. For millennia, shamans and witch doctors, the therapists of Indigenous and preindustrial cultures, made no distinction between physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. To them, all symptoms were signs of something awry in the individual’s relationship with a larger universe of spirits and animal powers. Using drums, dances, and hallucinogens, they reached trance states, made diagnoses that reframed people’s complaints, and enacted rituals to reconnect them to the tribe, to nature, and to the cosmos. In non-shamanic traditions, the same blurring applied. For centuries, Buddha was called “The King of Doctors,” and Jesus earned a reputation as a faith healer.

Then came the divorce. Western Europe industrialized; feudal villages emptied and city slums filled; extended families, communities, and religious supports frayed. Europe burned its witches, deified its doctors, lost faith in exorcism and confession, and fell in love with scientific materialism.

Sigmund Freud, a neurologist by training, believed religion was primitive, outmoded by his scientific ‘talking cure.” Insight and catharsis, he thought, would lead, if not to happiness at least to self- knowledge. He saw spiritual searching as consolatory and regressive, not evolutionary, a powerless infant’s longing for the oceanic feeling of the mother’s womb. Perhaps because of his eagerness to have psychoanalysis accepted by—and as— hard science, Freud deliberately distanced himself from the mystical. An atheist, he wanted to model the psychoanalyst on the white-coated scientist, not on the beaded shaman or the black- robed minister.

With the exception of C.G. Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and a few other mavericks, most therapists in the first half of the 20th century followed Freud’s views on religion or kept their differing opinions quiet. To most practitioners of the “new science,” religion was guilt, superstition, and repression; it was psychology’s eccentric great-uncle, dressed in dark, old- fashioned clothes, mumbling phrases in a half-forgotten language on the fringes of the wedding feast.

It was Carl Jung who first challenged Freud’s pathologizing of the spiritual. Jung popularized the Chinese Taoist text, the I Ching, in the 1920s, and strongly believed in the authority and the healing power of the nonrational, the mythic and the dreamlike. In fact, he characterized psychotherapy as a ministerial occupation.

Jung’s was only the first of many challenges—including family, behavioral, cognitive, hypnotic and brief therapy— to the perceived limitations of the effectiveness of insight, catharsis, and the medical treatment model of solvIng human problems.

In the 1950s, during the first “Zen boom” among American intellectuals, psychoanalysis Karen Homey and Erich Fromm studied at Columbia University with the Japanese Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, and parallels were drawn between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Both systematized ways to alleviate human suffering through a transformation consciousness,

Halfway across the country, hypnotherapist Milton Erickson showed no interest in Buddhism or any other religion, but his work proved that intuition, paradox, and trance states—all traditional tools of the religious trade— could be effective where science and rationalism failed-

Also in the ‘5 Os, anthropologist Gregory Bateson introduced therapists to systems thinking, emphasizing epistemology and patterns of communication rather than fixed notions of “self’ and “disease.” While Bateson was popular among family therapists for his scientific analysis of small systems of interaction, such as those within the Balinese culture, or between a mother and her schizophrenic son, few followed Bateson Into his explorations of the much larger systems that contained them. Bateson ultimately came to see world consisting of relationships rather than objects—an epistemology that challenged the Western notion of a self- contained “self’ extending no further than the boundary of the outer skin. This approach had affinities to Buddhist thought, which also teaches—although in vastly different language—that notions of a fixed “self’ amount to a convenient fiction. Bateson was a scientist, but he admired both Buddhism and Alcoholics Anonymous. AA’s reliance on a “power greater than oneself’ reflected what he thought was a more correct epistemology: that there are limits to human will, and that human beings are part of systems far larger than they can conceive or ime.

In the 1960s, the intellectual rehabilitation of the spiritual got a different sort of boost from psychologist and theorist Abraham Maslow, who, as one of the leaden of the humanistic psychology movement, challenged behaviorism and psychoanalysis. In contrast to Freud’s pathologizing of the spiritual, Maslow considered spiritual longings to be legitimate in their own right, and not a reflection of unresolved emotional conflicts. Be posited a “hierarchy of needs” that placed longings for transcendent experiences and moral values at the top of the ladder, saying that all people would seek them after more basic needs—for food, love and self-respect— were met In his final years, Maslow helped found The Association for Transpersonal Psychology to further explore mystical questions within the language of psychology. But he opposed the tendency of some transpersonal psychologists to seek the spiritual in exotic chemical substances like [SD, or in foreign monasteries. He wrote, “The great lesson from the true mystics [is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it to be found In one’s daily life; in one’s neighbors, friends and family, in one’s backyard.”

