Mark Epstein. The Zen of therapy

PhilosophyPodcasts.Org

Mark Epstein M.D. (private practice, NYC)

The zen of therapy: Uncovering a hidden kindness in life

“A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . 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."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review

A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year’s worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness—for his patients, and for himself

For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year’s worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life's difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can “hold” our awareness for us—and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted our selves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home. TRANSCRIPT Transcription: August Baker: This is August Baker, and today I'm happy to be able to speak with Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and private practice in New York City. And the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Seems to be one of the pioneers of using Buddhism in medicine in the United States. He worked with all the usual suspects that you learn about as an American looking into this issue; Herbert Benson, Ron Doss, Robert Thurman, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, not to mention the current Dalai Lama, who Dr. Epstein met very early on, and who actually also wrote the introduction to Mark's first book. Today, I'm pleased to talk to Dr. Epstein about his newest book, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness. Welcome, Mark. Dr. Epstein: Thank you so much. August Baker: I will say to our listeners that I actually listened to this book. If you're listening to this podcast, you used to listening, and I listened to this book. Dr. Epstein: You listened to the book? August Baker: I did. Dr. Epstein: You heard me reading it? August Baker: Yes. It was it a very good way of doing it. In fact, I listened to it twice. And it's a very enjoyable read. As you point out, it is always interesting, there are a lot of case examples, you're talking about actual patients and what's going on, and those are always interesting, as you point out. But it works well in the car. Dr. Epstein: That's good. August Baker: So to give you an open-ended prompt to start, it seems like for this book you decided to take a look at your own process and see how Buddhism has... You developed a style, and now you want to step back and say, "How did Buddhism affect my style?" Dr. Epstein: Yeah. Well, I developed a style as a therapist. I also developed a style as a writer. So if I can talk for a little bit, I can sort of flesh that out, what you're bringing up right from the beginning. When I first started writing, I didn't really think of myself as a writer. I knew I was a therapist, but then, I felt sort of compelled to be a translator in a certain way, of Buddhist psychological thought into western psychodynamic, psychoanalytic language, which is the language of the mind, that we speak in this country. So I set about at the beginning, trying to make sense of the concepts like ego and egolessness and emptiness, and what do we mean by that on the Buddhist side, what do we mean by that on the psychotherapy side. But when I continued writing, I found that what enlivened the writing was if I could talk from a personal place about my own experience. And the first book I wrote, you mentioned it already, the one the Dalai Lama wrote the introduction for, was called Thoughts Without a Thinker. And the third part of Thoughts Without a Thinker, I started writing a little bit from a personal perspective, more around being a meditator than being a therapist. But I thought to myself that if this meditation thing really has affected me in any way, I should be able to describe it in some kind of personal terms. So I sort of set that as my task, and I think it helped the books. It made them more personal and less just exclusively from the mind and about the concepts. So I kept that up through a series of books until this last one. But what I had resisted in my own writing was more writing from inside the place of the therapist. I wrote about being on retreats, on Buddhist retreats, and trying to be mindful, and wishing for a piece of toast on my retreat, and then taking the first bite of the toast, and then the toast disappeared, and who ate my toast.I had fun with that kind of writing. The question that people are always asking me is, "How do you bring your Buddhist leanings into the actual psychotherapy practice?" And I always resisted giving a good answer to that question because I didn't really know how I was doing it. I just trusted that if it was happening in me, it should be coming through in some way. But- August Baker: Isn't that kind of a Buddhist way of looking at it? Dr. Epstein: It might be kind of a Buddhist... At its best, it's a Buddhist way of looking at it. At its worst, it's a defensive maneuver to not answer the question. I think I really didn't know. I think I really was trusting that it must be coming through somehow. But I had run out of things to write about, but I had one day set aside for writing, and I didn't quite know what to do with it. So I decided, "Okay, why don't I look at my own work? Because mostly what I'm doing is therapy with people." So I decided to pick out one session a week where something interesting happened. Maybe I was bringing some Buddhist something or maybe there was just some kind of clearing or opening. Not exactly a revelation, because I don't think therapy works that way, but some little movement. And I forced myself to write down the