Tag: Zen

Listening to Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid’s Ordinary Mind.

Excellent so far. Within minutes I belatedly learned the difference between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

— Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness

This is what Zen means by being detached – not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

— Alan Watts

On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:

  • You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
  • In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
  • Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
  • The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
  • The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

And finally…

What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.

— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid

Don’t expect too much from therapy.

— James Low

When I first heard James say this on his podcast it stopped me in my tracks. James is not only a Tibetan Buddhism Dzogchen teacher but he also spent many years as a psychotherapist, so he knows a thing or two about therapy.

I underwent a few years of psychotherapy myself and look back on that time as one of the most profound and transformative periods of my life. So much so that I even considered training to become a therapist myself.

For me the benefits of therapy were demonstratively positive. So to hear a therapist warn not to expect too much was startling. As I listened on keenly what James went on to explain made enormous sense to me.

In therapy, broadly speaking, we bring with us stories about our life. How it was, how it is and how we think it’s going to go. These stories are heard and honoured. In most cases the process of therapy affords us the space to rewrite those narratives with new stories.

What James meant by not expecting too much from therapy was to recognise that what we are essentially doing is swapping one set of negative stories for a bunch of new positive ones.

In the end they are all just stories about our life, but not actually our life, not the actuality of our lived experience.

Of course stories have utility but only up to a point. We don’t live the stories of our lives, we live our lives, and the stories come after.

As Alan Watts so eloquently said about Zen:

Zen is feeling life not feeling something about life.

Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.

— Meister Eckhart

Wrapping both Jung and Zen up in a neat package.