These EXPANSIONS OF THE DOMAIN of psychology hardly filtered down to the Boston suburbs of my childhood. There, in the ‘6Os, Psychology and Spirituality weren’t speaking, because Psychology was doing all the talking. My parents, both formerly devout Anglicans, were immigrants from rural South Africa, where the church steepLe was the tallest building in town. They left that all behind, Lost their faith, and abandoned the distant, authoritarian God of their childhood and His impossible rules. They stopped using the language of sin and redemption. They spoke less of good and evil, and more of healthy and unhealthy choices. They joined a prosperous, post-n American generation for whom therapists became a secular priesthood.

My Family moved 14 times before turned 18. We never joined a church, We had no grandparents or aunts or uncles to turn to in difficult Limes, We subscribed to lime magazine, and got the issue asking whether God was dead, At our house, it was more like lie went to the corner for cigarettes one day and never returned. My parents’ guidance came not from priests or neighbors but from new icons: the psychoanalytically influenced Dr. Spoek, and the books of Freud and Betty Friedan. When that didn’t work, my parents turned to therapists, who were increasingly burdened by the breakdown of communities and extended families outside their office doors,

During the next two decades, at least in the comfortable suburbs and city neighborhoods where many of my friends lived, psychotherapy thoroughly usurped the role religion had long filled. The professional office, with its book-lined walls and oriental rugs, replaced the confessional, the sanctuary, and the parish hail. The therapists who set up shop were as deeply motivated to relieve human suffering as any priest. But few had training that equipped them with language to address deeper questions of human meaning that many of us inevitably brought. It is to therapists that my friends often turn with a wide range of soluble and insoluble problems—an alcoholic mother, a vague sense of loneliness or purposelessness, an unhappy child or stalled career. The consumers of therapy expect its practitioners to be not only teachers of communication skills and problem-solvers, but spiritual guides, mothers, fathers, and even paid friends.

In a simpler time, people filled most of those roles for each other, for free, in church and at village festivals, or during long summer afternoons on the front porch with cousins and grandchildren. Now we try to pour all our questions of meaning into one, expensive, weekly therapeutic hour—and into a Language that can barely contain them,

Some of the problems clients bring have roots in a system far larger than family communication patterns. What shows up in a therapist’s office as loneliness or purposelessness originates in a culture where people spend so much time commuting, working, or watching television that they have little left to develop what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “habits of the heart” with each other. Therapists cannot replace what organized religion, for all its drawbacks, provided: a sense of community, connection to something beyond ourselves, of help freely given, arid a broad view of human suffering as inevitable and part of an historical context thousands of years old.

Unrealistic expectations of therapy are shared by both clients and therapists. Caught between sacred and profane metaphors for their work, sensing in their hearts their clients’ pain, yet trying to apply technique with their minds, the secular priesthood is supposed to have all the answers, but doesn’t.

No wonder some therapists arc tongue- tied when clients hint at deeper questions of meaning. “Once you relieve immediate distress in therapy, questions of meaning or values often arise,” says psychologist Bergin, adding that the 1986 survey showed that only 5 percent today’s therapists received any training dealing with religious issues in therapy. “For example—is there a higher reason to endure• the pain in a relationship, does one just withdraw? Many therapists are so caught up in techniques that they shy away from these bigger issues.”

like a doctor attempting microsurgery with a lug wrench, some therapists sensed early in their careers that the principles of psychotherapy are insufficient to provide them with guidance for a more profound level of self-exploration, much less for addressing such Issues in their clients’ lives. Perhaps this is what leaves so many therapists frustrated, at mid-life, with their impossible profession.

“Many therapists enter this work with sense of what might be In themselves and those they work with,” says James Bugental, who sees an outpouring of spiritual searching among therapists he trains. “For many, the work is frustrating. Their hopes for themselves are not realized. They sense that there’s more to life than their training has told them about. And that’s when this turning to the spiritual makes sense.”

