Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

by Mark Epstein

Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

While psychotherapy has a long tradition of encouraging the development of a strong sense of self, Buddhism has an even longer tradition of teaching the value of collapsing that self.

I knew that emptiness (or sunyata), from a Buddhist perspective, was an understanding of one’s true nature, an intuition of the absence of inherent identity in people or in things. It was the core psychological truth of Buddhism.

had instead developed the responsible and cerebral persona that often grows out of a child’s early attempts to cope with parental unhappiness. Feeling both threatened by unhappiness and responsible for it, Lucy had learned how to hold herself together to manage her parents’ moods. Now in her late twenties, she was beginning to see how her tenseness and criticalness tended to interfere with her ability to enter into her characters’ roles.

Assessing the situation with her rational mind and fearing the dangers of the past, she was preventing herself from having any kind of new, and unanticipated, experience.

most of us have to free ourselves from overlearned responses that become habitual and restrictive.

“My mother would always say to me dismissively, ‘What do you know?’ ” As a child, Maryanne was always having to prove to her mother that she did, in fact, know something. She was never allowed, nor could she now allow herself, to have a mind that was unencumbered by knowing.

To Maryanne, it seemed more important to keep proving herself to her long deceased mother than it was to find some peace and quiet in her own mind. Only very gradually could she learn to turn down her own noise, and she was delighted when there were no terrible repercussions.

If we feel empty, taught the Buddha, we must not let that emptiness paralyze us. If we are reaching for intimacy, we must let ourselves get out of the way. If we want peace, we must first learn how to quiet our own minds. If we want release, we must learn how to cease our own craving.

Just as I had to learn to stop my worry rather than my speech, so did Angulimala have to learn to stop more than just his locomotion. The great problem with our minds, as with our selves, the Buddha explained, is how to stop them. We must learn to relax the grip of the thinking mind that is always, like Angulimala, assessing its next victim.

“What was all that obsessing defending against?” I wondered. “Engagement,” she said quickly. “And why should engagement be frightening?” I puzzled. “Disappointment in the actuality of the experience,” she answered, after only a brief hesitation. Rather than risking an encounter that might not meet her expectations, Kelly held herself aloof in her mind, recoiling from an imagined disappointment. As our discussions continued, Kelly came to see that she was similarly avoiding any intimate relationship that had the least hint of ambivalence. She had no trouble concocting enormous crushes on idealized figures whom she then avoided, but the fear of disappointment prevented her from engaging with anyone for whom she could foresee ambivalent feelings. In the aftermath of her meditation experience, Kelly began to see that by quieting her own mind she could find a middle way between idealization and isolation by venturing more willingly into relationships that carried the potential for disappointment.

The major obstacle to love, I have found, is a premature walling off of the personality that results in a falseness or inauthenticity that other people can feel. Love, after all, requires a person to be open and vulnerable, able to tolerate and enjoy the crossing of ego boundaries that occurs naturally under the spell of passion.

Because of the widespread Western belief in the merger of mother and infant, the feminine in our culture cannot escape identification with a dark and overwhelming force that seeks to engulf, swallow, or overcome the masculine properties of separation, reason, and autonomy that Western culture has come to pride itself on.

Rather than learning how to be tolerant of difficult feelings, many of us have learned only to avoid them. As with my hospitalized patients, our inclination is often to run from our emotions because they carry with them the threat of destruction. Indulging ourselves in thinking as a protective alternative, we try to avoid our fear by staying aloof of our feelings.

In meditation, the taming of the heart takes place through the gradual cultivation of mindfulness, in which nonjudgmental awareness is extended from the body to feelings, emotions, and states of mind.

“I pretend that I’m dying and that there’s nothing to be done. Rather than judging it, take no position in your mind. Stop leaning into circumstances,” he continued, “and rest in your own awareness.”

We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.

Just as the Buddha taught that we should begin with mindfulness of the body, so did Michael direct my attention there. Just as the Buddha taught that giving up our premature notions of who or what we are leads to a more authentic feeling of self, so did Michael encourage me to improvise without being tripped up by my own self-consciousness. I came to see that this was an active aspect of surrender. Rather than opening into the unknown, this was more of a letting go into spontaneity and self-expression.

Delusion is the mind’s tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience.

Delusion would have me believe that I was my anxiety and that I was forever isolated as a result. Motivated by fear and insecurity, delusion creates limitation by imposing boundaries. In an attempt to find safety, a mind of delusion succeeds only in walling itself off.

Just as someone who is sexually abused or degraded in her early sexual encounters has trouble opening up to the potentially transcendent nature of sexual intimacy, so too our culture, with its aggressive promulgation of sexuality, has difficulty cultivating the more subtle but powerful energy of passionate intimacy.

It is that continuing unknowability that fuels a relationship. While there can be intense pressure in a couple to override differences and to eliminate separateness, the insistence on complete attunement has a suffocating effect.

“Do not look upon your body as your self,” he told Nakulapita. “Do not think that the body is the self or that the self is the body, or that the self is in the body or that the body is in the self. Do not look upon your feelings as your self, your thoughts as your self, even your consciousness as your self. Your body can change and become otherwise,” he told him, “but grief, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair do not have to arise.”1

Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which the dying person is counselled not to identify with the various fears that arise in the process of dying but to yield to the mind that underlies conventional reality.