Bringing Practice Home

By Joan Hoeberichts

The practice of sitting meditation often provides the meditator with a profound sense of connection to everything in the universe. There comes a moment when body and mind drop off and the meditator experiences herself as one with the universe and everything in it. This feeling of connection is so strong that in post-meditation life, the memory of these numinous moments is continuous in the person's sense of being in the world. Such experience of my own interconnection with the universe and all things within it permeates my life with my family and my practice as a psychotherapist. It is my personal truth; it is who I am and it infuses my values as a therapist. It is through our connection to others and to life itself that we live a life that satisfies us. This is the interface of my Buddhist practice and my life.

Both psychoanalysis and Buddhism have a history in which being an autonomous, independent individual was treated as more important than being in relationship. Jung, for example, stressed the importance of separation and individuation, not connection, for growth. Freud was primarily concerned with the individual and how to resolve inner conflicts that developed in childhood. In Buddhism, I have always been uncomfortable with the story that the Buddha left his wife and infant son and went off to the woods to pursue nirvana. "What about his family?" I found myself asking in dismay. The model of implicit conflict between practice and family responsibility is still embedded in Buddhist practice. Traditional Buddhists generally regard monastic practice as the better, more rigorous, more devoted practice because monks can dedicate themselves to their teacher's care and concentrate completely on study and practice. There remains today in much of the world, a hierarchy between Buddhist monks and nuns on the one hand and lay practitioners or householders on the other hand, with monks holding the higher rank. Tung-shan Liang-chieh (Chinese) or Tozan (Japanese), the thirty-eighth Zen patriarch and a founder of the Soto school of Zen, reportedly abandoned his old mother to extreme poverty in going off to "acquire the dharma" (Keizan, 1300/1991, p.174-175). Zen Master Keizan tells this story of Tung-Shan,

Eventually, he completed his study and later went to live on Mt. Tung. Since his mother was alone and had no one else to depend on, she looked for him every day, finally wandering around with some beggars. When she heard that her son was on Mt. Tung she yearned to go and see him, but Tung-shan avoided her, barring the [entrance to the] room so she could not enter. It was because he didn't want to meet her. Consequently, his mother died of grief outside his room. After she died, Tung-shan went personally and took the small amount of rice she had collected as a beggar and he mixed it with the community's morning rice gruel. By offering it to the whole community of monks, he made a funerary offering to assist her on her journey [to future enlightenment]. Not long after, she told Tung-shan [in a dream], "Because you firmly maintained your resolve and did not meet me, I severed the delusive feelings of love and attachment. As a result of the power of these good roots, I was reborn in the Realm of the Satisfied Celestials" (Keizan, 1300/1991, p.175).

Attachment to family is often misunderstood to be an obstacle to enlightenment because in the instant of dropping off body and mind, all attachments dissolve. This is sometimes misunderstood to mean that attachments to family are an ongoing obstacle to living an enlightened life. And what is enlightenment? Enlightenment is letting go of the sense of self as separate and fixed and experiencing life moment to moment. Such an experience may result in a sense of liberation beyond the personal ego and may also integrate a transcendental awareness into everyday life. What could be more important than that sense of liberation in family connection? During my own years as a Buddhist practitioner, the tension between practice and family has been my greatest obstacle, my greatest source of inspiration and my truest place of growth.

In psychoanalytic thinking in the last half of the twentieth century, the importance of connection in human relationships has become more salient than it was in the days of Freud and Jung. Beginning with the Object Relations school in England in the first half of the twentieth century, the relationship between the mother (or primary caregiver) and the child began to be seen by advocates of the Object Relations school as the key to future mental health in adulthood.

Fairbairn (1952) departed radically from Freud by stating that the primary psychic drive was not towards pleasure or a sexual partner as Freud posited, but, instead, towards a love object. He believed that it is disturbances in the object relationship (parent/child) that cause all psychopathological conditions. For Fairbairn, the primary drive was toward relationship. He identified relational problems in adulthood that could be traced back to the childhood relationship with the mother. For example, a mother who was distant and inconsistent in her attentions to her child would leave her child with a longing for an alluring, but distant partner. Such a child would often marry someone who was perpetually unavailable.

