The master said, “It is impossible to take away any one of them.”

— attributed to Zhaozhou

— — —

Many of us might identify our work as helping midwife some facet of awakening. A common assumption about awakening is that the self or the ego is the trouble, and that getting free of it is possible through its elimination via meditation, medicine work, or other practices. An old Zen teaching argues the opposite. The self is one of three bodies of reality, and each is necessary. They are not really three things but one thing seen from three angles, and none of the three can be removed without unmaking the other two

.

— — —

Three Bodies

The teaching is called the trikaya, or three bodies, and to my mind it is one of the most important and helpful of Buddhist frameworks. The dharmakaya is the body of ultimate reality, the ground of emptiness and buddha nature, which has no shape because it is what shape happens in. Sambhogakaya is the body of becoming, transition, the realm of dreams and creativity and the not yet formed, the strangeness that has not hardened into fact. Nirmanakaya is the body of form: the actual appearance of a life in the world, this hand, this face, this particular arrangement of history and genetics and circumstance doing the dishes right now. Gautama Buddha was a nirmanakaya being. So is everyone reading this. Actually we are all three-bodied beings, and the nirmanakaya is most distinctly the realm of the self.

The Zen master Lin Chi told his students that all three were already present and did not need to be found elsewhere. “The pure light of the heart, at this instant, is the dharmakaya buddha in your own house. The undivided light of the heart, at this instant, is the sambhogakaya buddha in your own house. The undiscriminating light of the heart, at this instant, is the nirmanakaya buddha in your own house.” Three bodies, one house, one moment.

— — —

The Whirlpool: When the Self Forgets Its Kin

Joan Sutherland Roshi teaches that the self is what stepped forward, early in each of our lives, and said: I will take responsibility for the continuity of this organism. I will keep it fed and warm and out of the way of harm. That is a real job and an important one. The self, in this account, is not an illusion waiting to be dispelled. It is the nirmanakaya, the body of form, doing its natural work.

Trouble starts when the self forgets it has other facets. A self that has lost touch with the dharmakaya and the sambhogakaya, the wide ground and the strange dream, begins to organize itself around its own preservation and its own story alone. It becomes a narrative self: preoccupied, defended, self-referential. Joan’s image for this is a whirlpool. Things cannot arrive on their own terms once they are close enough to be pulled into the vortex of the narrative self. They become material for the story instead of neighbors in the world. The self that has forgotten its partiality does not stop existing. It gets louder, and everything nearby gets pulled into it. In psychoanalysis we might call this the echo chamber of projection and introjection.

— — —

Every Snowflake: The Self, Right Sized

There is an alternative to the narrative self, sometimes called the minimal self: the plain, pre-reflective sense of being here, in this body, meeting this moment through the senses before any story has had time to form around it. The minimal self can take care of business and function in the world without collecting stories and identities. It is closer to the ground, less elaborated, and more open to the outside world.

The neuroscientist David Linden makes a secular version of the same case in his book Unique. Genes do not fix a life in advance. They are provisional instructions, worked on continuously by the womb, by food, by injury, by the ordinary randomness built into development. Identical twins begin about as alike as two people can be and grow less alike, not more, as the years accumulate. Nature, on this evidence, is not in the business of copies. It is in the business of instances. Every snowflake really is different, every human is unique.

The awakened nirmanakaya is what shows up when the self stops trying to be a copy of the story it tells about itself and lets its actual specificity come forward instead. It is self returned to its right size, in right relation to the wide ground it is always part of.

— — —

Held Lightly

This has direct relevance for psychedelic therapists, where the goal is sometimes framed as ego dissolution, as if the self were simply an obstacle standing between a person and the medicine’s real work. The trikaya suggests a different aim. The point is not to eliminate the self but to return it to right relation with its own ground: to help a person feel, not only understand, that the self they have built is also made of emptiness, and is always in the process of change and transformation rather than a fixed structure that needs defending.

A self held this way becomes more flexible and adaptive, not less itself. She can be completely who she is, with her own history and her own preferences and her own particular hand doing the dishes, and also hold all of that lightly, the way you hold something you know is alive and still forming rather than finished. That is the real work of integration: not to dissolve the self permanently, and not to reinforce it as something solid to protect, but to let it settle into being both form and emptiness at once.

— — —

The Hand

There is a koan I keep close for exactly this: how does my hand compare with Buddha’s hand?

The koan catches the mind in the act of comparing, which is what the narrative self does with everything, and lets the comparing fall away on its own. This hand, tying a shoe, cooking dinner, is already the hand the koan is asking about. A monk once asked Chao Chou which of the three bodies was the original one. Chao Chou would not take any of them away, and he would not hand over an original hiding behind this one either.

The poet Han Shan wrote of coming down the mountain into birdsong that drowned him in feeling, cherry branches burning with color, sun flaring between blue peaks. Walt Whitman wrote that a leaf of grass is no less than the joined labor of the stars, that a mouse is miracle enough to stagger armies of unbelief. Neither poet is describing an achievement. They are describing what becomes available once the whirlpool quiets down enough to let the world in on its own terms.

Fetchable

Joan has a word for what happens then. She says we become fetchable to the ridiculously gorgeous, superabundant world. Not that the world changes. That we become available to be reached by what was already there, once the self stops running its story long enough to be found.

The self remains. It must, since as Chao Chou said, none of the three bodies can be taken away. What changes is that the self remembers it has kin, and comes back into a house it shares with the wide ground and the strange dream, willing at last to be one hand among the ten thousand things: cooking dinner, fetchable, home.

— — —

This piece draws on a dharma talk I gave on the trikaya, or three bodies, given at Crimson Gate Zen in October 2023. The teaching of the self as nirmanakaya, the image of the whirlpool, and the phrase “fetchable to the ridiculously gorgeous, superabundant world” come from Joan Sutherland Roshi. The Lin Chi passage and the Chao Chou exchange are traditional Zen teaching stories; translation sources to be confirmed. The concept of the minimal self draws on work in phenomenology and cognitive science. The material on genetic individuality is drawn from David Linden’s Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality (2015). The lines from Han Shan and from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are drawn from their respective translations and editions.

There is real wisdom here. But I think the piece stops short of where it needs to go, and I want to articulate that gap and why it’s important, from the perspective of relational depth therapy, meditative traditions, and a dip into psychedelic work.

— — —

A Convergence

The piece describes, in the language of neuroscience, almost exactly the structure I called the closed loop in an earlier post. The self-referential brain networks that construct our sense of who we are do not merely represent the world. They actively maintain a story and suppress what does not fit it. That is the default mode network’s version of a generative model defending its own predictions. The veteran who hears his wife’s footsteps as a midnight ambush is a clinical portrait of what I meant by the second arrow: the mind reading the present through a template built by the past, and finding, because it is looking for it, exactly what it expects.

This convergence is crucial. It means the meditative traditions, psychoanalysis, and cognitive neuroscience are describing one structure from three vantage points. Different vocabularies, same room of mirrors.

— — —

The Trouble with Updating a Model

Here is where I want to look closer. The piece’s resolution is that therapy works when safety and precision combine to produce a model update, when the brain revises “everyone will abandon me” into something closer to the truth. That’s a real account of how insight lands, when insight is available to land. But it assumes that whatever needs to change is already represented as something predictive: a belief, however implicit, that can be tested and revised. I’m not so sure.

Christopher Bollas named the material that isn’t represented that way. He called it the unthought known: what is known in the body, laid down in early procedural memory, but never symbolized into anything as tidy as a prediction that could fail and be corrected. It has no propositional form to update. You cannot generate a precision-weighted prediction error against something that was never encoded as a prediction. It has to be met on different terms: felt, received, held, before it can even become the kind of thing a model could include.

This is the difference between the two movements I described in a recent post. Enlightenment looks very much like a model getting more accurate. Endarkenment is the descent toward what has never had a shape a model could hold. Predictive processing gives us, so far, a beautiful account of the first movement. It hasn’t found language for the second.

— — —

The Veteran, Again

Return to the man in the garage in the NYT piece. His brain needs enough safety and enough well-timed mismatch to revise its prediction from ambush to wife. True, as far as it goes. But notice what is folded, unremarked, into “safety” in that sentence: another person. Not a static condition, like a padded room. A wife who does not leave. Children who are frightened and stay anyway. A therapist who does not flinch from the retelling. The safety that allows the update is relational. It is being received by someone else, over time, in a way the traumatized part of him has never had reason to expect.

The piece names this too. It quotes Winnicott’s “holding environment” as the neuroscience-approved version of safety. But a holding environment is not a set of favorable conditions under which a lone brain does its updating. Winnicott’s point was closer to the opposite: there is no such thing as an infant, only an infant and someone holding it. The self that forms in that early relation, and the self that has to re-form later in therapy, is not a private computational system doing better math once the room is quiet enough. It is a relational event from the start.

— — —

REBUS, and the Same Gap

The clearest version of this same gap shows up in the model many people in the psychedelic field already treat as their unified theory: REBUS, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston’s account of how psychedelics act on the brain. Their claim is that psychedelics relax the precision, the confidence, that the brain assigns to its highest-level priors: the entrenched beliefs about self and world that ordinarily dominate perception. With those priors loosened, bottom-up information, sensory, emotional, interoceptive, gets a say it doesn’t usually get. The system becomes more plastic, more revisable, for a window of time. This is the neurobiology behind what psychedelic researchers call the entropic brain, and it is a direct cousin of the safety-and-precision account in the Times piece. Loosen the prior, let the mismatch in, watch the model update.

REBUS is a real and useful theory of the opening. It says almost nothing about what happens next. Relaxed priors do not stay relaxed. They reconsolidate, and what they reconsolidate around is not specified anywhere in the model. Carhart-Harris and his collaborators have always known this, which is why they emphasize set and setting so heavily even though the theory itself is nearly silent on what set and setting actually do. In my own language: REBUS is an account of endarkenment’s opposite number, the loosening that makes contact with the unthought known briefly possible. It has no account of the encounter itself, the relational holding that determines whether what surfaces during that window gets metabolized or simply gets sealed back into the old story with a new, vivid memory attached to it. A person can have a wide-open predictive system for six hours and return to exactly who they were. I have seen this happen many times. The opening was real. The integration, the part that required a relationship steady enough to work through what came up, never really happened.

— — —

The Third Term

So here is what I would add, to an otherwise generous and useful account, and to REBUS along with it: a full theory needs a third term, alongside safety and precision. Call it presence, or contact, or what Daniel Stern named the present moment: a brief, unrepeatable encounter between two actual people, mutual on both sides, that changes something neither could have changed alone. Stern was careful that this is not simply the vehicle that carries an interpretation to its target, the way a safe room carries a prediction error to a waiting brain. The present moment is where the change happens. It cannot be manufactured by getting the conditions right and waiting for an update to occur. It has to be met.

This is not a rejection of predictive processing, or of REBUS. It may be exactly what both eventually need to explain their own best cases: not just a brain updating alone in a well-designed room, but two nervous systems in genuine contact, each altering what the other can predict. That is a harder thing to model. It may be why both accounts, for all their rigor, keep needing to reach for another person: a wife, a holding environment, an therapist, without just building that person into the theory as someone more than favorable predictions.

The room of mirrors can be mapped with extraordinary accuracy. It still needs a door. And in every tradition I have learned from, the door has always turned out to be another person, standing there, willing to be receive and connect.

— — —

This is a response to a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Therapy Needs to Get Help,” by Daniel Duane, on predictive processing and the state of psychotherapy. The concept of the closed loop, the default mode network, and the second arrow are drawn from earlier posts in this series and from the book I’m writing, Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. Christopher Bollas’s concept of the unthought known appears throughout his work; Daniel Stern’s present moments are developed in his research on intersubjective contact; Donald Winnicott’s holding environment and his observation that “there is no such thing as an infant” are foundational to his account of early development. The REBUS model is developed in Carhart-Harris and Friston’s “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain” (Pharmacological Reviews, 2019).

A bunch of people sent me the recent opinion piece in the Times, “Therapy Needs to Get Help,” by Daniel Duane. He takes on the identity crisis of psychotherapy: the Tower of Babel of competing schools, the way “evidence-based” came to mean CBT and little else. His way out is predictive processing, the neuroscience of how the brain builds a model of reality and continuously checks that model against incoming sense data. The brain does not passively receive the world. It predicts the world, moment to moment, and revises the prediction when the prediction fails. Distilled, his argument is that good therapy of any school works by supplying two things a “nervous system” (now a term used to refer to a human being) needs to revise a faulty model: safety and precision. Safety enough to stop defending the old prediction. Precision enough to generate the mismatch it cannot absorb. Get both right, in psychoanalysis or CBT or anything between, and the model updates. The person starts to expect something other than an ambush.

There is real wisdom here. But I think the piece stops short of where it needs to go, and I want to articulate that gap and why it’s important.

— — —

A Convergence

The piece describes, in the language of neuroscience, almost exactly the structure I called the closed loop in an earlier post. The self-referential brain networks that construct our sense of who we are do not merely represent the world. They actively maintain a story and suppress what does not fit it. That is the default mode network’s version of a generative model defending its own predictions. The veteran who hears his wife’s footsteps as a midnight ambush is a clinical portrait of what I meant by the second arrow: the mind reading the present through a template built by the past, and finding, because it is looking for it, exactly what it expects.

This convergence is crucial. It means the meditative traditions, psychoanalysis, and cognitive neuroscience are describing one structure from three vantage points. Different vocabularies, same room of mirrors.

— — —

The Trouble with Updating a Model

Here is where I want to look closer. The piece’s resolution is that therapy works when safety and precision combine to produce a model update, when the brain revises “everyone will abandon me” into something closer to the truth. That’s a real account of how insight lands, when insight is available to land. But it assumes that whatever needs to change is already represented as something predictive: a belief, however implicit, that can be tested and revised. I’m not so sure.

Christopher Bollas named the material that isn’t represented that way. He called it the unthought known: what is known in the body, laid down in early procedural memory, but never symbolized into anything as tidy as a prediction that could fail and be corrected. It has no propositional form to update. You cannot generate a precision-weighted prediction error against something that was never encoded as a prediction. It has to be met on different terms: felt, received, held, before it can even become the kind of thing a model could include.

This is the difference between the two movements I described in a recent post. Enlightenment looks very much like a model getting more accurate. Endarkenment is the descent toward what has never had a shape a model could hold. Predictive processing gives us, so far, a beautiful account of the first movement. It hasn’t found language for the second.

— — —

The Veteran, Again

Return to the man in the garage in the NYT piece. His brain needs enough safety and enough well-timed mismatch to revise its prediction from ambush to wife. True, as far as it goes. But notice what is folded, unremarked, into “safety” in that sentence: another person. Not a static condition, like a padded room. A wife who does not leave. Children who are frightened and stay anyway. A therapist who does not flinch from the retelling. The safety that allows the update is relational. It is being received by someone else, over time, in a way the traumatized part of him has never had reason to expect.

The piece names this too. It quotes Winnicott’s “holding environment” as the neuroscience-approved version of safety. But a holding environment is not a set of favorable conditions under which a lone brain does its updating. Winnicott’s point was closer to the opposite: there is no such thing as an infant, only an infant and someone holding it. The self that forms in that early relation, and the self that has to re-form later in therapy, is not a private computational system doing better math once the room is quiet enough. It is a relational event from the start.

— — —

REBUS, and the Same Gap

The clearest version of this same gap shows up in the model many people in the psychedelic field already treat as their unified theory: REBUS, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston’s account of how psychedelics act on the brain. Their claim is that psychedelics relax the precision, the confidence, that the brain assigns to its highest-level priors: the entrenched beliefs about self and world that ordinarily dominate perception. With those priors loosened, bottom-up information, sensory, emotional, interoceptive, gets a say it doesn’t usually get. The system becomes more plastic, more revisable, for a window of time. This is the neurobiology behind what psychedelic researchers call the entropic brain, and it is a direct cousin of the safety-and-precision account in the Times piece. Loosen the prior, let the mismatch in, watch the model update.

REBUS is a real and useful theory of the opening. It says almost nothing about what happens next. Relaxed priors do not stay relaxed. They reconsolidate, and what they reconsolidate around is not specified anywhere in the model. Carhart-Harris and his collaborators have always known this, which is why they emphasize set and setting so heavily even though the theory itself is nearly silent on what set and setting actually do. In my own language: REBUS is an account of endarkenment’s opposite number, the loosening that makes contact with the unthought known briefly possible. It has no account of the encounter itself, the relational holding that determines whether what surfaces during that window gets metabolized or simply gets sealed back into the old story with a new, vivid memory attached to it. A person can have a wide-open predictive system for six hours and return to exactly who they were. I have seen this happen many times. The opening was real. The integration, the part that required a relationship steady enough to work through what came up, never really happened.

