The Zen of Therapy by Mark Epstein M.D

Author:Mark Epstein, M.D. [Epstein, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

That evening, I had dinner with my former therapist and current friend, Michael Vincent Miller. I told him about the two sessions, about how it can take so many years for certain things to come out. I have enormous respect for Michael’s therapeutic acumen. He helped me a lot as my therapist and has guided me for years while becoming a real friend, and I have referred many patients to him. In the past fifteen years, he has begun to meditate, and we now share an interest in how seamlessly the two disciplines of Buddhism and psychotherapy can fit together. “You know what makes Buddhism and therapy similar?” he asked me. I waited for him to tell me. “They both aim for the restoration of innocence after experience.”

I could never have formulated it like that, I told him, but it struck me as absolutely true. Completely counterintuitive, yet absolutely true. We are educated to think that experience is what matters, that we must learn from experience, that experience is what makes us mature. But I want my patients not to be weighed down by their experience. Can they be open to what happened to them without feeling that they are somehow to blame? Can they own their attractiveness, their beauty, and their erotic potential without being perpetually tarnished by early abusive encounters? In one way or another, we are all broken by experience and could easily spend our lives trying to come to terms with it. But there is something more important for us to do, and Michael had his finger on the pulse of it. The restoration of innocence after experience. I realized some time after our dinner that he had been pointing at the moon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.