Winnicott (1965) believed that it was the re-experiencing of "good-enough mothering" in the therapy that provided the facilitating environment to allow the patient to let go of her false self and become her "true self". According to Winnicott, the therapist must be the good parent that the patient lacked in childhood and be readily available to meet the patient's needs as they are presented. The analyst creates a holding environment that accepts the patient as she is, thus creating connection. The patient, in this safe environment, can differentiate herself from her therapist, thus releasing the false compliant self she created to please her parent, and become more authentic. The healing occurs as the patient begins to internalize the therapist and the facilitating environment. For Winnicott, the essence of the "good-enough" mother was this quality of accepting the child as she is. This offers the child the inner strength to follow her own inner guide into adulthood. With Julie, an acting out fourteen year old whose family life was filled with bitter conflict, I allowed her to do as much "relaxation", a form of meditation, in our therapy hour as she needed. She responded positively to the lack of demand on her to perform or to be pleasing. She just relaxed lying on the couch with her hands on her abdomen as it rose and fell, following her breath. For those minutes where she knew I was present and approving of her doing "nothing", she could accept herself just as she was. Ofetn, halfway through a session, she would often ask if we could do the "relaxation", and leave feeling just a little bit better.

Guntrip (1995), following Winnicott, wrote further that it was the relationship with the therapist that cures. By providing herself as a "good object," a parental figure that cares about the patient, who tolerantly sustains the patient's attempts at growth despite the patient's many failures, the therapist allows the patient to let go of the internalized bad objects from childhood and replace them with the internalization of the good therapist, a non-possessive, non-critical good parent. For example, Peter, a forty year-old patient, had never had an intimate relationship with a woman. His mother was a highly anxious, extremely volatile woman throughout his childhood. In the beginning of his treatment, he sat on the edge of the couch in my consulting room, waiting "for the explosion". It was not until he'd actually expressed his own volatility and anger towards me and experienced my calm, non-reactive response, that he was able to sit back and feel safe with me. Following his slowly developing trust through being with me, his relationship with his mother began to improve and he began to form relationships with other women.

More recently, Stephen Mitchell (1993) has expanded the importance of the relationship between the analyst and patient to relationships in general. He has explored a model in which the human psyche is formed through relational interactions between self and other. In Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993), he writes, " The state of psychoanalytic knowledge is not anchored in enduring truths or proof, but rather in its use value for making sense of a life, deepening relationships with others, and expanding and enriching the texture of experience" (Mitchell, 1993, p. 65). With Mitchell we begin to see psychoanalytic thinking pay serious attention to how relationships may enhance happiness and mental health. My own objective, as a clinician, is to facilitate patients building relationships in their life, experiencing their authentic self in relationship, and living their lives moment by moment. Furthermore, as a Buddhist, I would like to see the value of family life and personal human relationships come to be more openly appreciated in the Buddhist world.

In the Oxherding Pictures, the ancient story of a spiritual journey told in pictures, a monk begins his journey by looking for something outside himself to salve his anguish. Slowly he realizes that what he seeks is within him. He was always enlightened, but he didn't see it. There is nothing to search for. He integrates his understanding and returns to the marketplace of ordinary life, but his anguish is resolved. He brings his new insight and his awakened mind into his ordinary life. For practitioners with families, coming home from a retreat is like coming down from the mountaintop and entering into the marketplace of family transaction. In the subsequent sections, using composite profiles of patients, I pursue my interest in relationships and family life as a path to mental health and a home to enlightened experience. The intimacy of a relationship with ourself, with another and within family provides a container that may enable us to let go of our fixed sense of self.

