In Boston there’s a stress-reduction clinic run on
Buddhist principles. It was started by Dr. Jon Kabat-
Zinn, a Buddhist practitioner and author of Full Cat-
astrophe Living. He says that the basic premise of his
clinic—to which many people come with a lot of
pain—is to give up any hope of fruition. Otherwise
the treatment won’t work. If there’s some sense of
wanting to change yourself, then it comes from a
place of feeling that you’re not good enough. It comes
from aggression toward yourself, dislike of your pres-
ent mind, speech, or body; there’s something about
yourself that you feel is not good enough. People
come to the clinic with addictions, abuse issues, or
stress from work—with all kinds of issues. Yet this
simple ingredient of giving up hope is the most im-
portant ingredient for developing sanity and healing.
That’s the main thing. As long as you’re wanting to
be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight,
or whatever it might be, somehow you’re always going
to be approaching your problem with the very same
logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good
enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never un-
winds itself when you’re trying to improve, because
you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that
caused all the pain to start.
There’s a life-affirming teaching in Buddhism,
which is that Buddha, which means “awake,” is not
someone you worship. Buddha is not someone you
aspire to; Buddha is not somebody who was born
Abandon Any Hope of Fruition 139