Phillip Friedman, a family therapist in Philadelphia, for example, had “done all the things you’re supposed to do to be happy” by the early 1970s. He had a house in the suburbs, a Ph.D., and a job at a respected family therapy center. But he was foil of emotional distress, and his job was a hornet’s nest of backbiting, professional jealousy, and competition. He wondered why people who were supposedly experts in human behavior were so nasty and unhappy. Then he went to a yoga workshop with the Hindu teacher Swami Satchitananda, who “radiated a peace I had never seen in my professional colleagues.” He sampled other spiritual paths, including the list training, A Course in Miracles, and meditation with the charismatic teacher Swami Muktananda. “At first, I tried to keep doing therapy in the regular way and hold those experiences in another part of my life,” says Friedman. “But now I integrate them. I meditate every morning, focusing first within myself and then on the people I’m going to see that day. To clients who are open to it, I sometimes talk about invoking a creative intelligence for help.”

WHEN A THERAPIST BECOMES involved in a spiritual practice, his or her outward techniques with clients may remain the same, while his or her inner conception of the therapist’s role may subtly but decisively shift. Sometimes the change is no greater than a willingness to try a little. guided imagery with a client, or to take out the earplugs when a client hints at religious beliefs that might be helpful. For instance, Mark Kolkto, a clinical psychologist in New Jersey, used a Mormon woman’s belief that she was a “child of God” to counteract feelings of shame arising from childhood sexual abuse.

Sometimes, however, baffling and intriguing therapeutic miracles do occur. In California, for instance, psychiatrist Seymour Boorstein once prescribed Carlos Casteneda’s Journey to Ixtian and other spiritual books to Jack, a man so suspicious and hostile and so overcome by weeping and murderous rage that he had left his job on permanent disability. Each week, the two discussed how the perspectives provided by the spiritual readings applied to Jack’s hanging on to old grudges, especially his rage toward former supervisor who had slept with his ex-wife and harassed him on the job.

Boorstein also taught Jack a traditional Buddhist “mindfulness” meditation technique that helped him develop an “observing ego” capable of witnessing feelings of hate and jealousy and then letting them pass away Jack turned out to be adept at it— far more successes than Boorstein himself. Jack’s weeping and murderous thoughts diminished. After 14 months of this unconventional therapy, Jack returned to his former job, under his former supervisor, and was later named Employee of the Year.

Such miracles are as rare and unexplainable as they are in conventional therapy. More common is a therapist relinquishing a view of him or herself as a clever magician, battling resistance with an armamentarium of flashy techniques, hypnotic suggestions, and ingenious reframings. Instead, these spiritually minded therapists see themselves as the servants of a larger system— a role at once humbler and less lonely.

Michael Elldn, a Massachusetts hypnotherapist and family therapist, was a strategic therapist long before he began studying the Christian mystical book, Course in Miracles, five years ago. Not long afterward, an enraged and terrified woman came to him. “None of the tricks I’d used with high- resistance, high-denial people worked,” says Elkin. “Any time I tried to explain her experience, she’d respond with a level of rage that could peel the paint off walls.”

Elkin was frustrated. He forgot an appointment. He took long walks with his dog, cursing his difficult client. He did not abandon techniques, but he also began praying for 15 minutes before the woman’s session, “I would pray for the ability to keep my ego out of it, not to feel threatened, to see her as undamaged, and just to be loving to her,” he says. “I stopped trying to do anything. She became much more reined and pleasant. Since then, it’s been a steady, uphill climb.