We usually think of intimacy as the revealing of self to other. It is through our interaction with others that we reveal who we are by what we say and do. We are often threatened by it. If we are not acceptable to ourselves, we certainly do not wish to be seen by another. Fear of intimacy encompasses both fear of being known and fear of losing oneself. Nonetheless, the experience of intimacy is enriching and validating and removes, for a moment at least, the sense of alienation and loneliness that pervades our culture. However, the pre-requisite for intimacy with another is a mature level of honest self-awareness.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to be intimate with oneself in isolation. We need others to mirror and engage us through relationship in order to see ourselves. Thus revealing ourselves and being intimate with another are mutually reinforcing and supportive. Intimate relationships are great partners in the path of meditation practice. Meditation practice lowers our defenses and allows us to see and feel aspects of ourselves we might not have access to otherwise.

"In your daily life, please accept yourself as you are and your life as it is. Be intimate with yourself ", Maezumi Roshi (Zen Center of Los Angeles, teisho, 1993) instructed.

Once, I said to him, presenting a koan, "I feel so stupid."

"Ahhh," he said, "If you feel stupid, be stupid. That's the most intimate."

Admitting to myself my feeling of stupidity was being most intimate with myself. It was stepping into not knowing. Allowing myself to look and feel stupid in front of someone else is, indeed, most intimate in relationship. But in the face of another, I prefer to look and feel smart, competent and on top of things. And even with myself, I would prefer to deny the feeling of stupidity, but being in relationship makes it impossible.

It's at home with my family that I am seen with the least pretense. I just can't keep the pretense up. Following a fight with my husband where I can't get what I want, I sit in meditation with boiling anger. Following a day of impatience and irritability with my family, I sit with my own aggression. No place to hide. Frankly, it's not a pretty sight. Being intimate with myself is not a warm, cozy, transcendent experience. I would much prefer to ignore these aspects of myself. Living in intimate relationship with my husband, forces me into an intimate relationship with myself because I can't ignore all these darker aspects of myself. But seeing myself as I am, not as I would like to think I am (and as I would like everyone else to think I am), I can sometimes accept my own imperfection.

It is less threatening to allow oneself to be seen by another if we have already seen and opened to our own imperfections. People who secretly hate themselves will not allow another to get close. Consider a psychotherapy patient of mine named Anna, a serious Zen student, who is very lovely looking and very intelligent and who first came to see me when she was twenty-nine.

Anna couldn't seem to hold on to relationships and felt she somehow sabotaged them. She had just begun a new relationship with a man she thought she could care about. She wanted help at understanding what went on within her when she was in a relationship. She tended toward an eating disorder, exercising madly and feeling "disgustingly fat" whenever she thought a man was interested in her. As we reviewed her history, she talked about her parents with apparent fondness, but over time it began to appear that her mother was an unrelenting critic, who consistently destroyed Anna's self esteem. Although Anna denied her mother's comments affected her, my dismay at what she reported gradually allowed Anna to see that remarks such as "You'll never be able to keep a man -- if you don't dump them first, they'll dump you" left her depleted and insecure. Her mother was toxic; leaving her feeling that at her core she wasn't OK. Sitting meditation was difficult for her because she couldn't sit with the corrosive anxiety that ate away her inadequate self. She felt empty.

I encouraged her to be with both her emptiness and anxiety on the cushion and in the consulting room. Her habit was to keep very busy as a defense against being present to herself. She very slowly began to reveal the inner terror of being known by another. Revealing herself entailed that she had to face that which she hid so well. She pretended to herself that she was fine; that she was her pretty, intelligent exterior self. But in permitting me to see the terror, inadequacy, and shame, she, herself, faced her own interior. If she could allow herself to be seen by me, she might be able to allow a man to see her as well. She is now thirty-four and she still hides from me in a pattern not unlike the one in which she engages men. She cancels many appointments but works diligently when she appears. Following an intense session she may miss the following session. There is a limit to how much intimacy with herself and another (me) she can endure. Meanwhile, in parallel process in her current relationship, she approaches and leaves her boyfriend, circling closer and moving out again and again. Her meditation pattern is similar. She can rarely stay a whole sesshin (a week-long period of practice) because it is so painful for her to sit with herself. She usually leaves early. Anna has an intense desire to be viewed as "spiritual and good." There's a fragile grandiosity in her goodness that is not uncommon among religious practitioners. Being present and seeing herself honestly is intensely painful and disturbs her self-view of her goodness. Like many people on a spiritual path or like those involved in social action and doing good for others, she relates only to the part of herself that is loving and kind, and denies, even to herself, her angry, hating, darker aspect. Deep spiritual practice demands the integration and acceptance of our own darkest selves. When we can acknowledge and accept our own shadows, our negative self-judgment lightens. When our negative self-judgment lightens, our negative judgment of others lightens simultaneously, and compassion for the pain of others arises. Anna, still struggles with her own negative self-judgment, coming of course, from her harsh and critical mother, but she continues to move towards self-acceptance in slow but conscious steps.