— — —

The Third Term

So here is what I would add, to an otherwise generous and useful account, and to REBUS along with it: a full theory needs a third term, alongside safety and precision. Call it presence, or contact, or what Daniel Stern named the present moment: a brief, unrepeatable encounter between two actual people, mutual on both sides, that changes something neither could have changed alone. Stern was careful that this is not simply the vehicle that carries an interpretation to its target, the way a safe room carries a prediction error to a waiting brain. The present moment is where the change happens. It cannot be manufactured by getting the conditions right and waiting for an update to occur. It has to be met.

This is not a rejection of predictive processing, or of REBUS. It may be exactly what both eventually need to explain their own best cases: not just a brain updating alone in a well-designed room, but two nervous systems in genuine contact, each altering what the other can predict. That is a harder thing to model. It may be why both accounts, for all their rigor, keep needing to reach for another person: a wife, a holding environment, an therapist, without just building that person into the theory as someone more than favorable predictions.

The room of mirrors can be mapped with extraordinary accuracy. It still needs a door. And in every tradition I have learned from, the door has always turned out to be another person, standing there, willing to be receive and connect.

— — —

This is a response to a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Therapy Needs to Get Help,” by Daniel Duane, on predictive processing and the state of psychotherapy. The concept of the closed loop, the default mode network, and the second arrow are drawn from earlier posts in this series and from the book I’m writing, Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. Christopher Bollas’s concept of the unthought known appears throughout his work; Daniel Stern’s present moments are developed in his research on intersubjective contact; Donald Winnicott’s holding environment and his observation that “there is no such thing as an infant” are foundational to his account of early development. The REBUS model is developed in Carhart-Harris and Friston’s “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain” (Pharmacological Reviews, 2019).

— Hakuin Ekaku, Praise Song for Meditation

A core teaching of the dharma is our inherent Buddha-nature: every person already has a pure, awakened mind, whether they realize it or not. It is not earned through years of discipline, not through becoming a better person or spiritual enough — it was never on offer under those terms to begin with. Practice doesn’t build this mind. It clears the stress and distraction and confusion that keep you from noticing it was never absent. And it isn’t somewhere ahead of you, waiting at the end of enough effort. It’s the ground you’re already standing on, right now, whether or not you can feel it underfoot. The work of practice is not improvement. It’s recognition.

Here I want to explore the radical implications of the teaching of buddha-nature, why it’s hard to trust, and what might shift when we stop treating awakening as something to earn.

— — —

Buddha-Nature

Buddha-nature is one of the oldest and most repeated teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It holds that the true nature of being is luminous: open, whole, always changing, and interdependent. Every being has this nature, without exception. Buddha-nature is not a potential to develop but a truth of what mind already is, underneath the weather of thought and story that tends to obscure it.

The term entered Mahayana teaching early, close in meaning to tathagatagarbha, often translated as the womb of the Buddhas — the sense that awakening is not created but already present, just waiting to be born into recognition. The Avatamsaka Sutra gave this its most vivid image: Indra’s net, a cosmic web in which every point reflects every other point, each thing distinct and at the same time inseparable from the whole. Buddha-nature, in this picture, isn’t an individual possession. Rather it’s what you are made of by virtue of being here at all.

Hakuin’s line makes the same point more plainly. Water and ice are the same substance in two different states. You don’t need to go looking for the water. You need only enough warmth for the ice to remember what it already is.

— — —

The Self Like a Cloud

If we really take the teaching of buddha-nature to heart, we have to let go of the self improvement project. Awakening to buddha-nature means breaking free from the conviction that we are only the small self that can be perfected: the self built from body, thought, history, habit, possession, relationship, everything we can point to and call mine. That small self is real, but maybe it’s too real to most of us. It is also, on inspection, more like a cloud than a stone. A cloud is a genuine formation, visible, with real effects. But it has no fixed edge. No graspable core. It’s constantly becoming something else. Always in flux, always impermanent.

Buddha-nature is the recognition that this isn’t a problem. We don’t require an enduring self to be whole. When we stop gripping the idea that we need one, what we find on the other side isn’t emptiness in the frightening sense of a void. It’s actually aliveness and authenticity unobstructed by the story we’d been mistaking for the whole of ourselves. Defensiveness eases because there’s less that needs protecting. Grasping eases because there’s less that needs to be secured. What’s left isn’t nothing. But it’s more like a luminous cloud than a sculpted self.

— — —

Why It’s Hard to Trust

If this is our nature, why does sitting down to meditate mean wading through agitation, doubt, and dullness first? Layers of looping thought, old griefs, boredom, static? The traditional answer is that buddha-nature is obscured rather than absent, the way clouds cover a sky that hasn’t gone anywhere. What covers it is ordinary: identity, story, stuck emotion, inherited patterns.

There’s also a harder, more structural answer, and it has to do with what we were built for. Evolution did not design us for liberation. It designed us to notice threat, to protect a boundary, to keep a small and vigilant self running the show, because the ancestors who did that survived to pass the design on. That inheritance is not a flaw to be ashamed of. It’s the architecture we’re working with, and it helps to befriend it. It means the small-self orientation isn’t a mistake we can simply see through and be done with. It’s load-bearing. Recognizing buddha-nature doesn’t require dismantling that architecture, it just helps us see it’s not the whole of what we are.

Zen master Keizan, in the Zazen-Yojinki, describes zazen meditation as entering directly into the ocean of buddha-nature. The image is somatic: wading into an ocean that is already there, that has been holding us the entire time, whether or not we noticed. The effort practice asks for is not the effort of building something new. It’s the effort of trusting what’s already underneath us enough to stop holding ourselves above it.

— — —

A Continuity, Not an Achievement

Winnicott’s language for this was being, as distinct from doing. The infant’s earliest well-being, in his account, does not come from growth. It’s an unbroken continuity of experience that isn’t yet organized around performing or managing anything, a state he called going on being. Most of what happens to us afterward, the good enough holding and the environmental failures alike, is a long negotiation over how much of that continuity survives contact with a world that asks us to perform, comply, and manage in order to be received.

Buddha-nature and Winnicott’s being are not identical claims, and I don’t want to flatten one into the other. But they’re circling the same recognition: that what’s most true about us is not a content to construct. It’s a ground that doesn’t require building, only enough stillness for the construction project to stop obscuring it. You’ve likely tasted this already, in a stretch of unguarded time in nature, in a creative flow that swallowed the clock, in a moment of contact so complete that the managing self simply wasn’t running. It doesn’t feel like arriving somewhere foreign. It feels like putting something down that you’d forgotten you were carrying.

— — —

Building from the Ground Up

This has direct implications for clinical work. If buddha-nature, or something enough like it to be useful, is the ground under a client’s defended structure, then the question in the room isn’t only what needs to be fixed or healed. It’s also what needs to loosen.

A man came to consult with me last year, a retired attorney in his early seventies, about whether psychedelic medicine might finish something sixteen years of psychoanalysis hadn’t. He’d been in treatment five sessions a week, for sixteen years. He wanted to stop. Not because the work had failed, exactly. He was comfortably retired, traveling, delighted by his grandchildren. But he still got angry over small things. Still impatient with people he loved. His life, by his own account, had gone dull and uninspired, and he’d come to wonder whether a medicine journey, taken as an adjunct, could help him feel more engaged in life.

He did not love my answer. I didn’t recommend psychedelics. I suggested he start with some ordinary mindfulness meditation.

Sixteen years of skilled analytic work had really helped him. It had clearly given him real understanding of his patterns, their origins, their shape. But understanding, however sophisticated, is still a form of doing. It’s the small self examining the small self, adding rooms to a house that was already extensively furnished. My sense was that he wanted a kind of magic psychedelic fix that would deliver him to a state of permanent happiness and perfection. One could argue that a psychedelic journey could lead to insight into the futility of that striving, but I wanted to prepare the ground first, with practice in being with life as it is. Meditation trains the capacity to let the doing quiet, long enough for what’s underneath it to be met directly rather than avoided. Here we can meet life exactly as it is, and bless it.

This client’s buddha-nature was present, but it was thoroughly obscured by a self that had become remarkably accomplished at examining and improving itself without ever quite setting the examining down.

In Hakuin’s language, ice isn’t wrong, a self isn’t bad, and it isn’t a mistake to correct. It’s a form water takes under certain conditions, useful and real while those conditions hold. But it is not a separate substance. Enough warmth, and it remembers. That, more than any effort of improvement, is what practice is actually for.

— — —

This is a post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The clinical material has been substantially disguised; profession, age, and other identifying details have been changed and the case is a composite. Hakuin Ekaku, Praise Song for Meditation, translated by Joan Sutherland. Yasutani’s line on impermanence and Buddha- or Dharma-nature — source and date needed. Keizan, Zazen-Yojinki, Points to Keep in Mind While Practicing Zazen — translator and edition needed.

A single night of love outdoes a hundred thousand years of sitting.

— Ikkyū

Romantic love is a subject Zen, in its traditional monastic garb, has long been wary of. This post is about what a few subversive poets found when they followed love all the way down. In a world that can feel grim, it is worth asking what the tradition actually knows about romantic joy.

Consider what happens in any long partnership. Two people develop a repertoire that is completely personal: the song one hums that the other finishes, the joke worn down by years of use to a single word, the way a hand on a shoulder in the kitchen can carry a whole conversation. One person’s habit becomes the other’s habit; one person’s courage steadies the other’s fear. It accumulated, always changing, until the life between them belongs to neither one alone.

There is a koan that captures this. A student asked Dalong, “The physical body decays. What is the pure everlasting body?” Dalong said, “Flowers cover the mountains like brocade, mountain torrents so deep they’re indigo.” (Case 82 of the Blue Cliff Record).

What does it take for a stream to run so deep it becomes a new color? Water doesn’t turn indigo on its own. It has to keep going, through mountain and shadow and root, gathering enough influence that when you finally look, you can’t say for certain where the water leaves off and the color begins. That’s what a mountain torrent has to do, apparently, to become indigo. I wonder if it’s also what two people do when they enter partnership and stay and it goes well: they support and influence each other until they make something strange and new.

Zen has a long history of being suspicious of romantic love. The precepts caution against sexual misconduct, Zen was long tied to a monastic tradition, and there is a whole vocabulary built up over centuries for treating desire and attachment as the things practice is meant to transcend. There is some wisdom in that caution. Desire can run us, can make us small and grasping and blind to everyone but the object of our wanting. But the tradition also has a counter-current, subtler, older in some ways than the caution itself, that says something different: that love, followed all the way down, doesn’t lead away from awakening. It leads into the same room by a different door. I want to walk through that door with a few Zen poets from old times, and see what they found.

— — —

Ikkyū, Who Called Himself Crazy Cloud

Ikkyū was born in Kyoto at the very end of the fourteenth century, the unacknowledged son of an emperor and a woman of the court low enough in rank that she had to flee before he was born. He was raised largely without her, given to a temple as a small child, trained in classical Chinese poetry and Zen almost from infancy. He was ferociously gifted and ferociously angry at what he saw around him: monasteries that had become rote, and teachers more interested in patronage than in awakening. When his own teacher offered him formal certification, a document that would have made his enlightenment official, Ikkyū threw it on the floor and walked out. He did this more than once, in different forms, for the rest of his life. He never let the tradition limit him.

For decades he lived as what he called himself, a crazy cloud: a vagabond monk who moved as freely through the brothels and taverns of Kyoto as through its temples, on the theory that a place everyone agreed was disreputable might be closer to no mind than a place everyone agreed was holy. He wrote, unapologetically, that a woman selling her company in a brothel, fully present in her body with no philosophy standing between her and the moment, had more Zen in her than most of the monks debating koans down the street. He wasn’t being merely provocative, though he enjoyed that too. He meant it as a serious teaching: an awakening that can only survive inside a temple isn’t sturdy enough to be called awakening at all.

Then, in his seventies, he fell in love. Her name was Mori, a blind singer decades younger than he was, and he wrote about her for the rest of his long life. What he wrote is some of the tenderest poetry to come out of the entire tradition, and it doesn’t separate the physical from the tender, the erotic from the grateful.

My hand, how it resembles Mori’s hand.

I believe the lady is the master of loveplay;

If I get ill, she can cure the jeweled stem.

And then they rejoice, the monks at my meeting.

Every night, Blind Mori accompanies me in song.

Under the covers, two mandarin ducks whisper to each other.

We promise to be together forever,

But right now this old fellow enjoys an eternal spring.

He writes of the two of them under the same blanket at night, murmuring to each other like a pair of waterbirds who have found their mate for the season and intend to keep her. He is famous for the line, often repeated and just as often misunderstood, that a single night of that kind of love outdoes a hundred thousand years of sitting sterile on a cushion. It’s not an argument against meditation. Ikkyū sat his whole life. It’s his way of insisting that whatever we are looking for in meditation cannot be so different from what happens between two people who have stopped defending themselves against each other. It’s intimacy.

What strikes me most, though, isn’t the frankness. It’s what the frankness makes room for, which is an unguarded gratitude. He writes that Mori found him barren, like a tree everyone had given up on, and brought him back into leaf:

The tree was barren of leaves but you brought a new spring.

Long green sprouts, verdant flowers, fresh promise.

Mori, if I ever forget my profound gratitude to you,

Let me burn in hell forever.

This is not the language of romantic idealization, where the beloved is a symbol standing in for something else. This is the language of someone finding words for what another particular person’s presence has done for him. He does not treat Mori as a stepping stone to some higher insight he then leaves behind. He stays. At seventy-seven he is beginning something he will not outgrow. And then, in his eighties, white-haired, he is still singing to her and to the sky, undiminished.

Zen can talk about non-attachment, and it is easy to hear that as code for not loving too hard, for keeping a certain detachment. Ikkyū offers an antidote to that reading. His non-attachment doesn’t look like distance. It looks like an old man who no longer needs love to rescue him from his own history, and who can therefore be extravagantly, helplessly thankful for it instead. That is a love that becomes a practice itself: a practice of connection, joy, warmth, and gratitude.

— — —

Two Poets of the Heian Court

I want to go back further now, to two women writing centuries before Ikkyū, in the Heian court, in a form even more compressed than his: the thirty-one-syllable tanka. Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi were both celebrated, in their time and ever since, for poems of love, which in the world they lived in meant something close to what it still means: waiting for a letter that may not come, watching a particular shadow cross a screen, turning a memory over and over in the dark until it wears thin as cloth.

Komachi writes again and again about the collapse of the line between waking and dream, between her own longing and the person she longs for, until she can no longer say whether she went to her lover in a dream or he came to her, whether what visited her in sleep was memory or invitation, whether the one doing the wanting is entirely separate from the one being wanted.

Without end

Do I think of you and so

Come to me at night.

For on the path of dreams at least,

There’s no one to disapprove!

This is usually read as heartbreak. But it is also, seen from inside a life of practice, a way to describe what happens when longing runs deep enough: the walls between self and other, between waking and imagined, stop being as reliable as we had assumed.

Izumi Shikibu goes further into the body and the dark. Her best-known poem in the West is not a love poem at all:

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

But it makes the same move her love poems make: something gets in through the broken place. Her poems about desire return again and again to darkness and winter themselves, not as an absence of clarity but as its own kind of intimacy, a place where a person can be found without first having to be fully seen and assessed. There is a reason lovers close their eyes.

why did you vanish

into empty sky?

even the fragile snow,

when it falls,

falls into this world

What both these poets do is refuse to separate falling in love from a certain willing undoing of the self. For Komachi and for Izumi Shikibu, to love someone was already to fall partway out of the fixed and defended self, to enter a state of not quite knowing where you end. We tend to reserve that kind of undoing for the meditation hall, for sesshin, for the long silences and the hard koans. These two women found the same door standing open in the middle of an ordinary erotic life, and walked through it, and wrote what they found there with a candor that is startling for court women writing behind screens a thousand years ago.

— — —

Lunar and Solar

Joan Sutherland talks sometimes about the dharma having a lunar quality and a solar one, a dark receptive current running alongside a bright clarifying one, and about how a full practice needs both, the way the sky needs both. I think of Komachi and Izumi Shikibu as unmistakably lunar poets. Their love lives by moonlight, by the strange logic of dream, by a willingness not to fully know. And I think of Ikkyū, at least the old, sun-weathered, singing Ikkyū of the Mori poems, as something closer to solar: fully exposed, holding nothing back, gratitude spoken right out loud where anyone could hear it.