“I pray for help before every session, now. I keep in mind that I am not the one doing the work—God does it, through the agency of the Holy Spirit I don’t always remember that, but I know that I have to learn to if I’m ever going to have any peace.” Tom Chancellor, a family therapist in Texas with a behaviorist background, attended a Buddhist meditation retreat for psychotherapists in Boulder, Colorado, last summer. There, he learned 2,500- year-old techniques for generating pleasant states of mind through meditation and awareness of the breath. What Chancellor discovered was that the greater his ability to feel good no matter how unhappy his clients were, the greater his empathy and compassion for them. ‘When I came back, focused more on my breathing, and on being at peace with myself, rather than pulling my hair out,” Chancellor said. “In the past, I struggled more with coming up with solutions so that clients’ problems would go away,” he said “Now I’m more comfortable realizing the problem isn’t the problem, it’s the reaction to it. And now I might say, ‘It’s real incredible you’ve been able to live through that,’ when in the past I might have said similar words— Well, obviously you’re a strong person because you’ve been able to live through so much’ —but I would have been more mechanistic, not so involved, with less of an empathic connection.”

THE GREATEST DANGER OF RELYING on spiritual approaches Is the sentimental hope that a sense of connection to a larger system will take away the pain of being a human being, or substitute for work that must be done on a psychological level. Although the spiritual and the psychological realms may overlap, they are not identical, and both are Important, says Jack Kornfield, a meditation teacher and a clinical psychologist in Woodacre, California. Kornfield is the author of Living Buddhist Masters and other books, and was one of the founding teachers of the Insight Meditation Society, which pioneered the practice of Vipassana Buddhism in (he United States in the early 1970s. When he was 21, he journeyed to Thailand shortly after graduating from Dartmouth College. lie lived in a little hut in a forest monastery, took vows of celibacy, was ordained as a Buddhist monk, owned only a single robe, and took alms in the traditional way in neighboring villages for his food. At the same time, he followed classical Vipassana Buddhist meditation practices lie meditated in charnel grounds, watching corpses burn, and spent most of his Lime alone, “1 learned a lot about facing my own death, and about not being able to possess things,” says Kornfield. “I had some stunning spiritual experiences. Then I came back to the United States, started driving a tarn and going to graduate school, and it took me six months or a year to come down from a great sense of equanimity, detachment, and calm. When I did, I found I had many of the same fears I’d had when I left”

What followed, Kornfield said, was a series of disastrous relationships with women, all of whom left him because he was needy, jealous, and insecure. During the same period, his Father was in a serious accident. Kornfield meditated calmly outside the Intensive Care Unit. When his father recovered and asked how Kornfield would have felt had he died, Kornfield replied calmly, ‘1 didn’t want you to die, but we all are horn and we all die,” which upset his father enormously.

“In retrospect, I was pathologically detached,” Kornfield told me. “I wasn’t feeling what it would mean to have my father die in front of me.” Kornfield entered therapy and later became a therapist himself “Meditation taught mc many things, hut it didn’t acquaint tile with my feelings,” Kornfield said. “I didn’t know ill was angry, sad, or happy unless it was very obvious. I spent the next 10 years using therapy, along with meditation, to reclaim my capacity to feel.”

The spiritual yearning for a state of enlightenment in which there are “no boundaries,” and “no self” can tempt people to think they can escape from the hard work of managing the give-and-take of everyday human struggles. ‘When Michael Reeds, a recent graduate of Naropa Institute’s contemplative psychology program, first began working in a halfway house, he found that his Buddhist training had taught him to remain calm in the face of obvious turmoil. But it did not train him to be a therapist.

The first day he walked into the halfway- house kitchen, a resident told him he could raise dead bodies. Reeds nodded and listened, internally congratulating himself for what he thought was an enlightened tolerance. “Five minutes later,” says Reeds, “I was fighting to survive. I felt dizzy, I was sweating, and I felt horrible. I he’d to him and said I had to go to a meeting and went to the office and chilled out. later I sneaked out hoping he wouldn’t corner me again”

Reeds now believes that an idealistic Buddhist emphasis on generosity and unselfishness had not prepared him for the mundane task of setting limits and telling the truth about his own feelings and limitations, “Now I’m learning, and it’s painful and awkward,” he said. “Care- giving was my style, and it was mistaken by some within the Buddhist community as a spiritually evolved state.”

Buddhist emphasis on generosity and unselfishness had not prepared him for the mundane task of setting limits and telling the truth about his own feelings and limitations, “Now I’m learning, and it’s painful and awkward,” he said. “Care- giving was my style, and it was mistaken by some within the Buddhist community as a spiritually evolved state.”