I see signs of improvement in her relationship to herself and the people she wishes to be close to. Anna has women friends now, and she sees them regularly. Her present relationship with a man is one she's been in and out of over a period of four years, but she's never let him go entirely and he seems to wait patiently or impatiently, struggling with his own similar issues, I presume. Anna is much more aware of how her mother brings her down with her toxic remarks and she fights back instead of swallowing the poison. She demands less perfection of herself and projects less criticism onto others. She risks being herself in her life. Her relationship is slowly maturing. As she becomes more intimate with herself, she can allow another more fully into her life.

Couples represent a large proportion of my psychotherapy practice. Much of my work with couples is to help them let go of their fixed mind and move into a more fluid connection with each other. Learning to disagree and, at the same time, remain connected to one another can be an awakening. They come to understand that the other's point of view holds validity from the other's world and it need not threaten them. They need not feel judged or criticized by the other's lack of agreement. Hendrix writes (1998, p.136-137),

When you accept the limited nature of your own perceptions and become more receptive to the truth of your partner's perceptions, a whole world opens up to you. Instead of seeing your partner's differing views as a source of conflict, you find them a source of knowledge: "What are you seeing that I am not seeing?' "What have you learned that I have yet to learn?" Marriage gives you the opportunity to be schooled in your own reality and in the reality of another person.

Terry and Joe recently appeared in my office in a significant amount of pain. They were both lawyers, and they viewed marital conflict as they viewed court cases. There had to be a winner and a loser. Every argument was a competition. They could not grasp that they could both be right, but just in disagreement. They had two small children and a newborn infant. The conflict they presented was over their second child, a two-year-old girl who was not happy about the recent arrival of a new baby in the family. Terry had elected to stay home with her children and was no longer working. She had been at the lake with the children for summer vacation, and Joe had arrived one Friday night to spend the weekend with his family. He had bought a present for his oldest child but nothing for the middle one because he hadn't thought that a Knicks jersey -- his present for the oldest -- was appropriate for a two-year-old girl. However, the two-year-old was inconsolable that her Daddy had nothing for her and Terry was very angry that Joe had not anticipated her distress -- nor did he seem disturbed by the child's hurt. In Terry's pain she lashed out at Joe, who responded by becoming more fixed in his position that he was right. His view was he hadn't done anything wrong and their disagreement was Terry's fault because she couldn't contain her anger.

In the treatment process, I wanted the couple to experience each other's world and maintain a connection despite holding their different viewpoints. My objective was that they stay in process until they could come to understand the other's pain, respect the other's viewpoint and let go of the rigidity of "I am right and you are wrong."

In the work with Terry and Joe, they struggled for several weeks with just listening and mirroring what the other said. Their own emotions would get in the way, and they would interrupt one another and not be able to follow what the other was saying because their own feelings were so strong. Maintaining the connection was impossible for them those first weeks because they could not understand how to take in the other's point of view and respect it without feeling like they were betraying their own viewpoint.

At first, Joe refused to say Terry's position made sense to him because he needed her to be wrong. He insisted that if he said her position made sense to him, he would himself be wrong. He could not grasp that it was possible to hear and understand her position without agreeing with it. At first grudgingly, then more willingly, he would acknowledge that the position made sense when viewed from within her world. And then one day he was able to say, "I imagine you must be feeling hurt and angry with me for being so stubborn." At this Terry's whole demeanor softened and her eyes glistened. The connection between them was palpable. They were disagreeing and maintaining the connection between them. Suddenly the content of the argument was much less important. Terry, in turn, was able to understand how hurtful her angry attacks were for Joe and said, "I imagine you must be feeling hurt and judged inadequate as a dad by my reaction." Joe, in turn, softened and responded by saying how much he loved the children.

