In and Out of Alignment

In the early days of the Maui Zendo, after sesshin, we would often pile into the zendo van and drive down to Baldwin Beach to swim, hang out, and eat junk food. Aitken Roshi would usually accompany us. Once, after a swim, I sat next to him and asked him about something I had observed and was curious about, "Why is it that those who experience kensho often continue to treat others in the same thoughtless ways they did before their experience?" He replied, "They must not be really doing zazen." Over the years, I heard similar comments from my other respected teachers, Yamada Roshi and Thich Nhat Hanh. I felt deep respect for my teacher but even as a green student, his response raised questions for me. Was it simply a matter of practicing more diligently? Our senior Japanese teacher, Yamada Koun Roshi taught that Zen was "the perfection of character," but it didn't seem to be, at least for us mostly young Zen students. Practice, wisdom and conduct were not always aligned. Even experiences of enlightenment did not seem to always translate into mutually beneficial conduct or observable character change. We seemed to get hung up as we made practice our own and lived it.

The disconnects and lack of alignment among practice, understanding, and conduct frequently present themselves in Buddhism, as they do in psychotherapy with patients and therapists alike. In Buddhism ideally they intrinsically interpenetrate and co-arise. However, realizing their symbiosis in ourselves and especially in our relationships is challenging. Ethical misconduct and boundary violations on the part of Zen teachers, other spiritual teachers, and religious leaders from other faiths are one illustration of the challenges.

In classical Zen meditation approaches, we become aware of somatic, emotional, and mental experience while meditating on the cushion and in daily life and train our attention so that we return to our practice or to the task at hand, eschewing distraction and preoccupation while developing focus and stability of attention. In other Zen traditions we focus closely on emotions as they arise in the body and on how we amplify some and reject others. Some Buddhist practitioners, aware of how motivation and intention create a chain reaction of effects, cultivate specific benevolent intentions in their practice. However beneficial these may methods be, we often fail to appreciate a simple fact: If conscious introspection alone sufficed to transform the factors that engender individual and collective suffering, we would have long ago achieved individual as well as universal peace, freedom, and justice. Most of what produces anguish is outside conscious awareness. We become aware of how our activity, inner or outer, has slipped out of alignment with non-harming, or ahimsa, perhaps the most central Buddhist teaching, après-coup, and then only if we are open to becoming aware of the resultant impacts. Although this is especially true in interpersonal relations and the relational field, it also contributes mightily to self-deception; we may be deluding ourselves as to what is going on inside and in our relationships with others. I use the term unconscious communication rather than transference, countertransference, and projection because I don't think these convey the multi-directionality of unconscious emotional communication. I also think these terms have become saturated in spiritual circles, and their meaning diluted and taken for granted.

An exchange with the Dalai Lama at a gathering of 250 Western and Asian Buddhist meditation teachers from various traditions around the world that I participated in illustrates the value of unconscious emotional communication in the relational field to the development of Buddhist practice in contemporary culture and how this cross-fertilization can lead to a more integrated view of human psychological and spiritual development than is available just using one or the other practice and world view. A conference coordinator, anxious it seemed over the Dalai Lama's imminent departure from the conference, posed a long question in what sounded like a plaintive manner beseeching His Holiness for "suggestions, last words and blessings" for the Western teachers gathered who were troubled by scandals and difficulties in their work with Western students. The Dalai Lama took it in, rocked from side to side breathing deeply, waited quite a while, and then responded: "When I'm uncertain or distressed, I look inside and check my motivation. Motivation is key. If I am motivated by afflictive emotions, I work on myself. If I am motivated by wholesome emotions, if that is clear after careful examination, I don't care what anybody thinks [about me]" This response could have come from a seasoned psychotherapist and was right on target in a number of ways. It also illustrates a key point - the limits of conscious introspection: Freud pointed out that motivations are multiple and mostly unconscious. When the Dalai Lama was asked about unconscious intention and motivation, H.H., speaking through two translators - one Tibetan and one a native English Tibetan Buddhist teacher - conveyed that this was something difficult to translate accurately into Tibetan, but an analogue might be alaya vijnana, or seed consciousness, in Buddhism (the container for all experiential impressions, termed metaphorically bija or "seeds"). H.H. said that although he was interested, he did not know much about the concept of unconscious motivation or emotional communication in the relational field.

After nearly forty years immersed in Zen and psychotherapy, I believe that a key missing piece in Buddhist praxis is understanding and appreciation for unconscious emotional communication, individually and in the relational field. There are three treasures in Buddhism . I think unconscious emotional communication in the relational field is the treasure, the "gold," that psychotherapy brings to the alchemy with Buddhism, to complement and enrich (and challenge) Buddhist practice and teaching.

In Zen, many of us used to think that after one, maybe two or three kensho, we were home free - no more personal suffering or causing harm. In classical Buddhism many still adhere to the teachings of higher stages of development that are permanently resistant to afflictive experience and to the tendency to inflict it on others. I do not agree. We are all of us a moment away from self-delusion and from inflicting our "certain certainties, on others, not just while suffering but all the more so when feeling great. Beloved meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein says that she is one word away from a meltdown. For her it involves picking up the ringing phone and hearing her daughter's voice on the other end: "Mom...??"