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

by Mark Epstein

“A mind that is already full cannot take in anything new,” the master explains. “Like this cup, you are full of opinions and preconceptions.” In order to find happiness, he teaches his disciple, he must first empty his cup.

Afflicted, as we are, with a kind of psychological materialism, we are concerned primarily with beefing ourselves up. Self-development, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-expression, self-awareness, and self-control are our most sought after attributes. But Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go.

When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves—from other people, relationships, or material goods—or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

“Stop trying to understand what you are feeling and just feel,” they told me. “Absence or presence, it doesn’t matter. Just pay attention to everything exactly as it appears and don’t judge it.”

By appreciating that she could never have what she thought she deserved, she was able to relax. Her emptiness stopped overtaking her only when she stopped taking it personally.

If therapy could target the fear of emptiness instead of trying to wipe out the entire feeling, perhaps it would be more effective.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.

Winnicott taught that to go willingly into unknowing was the key to living a full life. Only if a parent provides what he called “good-enough ego coverage” can a child go without fear into the unknown. As he explained it, a child needs to develop the capacity to be alone: a faith or trust in the relationship with the parent such that it is possible to explore the world outside of it.

Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest. Psychotherapy tends to focus on the personal melodrama, exploring its origins and trying to clean up its mess. Buddhism seeks, instead, to purify the insight of emptiness.

The emphasis in Buddhism on acceptance and meditation rather than talking and analyzing is something that Western therapy can learn from.

We must learn how to be with our feelings of emptiness without rushing to change them.

As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again.

This is, in fact, the heart of the Buddha’s teaching: that it is possible to cultivate a mind that neither clings nor rejects, and that in so doing we can alter the way in which we experience both time and our selves.

When we take loved objects into our egos with the hope or expectation of having them forever, we are deluding ourselves and postponing an inevitable grief.

Poised between inner and outer, the ego is like a membrane. When it becomes permeable, our boundaries are temporarily lifted. When we prevent this permeability and instead inflate the ego’s “reality,” we are in effect erecting impermeable walls and creating our own isolation. When we learn to leave the ego alone, however, we discover that it does not have any ongoing durability. Released from our self-imposed walling off, we find ourselves connecting more deeply with whatever surrounds us.

To experience true connection I had to be willing to come back into myself.

The antidote to hatred in the heart, the source of violence, is tolerance. Tolerance is an important virtue of bodhisattvas (enlightened heroes and heroines)—it enables you to refrain from reacting angrily to the harm inflicted on you by others. You could call this practice “inner disarmament,” in that a well-developed tolerance makes you free from the compulsion to counterattack. For the same reason, we also call tolerance the “best armor,” since it protects you from being conquered by hatred itself. THE DALAI LAMA

Abbie felt chagrined by this discovery and as if this too was a sign of how messed up she was, but I congratulated her for her accomplishment in meditation. She had discovered the chronic state in which most of us spend most of our time. Lost in thought, cut off from our bodies, nursing a grievance or two, with physical and emotional tension accumulating outside of awareness, we perpetuate the very sense of frustration that we struggle against.

he instructed them to trace them back to their roots. “Thoughts are like weeds,” he stressed, and they can be pulled up by their roots and used to fertilize the garden of mind.

Thought is not the enemy in meditation as so many people would like to believe. Thinking is quite useful when there is something to ponder. But defensive thinking just makes us feel cut off.

tracing thoughts back to their roots, back to the original feeling states, we get out of our heads and return to our senses.

“You know what I sometimes do?” said Joseph, referring in particular to my cold and discomfort. “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.”

Uncovering difficult feelings does not make them go away but does enable us to practice tolerance and understanding with the entirety of our being. As Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

‘Though I am ill in body, my mind shall not be ill.’

“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.”

Out riding in the countryside one day, he chanced upon an old person, a sick person, and a corpse—sights he had never before seen. The feelings aroused in him by these sights were so disturbing that they prompted him to forsake all that his father had created for him. He left his palace and his family and began a search for peace of mind. He later called those images of old age, illness, and death the “three messengers” that awaken people to the spiritual life.

I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did.