Even with these reservations and considerations regarding Miyuki’s use of the
concept of the koan, we need also to note that his integrated approach combining
meditation and psychotherapy appears, upon his report, to have been successful. His
client moved through the impasse in his life that was causing the depression, and was
able to develop a new life for himself, one that was more satisfying because it was
more his own, rather than the fulfillment of social and familial expectations.
In addition to using meditation practice for the benefit of clients, several authors
have discussed meditation as a useful mental training for psychotherapists. In order
to do their work, psychotherapists need the ability to attend closely to what the client
both says and doesn’t say, and also to their own reactions without being reactionary.
Epstein has traced this conception of the mental state of the psychotherapist back to
Freud, who recommends an ‘evenly suspended attention.’ From this mental stance,
the analyst suspends critical judgments, while attending impartially to all of the
psychic content of dreams, fantasies, and free associations. Epstein sees this as a type
of ‘beginning meditation’ (Epstein 1995:114). Similarly, Rosenbaum recommends
bringing meditative practices into the daily routines of a psychotherapy practice.
Breathing, relaxing mind and body, allows the psychotherapist to ‘focus on the
immediate experience of the moment,’ setting aside thoughts of previous sessions and
the psychotherapist’s own personal concerns (Rosenbaum 1999:12).
In this collection of essays Young-Eisendrath discusses the need for the
psychotherapist to hold to this kind of non-judgmental attention in terms of the
transference. The psychotherapist is the recipient of ‘sexual, aggressive, or other
frightening feelings’ which need to be explored rather than rejected or defended
against (Young-Eisendrath this collection). Also in this collection, Heynekamp
discusses how the practice of Zen meditation has improved her skills as a
psychotherapist (Heynekamp this collection).
However, one of the possible dangers of appropriating meditative practices, either
as psychotherapeutic techniques or as practices supportive of the psychotherapist, is
removing meditation from its intellectual and religious context, and treating it simply
as a kind of psycho-technology. It is characteristic of American society to treat
technologies as value neutral and context free. This allows for the export of not only
such concrete technologies as telecommunications and computers, but also such
things as accounting procedures and standards of taxation, without considering or
taking any responsibility for the societal and cultural impacts that such technologies
will have.
In the context of such a cultural attitude about technology, it may be all too easy
to think that one can treat the meditative practices of Buddhism as kinds of
technologies which can be divorced from the belief systems that support the practices.
It is not the goal of Buddhism to control pain or psoriasis (de Silva 1997:68). This
may be an effect of mindfulness or other meditation practices, a kind of coincidental
consequence. But this and other admittedly beneficial consequences may also result
from the practice of Transcendental Meditation or Christian contemplation. If
mindfulness practice is divorced from the goal of nirvana, is it still Buddhism?
Similarly, one may ask: If seated meditation is practiced in the context of a belief in
RICHARD K.PAYNE 177