A long love asks for both. It asks you to keep some of the moonlit not-knowing that first drew you together, the same uncertainty Komachi trusted enough to write down instead of resolving. And it asks you, at other times, to stand in full daylight and say the plain thing, the way old Ikkyū did, past all his wildness and provocation, when he simply wrote thank you and meant it with his whole ruined and unruined heart.

— — —

Flowers cover the mountains like brocade, mountain torrents so deep they’re indigo. I don’t think Dalong’s line is only about the world’s abundance. I think it is about what happens between separate things, water and mineral, mountain and stream, when they have been in relationship long enough. Neither one disappears. The mountain is still a mountain, the water is still water. But something has happened between them that now has a name of its own, indigo, that belongs to neither one alone. Perhaps you know a life like that. Perhaps you are in the middle of making one: two people who support each other, tumble together, surprise each other, and change each other, until the life between them has its own color.

May your years together run that deep. May you keep some of Komachi’s willingness not to know exactly where you end and another begins. And may you get, someday, to be old and a little foolish and entirely without embarrassment, singing the way Ikkyū sang to Mori and to the sky, thankful past the point of dignity, for one particular, unrepeatable love.

— — —

This post is drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The koan of Dalong’s everlasting body is Case 82 of the Blue Cliff Record. The lunar and solar currents of the dharma come from the teaching of Joan Sutherland Roshi. The Ikkyū poems are quoted in [translator/source to confirm]; the poetry of Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi is quoted in The Ink Dark Moon

The wish is understandable. It is everywhere now, in the culture as much as in the consulting room: the tracked sleep, the odds-maxxing dating profile, the self as a project with performance reviews. And underneath the apps and the metrics is something older, a view of what a human being is. In this view, a life is a problem to be solved, and the self is both the solver and the thing that needs solving.

The trouble is that the quest to optimize runs against the grain of what a human life actually is. We are limited. We are vulnerable. We age, we lose people we love, we misunderstand each other, we do not get to know how things turn out. No amount of assessment or remediation removes these conditions. They are not flaws in the design. They are the design.

So the optimizers arrive in a particular configuration. Holding the image of how things could or should be, they have stopped trusting how things are. They do not trust themselves, or the partners they chose, or the lives they are actually in. They do not listen to their bodies or hearts. The present has become evidence, raw material for an ongoing case. They live in a fantasized future.

This is the closed loop I have been describing in this series, wearing a contemporary costume, and it may be the hardest one to see through, because it does not feel like suffering. It feels like clarity, or discipline, or being smart. The optimizing thoughts do not announce themselves as symptoms. They arrive as accurate perception, as valid assessment, as the mind simply doing its job. A loop like this does not resist examination. It impersonates examination. And all the while it is eating the one thing that was ever actually on the table, which is the life happening right now.

Here’s what this looks like up close.

— — —

Theo is a therapist in his fifties who came to treatment after his wife told him she could no longer live with his withdrawal.

One session, he described a dinner out with his wife and an old friend. The conversation was easy, and he noticed he was happy. Then, out of nowhere, a thought: I could be with a more beautiful woman, a fancier restaurant, this could be better. The dinner went on. But the life in it had ended. When we sat with the sequence together, he found his own word for what had happened: the thought had dive-bombed the moment. It came from outside the conversation, with trajectory and intent, and its target was not his wife, not the restaurant. Its target was the happiness itself.

I asked more about the thought. He described a feeling that ran, he could now see, underneath almost everything: not right, incomplete, gap.

You have just given, I told him, a definition of dukkha.

The word usually gets translated as suffering, and that translation is misleading. The old root image is homelier: a cartwheel whose axle hole was bored a little off center. The cart still rolls. Nothing is broken, exactly. But every turn of the wheel reproduces the wrongness, a subtle lurch felt through the whole vehicle, mile after mile. When Buddhism says that ordinary life is marked by dukkha, it is not claiming that life hurts all the time. It is pointing at something subtler and more pervasive: a felt insufficiency, built into the way a self rides through its days, that no arrival ever seems to fix. Not right. Incomplete. Gap.

Theo recognized this. It gave him ground to stand on, a name for the weather he had lived in so long he had stopped noticing it was weather. And over the following months, we got an unusually clear look at what that feeling of gap sets in motion: the machinery of optimization at work, and what it costs.

— — —

Once Theo had the dive-bombing image, he began to see the raids everywhere. Dismissive thoughts, distancing thoughts, this-could-be-better thoughts, arriving reliably at moments when something in him had begun to open. The thoughts were not new. What was new was his relationship to them. They had always felt like clear seeing, like the plain registering of fact. Now he could watch the mechanism as mechanism: a pattern, a timing, a preferred target. It liked to arrive just as he was beginning to enjoy his life.

There was a second mechanism, subtler than the first. Theo had moments of real warmth toward his wife. The trouble began when the warmth tried to travel outward. She wanted more from him: kind words, some spoken form of the love he felt. He could feel the words gathering. And between the feeling and the saying there was something he called a surface tension, a thin membrane the warmth could not pass through. His body was free to move. He could reach for her, sit close, rest a hand on her shoulder. Only the words were stopped at the border. If he spoke them, the question would arrive before the sentence ended: are those words really true?

Two mechanisms, working the same small territory of a marriage. The dive-bombing kept him from receiving his moments. The surface tension kept him from giving anything back when a moment slipped through. Together they made a complete system, and everything the system did, it did in the name of assessment: of the marriage, of his feelings, of whether this life was the right life. It called itself being rational. Meanwhile, dinner by dinner, it was eating his life.

— — —

The surface tension had a voice, and the voice belonged to doubt. This doubt came well armed with evidence. In earlier relationships, Theo said, compliments had flowed easily. He had felt stronger things, praised without effort. Set against that record, his halting warmth toward his wife looked like data. The comparison, he said, was objectively true.

The old Buddhist psychologies knew this visitor well. Doubt, vicikiccha, appears on the traditional list of the five hindrances, the forces that cloud a mind, and again among the fetters that keep us bound. The tradition does not mean the wholesome uncertainty that begins all real inquiry; that is a kind of sacred Great Doubt. It means something more corrosive: a force that cuts us off from what is actually here by demanding a certainty that what is actually here can never supply. Doubt of this kind does not weigh evidence. It selects evidence. It is not the mind asking a question. It is the loop protecting itself, wearing the question as a disguise. And the disguise worked, because Theo could not experience the doubt as a hindrance. He experienced it as rigor. He is a careful thinker, trained to test claims, and the doubt borrowed his training. Are those words really true? has the grammar of a serious question. But every answer he offered was fed back into the same interrogation, and each round produced not clarity but a fresh increment of gap, which called for another round. The wheel turned on its off-center axle, and from inside, the turning felt like being responsible.

— — —

Then one day Theo saw the machinery whole. Looking at it not as an idea but from inside, he said: for my own life, I can see there’s no there there. What was running, he said, was a rogue program, tirelessly optimizing. It claimed to serve his wellbeing. It worked in service of an imagined self, a self that lived somewhere in the future, while it ignored the real moments of his life.

The old teachers had a word for what he glimpsed. They called it anatta, no-self. Look for the future self the program serves, and you find a hypothesis, a shimmer on the road ahead that keeps the exact distance no matter how fast you drive. It is made of comparison, and comparison always generates a remainder, another gap, another not right, incomplete. This is the deep circuitry of dukkha: the lurch is built into the hub. A mind organized around becoming will find every present moment insufficient, because the present is the one thing becoming can never use. It can only spend it. The dinner is never eaten. It is evaluated. The wife is never met. She is measured. The life is never lived. It is audited, continuously, on behalf of a self who is always about to arrive and never does.

— — —

So what is the antidote? Not a better program. You cannot optimize your way out of optimizing; the loop absorbs every improvement project offered to it, including the project of its own dismantling. The antidote is something the program cannot compute: a willingness to inhabit the moment as it is. This one. The kitchen, the coffee, the light on the table. The partner who is actually here, shining and aging, rather than the imaginary perfect one.

That willingness has the flavor of acceptance: this is the life, these are its terms. It includes humor, because the optimizer, seen clearly, is a little ridiculous: a program solemnly auditing dinners, filing reports no one will read, on behalf of a client who does not exist. Laughing at it does more than arguing with it, because laughter is already outside the loop. And it includes humility, which may be the hardest part. To inhabit the moment as it is means consenting to be what we are: limited, imperfect, goofy, unable to predict how things turn out. Yeats prayed to be guarded from thinking with the mind alone; a lasting song, he wrote, comes from one who “thinks in a marrow-bone.” The marrow bone does not optimize. It aches, it feels the weather, it moves toward what it loves without requiring a truth claim first. A hand reaching across the table before the assessment can convene is marrow-bone thinking. Most of us still have it. It is our original nature, before the algorhythms invaded.

This willingness has never been easy, but our moment makes it uniquely hard, because the optimizing mind is no longer only an inner structure, it is the way of the world. The phone in the pocket is an externalized optimizer, engineered by thousands of people to do exactly what the dive-bombing thought does: arrive in the middle of a good moment with evidence that something better exists. The feed serves the better body, the better kitchen, the better vacation. The dating app keeps the next profile one swipe away, so that no actual person ever closes the case. The metrics promise that the self can be tracked toward its ideal. Tech culture did not invent dukkha; the axle was off center long before electricity. But it has taken the whisper of this could be better and made it a business model, delivered dozens of times a day, and it is training whole generations to hold their lives at the exact evaluative distance that Theo held his marriage. Against all that, staying at the table with the coffee and the light and the imperfect person you chose is a subversive act.

Theo started to notice the moments in between the program, the moments of contact with his garden, with friends, with me. They came with a bit of sadness, since they are all always passing away. But they knit together to form a real life in skin.

— — —

As with all clinical material in this series, identifying details have been changed and composites made so that no one is identifiable. This post is drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. Dukkha, vicikiccha, and anatta are concepts from traditional Buddhist psychology. The phrase “thinks in a marrow-bone” is from W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer for Old Age.”

— Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960)

I’ve been writing about the closed loop system that happens when the self takes itself as its own object. The instrument of examination and the thing being examined are the same system, so every insight is generated inside the enclosure it is trying to see beyond. The loop is self-sealing: new experience is metabolized into the existing story, understanding is absorbed as more material for the story, and the pattern continues, now with better documentation. This is why a person can describe their own architecture with real accuracy, year after year, and remain entirely inside it. It is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is the structural limit of self-examination: a room lined with mirrors shows you everything except the room. As a psychologist and Zen teacher, I see how much suffering closed loop systems of the heart-mind generate

.

The hypothesis of this post is that what we commonly call depression, what Freud called melancholia, is a closed loop of a particular kind, and that it forms in a particular way: through the absence of mourning. When a loss cannot be grieved, the lost person is not released but taken inside. The relationship continues, underground, within the self. And the feelings that belonged to it, above all the forbidden ones, find a new target: the reproaches meant for the one who is gone turn inward, against the self. The relentless self-criticism, the ruminating depression, the four a.m. review of one’s failures: these are not simply low self-esteem, not a bad habit of thought to be corrected. They are an unmourned relationship, still running. The loop of self-attack is the relationship, preserved in the only form it can still take.

This was Freud’s insight in “Mourning and Melancholia,” and a century later it has not lost its clinical power. Mourning, he saw, moves: the slow, agonizing withdrawal of attachment from the lost person, piece by piece, memory by memory, each one brought up, felt, and released, until the work completes itself. Melancholia is stuck. It circles. “The shadow of the object,” in his famous phrase, “fell upon the ego,” and the self becomes the site where the frozen relationship goes on conducting itself. This is why melancholia cannot be examined open, however much insight is brought to it. The examination is performed inside the loop, in the lost one’s voice. Understanding enters and is immediately graded by the internal critic, turned into one more occasion for reproach. The inquiry into the prison is run by the warden.

Mourning and melancholia are not two intensities of the same grief. They are different structures: one is a process that moves and changes over time, the other is a system that circles endlessly. And the question of how a loop becomes a process again is not only a clinical question. My teacher, Joan Sutherland Roshi, describes awakening as having two movements: enlightenment, the opening upward and outward into spaciousness, and endarkenment, the descent toward what has been avoided, toward grief and loss and the unmetabolized material a life has been organized around not feeling. Mourning is endarkenment’s most exacting case. It cannot be risen above, and it cannot be thought through. It can only be gone down into, at its own pace, and not alone. This post is the story of one man, and of two things it took for his grief to move: a medicine that cracked the vault open, and then the long, relational descent of actually grieving what was inside.

— — —

The Man Who Couldn’t Mourn

Daniel was in his fifties when he came to treatment, two years after his mother’s death, because he could not grieve her. He knew this was the problem. He said it in the first session, with the puzzled air of a competent man reporting a malfunction: he had loved his mother, she had died, and nothing had happened. No tears at the funeral. No tears since. In their place, a tightening: anxiety that hummed through his days, self-criticism that never rested, obsessional loops of rumination that woke him at four in the morning to review his failures.

He described his childhood as happy, his mother as devoted. But the evidence of something else accumulated in the room. The boxes of childhood objects he could not release, filling a garage and then a storage unit. The inability to make plans, as if the future were a blank. And the voice, the relentless inner voice, that greeted every small error with contempt and attack.

Daniel was intelligent and psychologically minded, and the therapy produced real insight. He could trace the architecture of his patterns with increasing clarity. And yet, the grief remained untouched, sealed away. It stayed where it was, locked in some room he could describe from the outside but not enter. The mourning could not begin.

— — —

Three Deaths

Daniel’s predicament reminded me of Freud’s description of melancholia. The voice that reviewed his failures at four in the morning was not really his voice. He had taken his mother in whole, undigested, and the dialogue between them continued in the only form it had ever reliably taken. This is also why years of accurate insight could not touch it. Every act of self-examination was performed inside the loop, in her tone: he analyzed his grief and found it defective, examined his progress and found it insufficient. Even the therapy could be annexed as fresh material for the review. The loop could not be examined open, because the examiner was the ghost.

Why couldn’t he mourn her? Because mourning is hard work, and it requires feeling what was actually true about the relationship, all of it. For Daniel that was impossible, and the impossibility had a structure. His mother had been volatile and harsh, capable of a casual cruelty that could take a boy’s legs out from under him. She had also, at moments, been tender, funny, alive. A child cannot hold a mother like that as she is; it is too frightening. So the child does something ingenious and costly: he splits her. He builds an idealized mother, devoted and wronged and good, and he takes the badness into himself, where at least it can be managed. Better to be a defective child of a perfect mother than the helpless child of a dangerous one. The idealization was a life raft.

And here is why the grief was frozen. To mourn his actual mother, Daniel would have to let three mothers die. The real one, harsh and volatile and occasionally tender. The idealized one, his own needed creation, built piece by piece across a childhood, which meant dismantling something he had made in order to survive. And the mother he never had: the one who might have received him, delighted in him, found him easy to love. That third death is the hardest, because it is not the death of a person. It is the death of a hope. As long as the mourning stayed frozen, the hope stayed alive, in the boxes of toys he couldn’t release, in the future he couldn’t plan, in the voice that promised, implicitly, that if he could finally be good enough, the beloved mother would at last appear.

— — —

What the Medicine Opened

Ketamine’s action in the brain is distinct from that of the classic psychedelics. It works primarily as an NMDA receptor antagonist, and at the doses used in psychedelic-assisted therapy it produces a dissociative loosening: the grip of the habitual self-narrative relaxes, the usual boundaries of body and memory become permeable, and material that the waking personality holds at a careful distance can arrive with startling immediacy. It does not tell the psyche what to open. It lowers the cost of opening.

In one journey, partway through the arc of the medicine, Daniel’s kitchen returned to him. Not as a story about his childhood: as the kitchen itself, the light of it, his mother’s presence in it, the weather of her moving through a morning. He was a small boy making his own breakfast. And she was watching him, and she said, in the tone he had spent fifty years not remembering, “You could fuck up cornflakes.”