session, which I don't normally do. In the aftermath, when the patient left, I would scribble down notes. And then in my writing day I would try to write it up in a sort of literary fashion. And I did that for a year. So I had a stack of these sessions, different patients. The only real through line was myself. And then, I showed the stack to my editor, who I trust. And she said, "Oh, this could be a book. I think there's something here. But you are the only through line. So I think what you should do is go through them and write a reflection, or a commentary. Show us more of yourself from behind the curtain of being the anonymous therapist. So then, COVID happened, because I did all this before COVID, it was the last year of face-to-face therapy, it turned out to be. So the first year of COVID, I spent going through the sessions and really working with them and writing about what might have been going on inside of me during the time and so on. And I enjoyed that process. It brought out a kind of personal voice that was challenging, but enjoyable. And so, that's the nucleus of the book. August Baker: Yeah, that's true. It was all great, but you talk about being personal, the description of being in Maine with your family was just really moving. And I also thought that the description of your speech therapist when you were a kid just captured so much and it was very vulnerable and very well taken. Dr. Epstein: I'm glad you listened to the audio book, because I have a funny story about recording... It wasn't this book, but I wrote a book called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, which was the second book that I ever wrote. And that book, I did the audio version of, and it was the first time I ever did the audio version. The reason I needed a speech therapist when I was young was because I had a stutter or a stammer, which I managed to learn how to deal with. And now, no one could know that the tendency is still there. But when I was shut up into the recording studio, which is like a telephone booth when you're doing these audio books, I had to begin with the actual words, obviously, in Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. The trick that my therapist had taught me was that if I felt myself about to stutter, I could change the word a little bit. So when someone asked me my name, if I had trouble saying Mark, I would say, "My name is Mark." And somehow, changing it at the last minute let the words come out. So when I was recording this book, the very first words were a word that I knew I was going to stutter on, but I couldn't change the first words of the book. So I was sitting... There was this long silence where I'm in the recording studio. August Baker: That's great. Dr. Epstein: The voice of the engineer comes through my headphones and he's like, "Dr. Epstein, is everything all right in there?" And I thought, "Oh, here I am, the avatar of meditation and relaxation and stress reduction, and I can't even get the words out my mouth." So I was sort of frightened to go in and record this book, but it came out okay, I think. August Baker: No, it came out great. It was very nicely done. I tend to want to talk about the abstract, philosophical stuff, but I wanted to start... You say early on that you characterize yourself as spiritual but not religious, and there's a funny description of a conversation with your mom about that, which is really classic. And then, I felt that the way that came through for me as I thought about the book after having read it, was this sort of playfulness. I'm trying to think of the right word, serendipity and openness. A patient brings in experiences with Reiki massage, or body [inaudible 00:10:03], or energy blocks, or Ayahuasca, and you're conversant in that and happy to talk about it. And there were two occasions that I thought were just so interesting. You talked with patients about their dreams. And one with the patient Zach, and you used something called the I Ching and- Dr. Epstein: The I Ching. August Baker: The I Ching. And the other patient, Ricki says, "I don't know, I'm wishing for a miracle." Could you tell our listeners about those two cases? Dr. Epstein: Sure. I'll start with the second one. Ricki was a woman who was grieving, and she had lost her soulmate. And she was genuinely grieving, except I felt like there was some bit of pretense in her grieving. It just didn't feel completely true to me, like she was exaggerating the grief. But at the same time, I couldn't really feel it. So that's an uncomfortable feeling for me as a therapist. And I didn't quite know what to do. I wanted to help her, but I was a little bit put off be. So I'm just in my head and trying to be with her. And then, suddenly she came out with this, "I'm in so much pain and I just need a..." Yearning for a miracle. And I was like, "Oh, a miracle. You want a miracle?" And another patient of mine who was a follower of a now deceased guru in India, who had been Ram Das' guru, but people still go back to the ashram where he had been, she had brought me back some, they call it Prasad, some food that had been blessed by the guru or by the guru's disciple. They're like sugary sweets basically, that sit on the altar and are blessed. And then, they're given back to the devotees, and they have a bit of the guru, a bit of the God energy in it. And she brought me back some from India. It's like when people bring you a little bottle of water from the Ganges or something. And I have a ceramic vase that... My wife is a sculptor known for her innovative use of ceramics, but I have a vase that she made early, early on, when she was probably 20 years old, that has all these pennies in it, that I stole