Such intimacy with another can push us toward the letting go of a fixed sense of self, which is intrinsic to awakening. As we let go of the necessity of being right and of clinging to our viewpoint, we open to a larger universe. It is living meditation, the awakened mind in daily family life.

John Wellwood (1996) captured the pleasure of connection in an enlightened loving relationship,

Love inspires us to relax into the blessed flow of our being. That is why we value it so. What we most cherish with our loved ones are experiences of just being together. All our deepest, intimate moments are those in which we're simply present -- being ourselves, and sharing the richness of that with someone we love. Not so much together as being together. … Beyond all the particular things two people have or do together, their deepest connection is the quality of being they experience in each other's presence.

Only in this still point of presence can we really appreciate our life. Indeed, the things we most enjoy -- lovemaking, natural beauty, creative challenges, sports or strenuous exercise -- are those that bring us alive and fully here. And when we are fully here, we taste our true nature-that quality of open presence, which is homeground, the source of all joy and fulfillment (1996, p.5).

In a mature relationship, it is the ability to accept each other despite differing viewpoints, that allows the connection to flow into the kind of lovely intimacy described above by Wellwood. It is this acceptance that permits the deepest satisfaction in relationship with others. It does not, however, provide any guarantees that there will never be conflict, as we see in the following case.

Rebecca and Joel had been married almost twenty-five years when they entered my office the first time. They had two grown sons who had finished college and were working in other cities. Rebecca, of Jewish roots, had been a Buddhist for twenty years. Joel had been interested in Buddhism from a philosophical point of view, but he was not a meditator. He had been raised a Catholic, but was not church-going. He was deeply spiritual in his own untraditional, unorthodox way. They seemed comfortable, respectful and accepting of one another, but they were engaged in a conflict that had already been going on for a number of years. Rebecca wanted to be ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. Joel was thoroughly opposed and said he was "out of there" were she to go ahead.

As we explored their dilemma it seemed that not much had shifted in the years they'd been talking about it. Rebecca went on three or four week-long retreats each year and had a meditation group that met in their house. Joel had never become fully reconciled to Rebecca's absence when she went on retreats, but he tolerated the group that met in the house on Sunday mornings. On the whole he was supportive of her practice and felt that she had benefited from it and so had their marriage. He felt she had become more patient and less ambitious, and more accepting of him. However, he adamantly did not want to be married to a priest. They both felt stuck and did not know how to move forward. They felt locked into position and could not see how they could possibly resolve this struggle.

We agreed that their process would be to stay in dialogue about the conflict until it would begin to clarify for them. I explained that when couples felt they were at total loggerheads about an issue, if they could continue talking about it without giving up, eventually something would soften and it would resolve. Even if they felt they were saying the same thing over and over, being in dialogue allowed them to stay connected throughout the process. It was important not to put a time limit on this. For Rebecca, that meant giving up the idea that ordination would happen within a specified amount of time. She thought she could agree to that.

We agreed to examine what ordaining meant to Rebecca and what Rebecca's becoming a priest meant to Joel. Rebecca shared that, for her, ordination was essentially a private spiritual matter and she did not see that her relationship with Joel would be affected. She already had the meditation group in the house that he tolerated, and she did not imagine a significant increase in time or energy. When I pressed her to clarify why, in that case, she wished to be ordained, she said it had to do with making something very private more public. It was about revealing herself as someone whose spiritual life really defined her. She explained that for many years she had been a closet Buddhist, not letting anyone at work know where she was when she was away on retreats.