What broke open in that moment was not grief, it was anger, and fear, and humiliation: the feelings a boy has when the person he depends on for everything turns her contempt on him, feelings that the idealization had been built to contain. He shook. He was furious. He was enraged at her, decades after her death, in a way he had never once permitted himself to know. The medicine had not produced mourning. It had shown the sentries posted in front of mourning: the forbidden feelings standing guard at the door of the locked room. This is sometimes the actual sequence when frozen grief begins to thaw. The rage is not the grief. The rage is what has to be felt, and survived, and received by another person, before the grief becomes reachable at all.

— — —

The Slow Work

Then came the part that no medicine can do, and it took many months.

Session after session, we returned to what had opened. Some weeks he could touch it; some weeks the old machinery reasserted itself and he arrived organized, reasonable, reporting on his feelings from a safe altitude, and the work was to notice that together, without judgment, and wait. There was the session where he said the cornflakes line aloud for the first time, and laughed, and then heard his own laugh and stopped. There was the session where he defended her, urgently, as if I had attacked her, though I had said nothing. There was the session, months in, where the anger finally tipped over into something underneath it, and he wept for the boy in the kitchen.

This is endarkenment in its most concentrated form: not rising above the difficult material but turning toward it, descending at the pace the nervous system can bear, in the company of someone who can stay. The medicine had opened the door; it could not walk him down the stairs. And the descent was relational through and through. The feelings had been exiled in the first place because no one could receive them, and they returned only as they were received: the anger felt in the presence of someone who did not flinch, the humiliation spoken aloud to someone who did not look away, the grief wept with a witness. What was formed in relationship needed relationship to move.

What he was doing, across those months, was the mourning itself. All three deaths, in no tidy order. He grieved the actual mother, which meant letting her be what she had been: a woman who could say that to a child, and a woman who sang in the car, and both, without one canceling the other. He grieved the idealized mother, dismantling with his own hands the raft he had built, which is its own strange loss; people are rarely warned that recovery includes mourning one’s defenses. And slowest of all, he grieved the mother he never had. He let the hope die. He stopped waiting, at some level below decision, for the childhood to come out differently.

The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald gave this work its most beautiful description, the one that gives this post its title and its epigraph. The ghosts of the unconscious, he suggested, are the unlaid dead of our inner lives, and what they want, what the whole underworld of a person wants, is to be mourned into ancestors. A ghost haunts. It lives in the basement of a self, unmourned and undigested, and it compels: repetition, reproach, the four a.m. despair. An ancestor is different. An ancestor has been grieved, which means fully felt, which means released. Ancestors take their place at the table. They live on in us as legacy and inheritance rather than as possession. The work of analysis, in Loewald’s vision, is exactly this transformation, and it cannot be done in an afternoon, or a medicine session or a meditation retreat, no matter how profound. Ghosts become ancestors at the pace of mourning, which is the pace of a relationship, which is slow.

— — —

What Changed

One Monday, more than a year after that ketamine session, Daniel mentioned, almost in passing, that he had spent the weekend in the storage unit. He had gone through some of the boxes. He gave several away, and threw some things out, and kept a few, and the keeping was different: he kept them because he wanted them, not because letting go was impossible. It was not a purge. It was a sorting, which is what mourning looks like when it reaches the material world.

Other changes came in the same vein. He began to tell stories about his mother that had both registers in them, the cruelty and the aliveness, and the stories held; they didn’t collapse into either hatred or the old shine of idealization. The voice at four in the morning grew quieter, and when it spoke, he recognized whose voice it was, which changed his relationship to it more than any argument with its content ever had. He and his partner began, tentatively, to find each other again. He made a plan for the following summer, an unremarkable act he had been unable to perform for years, because a future requires a mourned past to stand on.

This is what it looks like when a ghost becomes an ancestor. Not forgetting. Not forgiveness, necessarily, though something adjacent to it sometimes arrives unbidden. The dead woman stopped being a verdict that lived inside him and became a person who had happened to him. She moved, you could say, from the basement to the table.

— — —

Mourning does not return us to who we were before the loss. It carries us somewhere we have not been, at a pace we do not choose, and it leaves us in a life where the dead are neither clung to nor banished but woven in. Daniel, sorting boxes in a storage unit on an unremarkable weekend, was putting forth effort in just this way. The waves spread wide. The relics are everywhere.

— — —

This post is part of a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The clinical vignette of Daniel is a composite; identifying details have been changed. Freud’s account of frozen grief appears in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). The image of turning ghosts into ancestors comes from Hans Loewald’s “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960). The concepts of enlightenment and endarkenment, and of awakening as an ongoing process with two movements, come from the teaching of Joan Sutherland Roshi.

There is a question that follows every opening, in psychedelic work, in meditation, in the ordinary graces of a life: what happens next? An hour of contact with the ground of things is not so rare. What is rare is for that hour to truly change the shape of the person who had it. Openings are common. Real metabolization and integration into maturity are not.

In a previous post I wrote about Maria, an attorney in her early forties who had substituted evaluation for experience so thoroughly that her own life stayed out of reach, like a landscape behind fogged glass. In an MDMA session, with the alarm system quieted and a clinician who could stay close without fixing anything, she touched something old and simple: the grief of having been very young and very capable in a house that did not know what to do with her sadness. She did not analyze it. She wept for the child whose feelings could not be met. For several hours, the loop of management ceased, and something authentic moved through.

That post ended at the threshold. Here I want to walk through the door, into the weeks and months and years that decide whether an opening reorganizes a self or becomes a beautiful memory of a special experience.

— — —

The Afterglow Problem

Anyone who works with human suffering knows about the afterglow effect. In the days after a deep opening there is warmth, gratitude, joy, a softened relationship to one’s habitual concerns. People say things like everything feels different now. And my observation is that, for most people, most of the time, everything is not different six weeks later. The waters close over the place where the opening was. The loop resumes its familiar circuit, sometimes with new vocabulary. Now the person can describe their defenses in the language of the journey. The management project has acquired a spiritual department or a new angle.

This is what selves do. A self is a coherence-maintenance operation, and coherence-maintenance is very good at absorbing exceptions. The interesting question, the one I think remains undertheorized in both the psychedelic literature and the contemplative traditions, is what distinguishes the openings that fade from the ones that take root. What allows an experience of contact to become a reorganization rather than a souvenir?

The afterglow is warm but passive. It happens to a person. Metabolization is stranger and quieter, it takes time and experience and the visceral rub of real life, making mistakes, being in relationships. It emerges slowly, it’s not dramatic, and it certainly doesn’t proclaim itself. There are signs, though, that this real integration is happening, and it’s worth looking more closely.

— — —

Three Signs That Are One Sign

The first sign is curiosity, but of a particular kind. Not the generalized openness of the honeymoon period, which anyone can sustain while life is being gentle. The curiosity that matters is the kind that survives friction. Our lives are exquisitely designed to evoke our oldest patterns; that is what intimacy is, what work is, what family is. The person in whom something has reorganized stays interested right there, in the places that used to be defended and automatic. When the partner says the triggering thing, when the deadline looms, when the old injury is touched, something in them leans toward the moment instead of sealing against it. They are willing to be surprised in the exact locations where surprise was once intolerable.

The second sign is the appearance of choice where there was only reflex. Maria described this about four months after her session. She was in a partners’ meeting, and a senior colleague dismissed her work in the particular register that had always sent her into a familiar sequence: tightening in her body, a devastating self-attack, then doubling down on the performance of competence. She felt the sequence begin. And then, she said, there was a kind of space that had never been there before, not a technique she needed to apply, but a room that had appeared where a narrow conduit used to be. She could feel the first movement toward the old circuit and stand in the doorway of it, neither suppressing the reaction nor doing it. What she did next mattered less than the fact that next had become a question rather than a foregone conclusion.

The third sign is the one I now trust most: an unmanufactured tenderness, toward oneself and others, with its constant companion, humor. I say unmanufactured because compassion can be performed, and often is, especially by people as capable as Maria. Manufactured kindness has a faint ache of effort in it, a person being good at someone. What shows up when an opening has metabolized is different in texture. It arrives without a project attached. Maria began to speak of her younger self, the capable child in the anxious house, not with the clinical accuracy she had always commanded but with something closer to affection, and then, unmistakably, with humor. She could laugh at the loop. Not bitterly, not from above, but the way you laugh at Uncle Joe’s stories from back in the day, with sweetness and affection.

Humor says so much. Humor requires space. You can only laugh at the old pattern when you are no longer inside it wall to wall, desperately performing it. Maybe the laugh is the sound of room appearing.

Notice that these three signs, curiosity that survives friction, choice where there was reflex, and true warmth, are really one sign wearing different clothes. All three are forms of spaciousness. Something opened, and instead of closing, it became habitable. Everything that lives in a more spacious house behaves differently.

— — —

Taking the Balcony Away

Here is where I want to be careful, because there is midway point that can be mistaken for true integration.

It goes like this: what these signs indicate is the development of an observing capacity. The person has internalized a witness. They can now watch their patterns from a stable vantage point, and this watching creates the pause, the choice, the room. This is the language of much mindfulness instruction and no small amount of psychotherapy, and it is not exactly false. But I have come to think it describes a helpful place along the way but not the full metabolization.

The observing stance can be the old self in a new costume, the examiner promoted to a higher floor of the same building. Maria had been observing herself with great precision for decades; that was the problem, not the solution. Her exquisite capacity to watch, assess, and articulate her experience was the very architecture of her removal from it. If the fruit of her opening had been a better balcony, a calmer and more spiritual vantage from which to monitor the life below, then the management project would simply have won again, at a higher altitude.

What I saw in her instead, and what I have seen in others when metabolization is real, is not a gathered awareness that becomes an identity. It is awareness gone into distribution. The opening did not produce a watcher who remembers the view. It produced a person who is porous in place, in the meeting, in the marriage, in the body, with no balcony required.

An analogy is that of salt and water. Before metabolization, awareness is like a crystal held above the sea: distinct, defined, observing the water from its own dry vantage. Afterward, the crystal has dissolved. You cannot point to the awareness anywhere, and the whole sea tastes of it.

This is, I think, exactly what the koan tradition has been pointing at all along. When Dizang says not knowing is most intimate, he is not recommending a stance of not-knowing, held by a knower who has decided to be humble. He is describing what remains when the knowing project dissolves: an intimacy that has no location because it is everywhere in the experience at once, the way water knows the shape of the riverbed without standing apart from the river. And when Miaozong says that each being’s eternal radiance appears before you, she immediately adds that each being is an eight-thousand-foot precipice. The radiance is not visible from a safe overlook. There is no overlook. That is the precipice.

— — —

Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Do It

This reframing answers a question that has puzzled the field for as long as there has been a field: why insight, even accurate and hard-won insight, so often fails to change anything. Maria arrived in treatment already in possession of most of the insights that mattered. She could have written a competent paper on her own dynamics. Insight is an answer, and answers are precisely what her system knew how to metabolize into more management. The loop ate insights for breakfast.

What reorganized her was not a better answer but a changed relationship to the question, the capacity to stay in not-knowing without the alarm sounding. And this is why the reorganization cannot be accomplished by the self examining itself, no matter how skillfully. The examining is the structure. You cannot dissolve salt by having the crystal study the water more closely. Something has to happen at a level beneath the examination, in the body’s oldest assessments of what is safe, and when it does, the examiner is not strengthened or refined. The examiner is what dissolved.

The signs I described, the durable curiosity, the pause, the tenderness and the humor, are not achievements of a self that got better at its job. They are what a life looks like when the job has been, in some measure, laid down. The pause Maria found in the partners’ meeting was not a watcher intervening from above. It was the absence of the compulsion that used to close the space. Nobody was standing in the doorway. There was just a doorway, where there used to be a wall.

— — —

The Slow Sea

None of this happens all at once, and the opening itself, however profound, is the just the beginning of the process. Metabolization is relational and slow. It happened for Maria in a hundred unremarkable moments: in sessions where the old loop started up and was met, again, without alarm; in the ongoing presence of a clinician who did not need her to be transformed; in her own daily willingness to return to the places where the pattern lived and remain curious there. Openings are events. Metabolization is a practice of hospitality toward what the opening revealed, extended long enough that the nervous system revises its ancient verdict about what is survivable.

This integration is most likely to happen with the support and guidance of a community or companion. Sadly, this is missing in way too much of Western psychedelic work, from the lack of sustained integration in clinical trials, ketamine clinics, and heroic psychedelic narratives.

The traditions know this. Zen has never been very impressed by openings. The literature is full of teachers responding to a student’s dazzling breakthrough with some version of fine, and now wash your bowl. The washing is not a comedown from the realization. The washing is where the realization becomes a body, becomes a partnership, becomes a way of sitting in a meeting while a colleague is dismissive. The sea does not taste of salt because the crystal had a peak experience. It tastes of salt because the dissolving completed itself, quietly, everywhere.

I saw Maria some time after our work ended. She told me, laughing, that the loop still visits, usually when she is tired, and that she has developed a certain fondness for it, the way one is fond of an old dog that still barks at the mail. What struck me was not the content of the report but its weather. There was no one presenting recovery to me, no balcony from which progress was being observed and described. There was just a person in her life, amused and unguarded, the question still open beneath her days, and habitable now.

That is what it looks like when it takes. Not a new self, watching from a better height. A wider sea, and the salt everywhere in it.

— — —

The clinical vignette is a composite and continues one introduced in an earlier post; all identifying information has been changed. Dizang’s ‘Not knowing is most intimate’ is Case 20 of the Book of Serenity. Miaozong’s koan appears in the records of Zishou Miaozong (1095–1170); the rendering follows the Pacific Zen Institute tradition. Winnicott’s account of unintegration and the true self is found in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965). The understanding of metabolization as relational draws on Daniel Stern’s The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004) and on Philip Bromberg’s account of self-states in Standing in the Spaces (1998).

— Dizang, Zen koan

There is a question that surfaces repeatedly in depth therapeutic work, and in contemplative practice, and in the emerging field of psychedelic-assisted therapy, though each tradition frames it differently: what does it mean to actually contact one’s own experience, rather than manage and optimize it from a distance? Winnicott called what is found in that contact the true self, a concept he offered with some reticence, aware that naming it too directly risked turning it into another object of the very management project it was meant to describe. This post takes up that question close to the ground, in the room with one patient, and with a particular therapeutic instrument that can, under the right conditions, make the management temporarily unnecessary.

— — —

The patient Maria, an attorney in her early forties, came to treatment describing what she called a clarity problem. She was successful, respected in her firm, in a long partnership she valued. And she could not shake the sense that none of it was happening to her. She moved through her days with competence and warmth, but the texture of actual experience, the felt quality of being in her own life, stayed out of reach, like a landscape seen through fogged glass. She was not depressed, exactly. She was elsewhere, in a world of how things “should be,” how her partner, her body, her emotional life “should be” different, better, closer to perfect. She had been living in the world of comparison, self-loathing, and management for a very long time.

In the therapy room she was gracious, attentive, and fundamentally unreachable. When her therapist offered her a response, it went into Maria’s mind to determine its utility, but it did not land emotionally. By the following session the opening had resealed. She was not resistant in any ordinary conscious sense. She wanted to change. She had simply developed, over decades, an exquisite capacity to process her experience in terms of her mental framework rather than have it: to observe, to reflect, to articulate with great accuracy what she felt, and to remain at a slight remove from the feeling itself.

Maria had a quality that many motivated professional people share: a substitution of evaluation for experience. Her closed-loop system was not a failure of intelligence or motivation. It was intelligence pressed into the service of a much older problem, the problem of how to remain safe while also remaining alive to one’s own experience. At some point, early enough that it left no explicit memory, the direct expression of feeling had become unreliable, or costly in ways a child could not afford. What she had learned, with a sad efficiency, was to manage experience from a slight distance: to think about it rather than feel it, to analyze it rather than inhabit it. By the time she arrived in treatment, this had become invisible to her. It was not a strategy. It was simply how she felt from the inside. She had substituted a known, performed, and mangaged body for a knowing, receptive, vulnerable one.

— — —

The True Self

D. W. Winnicott introduced the concept of the true self with deliberate imprecision, insisting that it could be pointed at but not captured. “The true self,” he wrote, “comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing.” It is, at bottom, prior to thought: a felt sense of existing, of being the origin of one’s own experience rather than its observer. Against this he set the false self; not a lie, exactly, but an organization of the personality around compliance and performance, constructed early in response to an environment that could not reliably receive what was real. The false self is adaptive. It is often highly functional. Its cost is the persistent sense, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, that one’s life is happening at a remove, so that the person managing so effectively is not quite the person who is living.