from her and I keep in my office. And I put the Prasad that my patient had brought back from India in that vase. So it's there on a shelf in my office. So Ricki's like, "Oh, I need a miracle. Why won't someone give me a miracle?" "So I'll give you a miracle." So I went to the vase and I took out the Prasad. It was in a little plastic envelope. And I came back and stood by her side, and I took out these couple of sugar pills that had been blessed by the guru. And I said, "Here, hold out your hand." She's like, am I giving her LSD or something, or an antidepressant. But I said, "No." I explained what I just explained. And she took it gingerly and put it on her tongue and swallowed it. And it changed the energy in the room. So there was this moment of real contact, where I think I just totally surprised her. So it shook her out of whatever her... It was like her ego was doing the grief, but something was stopping it from coming from deeper. But anyway, we had this moment around the miracle, around the Prasad. And then the session went on, and it was better. But then she left. And later that night or the next day, she sent me an email that I quoted in the book. Basically saying, "Your placebo or whatever it was, you should give that to all of your patients." And she misspelled patients as being patient. But anyway, it cleared something. And it was just made this nice moment between us. So that's not something I usually do, but the playfulness that I think you were referring to, part of my job, I always think as a therapist, is to try to make the session interesting for people, in a way that possibly does shake them out of a fixed narrative that they're telling themselves about who they are or what their problem is or what needs to happen. So if I can get into that in a way that- August Baker: Sticks. Dr. Epstein: ... breaks that up. Yeah, then I feel like I'm doing my job. So that was the story with her. With Zach, he was telling me a dream that was very sexual in nature, that maybe I won't describe all of the details on the podcast. But anyway, one part of his dream was the sort of mechanical sexual situation, as if he was in a porn film or something. That it wasn't him, it was another couple in the corner who were having sex, I think the way he thought you were supposed to have sex, or something. And then, he was being introduced to a beautiful woman who he felt like he had to go down on. But he went down on her, but there was so much pubic hair in the way that he couldn't find her genitalia. And so, he was frustrated with her, with himself, woke up from the dream. And so, he was asking for help with the dream. I had some ideas, but what occurred to me was, "Maybe we should ask the I Ching about the dream. Have you ever thrown the I Ching?" He didn't know what the I Ching was, but I Ching is- August Baker: He had a little- Dr. Epstein: He had a little knowledge. He did Tai Chi. I thought he would know more what it was than he did. Anyway, I have an old copy of the I Ching in my office, and I took it down and I showed him how to throw the... You throw three pennies six times, and it gives you a hexagram, and the hexagram gives you an oracle that tells you in kind of coded language the answer to whatever question you're asking. So we threw it together, and the oracle, the hexagram that comes up has a title, and the one that came up was called Biting Through. So it was exactly what this dream was. It was about biting through the obstacles that keep you from your true self. And so, I made a thing with him, that the performative aspect of sex was getting in the way of the being aspect. The doing versus the being seemed to be what the I Ching was talking about. And that maybe he was in search of the female element, as represented by the female genitalia that he couldn't quite find. And we had a beautiful session. August Baker: The other thing that comes through is your use of poetry. And also, I don't know if you play music in your sessions, but you talk a lot about John Cage. And that was one of the cases where John Cage had used that as a way to put in this, scientists would say randomness, but serendipity or playfulness into a composition. Dr. Epstein: Yes. Well, to take his ego out of it, that was what he would say. To take his choice out of the composition, so that his music could become reflective of the ways of nature. The I Ching was supposed to be a way of connecting to the natural world and the natural intelligence. So Cage, I don't know if everyone who is listening to this knows about John Cage, but Cage was a very important figure, not just for me, but for the whole history of contemporary art. Friends of Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, and really affected the course of modern art by challenging the centrality of the ego by undercutting the artist's ego as the defining factor in the work. But Cage was a beautiful man, who his own humor and his own sensitivity managed to sneak through his own process. So I really respect that about him. August Baker: And I was struck by, you mentioned his famous piece of Four Minutes, and however many seconds. Dr. Epstein: Thirty-Three Seconds. August Baker: Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds. You could tell our listeners about that. But I also wanted to ask you, I don't recall you addressing this exactly in the book, but I wanted to see what your thoughts were on silence in the psychotherapy session and how that might relate. Dr. Epstein: Oh, it totally relates. Cage's famous piece, it's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. But he performed it in an outdoor amphitheater in Woodstock, New York, an arts and crafts outdoor theater. So