seen for what they are: impermanent components of reactions to experience. When
seen for what they are, choice and transformation may take place (Watson 1996).
Due to inertia in the human mind, both positive and negative impulses may set
up entire sequences of the same (Brazier 1995). Compulsions, mental habits, and
stereotyped reactive patterns are carefully observed and seen through as changing,
impermanent phenomena that do not make up the self. With sustained meditation
practice, over time they can be intercepted early in the mental chain of events, before
mental processes become final products, such as thoughts and images (Brazier 1995;
Mikulas 1990; Watson 1996).
When long-standing mental habits and self-identifications are seen through in this
way, a greater freedom, openness, expansiveness, and inclusiveness of self-structures
takes place (Rubin 1996). Because self-centric preoccupations give way to a more
engaged relationship to life, a greater affect tolerance, a more flexible relatedness to
self and others, and hence a decrease in self-recrimination ensues (Rubin 1996). By
bringing formerly unconscious material to the fore and developing enhanced
receptivity to subtle mental and bodily phenomena, meditation fosters
self-introspection, and formerly disowned experience may be more easily integrated
(Rubin 1996). The Winnicottian ‘capacity to be alone’ is enhanced by disidentifying
with internalized objects and letting go of memories from the past and preoccupation
with the future (Brazier 1995; Miller 2001).
Rather than doing away with complexes, for example, Zen meditation enables
clients to stop being vexed by them and to stop identifying with them as though they
were the real self (Brazier 1995; Odajnyk 1998). In this way, automatic reactive
patterns may be seen through instead of acted out (Watson 1996). Zen meditation
is a way of ‘creating stops’ whereby practitioners can take a non-judgmental,
witnessing, or observing stance, which facilitates deconditioning from unhealthy,
learned mind states (Brazier 1995: 130). From a Jungian point of view, sitting still
in zazen and focusing the mind may also have the effect of withdrawing psychic energy
from drives, instincts and complexes, including the ego complex, which in turn tends
to create conditions of well-being (Odajnyk 1998).
Therapists who meditateMany Western Buddhist psychotherapists consider it far more relevant for the therapy
process that the therapist rather than the client practice meditation. Therapists who
practice meditation tend to be more comfortable with and befriending of gaps and
silences in the therapy dialogue (Welwood 2000). Meditation provides a context for
the therapist to relax into his or her own as well as the client’s open spaces between
their attempts to grasp onto something. The problem is not entering a void, but
knowing how to relate to it without panicking about it. Meditation is valuable for
the therapist because it offers him or her experience in entering the void, acquiescing
in it, and working with his or her own vulnerability (Welwood 2000).
Through consistent practice of quieting the mental chatter and focusing attention,
the groundwork is laid for developing the attentional precision for true listening: the
152 KATHERINE V.MASÍS