The developmental picture Winnicott drew is relational at its core. The true self is not a hidden essence waiting to be uncovered; it emerges, or fails to emerge, through the quality of early care. When a caregiver can reflect an infant’s spontaneous gesture back with accuracy and warmth, the infant comes to experience its own impulses as real, as efficacious, as the basis of a self that can engage the world directly. When the caregiver cannot, when they need the infant to be different from what it is, or when they are simply too preoccupied to attend, the infant learns, to substitute compliance for gesture. The false self is what fills the gap: a self organized not around what is spontaneously felt but around what will be well received.

Later theorists elaborated and complicated the picture. Christopher Bollas, writing about what he calls the unthought known, locates much of what Winnicott meant by true self in the domain of pre-symbolic experience: knowledge held in the body, in procedural memory, in what Bollas describes as “the grammar of being” that forms before language is available to name it. This material is not unconscious in the repression sense. It was simply never symbolized in the first place. It cannot be reached by insight, because insight operates in language, and the unthought known lives below language. It waits not to be understood but to be felt.

Philip Bromberg, drawing on dissociation theory, adds another dimension: the false self is not a single structure but a set of self-states, organized around different relational contexts, each with its own logic and its own way of managing experience. The sense of inauthenticity that brings many patients to treatment is often the experience of living predominantly in one or two managed self-states while other, less defended states, younger, rawer, more directly in contact with need and feeling, remain sequestered. Integration, in Bromberg’s account, is not the elimination of multiplicity but the loosening of the walls between states, so that a wider range of experience becomes available to the person in ordinary life.

What Maria carried, beneath the loop, was something Bollas’s framework helps name: the somatic trace of having been very young in a family that required, above all, competence. Her parents had not been unkind. They had been anxious, and busy, and more comfortable with achievement than with feeling. She had learned early that the expression of difficulty made the adults around her more anxious, not less. She had reorganized herself around this with impressive speed, learning to locate her sense of aliveness in the doing rather than the being, in the performance rather than the ground beneath it. By the time she arrived in treatment the reorganization was so thorough she could barely remember what the other thing — the being, the ground — had felt like, or whether she had ever quite known.

— — —

The Genius of MDMA

MDMA occupies a particular position among the psychedelic medicines, and understanding what it does pharmacologically helps explain what it can make possible therapeutically. Unlike psilocybin or ketamine, MDMA does not primarily produce altered perception or dissolution of the self-boundary. Its action is subtler and, for certain presentations, more precisely targeted. It triggers a sustained release of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin while measurably reducing activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection center. The result is a window of several hours in which fear-based reactivity is quieted without consciousness being distorted: the person remains lucid, relational, and present to their own experience, but the alarm system that ordinarily stands between the observing self and the felt self is temporarily offline.

This matters enormously for patients organized around management. The false self is, at bottom, a fear response, a very early decision that direct experience is not safe, that feeling must be evaluated before it is felt, that the spontaneous gesture carries risk. What MDMA interrupts is not the content of this organization but its urgency. The ordinary cost-benefit calculus of self-protection becomes, for the duration of the session, simply less pressing. The performing of openness, which Maria had been doing throughout years of good analytic work, becomes unnecessary, not because a drug has bypassed it but because the felt threat that originally required the performance is no longer broadcasting at the same frequency.

This does not magically resolve things, but it opens a door. What the person does with the opening, and whether they can be adequately held while they step through it, is a relational question that the medicine alone cannot answer.

— — —

The Session

The MDMA session began with Maria feeling good in her body, content, alive, present. She noticed how she never actually feels her body, but rather thinks about how to best keep it fit, healthy, and attractive. Her clinician noticed this shift as a change in the room’s quality, a settling. Maria was no longer following a thought. She was present in a different register, one that had no immediate use for evaluation or conclusion.

In Zen, there is a teaching about what the masters call don’t-know mind — not ignorance, but the quality of attention that is available when we are not simultaneously generating and assessing our own experience. Dizang’s line, not knowing is most intimate, points at exactly this: that intimacy with our own experience is not achieved by understanding it more thoroughly but by releasing the knowing project long enough for direct contact to occur. Maria had been in the knowing and optimizing project her entire adult life. For several hours, she was not.

What arose in the space the loop had vacated was not insight. It was, to use Winnicott’s word, something closer to formlessness — not disintegration but a release from the constant work of coherence-maintenance, a moment of what Winnicott called unintegration: the relaxed, trustful dissolution that is only possible when the environment feels genuinely safe.

What she touched there was simple and very old. A grief without a specific object, or whose object kept shifting as she moved toward it. A sensation in her chest she eventually described, quietly, as the feeling of having been very young and very capable in a house that had not known what to do with her sadness. She did not analyze it. She let herself feel it, and wept for the young child with so many feelings that could not be met.

Her clinician remained close and attuned but didn’t offer new thoughts. The nondirective quality of presence holding the session was itself part of what made the emergence of true self possible. Daniel Stern’s research on intersubjective contact finds that transformation happens not primarily through interpretation but in what he called present moments: brief, unrepeatable encounters in which both people are changed by genuine contact. The medicine had lowered the alarm. But it was the presence of someone who could remain without flinching, without fixing, without making the material about themselves, that allowed the metabolization to complete itself. There was nothing to interpret. The experience was not communication awaiting translation. It was, at last, simply itself.

— — —

Integration

This is what the true self feels like when it is reached. It is not dramatic, not revelatory in any spectacular sense, but unmistakable in its quality of freshness. Maria was not thinking about her experience. She was having it. The loop, with its perpetual evaluation and its simulated aliveness, had for this time ceased. What remained was something more direct: the felt sense of grief, of longing, of having wanted things she had not been able to want. Not the question of whether the wanting was correct. Just the wanting itself, prior to evaluation, prior to the loop’s first turn.

The integration work that followed was patient and unhurried. The loop did not disappear; old organizations of self rarely do. But its authority had been interrupted. Maria could now sometimes feel the first movement toward the familiar circuit and pause there long enough to notice what was beneath it. The place she had touched in the session had become a kind of internal reference point, not a destination she could reach at will, but evidence that such a place existed. Beneath the question and before the answer.

— — —

There is a small story in the Zen tradition of a student who comes to the master and says: I have been practicing for years and I still do not understand. The master pours tea into the student’s cup until it overflows. The student watches the tea spill across the table. The master says: You are like this cup. How can I show you anything unless you first empty yourself?

The story is usually told as instruction. But it is also, simply, a description of what had been happening to Maria for decades. The cup had been full — not with the wrong things, but with the constant motion of evaluation, with the loop running its familiar circuit, with the management project that had once been necessary and had stayed long past its season of usefulness. The medicine did not fill the cup with something better. For several hours, it allowed the cup to be empty. And in that emptiness, briefly, without agenda or analysis, something original moved through.

That is not a cure. It is a moment of contact with an interior ground that had always been there, beneath the competence and the careful reflection and the life lived at a slight remove. An ordinary ground. The place where experience is simply what it is, before the loop’s first turn.

— — —

—

The concept of the true self and false self comes from D.W. Winnicott’s Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965); the quoted passage is from ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’ in that volume. The concepts of the unthought known and the transformational object come from Christopher Bollas’s The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987). The framework of self-states and dissociation draws on Philip Bromberg’s Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation (1998). The concept of present moments as the unit of psychic change comes from Daniel Stern’s The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004). The pharmacological summary of MDMA’s action draws on research by Michael Mithoefer and colleagues, including ‘MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder,’ Journal of Psychopharmacology (2011), and subsequent Phase 2 and Phase 3 trial publications. The koan ‘Not knowing is most intimate’ is Case 20 of the Book of Serenity and Case 62 of the PZI Miscellaneous Koans; the teacher’s name follows the Pacific Zen Institute rendering. The clinical vignette is a composite; all identifying information has been changed.

It didn’t take long before I noticed my meditation wasn’t transcending anything. In fact, I was left marinating in the loneliness and confusion I’d come to escape, only worse, without the usual distractions. The wine wasn’t available. The books weren’t available. There was just the cushion, and the silence, and in came everything I’d been finding ways not to actually feel.

I went to my teacher, full of shame. She listened, and she said that the way to work with this kind of suffering is to welcome it, to feel it all the way through. She said, lean in, feel it more, in detail, let your heart break. That was definitely not what I wanted to hear.

— — —

There’s a way of relating to what comes up inside us that’s very familiar in meditation circles. It’s often called noting practice: you observe your experience, you give it a name, you let it fall away. Anger arises, you note “anger, anger,” and you return to the breath. I think this trains something important, the ability to unblend from strong emotion and get perspective, and for awhile I thought it was most of what practice had to offer. But I’ve come to think that if practice stays there, it trains something else too, a kind of distance and remove from experience.

The frightened part of us, the lonely part, the part that’s been longing for a long time, doesn’t experience being witnessed as welcome exactly. It experiences it more as being seen but handled gingerly, like something dangerous.

— — —

What my teacher offered that day was less than a welcome in its fullest sense, and also more than witnessing. She hosted me. The door stayed open, and nothing but recognition was asked of whatever I brought. She offered exactly what I was ready for.

That hosting was literal at first, and became internal over time. I learned to trust that she could receive my most abject moods. And it wasn’t only that she said accepting words, it was that she said them from somewhere settled, without urgency, without needing me to feel better, without her own anxiety leaking into the offer. I couldn’t have told you that at the time, but some part of me registered it, the way you register whether someone’s welcome is actually warm and lived-in, or just performed to look that way.

Someone can host you while themselves bracing, needing the guest to behave a certain way, see them as good, and they will, without meaning to, communicate that some things are welcome here and others actually aren’t. The welcome is technically there. But the frightened part of ourselves can tell the difference between a welcome that’s a true lap, and a welcome offered by someone who is, underneath, hoping you won’t come all the way in.

— — —

In the therapy world we talk about the therapeutic relationship, the alliance, the container, as though these were things a clinician either has or doesn’t, techniques to be learned and then deployed. But what a patient’s nervous system really responds to, underneath all of that, is the quality of the hosting. Is the person settled enough that the welcome is real, or is the hospitality itself a kind of management, the therapist’s own way of performing, dressed up as openness?

A therapist who’s anxious about silence will communicate, without saying so, that silence isn’t really welcome here, however many times they say the opposite. A therapist who needs the patient to get better, to show progress, to validate the work, will host with conditions attached, even while believing, quite sincerely, that there aren’t any. And the patient’s defended parts are very good at detecting this. They’ve spent a lifetime detecting exactly this. It might be the whole reason the parts are defended in the first place.

None of this is really a failure of technique. It has more to do with what the clinician has done with their own bracing, their own discomfort with silence, their own need for things to go well, their own unprocessed material that gets stirred by what the patient brings. How someone hosts seems to be built from how they themselves have been hosted, and how much of that they’ve let in.

— — —

Over time I’ve come to see that the frightened part doesn’t, in the end, want to be hosted so much as held. A lap is different from a threshold, there’s no door, no remove, no honoring from a polite distance. A lap is where you go when something is too big to hold alone, not to be observed, not even quite to be hosted, but to be in contact, the body landing against another, bigger body, before any words. Just warmth, safety, protection, an ability to relax.

This can’t really be offered directly, and it can’t be rushed. You don’t climb into a lap you don’t trust, and trust doesn’t get perfomed into existence, it accumulates, through being hosted again and again, in a way that turns out, each time, to be steady and warm and sturdy. Maybe it’s something like the hundredth time the welcome is there in like the way it was there the first time, and that’s what eventually lets the part that’s been standing at the threshold come further in.

— — —

Bion’s reverie is usually described as a capacity, the analyst receiving the patient’s material, holding it, not needing it to be otherwise. But reverie isn’t primarily a clinical stance. It’s more a description of the analyst’s own internal weather. The analyst who can offer reverie is one whose own hosting is settled enough that someone else’s difficult material doesn’t change it.

And this is part of why presence can’t really be trained directly. You can train someone to say the right things about welcome. What you can’t train is the settledness that makes the welcome real instead of performed, and that seems to come from the clinician’s own work, their own time spent being hosted, their own slow accumulation of trust that let something in them stop bracing.

Schore’s work on right-brain-to-right-brain communication describes something like the mechanism, two nervous systems, after enough repetition, registering each other as safe enough for contact. It’s not enough that you were welcomed. It matters who did the hosting, and whether their own nervous system was, underneath the welcome, still subtly asking the guest to be careful.

— — —

Many years on, I understand what happened at that retreat a little differently.

It wasn’t that my teacher said the right thing, exactly. Plenty of people, including me at various points since, have said some version of: welcome it, feel it all the way through, and had it land as one more impossible demand. What was different, I think, was that she wasn’t, underneath the words, needing anything from me. The way she hosted me didn’t change depending on what I brought, and that’s a rare thing to encounter, and something I didn’t really understand about meditation or therapy for awhile.

Hosting has to come first, and it has to be real, a welcome whose warmth doesn’t depend on the weather of whoever walks in. The lap comes later, if it comes, and it can’t be hurried. But I think the quality of the hosting, the host’s own center of gravity, is what decides whether later ever arrives.

— — —

This is a post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. Bion’s idea of reverie comes from his writing on container and contained. Allan Schore’s work on right-brain-to-right-brain communication is in The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy (2012).

— D.W. Winnicott

Something happens to many people when they sit to meditate that goes unnoticed, and that many meditation teachers do not identify. The instruction may be something like: follow the breath, notice what arises, rest in awareness. The meditator does something that looks like following those instructions. The session ends. The bell rings. They feel, perhaps, better. Calmer. Sometimes tired. Or maybe empty in a way that passes for peaceful

.

But they were not, in a sense, there.

This is dissociation on the cushion, and it is far more common than the contemplative literature acknowledges. It is one of the most important things to understand for anyone who meditates, who works with meditators, or who is trying to understand why dedicated practitioners stall out over years of sincere practice.

Truly engaged meditation feels deeply alive. Meditation and samadhi, the concentrated stillness the traditions cultivate, has a quality of liveliness and deep presence. The practitioner is more embodied, engaged, receptive, and creative. The landscape of meditation tends to be dynamic, fluid, and generative. Often pain and sorrow visit, and memories and feelings rise and fall, but they are all part of a constantly changing inner landscape. Our koan tradition moves with this dynamic quality of the mind, bringing images and relationships that can perturb our tendency for dissociation and challenge our default habits of mind and body.

— — —

Dissociation, in the sense I am using it here, is a habitual separation from one’s own experience: from the felt sense of the body, from the current of emotion, from the memories that live below language. It is about distance, numbing, flattening. The self is present enough to function, but it is not quite occupying the body that is functioning.

Philip Bromberg, one of the most important relational psychoanalysts of the last fifty years, describes dissociation not as a pathology but as a fundamental feature of the mind, a capacity the nervous system developed to protect itself from experiences it could not integrate. The mind, under conditions of overwhelm, learns to go elsewhere, as a form of psychic survival.

Bessel van der Kolk and his collaborators have shown us the body dimension of this. What dissociates is not only the mind but the whole organism. The smooth integration of sensation, emotion, and narrative that constitutes ordinary self-experience breaks down, and the person loses access to their own interior. They remain functional. They can speak, move, carry on. But they are, in a meaningful sense, not home.

Sometimes the dissociation that people bring to the cushion is dramatic. But most of the time it is ordinary, quiet, subtle. An invisible emotional retreat. A going-thin. The self becomes blank or checked out. And this subtlety is exactly what makes it so difficult to identify in meditation. The person often looks like a perfect meditator.

The research bears this out. Willoughby Britton and her collaborators at Brown University have spent more than a decade systematically documenting what practitioners actually experience on the cushion, beyond the outcomes meditation is supposed to produce. Their landmark Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, drawing on qualitative interviews with Western Buddhist practitioners and teachers across Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions, found that challenging, distressing, and functionally impairing experiences are significantly underreported in both the clinical and contemplative literature. Depersonalization and dissociation appeared consistently among them. A 2021 follow-up found that lasting adverse effects, those that persisted beyond the sit itself, were specifically associated with signs of dysregulated arousal, including dissociation. These are not rare edge cases. They are a quiet feature of many people’s practice, unnamed and therefore unaddressed.

— — —

A monk asked Dongshan: “When cold and heat come, how can we avoid them?” Dongshan said: “Why don’t you go to the place where there is no cold or heat?” The monk said: “What is the place where there is no cold or heat?” Dongshan said: “When it is cold, the cold kills you. When it is hot, the heat kills you.”