the performance was the pianist sitting down at the piano, opening the keyboard was the first movement, closing the keyboard back up was the second movement. And then, the crowd coughing and rustling and getting up and leaving and being uncomfortable was the third movement. And all throughout, it wasn't silent, it was the sounds of the Hudson Valley, the sounds of nature, the wind, and the birds, and the animals scurrying through, and the people. August Baker: And the people trying to make sense of it. Dr. Epstein: The people trying to make sense of it. The people's minds trying to make sense of it, which Cage was deliberately engaging with. So Cage's big, his big book that he wrote is called Silence. And his big revelation is that there's no such thing as silence, that there's always... He even went into these echoic chambers at Harvard, where it's completely silent. But even in the chamber, he was hearing his own blood rushing in his body, and his own heartbeat, his own nervous system. So his revelation was that silence doesn't exist, that there's always... So as a therapist, one of the things that I've had to train myself to do, that meditation helped me with, is not to jump in right away when a patient first comes into the room, when it's awkward, and when there's anxiety, because starting... When I was a patient in therapy, I always wished for a dream. So if I had a dream the night before, then I knew I could just start with the dream, and then I was off the hook. So as a therapist, to be able to wait for what's behind the presenting words. People often make up something to start the session with, or else they sit uncomfortably. But the trick with therapy is to be open to whatever arises naturally, and to really trust that what comes, even if it seems ordinary, or benign, or not that interesting- August Baker: Or nothing. Dr. Epstein: Or nothing, that there's always something. So to be able to go with that, unless a person is really too anxious and then needs my support, then I'll jump in. But that being able to wait that extra beat as a therapist potentially allows something unexpected to emerge. And that's always what's interesting in the therapy.And I tried to show that in the book by just showing how ordinary most of therapy is. We're not really talking about the deep childhood traumas that often. We're more talking about the mother-in-law visiting, or the fight with the wife, or difficulty with the stepchildren- August Baker: Bringing home the avocado toast and the soup, and getting the sizes wrong. Dr. Epstein: That's my favorite story. August Baker: I love that. That was the man who looks very much like the young Antonio Banderas, I believe. Dr. Epstein: Exactly. August Baker: By the way, I thought that one of the very interesting things about your book, I haven't seen this before, is that in most books about psychotherapy, where you see case studies, you don't... They're a composite or they're really just the author. Like, [inaudible 00:23:07] did that, and just two cases of Mr. Z, it's just him. And these, I thought it was very interesting, each one, you had the patients read over and comment on and say, "Yeah, I agree with this. And by the way, I remember that session and this happened." But they've all been approved by our- Dr. Epstein: Oh, yes. August Baker: Is that something you've done before? I thought that was- Dr. Epstein: Well, anytime I've used anything from a real patient, I always ask them, "Will you read this over? And is this okay? And should I change anything?" I've always done that. But I've always been very reluctant to mine the sessions because I didn't like having my mind in a separate place, "Oh, I could use this." So that's when I started using myself as a patient. In a lot of my earlier books, I write about my speech therapy and my first therapist, my second therapist, my troubles with my wife. I decided to use myself as the main patient. But here- August Baker: As did Freud. Dr. Epstein: As did Freud, yes. I had a good mentor and a good example in Freud. But here, where I was using the real patients, with everyone, I went back and forth, "Do you remember it this way? Is it okay to say this?" The main thing that people wanted to discuss was what the pseudonym was, because they were like, "Why did you call me this? That's my middle name. I hate that name." One patient thought the name I picked was too fem and wanted a more gender neutral name, et cetera. So I'm fine with all of that. But the back and forth was fun. And I tried to include a little bit of that in the narrative of the book. August Baker: You did. That was nice. Dr. Epstein: And the one you're referring to, my patient who bears a remarkable resemblance to Antonio Banderas, in my back and forth with him, as a sort of joke at the end of our correspondence about the actual session, he said, "And if you would just say that I bear an uncanny resemblance, my mother will be so happy." So I was like, "Oh fine, I'll do that." August Baker: That was fun. Dr. Epstein: So I started the case out by describing him that way. And then, at the end- August Baker: It was charming, really. Dr. Epstein: Yeah, I had fun with that. August Baker: I had never read the D. H. Lawrence poem, the Snake, that you excerpt, and there's so much there. We could spend 45 minutes on it or a whole semester on it. Dr. Epstein: That was my most fun doing the audio book, was reading that poem out loud. I loved reading that. August Baker: The words he chooses are just amazing. Dr. Epstein: Incredible. August Baker: Each word, you could think, "How did that word come in there?" But to just look at the very ending, "And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness." I'll