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Summary
Summary
The bestselling author ofGoing to Pieces Without Falling Apartcombines a memoir of his own journey as a student of Buddhism and psychology with a powerful message about how cultivating true self-awareness and adopting a Buddhist understanding of change can free the mind. "Meditation was the vehicle that opened me up to myself, but psychotherapy, in the right hands, has similar potential. It was actually through my own therapy and my own studies of Western psychoanalytic thought that I began to understand what meditation made possible. As compelling as the language of Buddhism was for me, I needed to figure things out in Western concepts as well. Psychotherapy came after meditation in my life, but it reinforced what meditation had shown me." Before Mark Epstein became a medical student at Harvard and began training as a psychiatrist, he immersed himself in Buddhism through experiences with such influential Buddhist teachers as Ram Dass, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield. The positive outlook of Buddhism and the meditative principle of living in the moment came to influence his study and practice of psychotherapy profoundly.Going on Beingis Epstein's memoir of his early years as a student of Buddhism and of how Buddhism shaped his approach to therapy. It is also a practical guide to how a Buddhist understanding of psychological problems makes change for the better possible. In psychotherapy, Epstein discovered a vital interpersonal parallel to meditation, but he also recognized Western psychology's tendency to focus on problems, either by attempting to eliminate them or by going into them more deeply, and how this too often results in a frustrating "paralysis of analysis." Buddhism opened his eyes to another way of change. Drawing on his own life and stories of his patients, he illuminates the concept of "going on being," the capacity we all have to live in a fully aware and creative state unimpeded by constraints or expectations. By chronicling how Buddhism and psychotherapy shaped his own growth, Mark Epstein has written an intimate chronicle of the evolution of spirit and psyche, and a highly inviting guide for anyone seeking a new path and a new outlook on life.
Author Notes
Mark Epstein, M.D., is also the author of "Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective". A psychiatrist & consulting editor to "Tricycle: The Buddhist Review", he lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Psychiatrist Epstein revisits territory he explored in his earlier books, Thoughts Without a Thinker and Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. Borrowing his title and his inspiration from the British child analyst D.W. Winnicott, Epstein sets out to elucidate how Buddhist meditation can work with psychotherapy to guide people off the rocky shoals of "psychological emptiness" and into the deep flowing water of being. As in his earlier work, Epstein demonstrates a keen ability to link Buddhist ideas and practice with Winnicott's insight about the sense of psychological well-being that comes with the primal experience of "the uninterrupted flow of authentic self." Here, however, Epstein also describes his own liberation from inner emptiness, offering a memoir about his encounter with Buddhism as a Harvard student in the early 1970s. As a structuring device, he attributes different aspects of his growing Buddhist understanding to his encounters with three extraordinary teachers: Ram Dass, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. Alas, Epstein's admirers will hunger for more meat on the bones he lays out with such care. Part of the problem is the way that Epstein breaks narrative momentum by recapping material that has appeared in more potent form elsewhere, both in his earlier books and in classics like Ram Dass's Be Here Now and Kornfield's A Path with Heart. Lucid writing and truly useful ideas abound, although the talented Epstein travels a well-worn path here. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Exposed to Buddhism as a college student, Epstein became immersed in it before he entered medical school. That immersion has had a profound effect on his practice of psychotherapy. Buddhism and its core principles imbue everything he does and everything he believes. The foundation of Eastern wisdom is to disengage the mind from one's troubles and thereby better understand that there is more to a person than neurosis and depression. In other words, one is more than the sum of one's ailments. Going On Being chronicles how Epstein learned to live more fully within himself and teaches others how to do likewise. It is partly memoir and partly a fascinating examination of how Western and Eastern approaches to psychotherapy differ and how they can find common ground. Like the best Buddhist masters, Epstein tells wonderful stories, full of wisdom and flashes of inspiration. From the stories emerges a way of being and of seeing. --June Sawyers
Library Journal Review
People who are suffering want to change but don't know how, says Epstein, a New York psychiatrist, author (Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart), and 25-year practitioner of Buddhist meditation. Conditioned by Western therapy, we think that we have to go into our problems or get rid of them entirely, which may be neither helpful nor possible. Instead, Epstein says, real healing involves learning how to see ourselves as we truly are, and Buddhist methods can free the mind to do this. Part memoir and part explanatory guide, the book melds many Eastern and Western concepts in a clear and original manner. Epstein's account of his own journey as meditator adds depth and intimacy. Although the change in outlook advocated by Epstein is not quickly or easily developed, readers will come away encouraged to try. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. Madeleine Nash, Finkelstein Memorial Lib., Spring Valley, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Going on Being There is a story that has kept popping up in my work over the years that embodies much of what I have learned about how people change. It is a story that has served a number of different functions as I have wrestled with the sometimes competing worldviews of Buddhism and psychotherapy, but it ultimately points the way toward their integration. It is one of the tales of Nasruddin, a Sufi amalgam of wise man and fool, with whom I have sometimes identified and by whom I have at other times been puzzled. He has the peculiar gift of both acting out our basic confusion and at the same time opening us up to our deeper wisdom. I first heard this story many years ago from one of my first meditation teachers, Joseph Goldstein, who used it as an example of how people search for happiness in inherently fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory, pleasant feelings. The story is about how some people came upon Nasruddin one night crawling around on his hands and knees under a lamppost. "What are you looking for?" they asked him. "I've lost the key to my house," he replied. They all got down to help him look, but after a fruitless time of searching, someone thought to ask him where he had lost the key in the first place. "In the house," Nasruddin answered. "Then why are you looking under the lamppost?" he is asked. "Because there is more light here," Nasruddin replied. I suppose I must identify with Nasruddin to have quoted this story so often. Searching for my keys is something I can understand. It puts me in touch with a sense of estrangement, or yearning, that I had quite a bit of in my life, a feeling that I used to equate with an old reggae song by Jimmy Cliff called "Sitting in Limbo." In my first book I used the parable as a way of talking about people's attachment to psychotherapy and their fears of spirituality. Therapists are used to looking in certain places for the key to people's unhappiness, I maintained. They are like Nasruddin looking under the lamppost, when they might profit more from looking inside their own homes. In my next book, I returned to this story obliquely when I described locking myself out of my running car while trying to leave a meditation retreat that I had just finished. I knew I had locked my keys in the car (it was idling away right in front of me, for goodness sake!), but I still felt compelled to look on the ground for them just in case I might somehow be miraculously saved. Being locked out of my car, with it running on without me, seemed like an apt metaphor for something akin to the title of my first book, Thoughts Without a Thinker. Something like a car without a driver, or, in this case, a driver without his car. Humbled by my own ineptitude, I felt closer to Nasruddin in my second pass through his story. Rather than seeing him simply in his foolish mode, as a stand-in for psychotherapists looking in the wrong place for the key, I now felt sympathy for Nasruddin, allied with him searching in vain for what he knew was not there. But it was not until some time later, when I came upon the same story in someone else's work, that I could appreciate it in yet another way. In a marvelous book entitled Ambivalent Zen, Lawrence Shainberg told how this same parable captivated his imagination for ten years. He, too, thought that he understood it. The moral, he concluded, is to look where the light is since darkness is the only threat. But he determined one day to ask his Japanese Zen master (who is a wonderfully engaging character as described by Shainberg) for his interpretation. "You know the story about Nasruddin and the key?" Shainberg asked his master. "Nasruddin?" the roshi replied. "Who is Nasruddin?" After Shainberg described the story to him, his master appeared to give it no thought, but sometime later the Roshi brought it up again. "So, Larry-san, what's Nasruddin saying?" the Zen master questioned his disciple. "I asked you, Roshi." "Easy," he said. "Looking is the key."1 There was something eminently satisfying about this answer; besides having the pithiness that we expect from Zen, it made me look at the entire situation in a fresh way. Shainberg's roshi hit the nail on the head. Nasruddin's activity was not in vain after all; he was demonstrating something more fundamental than initially appeared. The key was just a pretext for an activity that had its own rationale. Freud evolved one way of looking, and the Buddha discovered another. They had important similarities and distinctive differences, but they were each motivated by the need to find a more authentic way of being, a truer self. Somebody vs. Nobody I love this story because it connects me to something fundamentally true about my own process of self-discovery. I had the sense very early of feeling lost and cut off from myself. This feeling motivated my spiritual and psychological search, but it also had the potential to make me feel terrible about myself. In my discovery of Buddhism, I found a method of cutting through the self- estrangement that so bothered me. I found a new way to look at myself. In the 1970s, there was a saying in Buddhist circles, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." This was a popular statement because of how clearly it summed up a very obvious phenomenon. Many of the people who were drawn to Buddhism were attracted by the ideas of "no-self" and "emptiness" that are central to the Buddha's psychology. But these are difficult concepts to understand; in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, for example, monks often study the scriptures that explain them for years and years before even meditating. In the West, people who were suffering from alienation or from spiritual and psychological distress often mistook the Buddhist descriptions for an affirmation of their psychological emptiness. "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody," was a way of telling them that their psychological work of raising self-esteem or creating an integrated or cohesive self had to precede efforts at seeing through the ego. In many cases, this was indeed sound advice; but the categorization of people into the two categories of "somebody" and "nobody" created another set of misunderstandings. When the Buddha taught his middle path, he had the temerity to suggest that both "somebody" and "nobody" were mistakes, that the true vision of who and what we are involves looking without resorting to the instinct of intrinsic reality. "Somebody" was the equivalent of clinging to being, while "nobody" was the same as clinging to nonbeing. In either case, the mind's need for certainty was shortchanging reality. The correct view, the Buddha perceived, lies somewhere in between. The self-centered attitude is as much of a problem as the self-abnegating one. We can be proud or empty; in either case the problem lies in our sense of self-certainty. Excerpted from Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change: A Positive Psychology for the West by Mark Epstein All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: How People Change | p. 1 |
Part 1 The Middle Way | |
1. Going on Being | p. 17 |
Part 2 The Obstacle of Somebody | |
2. The Freedom of Restraint | p. 37 |
3. The Easing of Identity | p. 55 |
4. Injured Innocence | p. 73 |
Part 3 The Obstacle of Nobody | |
5. The Platform of Joy | p. 99 |
6. Psychological Emptiness | p. 119 |
7. The Klesha of "I Am Not" | p. 132 |
Part 4 Relationality | |
8. The Problem of the Emotions | p. 151 |
9. Bringing Balance to Relationships | p. 169 |
10. Fear of Death: The Last Obstacle to Going on Being | p. 189 |
Conclusion: The Quest for Identity | p. 210 |
Notes | p. 221 |