-Blue Cliff Record Case 43

The monk’s question is dissociation stated as a spiritual aspiration: find the place above or outside the difficult, painful experience, a place of avoidance. Dongshan’s answer refuses the escape route entirely. “The cold kills you” doesn’t mean suffer more, but rather be so thoroughly cold that there is no one left trying to get away from it. The separate observer, the one managing and watching from a distance, vanishes into the cold itself. That dissolution is presence, not absence. It’s the inversion of what dissociation does, and Dongshan’s invitation to radical intimacy.

— — —

Here’s what dissociation tends to look like on the cushion.

The mind goes blank, but the blankness does not feel restful or spacious. It feels more like flatness: a field with the lights turned low. There is nothing particularly wrong. There is also nothing particularly present. When the bell rings, the meditator surfaces slowly, without quite being able to say where they have been.

Or: the breath becomes something observed from a slight distance. Not intimately inhabited, not the felt sensation of air moving in the body, but something watched. The meditator is present to the idea of the breath rather than to the breath itself. They feel calm. But there is a faint quality of unreality to the calm, a sense that something is covered rather than settled.

Or: time passes without the sense of time passing. Not the time-dissolving quality of deep concentration, which has a texture and a quality of arrival, but a simpler absence: the session is over and the meditator cannot account for where it went.

Or: emotions flatten. The sit happens after a difficult week, and on the cushion everything becomes manageable, the difficulty recedes. This is experienced as the practice working, and it may be. But it may also be dissociation: the difficult material going underground rather than being metabolized.

Britton’s research identified six discrete changes in sense of self that meditation practitioners reported: change in narrative self, loss of sense of ownership, loss of sense of agency, change in sense of embodiment, change in self-other or self-world boundaries, and loss of basic self. What is striking about this taxonomy is how closely it tracks the phenomenology of dissociation as psychoanalysis and trauma theory have described it, and how easily any of these experiences might be mistaken, in a meditation context, for “progress.” In other words, dissociation can mask as deep meditation for years and decades and not be noticed.

— — —

How It Differs From Sleepiness and Deep Meditation

The Tibetan traditions have a concept, laya in Sanskrit, sometimes translated as “sinking mind,” that names a related phenomenon. The mind becomes dull, heavy, inward. The instructions are to brighten attention: open the eyes, introduce more alertness, straighten the posture. This is useful. But laya, as classically described, is a problem of attention, and dissociation is a problem of presence. They can overlap and intertwine, but the distinction matters. Sleepiness has weight, the head nods, the body pulls downward. Dissociation tends toward weightlessness, toward a feeling of becoming lighter, of going thin.

Deep meditation and samadhi, the concentrated stillness the traditions cultivate, has a quality of aliveness and deep presence. The practitioner is more embodied, engaged, receptive, and creative. The landscape of meditation tends to be dynamic, fluid, and generative.

— — —

How to Recognize It

The first step to recognizing dissociation in meditation is to bring attention and curiosity to the quality of presence rather than only to an evaluation of the experience, or its contents.

Most meditation instruction focuses on what arises: thoughts, emotions, sensations, the quality of the breath. This is important. But there is another question: is anyone home to notice what arises? The quality of presence, whether you are inhabiting your experience or observing it from a distance, is itself something that can be learned to attend to.

Some useful questions to bring to the cushion, or to the moments after sitting:

Where am I in relation to my body right now? Not whether you can locate sensations, but whether you are inside or outside the experience of having a body. There is a felt difference between sensing the weight of one’s hands from inside and observing them from a slight remove.

Is this stillness alive? Even quiet, even concentrated, genuine meditative stillness tends to have a quality of aliveness: presence, availability, receptivity. Dissociated stillness tends toward flatness, toward a field with the lights dimmed.

What happened to what I came in with? If a difficult emotion or situation was present at the beginning of a sit and has entirely vanished by the end, without any sense of having moved through it, it is worth asking whether it was metabolized or simply sealed off.

Can I feel my feet on the floor right now? This is a simple somatic question, but it has real diagnostic value. Dissociation tends to make peripheral sensations difficult to access. The capacity to feel one’s contact with the ground is a basic measure of embodied presence.

— — —

How to Work With Dissociation

The first and most important thing: do not treat dissociation as the enemy. It arose as protection. Meeting it with frustration or self-criticism simply adds a second layer of difficulty on top of the first. The beginning of this work is curiosity and kindness toward the part of oneself that learned to go away, toward what it was protecting, toward the intelligence of the strategy even when it is no longer needed.

Orient before you sit. Peter Levine and the somatic experiencing tradition have made the orienting response central to working with trauma and dissociation. Before closing the eyes and directing attention inward, take a few minutes to orient to the space: let the eyes move slowly around the room, notice what is visually present, feel the contact of your body with the chair or cushion. Treleaven has refined this into a range of specific modifications for meditation practice. The nervous system needs to register that it is safe here before it can be asked to go inward without protective withdrawal.

Feel the body before you find the breath. Most meditation instruction moves fairly quickly to the breath as the primary object. But for someone prone to dissociation, arriving at the breath can become a vehicle for going thin, becoming absorbed in the idea of the breath rather than the felt reality of the body breathing. Beginning with the weight of the body, the contact of the body with the earth, the felt presence of the hands, the temperature of the air on the skin: these more immediate somatic experiences can provide a grounding that allows the breath to be met from inside.

Consider eyes open or half-open. Closing the eyes removes visual input and can accelerate the inward retreat that becomes dissociation. Many traditions, including Zen, prescribe eyes open, cast down, for exactly this reason. The visual field keeps one oriented in physical space. This is not a distraction; it is an anchor.

Shorten the sits. This is not a recommendation most meditation teachers make readily, but it is often exactly right. Long sits, for someone who tends to dissociate, can become extended periods of protective absence. Shorter, more frequent sits, five or ten minutes several times a day, can be more productive than hour-long sessions during which the self departs and returns without much having happened.

Titrate the approach to difficulty. If particular kinds of inner experience seem to trigger the departure, if attention to certain emotions or body regions is reliably followed by flatness or blankness, this is important information. The nervous system is telling you that this territory approaches something that originally required protection. The work is not to push through, but to approach slowly, at the edge of what can be tolerated without the protective response activating. Somatic psychotherapy calls this titration, and it is as relevant on the cushion as it is in the consulting room.

Consider walking meditation. People who tend to dissociate during seated meditation often benefit from movement meditation, as the cues from the body and senses are foregrounded and easier to stay with. Walking with attention to the sensations of the body and environment, rather than being lost in thought, is a lovely, gentle invitation into the present moment.

— — —

The Relational Dimension

Dissociation develops in relationship (or the absence of relationship), and so healing is always relational. In meditation that means finding sangha, community, a teacher, others to rub up against.

The dissociative response did not develop in solitude. It developed in relationship, in the presence or absence of caregivers whose own capacity to remain present with difficult experience was limited. What could not be held there learned to go underground. And what went underground in relationship tends to need relationship to surface.

Daniel Stern’s research on intersubjective contact is relevant here. Psychic change happens, in his account, not primarily through insight or technique but in present moments: brief, unrepeatable encounters in which two people are in full contact, both changed by what passes between them. This kind of contact is what Winnicott was pointing toward when he wrote that it is a disaster not to be found: the self that learned to hide needs, eventually, to be discovered, not because it was wrong to hide, but because hiding is not the same as living.

Solo meditation practice can open space. It can develop the capacity to notice. It can provide conditions in which dissociation becomes observable rather than simply enacted. But when the going-away is deep, when the pattern is old and well-practiced, the full metabolization often requires the presence of another person or community who can remain, who can stay without flinching, without needing the material to resolve quickly, without requiring the practitioner to manage the encounter. This is where spiritual community and the help of a good teacher are invaluable.

Britton’s most recent research has begun to document this relational dimension empirically. Her group found that the quality of the teacher relationship significantly shapes the trajectory of practitioners who encounter meditation-related challenges. The container matters, not just the practice.

— — —

Meditation invites going on being. And for some people, that invitation is what activates the oldest learned response: the exit.

The self that learned to leave is not failing at practice. It is doing what it learned to do in conditions where staying was not safe. The work of meeting dissociation on the cushion is, at its heart, the slow rehabilitation of safety: the gradual, patient discovery that being here, in this body, in this breath, in this moment, is survivable. More than survivable: the very place where the life is.

“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

The practice is the finding. Not once, but slowly, incompletely, with kindness and patience. The cushion again. The breath again. The feet on the floor. Coming home, a little more, each time.

— — —

This is one of a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. Philip Bromberg’s account of dissociation as a fundamental feature of the mind is developed throughout his collected writings, and especially in Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation (1998). The concept of going on being is from D.W. Winnicott’s The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965). Willoughby Britton’s research on meditation-related challenges appears in ‘The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists,’ PLOS ONE, 2017 (with Jared Lindahl and colleagues), and in ‘Defining and Measuring Meditation-Related Adverse Effects in Mindfulness-Based Programs,’ Clinical Psychological Science, 2021. The research on teacher relationships and practitioner trajectories is from Canby, Lindahl, Cooper, Joseph, Palitsky, and Britton, ‘The Teacher Matters,’ Contemporary Buddhism, 2025. David Treleaven’s framework for trauma-sensitive practice is developed in Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (W.W. Norton, 2018). The orienting response and its relevance to trauma treatment is central to Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997) and the somatic experiencing tradition. Daniel Stern’s account of present moments is developed in The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004).

Your patient comes in and tells you they spent the weekend on a psilocybin retreat. Or they’ve been doing ketamine infusions and something shifted. Or maybe they’ve been microdosing for months and they’re not sure what to make of it.

You don’t have specialized training in psychedelic-assisted therapy in order to work with these folks. You may have read a little, or nothing. And now here it is in your office.

Here’s the good news: you don’t need specialized training to do useful integration work. What you need is permission to stay curious, be open minded, know a few practical things, and a sense of where your limits are. Here’s some guidance for therapists on working with psychedelic experience.

1. Simply ask about it.

The most important thing you can do is also the simplest: bring it up. Many patients won’t raise psychedelic experiences in therapy because they assume their therapist will pathologize it, won’t understand it, or will become uncomfortable. That assumption (sometimes accurate) means that the material that most needs integration goes underground.

You don’t need to be an expert to ask an open question. Tell me about what happened. What was it like? What has stayed with you? What from this experience do you want to integrate into your life? These questions signal that the territory is safe to bring into the room. That alone can be the difference between an experience that gets metabolized and one that sits unprocessed for years.

Ask with curiosity and openness rather than clinical wariness. The patient will feel the difference.

2. Work in somatic and nonverbal registers.

Psychedelic experiences often exceed language. The felt sense of a session, the body memory of it, the emotional texture, frequently doesn’t translate cleanly into words. If you wait for your patient to articulate it in narrative terms, you may be waiting for something that isn’t coming, or that flattens the experience in the translation.

Slow down. Ask where they feel it in the body. Ask what happens physically when they try to bring the experience back. Notice what you see, the shift in posture, the change in breathing, the moment they stop talking and something moves across the face.

This is not exotic clinical territory. It’s the same attunement you bring to any moment of felt experience in the room. The difference is that psychedelic material often lives more exclusively in the body than ordinary insight does. Follow it there.

3. Take spiritual and mystical content seriously.

Psychedelic experiences frequently produce content that patients describe in explicitly spiritual terms: a felt sense of unity, encounters with presence or meaning, experiences of dying and returning, contact with something larger than the self. This material is extremely common and, in the research literature, is strongly correlated with positive therapeutic outcomes.

The two errors to avoid are equally distorting. Pathologizing the content, treating it as symptomatic, or quietly moving to reframe it in more secular terms, communicates that the most significant thing the patient experienced is not acceptable in the room. Inflating it, reinforcing grandiosity or a felt sense of having “arrived” somewhere, bypasses the actual work of integration.

What works is holding the content with respect and curiosity. What did that feel like? What does it mean to you? What does it ask of you? These questions neither dismiss nor inflate. They locate the experience in the patient’s own meaning-making, which is where it belongs.

4. Sit with difficult and destabilizing experiences.

Not every psychedelic experience is expansive. Some are scary. Some bring up trauma in raw form. Some leave the patient shaken, confused, or carrying imagery they don’t know what to do with.

The therapeutic reflex to reassure or to quickly reframe can close down exactly what needs to stay open. A difficult experience is not a failed one. It is often material the psyche could not otherwise surface, because it couldn’t be held or approached through ordinary means. The question is not how do we make this feel better but what is this experience trying to metabolize?

Your job in these moments is not to resolve the difficulty but to stay present with it — curious, unfrightened, neither minimizing nor amplifying. The patient needs to know that what came up can be held in the room. Your steadiness is the container.

5. Don’t over-interpret. Don’t rush to fit it into your existing framework.

There is a real temptation, in the presence of vivid and symbolically rich material, to interpret. And there is an equally real temptation to run the experience through whatever theoretical lens you know best, to quickly locate the content in attachment history, or object relations, or whatever organizing framework the therapy has been using.

Sometimes that translation is useful. Often it forecloses something. The experience may have its own logic, its own meaning-structure, that doesn’t map neatly onto existing interpretive categories. Following the patient’s own meaning-making, rather than leading with yours, is usually more useful, especially early in integration.

Hold interpretations lightly. Ask more than you tell. Let the patient determine what the experience means, rather than arriving there first.

6. Return to the insights. Integration is slow and repetitive.

The opening that a psychedelic experience can produce is real. What most people don’t understand before they’ve been through it is that the opening is not the integration. The integration happens afterward, slowly, in ordinary life, through the unglamorous work of letting what was seen in the session actually reorganize how you live.

This means that the most useful work you can do may happen not in the weeks immediately after the experience, when everything feels vivid and charged, but in the months that follow, when the glow has faded and the question is whether anything actually changed.

Keep returning to what was seen. Ask what it looks like in practice, in the specific relationship, the recurring pattern, the ordinary Tuesday morning. The insights don’t do their work by being remembered. They do their work by being lived, gradually, in the texture of a real life.

7. Know when to refer.

There are situations that call for a more specialized container. If a patient is experiencing ongoing perceptual disturbances, signs of dissociation or derealization that aren’t resolving, or grandiosity that is escalating rather than settling, those are signals to involve someone with deeper training in psychedelic medicine.

The same is true if a patient is actively planning frequent or high-dose use without adequate integration time between sessions. Integration requires time: the nervous system and psyche need space to metabolize what was opened. More experience on top of unprocessed experience is not more healing.

Knowing your limits and naming them honestly is itself good clinical practice. The field of psychedelic medicine is expanding rapidly, and the network of trained practitioners is larger than it was even a few years ago. A warm handoff to someone with more specific expertise is a gift, not a failure.

You don’t need to become an expert in psychedelic medicine to be useful to the patients who come to you with this material. You need to be willing to enter the territory with them — curious, steady, and honest about what you know and what you don’t. That, in the end, is what integration most requires: the presence of someone who can stay.

This post is part of a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation.

The beach was coarse sand and tar balls, oil derricks offshore, the smell of sulphur and salt. Brown pelicans flying by, slow and stately, patrolling the coast. Flocks of shorebirds at the tideline that we would run at to watch rise. And the waves — hours of them, my body arced and curled, tumbling and rolling, front flips and back flips with the energy of the water, salt in my nose and ears. Sometimes when I got tired, I’d dive under the waves and find that still, cool place that was always there. A place to rest.

I had not thought about any of this for decades. Then I took up koan practice.

There is a koan: The leaves of a lotus are round, round, rounder than a mirror. As I bent my body into a circle during practice, something unexpected happened. The whole kinesthetic experience of Galveston beach, long forgotten, came forth, not as a story about my childhood, but as a somatic memory that became alive in my body in the present tense. The feeling of curling to flip in the tumble of a wave, spinning, that energy moving through me. Not remembered. Relived.

Another koan: My relaxed gaze follows the tracks of flying birds. And it is the pelicans and plovers and gulls from the Gulf that rush forth — not just as images but as something felt, the particular quality of tracking slow flight against a bright sky.

And then: In the Sea of Ise, ten thousand feet down, lies a single stone; I want to pick up that stone without wetting my hands. And I dive down to that cool spot under the waves — through the sense memory, through the surface of the childhood experience, down to the bottom of the ocean, into the dark mysterious. With this koan it was as if I could fall through the bottom of the sense memory itself, into something older and quieter beneath.

I had been, as Joyce’s Mr. Duffy in Dubliners, someone who lived a little distance from their body — mostly from the neck up. These koans gave me the feeling of my childhood, which I knew in my marrow but wasn’t aware of. They gave me the world, and my own life, in a way I didn’t have them before, not as narrative, not as meaning, but as something more immediate than either.