just give you guys a prompt. You saw the whole poem as capturing a lot of what mindfulness does and what psychotherapy does, I guess. Dr. Epstein: Yeah. Both. I'm glad you're saying both. The poem is about D.H. Lawrence in Sicily, going into his backyard, into his garden, and seeing a snake coming up the wall, and he's captured by the majesty of the snake. But then, also gets afraid of it and says that his educated self wants to throw a log or throw a rock at the snake to get rid of it. And he ends up doing that and sees the snake scurrying away and then realizes he's destroyed the moment, basically. There, he was, able to be in dialogue with one of the lords of the underworld or something like that. I didn't know the poem either. One of my patients told me about the poem. The snake, it's been a symbol forever for everything, from the kundalini, to the unconscious, going back to Adam and Eve. So I saw it as a metaphor for both, for being able to look at the horror of oneself, as one has to do often in psychotherapy, but also at all the raw, sometimes violent aspects of ourselves that we come face-to-face with in deep meditation. All the ways that we've hurt people, that when you're sitting with your own mind for long periods of time, that's what you end up reflecting on. Or your deepest fears, your sense of shame, your deepest cravings, your anger, your frustration, all that stuff. There's a big tendency in the meditation world to sort of leapfrog over that and just hope for the bliss that's been promised to you by all the self-help books. But that's not necessarily what really happened. So I'm trying to make that point. August Baker: And the snake comes up even earlier, in the Buddha story, that you've given earlier. Dr. Epstein: Yeah, the snake comes. Mucalinda is the big snake in the Buddha story, where he comes up behind the Buddha, and he's like a cobra, and puts his hood over the Buddha and shields him from the rain and from the sun and so on. August Baker: That was the best way I could think of it also. And one of the points you make is that when the Dalai Lama wrote the introduction to your first book, when you got it, you write that it took you a while to appreciate it because it said things like... He wrote, "The purpose of life is to be happy. As a Buddhist, I have found that one's own mental attitude is the most influential factor in working toward that goal. In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves. Inner peace is the key." And I thought it was very interesting. You were sort of incredulous. Then, what clarified it for me was you said that the Dalai Lama means by inner peace is not what we might think. Namely, relaxation, or the state of, what do you call it- Dr. Epstein: Acquiescence, maybe. August Baker: ... hypometabolic. Dr. Epstein: Right. Yes. Scientific, the hypometabolic. August Baker: Right. Could you talk about what the Dalai Lama means by inner peace? Dr. Epstein: Well, what I came to believe that he meant by inner peace when... Because I was reflecting on it for decades. At first, when I read it, I was like, "Oh, inner peace, TM, the relaxation response, stress reduction," all that stuff. "Is that all that meditation is? Even the Dalai Lama, is he saying..." But then, I spent a lot of time over the years listening to the Dalai Lama's teachings. The more I listened, the more I realize, "Oh yeah, he's talking about nonviolence, like inner nonviolence. He's talking about weaponizing our own minds. He's talking about how each one of us has destructive tendency that we deploy either on ourselves, or on the people that we love and need the most, or on people we perceive as our enemies, but what's that doing for the world?" So really dealing with our own aggression, really dealing with our own anger, with our own rage, with our own frustration. How do we really deal with that in a way that de-weaponizes it? August Baker: There were a lot of great examples about that in the book. At one point you say, "It's not what you are thinking that matters, it's how you relate to your thoughts that will make all the difference." You say, "If Zach could see his negative thoughts, not as a reflection of his inherent inadequacy, but as the understandable misperceptions of where he was, he might not feel so much shame." Another patient, "Cultivate an attitude of forgiveness about a divorce situation." The whole love thoughts, I think, captures that. Another time, "If I am successful with Margaret, I will get her to mindfully observe her self hatred rather than remaining a victim of it." There's lots of examples of this, but that seemed to be one of the key points. Dr. Epstein: That is definitely one of the key, if not the only key. Because that phrase, "It's not what you're thinking that matters or it's not what you're experiencing that matters, it's how you relate to it." That I stole from Joseph Goldstein, one of my main meditation teachers, Buddhist teachers. Because every time I would go on retreat with him, I would smuggle a little notebook into the retreat with me, because you're not supposed to write anything or read anything, but just in case I had a revelation. And he would give that teaching in one form or another. And every time I would hear it, I would be like, "Oh, that is really the essence of everything. It's not what's going on in my mind, it's how I relate to it. That's what meditation is giving me, that's what it's teaching me, to relate from that place of allowance, of forgiveness, of kindness, of generosity, with humor," all of that. So I would write down some version of that. And then, every 10 years or so, I would look through this notebook when I was trying to write something, and