control because I can do something and I’m with it.’ Ella in fact states that she feels
more a ‘person of her own’, a seemingly paradoxical effect, because it helps to
disidentify with a fixed identity! She experiences this space for being her true self.
A client can be asked to investigate a symptom or complaint with mindfulness, as
a seemingly paradoxical question, while in one way we ‘choose’ the symptom for
expressing our suffering, and in another way we want to get rid of it. One can ‘sit’
every day with a question, for example ‘Why do I drink alcohol?’ on every out-breath;
an answer will come and often can be formulated as a new question. For instance, if
the answer is ‘To protect against loneliness’ one can ask, ‘What makes me so lonely?’
(Kief 1999). The practice can help us to develop a steady motivation for deeper
penetration into our questions and problems and support in desensitization of
concomitant anxieties.
Mindfulness supports living in the present, and sharpens perception and
consciousness. The practice has been taken up as a universal approach, and been
included in psychotherapy, and in stress and pain management programs with
significant positive effects (see Kabat-Zinn 1990; Kabat-Zinn et al. 1992).
Beyond the separate selfMindfulness can be seen as an attention strategy that can help us non-judgmentally
to investigate our doings, thinking, and feeling, in order to get better insight into the
ways we represent our fluctuating selves, and can help us towards transformation
beyond this self. Koan practice from Zen Buddhism takes us radically beyond this
self. A koan, often presented as a story, sometimes a metaphor, is a question that may
sound ‘non-rational’, even paradoxical to our ears. ‘What is the sound of one hand
clapping?’ Koan practice thwarts the desire for meaning and demands a new kind of
encounter with the problem or question. In formal practice, a Zen student must
manifest, actualize, or embody a response, not simply give a verbal answer. This kind
of practice demands a new kind of attentive concentration and mindfulness. A koan
is a strategy to break through the dualism of the mind, and pass by the self-other
dichotomy that tends to keep us defensively fixed and identified with our separate self.
‘Sitting with a koan’ in meditation can help to let go of ordinary thinking and to
exercise a form of attention which for a therapist can be very helpful in the therapeutic
relationship. Sometimes a psychoanalytical interpretation, developed from the
intersubjective interaction between therapist and client, may have aspects of a
liberating breakthrough for the client; suddenly there is an opening, exactly because
the I was able to let go and give room to the creativity and intuition of a non-conscious
stream of thought, from which we can name a non-discriminative, non-discursive,
‘lateral’ thinking; a knowing which has been lifted to a wider form of consciousness
and awareness. The solution to a koan may be seen as the lived manifestation of a
transcendence beyond dualistic self where there is no need for discrepancies of
experiencing an attached and an unattached self, because you are who you are, because
it is the way it is.
A MINDFUL SELF AND BEYOND 99