— — —

W.B. Yeats wrote:

God guard me from those thoughts

Men think in the mind alone;

He who sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow bone.

— W.B. Yeats, “A Prayer for Old Age”

Perhaps what happened with those koans and Galveston was thinking in a marrow bone — a kind of knowing that precedes language, that the narrative self cannot fully supervise, that carries more than can be told. And it is, I want to argue, the kind of knowing that transformation actually requires. Not insight. Not understanding. Something more immediate and less manageable than either.

— — —

Three Layers

What the Galveston experience points toward is a structure of consciousness that I have come to think of as three distinct layers — each real, each important, but only one of them the site where genuine transformation lives.

The first is personal narrative: the story of who we are, what happened to us, what it meant, how it shaped the person we became. The self as protagonist, moving through time. This is the layer of insight and understanding, of the coherent account of one’s own psychology, of the hard-won capacity to see one’s patterns and trace their origins. Most therapy works here. Most meditation addresses this layer. Most integration work engages it. It is real and it matters. And it is not where transformation lives.

The second layer is larger and stranger than it first appears. It includes the body’s somatic memory — what the body holds that the mind never articulated, the pre-verbal knowing that the Galveston koans reached. But it also includes the unconscious in the fuller psychoanalytic sense: what has been repressed and returns as repetition rather than memory, what was never symbolized and drives the engine of the closed loop from below, the emotional and phantasy layer that precedes and shapes the narrative self’s account of things. The psychoanalytic theorist Rudi Vermote calls this Zone 2: the domain of affect, phantasy, and — notably — the default mode network itself. The DMN, the neural substrate of the closed loop this series has been examining, operates not at Layer 1 but here, at Layer 2. The loop is deeper than it appears. It is not only a cognitive structure. It is an emotional and somatic one, rooted in the body and the unconscious as much as in narrative and language.

Here, at Layer 2, I am not quite separate from the landscape. The body and the world respond to each other, taking each other in, and experiences layer on top of each other, becoming dreams and textures and patterns. The story gives way. The body is left breathing.

The third layer is what psychoanalyst Rudi Vermote calls Zone 3: the infinite. Not a place reached by going further into Layer 2 — Zone 2 expands horizontally but cannot reach Zone 3 by its own momentum. Zone 3 opens through a different movement altogether: a releasing of both narrative and emotional activity in which something of a completely different character suddenly and simply arrives. Vermote describes it as characterized by surprise and simplicity. Not more of anything. Less — and then, completely, open.

— — —

Into the Ocean

A friend described his psilocybin journey to me, and I have been thinking about it in the context of these three layers.

He found himself traveling down a moonlit beach, filled with feelings of awe and profound calm, still himself, still a man walking, Layer 1 present but quiet. Then he entered the ocean. The water received him and he moved with the surge and release of the waves — his body no longer separate from the motion, no longer observing the movement but participating in it. Going deeper, he began to dance with the kelp, swaying rhythmically in the tides. And then, as a sense of direct somatic reality, he felt that he was the kelp. The boundary between self and world had dissolved. He was not watching the ocean. He was in it, as it.

This is Layer 2 fully inhabited: the subject/object boundary softened, the body knowing through rather than about, experience arriving not as narrative but as immersion. The DMN — the network that maintains the separation between self and world, that generates the closed loop — had quieted. What remained was sensation and presence, the surge and release, the rhythmic aliveness of something far older than the story he usually told about himself.

And then it went further. At some point the ocean became a kind of primordial womb, and it was him, and he was the origin of everything as well as everything born from that Mother. Not dissolution into nothing, but something perhaps the opposite: dissolution into everything. The sense of being the source and the sourced simultaneously, held in something that preceded and included all of it.

This is Zone 3. Vermote’s surprise and simplicity. Not produced by going deeper into Layer 2; the kelp dancing was Layer 2. The primordial arrived from a different direction entirely, unbidden, as a different order of experience. What the psychedelic research calls the mystical or unitive experience: the sense of being held within something larger than the self, the boundaries of individual existence temporarily and completely suspended.

What my friend did with this experience afterward, how he metabolized it, whether it reorganized his life or became a very beautiful memory, depended entirely on the work that followed. Zone 3 opened. Layer 2 still needed to be inhabited. The ocean as primordial Mother points toward something that the body, over time and in relationship, needs to learn to receive. The integration work after such a session is, in part, the work of descending into Layer 2, into the emotional and somatic material the Zone 3 experience touched, and allowing that material to be genuinely metabolized. Not primarily meaning-made. Metabolized into being.

It did not escape me that his journey was also into the ocean. Different waves, different water, but perhaps the same descent.

— — —

The Known Body and the Knowing Body

There are two ways to relate to the body, and they produce entirely different kinds of knowing.

The first is the body as object: the body that is known, observed, monitored, managed. This is how the narrative self relates to it: something with symptoms and sensations that can be tracked, optimized, and consulted for information. The defended self watches from a slight remove, noting what is felt, categorizing what arises, managing what threatens coherence. The body is what happens to us. The mind is what understands it.

The second is the body as subject: the knowing body, not the known one. The body that feels before it thinks. That registers the quality of a room before it has a sentence for it. That carries grief in the chest and recognition in the gut and the particular aliveness of genuine contact somewhere in the sternum. This body does not report to the mind. It is the knowing prior to language, prior to narrative, prior to the self’s account of what is happening. Merleau-Ponty described it as the medium through which we have a world: not the vehicle the self drives through experience, but the very condition of our being in contact with anything at all.

The shift this series has been tracing, from the narrative self to the less defended, more available, more genuinely present way of being, is, at the level of the body, a shift from the first kind of knowing to the second. From the body observed to the body inhabited. From the mind that supervises experience to the marrow bone that thinks through it.

This is what Polanyi meant by indwelling: the knower inhabiting the known rather than standing outside it. We know more than we can tell, he wrote, and what we know in the marrow is always more than what we can get into language. The body’s intelligence precedes articulation. And that precedence matters enormously for transformation, because the loop operates primarily through language and narrative at Layer 1 and through affect and somatic patterning at Layer 2. What lives below the stories, and below the emotional patterns that sustain them, is what the practices of unselfing are trying to reach.

— — —

Why the Story Isn’t Enough

Most of what passes for therapeutic and contemplative work operates at Layer 1. This is not a criticism; Layer 1 is where most human suffering is organized, and the work of making the narrative more coherent, more compassionate, more honest is genuine and important. But it has a ceiling.

The ceiling is this: the loop that maintains the defended self is a Layer 1 and Layer 2 structure simultaneously. At Layer 1 it runs through narrative and language. At Layer 2 it runs through affect, somatic patterning, and what Bollas called the unthought known — what is known in the body and procedural memory before language has organized it into story. When we bring more language and narrative to the task of loosening it, we are using Layer 1 tools on a problem that extends into Layer 2. The instrument and the deepest part of the obstacle do not share the same ground.

Understanding that you hold grief in your chest is a Layer 1 event. The grief actually moving in your chest, without your narrating it, is a Layer 2 event. Both are real. Only the second one reorganizes anything.

Allan Schore’s research on right-brain-to-right-brain communication makes the neuroscience precise: the most transformative moments in the therapeutic encounter happen not through interpretation but through something that passes between two nervous systems below the threshold of language. The therapist’s regulated body speaking directly to the patient’s, before either has found words for what is happening. Layer 2 meeting Layer 2. This cannot be produced by Layer 1 tools, however skillfully applied.

— — —

Three Technologies for the Descent

Each of the three traditions I work in has developed its own technology for reaching Layer 2. They look entirely different from the outside. What they share is that none of them work primarily through language and narrative, which is precisely why they can reach what language and narrative cannot.

Koan practice works through the body by presenting the practitioner with something that cannot be solved at Layer 1. The koan defeats the intellect — and in that defeat, attention drops from the narrating mind into the body’s more immediate mode of knowing. The lotus leaves become round not as a concept but as a felt sense moving through the practitioner’s own body. The beach returns not as memory but as sensation. The Sea of Ise koan opens something deeper still — the movement through sense memory into what lies beneath. The technology is precise: the koan is calibrated to defeat Layer 1 and open Layer 2, and occasionally, when the practitioner stays with it long enough without agenda, points toward Layer 3.

Psychedelic experience works through Layer 2 by taking the default mode network offline — the network that operates at Layer 2 to maintain the defended self. When that suppression relaxes, bottom-up signals from the deeper body become suddenly available with a vividness that Layer 1 ordinarily keeps out: somatic memories, affects, early relational patterns laid down before language. My friend’s experience of being the kelp, of moving with the surge and release, is exactly this: Layer 2 fully inhabited, the body knowing through rather than about. And when the psilocybin opens Zone 3, the primordial, the unitive, the experience of being the origin and the originated — it does so not by going further down into Layer 2 but by a different movement altogether. Which is also why the integration work that follows needs to be both body-centered and relational: what Zone 3 opened, Layer 2 still needs to metabolize.

Depth analytic work reaches Layer 2 through the relational body, what Schore calls right-brain-to-right-brain communication, what Bion called reverie, what Stern named the present moment: the unrepeatable, mutual encounter in which something is transmitted and received that cannot be said. The analyst who has done their own work, whose Layer 2 is available rather than defended against, can meet the patient’s Layer 2 material in a way that interpretation alone cannot. The patient’s unthought known becomes thinkable not because it has been understood but because it has been met, received, felt in the room by someone whose own body was not defending against it.

— — —

The Third Layer

Rudi Vermote is careful about Zone 3, and I want to honor that care. It is not a deeper version of Layer 2. It cannot be reached by going further into the somatic or unconscious material — Zone 2 expands horizontally but cannot by its own momentum cross into Zone 3. What allows the crossing is a different kind of movement: a releasing of both narrative and emotional activity, a quality of openness in which something of an entirely different character becomes possible.

Zen has been pointing at this layer for centuries without quite naming it as a layer, because naming it tends to make it into a destination, which immediately removes you from it. The koan tradition works precisely by defeating every attempt to make Layer 3 into an object. The koan question What was your face before your parents were born? cannot be answered at Layer 1 or Layer 2. It points past both. And the practitioner who stays with it long enough, without reaching for resolution, occasionally finds themselves in territory Vermote would recognize as Zone 3: surprising, simple, not what was expected, and not produced by any effort.

Yongjia describes the phenomenology: there is someone at peace, walking in the Tao, not fleeing delusion, not seeking truth. That is the quality of Layer 3 when it becomes, gradually, a way of being rather than an occasional opening. Not elevated, not transcendent in the sense of removed. Simply present, available to what is actually there, without the management project of Layer 1 or the emotional reactivity of Layer 2 in the way.

Bion called it O — the unknowable ground that cannot be known but can be approached through the abandonment of memory and desire. The analyst who sits with genuine not-knowing, without the protection of what they already understand, is sitting at the threshold of Zone 3. It is characterized, Bion said, by being rather than knowing. And that, being rather than knowing, is exactly what distinguishes Layer 3 from the other two. It is also what my friend encountered in the ocean: not more experience, not richer sensation, but the ground from which both experience and sensation arise.

Psychedelics can open Zone 3 directly, sometimes with a force and completeness that neither contemplative practice nor analytic work typically reaches without years of sustained effort. This is simultaneously their greatest gift and the source of their specific integration challenge. Zone 3 arrived at without Layer 2 preparation tends not to reorganize the life. What is needed after such an opening is not more meaning-making but the patient, body-centered, relational work of descending into Layer 2 - of letting what Zone 3 revealed be genuinely felt, genuinely metabolized, genuinely received by the nervous system and the relational field. All three traditions are needed for this. None of them is sufficient alone.

The caution remains: Layer 3 is the layer most vulnerable to bypassing. The equanimity it offers can be mistaken for the equanimity that avoids. What distinguishes them is not their phenomenology but their ground; genuine Zone 3 opens from Layer 2 having been genuinely inhabited, or returns the person to Layer 2 with new urgency. It does not substitute for it.

— — —

Transformation is not a thought you have. It is a descent you make.

The insight matters — it orients the descent, it names what has been avoided, it makes the territory recognizable when you arrive there. But it is not the arrival. The arrival is somatic and pre-narrative: something shifting in the chest, something releasing in the throat, something that was braced relaxing in the belly. The defended posture, held tight around the story of who we are and what we must protect, discovering, in the body itself, that the holding is no longer necessary.

When I dove under the waves at Galveston and found that still, cool place, I was not thinking about it. I was in it. My friend, moving with the surge and release of a moonlit ocean, feeling himself become the kelp, touching the primordial, he was in it too. Different waves, different water, different way of descent. The same place, found beneath.

The loop loosens, finally, at Layer 2. And what occasionally opens beneath Layer 2 — surprising, simple, unbidden — is what all three traditions have been pointing at, each in their own way, from the beginning.

— — —

This is the fifth post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The Galveston material and three-layer framework are drawn from my dharma talk and essay, ‘Galveston.’ The three-zone framework comes from a lecture by Rudi Vermote, informed by his work on Bion and Matte Blanco. The concept of indwelling comes from Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958). The concept of the unthought known comes from Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (1987). The right-brain-to-right-brain framework comes from Allan Schore, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy (2012). The psilocybin journey is shared with permission.

This is a transcript of a dharma talk I gave at Crimson Gate Meditation Community in May 2026.

Tonight I want to talk about boredom and Zen, with some stories, and a koan or two, and and I’m hoping at the end we can compare notes.

When I was nine years old I played right field on a softball team.

I should tell you that I was not a good softball player. I was small, I was slow, and I was completely terrified of the ball. Nothing ever happens in right field. It is the dharma seat of softball, the place of pure and unrelenting nowness, with absolutely nothing to recommend it.

Every practice, every game, I would take my position in that vast and empty outfield, and time would simply... stop. The other girls were doing things. There was action, drama, failure, triumph — over there, near the infield, where things happened. Out here there was grass. There was the particular quality of a Tuesday evening in late spring when you would rather be anywhere on earth than where you are. There was the sound of your own breathing.

I started to pray. I was not a religious child, but right field made a theologian of me. God, maybe a ball to right field wouldn’t be so bad. Or a sudden downpour. Maybe a bolt of lightning. I was genuinely open to the lightning. It seemed like a reasonable trade.

This went on for two years.

One evening, a pop fly was hit to right field.

You should understand that this was an answered prayer. The universe had heard me. After two years of standing in the void, something was finally coming my way, a small white ball arcing beautifully through the evening sky, arriving — arriving specifically for me.

I dropped it immediately.

The shame was extraordinary. For a moment I had been released from boredom into something worse, which was humiliation. And then — here is the thing I didn’t expect — the boredom was gone. Something had happened. Even catastrophe, it turns out, is a kind of relief.

* * *

A few years later my sister and I were latchkey kids, as we were called in the seventies, and we had a game we played when boredom reached a certain pitch after school. We called it Freaky People. The rules were simple: you had five minutes to scour the house for five items of clothing — undergarments were highly valued, hats were essential — and then everyone would retreat to the costume room and assemble a character. Points for coherence, more points for inexplicability.

I remember Pinup Farmer. I remember Alien Jazzercize. I remember one entry that my sister presented with complete seriousness, that she called Nothing Trying to Be Something.

Nothing trying to be something. She was eleven years old!

We didn’t have screens to reach for. We had a house, each other, and enough boredom that the mind eventually gave up waiting for rescue and started making things. The game wasn’t planned. It arrived the way things arrive when there is finally enough space — sideways, unbidden, a little strange, room to be slightly naughty.

* * *

When I first started to sit, I noticed something uncomfortable almost immediately.

I was boring.

Not the right-field kind of boring, that open and terrible emptiness. Something more constricted than that. My mind had a limited repertoire, and it played the hits: the grievance I’d been nursing for six months, the fantasy about how things should have gone, the background hum of wondering whether I was doing it right, whether I was good enough, whether anyone had noticed. The same loop, reliably. Every sitting.

There is a particular quality of boredom that comes from being stuck with your own predictable mind. The closed circuit. The snake eating its tail. You’ve heard this story — you’re the one telling it, and you’ve told it before, and somewhere underneath the telling a small voice is saying:

I know. I know how this ends.

What surprised me was that recognizing this was actually useful. Not pleasant — but useful. The constriction had a shape, and once I could feel its shape I could feel, occasionally, the edges of something outside it. A fresh breeze. Not something I manufactured. Something that arrived when the loop finally, briefly, ran out of material.