Rebecca had always been on a spiritual quest and had eventually landed in Buddhism. Rebecca's deepening connection to Buddhist practice had led her to leave a high level corporate position to become a therapist. When I met them she was in graduate school. She was no longer a closet Buddhist but was out and enjoying a new sense of fuller union with herself. She felt she had lived most of her life with a compartmentalized self, one compartment for her family, one for work and one for spiritual practice. Rebecca regarded becoming a therapist as something of a calling and a good fit for her Buddhist practice, making work and spiritual practice one. Ordaining seemed like a next step. She said she was beginning to live from her own spiritual source and letting it lead her. As Joel listened and mirrored, he did not dismiss her desire. She felt he heard her and she relaxed. Her sense of urgency was reduced and she became patient with the process.

For his part, Joel felt that he could not be married to a priest. Specters from his Catholic childhood arose of authoritarian figures cloaked in black. They were unmarried and masculine. Their first priority was their parish. Furthermore, he rejected the hierarchy implicit in organized religion where priests claim to have a higher authority than the congregation. For Joel, priests were separated from the community in which they lived by their priesthood. That violated his democratic instincts. He feared that by becoming a Buddhist priest, Rebecca would likewise become separated from their marriage. The issue for him was that he would lose her in spirit. He feared they would not share a spiritual life since his path was still a work in progress and her path was now going to receive official sanction. He liked her spirituality and was glad that that was important to her, but he wanted her to remain who she was. He was afraid that, by ordaining, Rebecca would change and so would their relationship. For many weeks he refused to budge.

Over time, as Rebecca mirrored Joel, and stayed in process expressing clearly her understanding of his pain and fear, he began to relax his fear of losing her. He could take in how important this was to her and how committed she was to him and their relationship. Rebecca had never intended to distance from the marriage or to be any less present than she already was. She was able to express to Joel that being with him was her practice. She wanted to model how to live both a family life and a committed Zen practice. She felt she would always be a wife first and that there was no conflict in the two roles for her. From this point they slowly moved forward in their process. Joel became less obstinate and Rebecca more open and patient. Joel felt cared about, Rebecca felt respected. He acknowledged that her desire to ordain was important to her and, feeling loved himself, he could love her and allow her to do what she wanted without a break in their connection.

The bond between a baby and its mother is an experience of deep connection. Giving birth is a miracle experienced daily everywhere in the world. It is an entrance into mystery. There is a profound sense of connection with all those ancestors who went before and all the future progeny yet to come. The mother and child in an instant are no longer one, but two, and yet not two either, as they are yet deeply intertwined. The baby cries and the mother's milk begins to flow. Out of a sound sleep a mother is awakened by the whimpers no one else in the house hears.

Not One, Not Two

Infant cries,
Dark night
Cold floor
Baby, warm, soft.
Seeking mouth turns towards mother's hand,
Pants with urgency.
Tiny mouth moves over neck, shoulder, breast, searching, searching,
Seizes nipple, s u c k s
Mother's milk releases
Small body sighs with satisfaction.
All eyes close, lost in mutual feeding.
Infant hand caresses mother's breast, strokes so gentle.
Tenderness deeper than pleasure.
Two bodies one body, nothing else exists.

~ Joan Hoeberichts

The ease of that early connection seems to break down these days, as childhood progresses. The naturalness of the parents being in charge and in control, keeping the child safe, often seems to rupture as children become more independent. Parents have difficulty with children who do not match the unconscious template of parental expectation. If the parents were good students, they assume their child will be a good student. If that doesn't happen, family struggle ensues. If they were popular extroverts or athletes, they feel a sense of failure or shame at their child's introversion or nerdiness. If they viewed themselves as failures in adolescence, they need their child to be successful where they failed. Parents do not realize they are forcing their child into the mold of their own needs and desires. They think they only want what is best for their child. It is so hard for them to see their child for himself.

Family work is the most complex, difficult work I do. I limit the number of families I can work with in the same period of time to no more than three because it is so demanding. I try, instead, to facilitate the family working things out their own way through better communication and better understanding. As a therapist, I find it demanding because it is hard to hold three or more different, usually conflicting viewpoints, in a neutral and empathic state of mind. Being a parent is a very difficult job that most of us are poorly prepared for, so I try to hold the parents from a non-judgmental, supportive stance. However, often the parents are at odds, which complicates the dynamic and requires that I hold both views with equal understanding. The child or children usually want to be heard, respected and understood so I try to facilitate the parents listening, respecting and understanding them. This requires from the therapist a high level of concentration and attention to every minute family interaction, including body language, silence, eye contact, and lack of eye contact.