I would see I had written the same thing over and over again. So finally, I'm able to talk about it as if it's mine. August Baker: It really came through. Typically, we try to make these 45 minutes, and I have about a million more things I want to talk to you about. Let's talk about Hate in the Counter-Transference, the Winnicott... I'll just mention, you make the good point that Western psychotherapy often uses the metaphor of development. That something has gone wrong in development and that the Buddhist approach doesn't necessarily go that way. That seemed very clear. Let's talk about Hate in the Counter-Transference. The word hate is pretty strong. And one of the things he says is, the baby can hate the mother, the mother hates the baby. And one of the lines is, "Sentimentality is useless for parents as it contains a denial of hate." I thought that was great. But when I mention that to people now, culturally, it's like, "I don't want to go that far." And another line, I'll just give you one. He says, "However much the analyst loves her patients, she cannot avoid hating them and fearing them." And finally, "As an analyst, I have ways of expressing hate." You think, "Well, no, the analyst is nurturing and empathetic. How do they show hate?" He says, "Hate is expressed by the existence of the end of the hour." I would just like to hear your thoughts on that because I just find there's a lot of reluctance for people to acknowledge hate in themselves. It seems to be a very difficult one. You talk about anger at the end of... Your discussion's fascinating. But anyway, what comes to mind? Dr. Epstein: Well, Hate in the Counter-Transference, that's a very important paper by this British child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named Donald Winnicott, who, like John Cage... I would say John Cage and Winnicott are my two grandfather figures, because I think Winnicott is a great Buddhist teacher, although he didn't know that he was a great Buddhist teacher, I don't think. But he knew he was doing something. So whenever I'm teaching work in a workshop thing with Robert Thurman, or Sharon Salzberg, or Joseph, or whatever, when I'm teaching to Buddhist audiences, I have found that if I take this paper of Winnicott's, Hate in the Counter-Transference, and read them bits of it, that it's magnificent. Because it's making an important point, but not one that people necessarily want to hear, about how central anger and even hate or rage is to our psychic experience. And if we're sentimental about it and pretend that, "Oh, no, I'm a meditator and I love everybody, including myself," we're missing what meditation is really good for. What it can really do. So this- August Baker: And what therapy's really good for. Dr. Epstein: Exactly. Winnicott's equating child rearing, in particular in his time, the '40s and '50s, the mother's relationship with the infant. He's saying, "No way does the mother not sometimes hate the baby." The baby, of course, is a ball of every emotion that the human is capable of. Desire, need, love, anger, rage. His favorite word for the baby is ruthless. Like, the baby attacks the mother ruthlessly with no regard for her wellbeing. Therefore, the mother sometimes feels like, "Oh my God, get me out of here." Feels hate. But because the maternal thing is so strong, the mother naturally doesn't give into her hate, the good enough mother, that's Winnicott's phrase, doesn't abandon and doesn't retaliate. Those are the two poles that Winnicott sets up. Something in the mother, which is her inherent kindness or her maternal aptitude stays present with the hate, of the hate of the baby and her own hate, stays present enough to feed, change, sing, hold the baby. So the mother has this natural capacity and Winnicott was always reinforcing, "Well, you don't need teaching for this. You don't need science for this. It's there in you already. You know how to hold..." Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, "Hold anger like a baby." So the mother knows how to hold the range of emotion. So when Winnicott's point is the therapist is doing something similar, in particular when he or she is repairing early developmental struggles, where maybe the mother or the father didn't do it so well, did avoid or did retaliate. And so, created some kind of reaction in the child that gets carried into adulthood. My point is that something very similar applies in meditation also, that one of the things we're learning with mindfulness is how to bring out that maternal aptitude, that ability to stay with kindness with the entire range of our emotional experience. And that we all have that potential. Even if we've been hurt, even if we've been traumatized, even if we're sitting on a lot of our own difficult emotions, we can find that observing self, that maternal self, or now we could even say that paternal kind of mind. And I like to use all those examples because they're not the traditional ones that are used in Buddhism because Buddhism didn't really have a developmental psychology the way we have developed post-Freud. August Baker: Right. Well, I really enjoyed the book. I'll tell you lastly, the image of being out in the ocean with Ron Doss was just unforgettable, just goosebumps. It was really something. It was really great talking with you, Dr. Mark Epstein. The book is The Zen of Therapy. Dr. Epstein: Yep. August Baker: And it was great talking with you. Dr. Epstein: It was great talking with you too. I'm so glad you really read the book and liked... Or listened to the book. August Baker: Listened, yes. Dr. Epstein: Listened and liked it. So that means so much to me. Thank you very much. August Baker: Okay. Great.