ONE NIGHT SUMMER A YEAR AFTER my small epiphany at Most Holy Redeemer, I found myself at a retreat center in Santa Barbara with a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh, a handful of other Vietnamese, and 20 American veterans of the Vietnam War. I was there as a reporter, once again. The air smelled of orange blossoms, and crickets were chirping.

On the first night of the five-day retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh sat in flail lotus position at the front of a meeting room, a microphone clipped to his brown, polyester robe. “When it comes to healing, Western psychotherapy has been very helpful,” he told the veterans softly. “But Buddhist meditation—and meditation just means to look deeply—is also a way of healing. It’s very easy, very pleasant.”

The veterans, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with me, were strong, muscular men, but not cocky—it was as though they’d had the corners knocked off. Many were social workers for the Veterans’ Administration, and most had been in therapy and sharing groups. All had suffered what one called “inner bruises” from the war—bruises simultaneously political, psychological, and spiritual. One had burned a village on a routine mission; another had coordinated bombing raids. A third had shot two Vietnamese to death on Nui Ba Dinh, the Black Virgin Mountain, when he was a young soldier. Later, he found family photographs on their bodies.

We were silent for most of the first three days. Every morning we meditated, ate a silent breakfast, and took a slow walk, staying aware of our breath, past orange groves and beds of purple statice. In short, daily lectures, Nhat Hanh recommended against calling up emotions intentionally. “Sometimes we think we have to express our feelings In order to feel better,” he said, challenging the Western psychological tradition of emotional release. “But sometimes you don’t have to touch your suffering a lot. You should have a reserve of refreshing images to counterbalance the suffering within you.”

On the third morning, I sat in the meditation hail next to a slim, fine- featured man named Michael Stevens, a social worker from Portland, Oregon, who counsels homeless veterans at the VA hospital there. He had gone to Vietnam at 22, straight from what he described as “a world of limited choices” in the foothills of the Appalachians. “At first, I liked the Vietnamese and managed to feel neutral about both sides even though I was coordinating bombing raids,” he had told me the previous evening. “Then, one night, a friend of mine was ambushed, and he radioed our command post for protective fire. This was when Nixon was winding down the war. My commanding officer told me we had used up our ammunition quota for the night and we couldn’t protect him. That’s when I wanted to bomb; that’s when I began to hate.”

Sitting in meditation that morning, I could hear him sucking in small breaths, trying unsuccessfully to hold back tears. “There was a block inside me,” he told me later, “something that still hated the Vietnamese. In meditation, I watched my breath and felt my stomach get tight and my breathing get shorter. I saw Vietnam again—the ftingle, the smell of diesel oil and dung—and I said to myself, ‘forgiveness.’ I moved my consciousness down my throat, thinking ‘forgiveness’ until I got down to my stomach. Then I shook with happiness, with sadness. I was obsessed with saying I’m sorry. I thought, ‘How am I going to say this? Where am I going to say this?’ And tears came down my face.”

That afternoon, we met together—vets, non-vets, and Vietnamese—in small, Western-style sharing groups focused on self-expression, apology, and forgiveness. In one group, Stevens apologized to Vietnamese nun named Cao Ngoc Phuong. “I needed to say, ‘Please forgive me for the suffering I helped cause,” he told me later. Sister Phuong said fiercely, “That was then. This is now.”

In my group, an acupuncturist named Daniel Bruce, who had burned a village as a young Marine, turned to a refugee Vietnamese monk named Gian Ly. “I want to apologize fur being apart of destroying your country,” Bruce said, somewhat formally. “And to all the people you probably helped after I made them homeless.”

Chan Ly put his palms together and bowed until his knees and forehead touched the carpet. “I have been a monk for many years, and I thought I could control my emotions, but today I can’t,” hesaid.1wasbornmn 1948, in a tent, because the French troops were bombarding my father’s house, and I have wandered ever since. During the war, I used to give funeral services, but my heart was hard, like ice, like steel, because the suffering was too much. Then I got a telegram saying my own brother had been killed, and I knew true suffering.” Chan Ly turned to the veterans. “Today the voice of Jesus Christ speaks through you.”

As I looked around the room at us all— Vietnamese and veterans, warriors and victims—I could not tell whether the healing we gave each other was spiritual or psychological.