Family work usually begins with an adolescent or child coming in for treatment because the parents feel the child needs it. Once I feel I have built a therapeutic alliance with the child, I will begin, with the child's agreement, to get the family involved.

Our American culture seems to foster disconnection in families. Everyone is so busy; no time or importance is given to connection. Leaving all the family theory behind, when I see a family together I get them talking to each other. Families don't seem to realize how little they talk to each other about themselves, about what's important or going on for each person. Their daily conversations seem to be limited to organizational issues, such as how to manage time, chores, schoolwork, transportation and so on. Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to families in therapy, but is widespread. The paradigm of staying connected without entering into an enmeshed or merged relationship creates constant tension. This paradigm seems so clear in theory, but in life it's muddy and full of conflict. Parents want their children to be good, obedient, compliant and independent, autonomous, creative, successful. For the most part these are opposing sets of desires. A child cannot be compliant and independent at the same moment. Of course, adolescence is about separation from parents, and conflict is inevitable and even makes the separation process easier to bear. However, it is possible, if difficult, to stay connected throughout the separation process and the difficult adolescent years. The key is listening to each other carefully and with respect, even while disagreeing.

His parents brought Ken, a depressed 16-year-old, to therapy. Ken's parents were worried about their inability to communicate with him except through terrible arguments. Furthermore, they worried, he lied whenever it was more convenient than telling the truth. Following our third visit, by which time I had barely established an alliance, Ken made a suicidal gesture and was subsequently hospitalized for a week at an adolescent residential psychiatric hospital. He loved it there and said it was like a "family." He didn't want to come home. Why, I wondered, was the hospital more like a family than home? He said he could be "real" there and people talked about what was really going on for them.

At the first family visit, Ken began to tell his parents how he was feeling about school. He was miserable. He could do the work, but if he kept up the standard he had set himself, he had no time for his friends. His friends were the most important aspect of his life. He was in all advanced placement courses. Both parents insisted they were not invested in his academic achievement. His dad announced, much to Ken's surprise, that he himself had been a poor student. Ken could not believe it. Dad had gone on to graduate school and held a very important job in industry, so Ken assumed his success was due to his having been a very good student. Dad insisted he had been very disinterested in high school and gotten mostly C's. His mother realized as the session progressed, that she was indeed, invested in Ken's academic performance. She had been a very good student and had subsequently earned a Ph. D. in economics. It was hard for her not to encourage Ken to extend himself the utmost academically, and she kept a close eye on how Ken did --or rather didn't -- organize his time.

Observing the family dynamic, I noticed the mother constantly attempting to interrupt the lovely conversation that was taking place between father and son. It was really hard for mom to hold back and just allow the connection between dad and Ken to develop. Dad's job took him away from home often and he rarely had an opportunity to talk to his son, and when he did have that chance he didn't know where to start. Mom was so used to running the home show that she did not realize she had inadvertently helped to sever the father-son connection. Her own connection with her son was marred by the constant conflict they engaged in over all the things Ken was "supposed to do." They regularly had screaming battles and barely heard one another. Ken was isolated in his own family.

In a subsequent visit mother and son dialogued about all the things that caused conflict. Ken wanted to be trusted to manage his own time and did not want his mother telling him when to do his homework and when to go to sleep. Mom was concerned that he was not getting enough sleep and was letting his homework go until the last moment. This resulted in Ken's feeling highly stressed because the homework wasn't done or wasn't good enough. I did not see it as my job to negotiate this process or to set rules, although separately with the parents I encouraged them to maintain clear rules and to set consequences for Ken when he broke the rules. In the family session, I saw my task as one of coach, managing the dialogue so that they could fully express to each other all their feelings and thus connect. I suspected Ken was not ready to manage his time fully independently, but I thought it would not be so bad if his mom could back off a bit and let him try. However, I did not offer any opinion. I just insisted that mom listen carefully and mirror Ken. As Ken felt fully heard, he began to listen more carefully himself to what his mother was saying and what she was feeling. When his mother felt heard and respected, she softened and spoke more warmly and less anxiously.

There was no doubt in my mind that this family cared about each other. The task was to rebuild the connections among them all. The parents had a severe rupture in their relationship. They had never been able to talk about problems in their own relationship. Ken habitually kept secrets from both parents. He struggled with trying to look to them like what they wanted in a son, but he wanted most to just be himself. My goal was to help them talk about the things they couldn't talk about on their own and help them allow each other to be "real" in the family. As parents, most of the dialogue directed at their son, was around guidance and "shoulds". The parents seemed not to allow themselves to just enjoy this intelligent and lively son.

Working with them separately and together as a family, I noticed real communication slowly but steadily beginning to take place. As Ken felt he could express himself more fully with his parents and trusted that they would listen with less judgment, he began to feel the connection with them for which he was unconsciously yearning. His mother worked hard to restrain her tendency to be overly directive and to interject herself in his interactions with his dad. Ken's father made an effort to connect with Ken by teaching him golf and then spending time golfing with him on a fairly regular basis. There was nothing dramatic in this family therapy. There were only subtle shifts taking place as they leaned toward each other in more gentle ways, tentatively at first and later with relaxed laughter as they began to find their natural connection. This tenuous renewed connection allowed them to be more genuine with one another.

The connection between family members is constantly being challenged. How far to go toward satisfying oneself and how far to compromise our own desires when they conflict with what is best for others, is a constant tension in family relationship. However, it is often possible to stay in that tension without pressing for an immediate resolution. When that can be done, even intractable problems may resolve themselves given patience, time and trust. The key is maintaining that sense of caring, mutual respect and connection while the dialogue takes place and, most important, staying in dialogue. Dialogue itself maintains connection and keeps relationships vital. We are interdependent beings. Our notion of total independence is illusion. Managing our relationships is the greatest challenge we have as human beings, but staying in relationship is also the most rewarding.

Of course, this tension between what is best for me and what is best for others brings me full circle to my own Zen practice. How to be present with my family and participate fully in my Zen practice? That question remains my practice as I continue to experience occasional conflict between my desire to be with my family and my desire to practice.

I have a meditation group that sits at my house every week. One morning recently, the sangha arrived when my house was full of visiting adult children and grandchildren. I introduced a couple of early arrivals to my family and then we went to sit. Later, as we did walking meditation outside, my two-year-old grandson raked the leaves in the backyard. "Hi Steve," he called happily to one of the silent walking meditators he had met that morning. Steve waved back. As I reflected on this with amusement, I thought that, in fact, I had come a long way toward integrating practice with my family. Our sangha's practice doesn't look a bit monastic and we lack the lovely precision of a formal temple. We sit amidst the messy chaos of undressed grandchildren and unmade beds. When we do sesshins my husband will often enter the kitchen and strike up a conversation forgetting that a silent retreat is in progress. And yet, this is my life and it is full and satisfying.

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References

• Bercholz, Samuel and Kohn, Sherab Chodzin, (Eds.). (1993). Entering the Stream. Boston: Shambala.
• Keizan, Zen Master, (1991). The Record of Transmitting the Light (Francis H. Cook, Trans.). Los Angeles: Center Publications. (Original work circa 1300).
• Fairbairn, W.R.D., (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge Press.
• Guntrip, Harry, (1995). Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self. Madison: International Universities Press, Inc.
• Hendrix, Harville, (1988). Getting the Love You Want. New York: Harper Perennial.
• Miller, Jean Baker and Stiver, Irene Pierce, (1997). The Healing Connection. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Mitchell, Stephen, (1993). Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
• Wellwood, John, (1996). Love and Awakening, Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship. New York: Harper Collins.
• Winnicott, D.W., (1965). The Maturational Processes and The Facilitating Environment, Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison: International Universities Press.

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