* * *

So here are three kinds of boredom, and I want to name them now that you’ve felt them.

There is the open boredom — right field, the long afternoon, the mind with nothing to grab onto. This is the boredom that is closest to the threshold of something existential. It’s uncomfortable precisely because there is space in it, and we don’t know what will fill that space. It is the precondition for the game, the prayer, the unexpected arrival.

There is the generative boredom — my sister in the costume room, eleven years old, presenting Nothing Trying to Be Something. This is what the open boredom becomes when two people are in it together, when there is nothing to reach for and so something gets made instead. Creativity is not the opposite of boredom. It is what boredom, given enough time and enough trust, turns into.

And there is the recursive boredom — the closed loop, the self eating itself, the default mode network running its familiar routes. This is the most painful of the three, because it looks like a trap. And it is a trap. But it is a trap with a signal buried in it. When you are thoroughly bored with your own mind, something in you is ready.

* * *

There is something else worth naming — not quite any of these three boredoms, but not far from them either.

Something has happened to our collective capacity for stillness. Most of us — and this is an observation about the water we all swim in, not a judgment — find it genuinely difficult to sit without stimulation. The phone appears in the hand before the thought to reach for it has fully formed. The moment of pause, of waiting, of nothing-in-particular, feels not just uncomfortable but intolerable, something to be immediately remedied.

This is not exactly restlessness, though the tradition names that as a hindrance. It’s something more like an allergy to the gap — a reflexive reaching that happens below the level of intention. The space where Nothing Trying to Be Something might arise has been colonized, preventively, before we even feel the emptiness.

Contemplative traditions have always worked against the mind’s tendency toward distraction. But there is something new in the scale of this — the way our attention has been so precisely studied and so deliberately harvested that the capacity for silence has to be cultivated like a rare plant. We can notice the extent to which all our minds have been colonized in this way, and meet that with compassion rather than judgment. When we sit, we are practicing against a strong current. That is worth knowing. The capacity for silence is not a given anymore. It is something we tend, together, carefully.

* * *

There is a koan — Blue Cliff Record, Case 6.

Yunmen said, “I’m not asking you about before the full moon.18 Come and say a word or two about after the full moon.”

He responded to his own request, “Every day is a good day.”

That’s it. That’s the answer.

The tradition treats this as a statement of realization, which it is. But let’s stay with how annoying it is for a moment. Every day? Including the right-field days? Including the days when the loop won’t stop and the mind is gray and nothing means anything?

Yes. Particularly those.

John Tarrant, in his book Bring Me the Rhinocerous, brings us the koan from the miscellaneous collection,

Count the stars in the sky.

He called it a boring koan. And it is. You can’t do it. It goes nowhere. The task is impossible, the instruction is absurd, and yet — here you are. Something in you is attending. Something is counting, even knowing it can’t count. That attention, that faithful and somewhat ridiculous presence with the impossible task, is the whole thing.

The monk stands in right field. Nothing is happening. The monk prays for a pop fly or a bolt of lightning. Time continues.

Count the stars in the sky.

* * *

Suzuki Roshi said: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. Boredom is the expert’s mind — the mind that thinks it already knows what this is. The cushion. The breath. Tuesday evening. Already categorized, already filed, already survived before. The closed loop is another name for expertise about yourself — you know your own moves, your own complaints, the shape of your own constriction. You are an expert on you, and the expertise is killing you.

Beginner’s mind doesn’t mean you don’t know things. It means you haven’t decided yet what this moment is. My sister, presented with an afternoon and five items of clothing, hadn’t decided yet. The costume room was full of possibility precisely because nothing was determined. She walked in with nothing and came out as Nothing Trying to Be Something, which is also kind of a description of what we notice we are doing when we sit.

Nothing trying to be something. Something trying to remember it is nothing. The two Chiens meeting in the doorway.

* * *

Dogen said that each moment is completely itself — not a vehicle to somewhere else, not a waiting room. This is the root of boredom’s suffering: the assumption that now is insufficient. That the real thing is coming. That right field is what you have to get through to reach the place where things happen.

But Yunmen just says: every day is a good day.

Not every day is pleasant. Not every day is luminous. Not every day yields a pop fly or an answered prayer or a moment when the stars come close enough to count.

Every day is a good day.

Which means this day. This sitting. This Monday evening in spring with nothing happening and the sound of your own breathing and God apparently unavailable for comment.

* * *

I have sat through retreats that felt like right field — whole days of the same tired loop, the mind on its familiar routes, nothing breaking open, the koan sitting there like a stone. And I have learned, slowly, to trust something in that. Not to like it. Not to perform equanimity about it. But to trust that the boredom, whatever its flavor, is doing something I cannot see.

The open boredom is clearing the ground. The recursive boredom is running down. Even the flat, gray, existential boredom — the acedia, the noon-day demon, the dark night of the softball diamond — even that is a kind of drilling. Boredom bores a hole. What comes through is not something we made.

My sister walked into that room with five ridiculous items of clothing and no plan. She came out as Nothing Trying to Be Something. And we giggled, and we recognized it, and something true had been made from nothing.

Every day is a good day.

You have sat across from someone who was listening to you and felt, at some level beneath the words, that they were not quite present — that their attention was somewhere else, or that they were composing their response while you spoke, or that they were relating to you through a template of who they expected you to be. Their words may have been right, their voice may have been warm. But something was missing from the contact. You left the conversation feeling heard in the technical sense without feeling truly connected.

And you have had the other experience. Rarer. The person across from you was simply there — attending to what you were actually saying rather than to their version of it, genuinely curious about what you were going through rather than how to respond to it. You felt the difference in your body. Something in you relaxed and expanded that had not known it was tense. You said things you had not planned to say. You understood something about yourself in the act of speaking it that you had not understood before. There was a bit of magic.

That difference is what this post is about. It is not a variation in interpersonal skills. It is the difference between being in the presence of a closed loop system and an open one. And I want to suggest something further: that the capacity for genuine attention is not primarily a social skill or a therapeutic technique. It is the direct expression of the unselfing project. You cannot offer it without having done something with yourself first.

— — —

What the Loop Does Instead

The self running the closed loop , self referential system cannot genuinely attend to another person. It can perform attention — warmly, skillfully, with impressive fidelity to the surface features of what attending looks like. It can be empathic in the sense of registering what the other person is feeling and responding in kind. It can ask the right questions and remember what was said and demonstrate that it was listening.

But beneath the performance, it is always attending to itself. Managing how it appears in the encounter. Monitoring the interaction for confirmation or threat. Filtering what the other person is saying through the lens of what it means for the self’s story. The other person is not received as they actually are — they are received as the self’s projection of them, organized by old expectations, young needs, shaped by what the self already knows to be true.

This is not deliberate hypocrisy, but rather the limits of the closed loop structure. The loop filters what arrives, confirms what it already knows, and cannot receive what is actually new — including strange reality of the person in front of it. The closed loop cannot be surprised by another person. And a relationship in which you cannot be surprised is a relationship in which the other person is not quite real, but rather a repository of projections.

Bion named what the alternative requires with the concept of reverie: the analyst’s capacity to receive the patient’s unprocessed emotional experience — to be genuinely entered by it, to metabolize it, and to return it in a form the patient can use. What makes reverie possible is the abandonment of memory and desire: the analyst does not bring to the session what they already know about the patient, what they want the patient to become, or what they need the session to produce. They arrive, as nearly as they can manage, without agenda. Not as an exercise in “neutrality” but as an act of genuine openness to what is actually there.

Bion’s instruction sounds like a clinical technique. It is not. It is a description of a degree of unselfing applied to the encounter with another person. And it cannot be produced by training alone. The analyst who has not done their own work will find that their memory and desire — their anxiety about the patient, their investment in particular outcomes, their unprocessed personal countertransference responses to what the patient evokes — flood the session regardless of their intention. Reverie is what becomes possible when enough of that has been cleared away. You cannot will it into being. You can only do the work that removes what is in its way.

— — —

The Direction of Attention Is Love

As I’ve mentioned, Iris Murdoch used the term “unselfing” to describe the moment her attention was captured by something outside herself, freeing her for a moment from her own self-referential pattern. And she describes what it is: not the absence of self, but the temporary release from self-preoccupation — from the hungry, relentless ego and its perpetual management project. What replaces it is attention. Direct, unmediated, the thing itself rather than the self’s story about the thing. The direction of attention, she writes, is outward — away from the self that reduces all to a false unity, toward the great surprising variety of the world. And the ability to direct attention that way is, she says, love.

Simone Weil, whose thinking underlies Murdoch’s, pushes this further into territory that should be unsettling for anyone who works in the helping professions. Attention, she argues, is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Not warmth, not helpfulness, not empathy in the ordinary sense — something more specific and more demanding. The capacity to receive what is actually there, without the self filtering it into something more comfortable or known or more manageable. Her account of what genuine attention looks like is a statement of ethics: What are you going through? Four words. Asked without agenda for the answer to be other than it is. Willing to stay with what comes back.

Most people, Weil observes, do not receive this quality of attention even once in their lives. The people who should offer it most reliably — therapists, teachers, parents, guides — are often the most defended against it, because the material that genuine attention opens them to is the same material their own loops are organized around avoiding. You cannot receive another person’s grief without being touched by grief. You cannot be present to another person’s terror without some access to your own. The loop protects against this. And the protection costs the other person the only thing that actually helps.

— — —

Permeable to the Joys and Anguish of This Life

Joan Sutherland describes the koan tradition as making practitioners permeable to the joys and the anguish of this life. That word — permeable — is one I want to stay with. The koan works not by producing insight but by dissolving the membrane between the practitioner and reality. Including the reality of other people.

The Mahayana Buddhist tradition from which Zen descends is built around a figure who embodies this dissolution as a way of life: the bodhisattva, the being who vows not to enter final liberation until all sentient beings are free. The bodhisattva’s practice is not primarily private meditation. It is, at its root, the turning of attention outward — toward others, toward their suffering, toward the reality of what they are going through. Vimalakirti, one of the tradition’s great exemplars, is sick because all sentient beings are sick. His illness is not metaphor. It is what genuine permeability looks like when taken to its logical conclusion: the self so permeable to the reality of others that their suffering is felt as one’s own.

Kanzeon — the bodhisattva of great compassion, whose name means Hearer of the World’s Cries — is awakened precisely by hearing the sounds of others’ suffering. Not by inner cultivation alone. By turning toward. The sound of one hand, in Hakuin’s formulation, is the sound that stills all suffering — but he introduced the koan with reference to Kanzeon, who is awakened by hearing. Attention to the other is not the consequence of awakening. It is its mechanism.

Sutherland’s commentary on the Vimalakirti Sutra carries a line that I return to often: the awakening of each of us is an inextricable part of the awakening of the world. This is not an aspiration. It is a structural claim about what awakening actually is. The transformation we have been tracing through this series — the loosening of the loop, the two movements of integration, the return to ordinary life from a different center of gravity — is not a private achievement. It becomes real in the encounter with another person. It is verified, and deepened, and completed there.

And it’s also important to state that this does not mean an absence of boundaries. One who is permeable is actually selectively permeable, like the cell walls we learned about in high school. When there is genuine threat or ill will, the bodhisattva can skillfully refuse, protest, and redirect.

— — —

The Face That Interrupts

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes the most radical move available on this territory, and it is worth sitting with because it inverts the standard model of self-development that runs through most therapeutic and contemplative culture.

The standard model assumes: work on yourself, and better relationships will follow. Cultivate presence, develop insight, loosen the loop — and then, from that improved vantage point, engage with others more genuinely. The self develops first, privately; the relational life improves as a consequence.

Levinas reverses this. The encounter with the other person — what he calls the face, the irreducible presence of another human being who makes an ethical claim before I have decided how to respond — is not a consequence of self-development. It is its condition. The face of the other is the original interruption of the closed loop. Before I have had a chance to organize my response, before I can filter this person through my story about who they are and what they mean for me, the face arrives and demands: here I am. What are you going to do with that?

This is disorienting if you have spent years in practices oriented primarily toward private cultivation. Levinas is not saying meditation is useless or that therapy is beside the point. He is saying that the encounter with genuine otherness — the person who is irreducibly not me, not my projection, not my story — is what the self-work is in service of, and also what it requires to complete itself.

The relational psychoanalysts have been making a version of this argument from their own angle for decades. Winnicott said, there is no such thing as an infant. The self forms in relationship, in the quality of being received by another. Stern said that the basic unit of psychic change is not insight but the present moment — the brief, unrepeatable encounter between two people that is genuinely mutual. Loewald said our ghosts must be met in relationship before they can become ancestors. In each of these, the other person is not the backdrop to transformation. They are its medium.

— — —

You Cannot Train Presence

This brings me to the claim in this series that I think is most uncomfortable for the fields involved — and that I believe most urgently needs to be said.

The quality of attention you can offer another person — in the consulting room, in the zendo, in the psychedelic session — is a direct function of your own degree of unselfing. Not your training. Not your technique. Not your years of experience or your theoretical sophistication or your certification from the appropriate body. Your own work. How much of your own loop has been seen and loosened. How much of your own material has been through the mourning hut. How permeable you are to what is actually in the room.

This is not an argument against training. Training matters. Technique matters. The map of the territory is genuinely useful. But the map is not the territory, and the territory — the actual encounter with another person in genuine difficulty — requires a quality of presence that no curriculum can directly produce. You cannot train presence. You can train the conditions that make presence more likely. The conditions are your own work.

The psychedelic-assisted therapy field is currently building elaborate protocols for guide training. They are, many of them, genuinely useful. They address set and setting, therapeutic alliance, contraindications, the management of difficult sessions. What they cannot address directly is whether the guide can remain genuinely present when the person before them enters the dark — when the opening cracks into something frightening, or when the material that surfaces is the material the guide has been organizing their own life around avoiding. In that moment, the protocol is not what holds the container. The guide’s own work is what holds the container.

The Zen tradition has always known this. Dharma transmission — the formal recognition of a teacher — is not a certification of knowledge. It is the recognition of a quality of presence that has been verified through years of sustained encounter. The teacher transmits not information but something more immediate: a way of being that the student can feel, and that points toward what practice actually produces when it goes where it needs to go.

— — —

There is a paradox at the center of this, and I want to name it directly because it is the paradox the whole series has been circling.

You cannot will genuine attention. The harder you try to attend — to really listen, to be truly present, to offer the quality of reception that Weil describes — the more self-conscious the attending becomes. And the more self-conscious it becomes, the further it recedes. The effort of attention collapses back into self-preoccupation. The person before you is attended to by a self that is now watching itself attend.

This has the same structure as the unselfing paradox that opened this series: you cannot produce it by trying. You can only create the conditions in which it becomes possible. The conditions — the ongoing work of loosening the loop, the two movements of integration, the relational and contemplative and psychedelic practices that each contribute something the others cannot — are what gradually remove the obstacles. Real attention is not achieved. It arrives, when enough has been cleared away, as the natural quality of a mind that is no longer primarily occupied with managing itself.

What it feels like, from the inside, is not effort. It is availability. Receptivity. The sense of being truly open to what is actually there — the specific grief of this person, the particular quality of this moment, the irreducible reality of this face. Weil’s kestrel coming into focus. The thing itself, rather than the self’s story about the thing.

Joan Sutherland describes the awakening of each person as inextricably part of the awakening of the world. This is the ethical horizon of all the work described in this series. Not the private peace of a less defended self. Not the expanded perspective of someone who has glimpsed something larger. The capacity to be genuinely with another person — to offer them, in Weil’s phrase, the rarest and purest form of generosity — and to find, in that offering, that the boundary between self and world has become somewhat more permeable. More available. More alive.

— — —

This is the fourth post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The concept of unselfing originates with Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). The concept of attention as moral practice comes from Simone Weil’s Waiting for God. Joan Sutherland Roshi’s description of koans as making practitioners permeable to the joys and anguish of life comes from Through Forests of Every Color (Shambhala, 2022). The ethical philosophy of the face comes from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961).

oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage to my prestige,

when suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.

In an instant everything is altered.

The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.

There is nothing now but kestrel.

— Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

By now, if you have been following this series, you may be asking a reasonable question: fine, but what do I actually do?

The first four posts established a problem and a direction. The self cannot transform itself by examining itself. The loop is self-sealing — it metabolizes insight without being reorganized by it. Transformation requires a temporary loosening of the examining structure itself. And the loosened self, returned from the opening, needs a container and a practice and a relationship to make the loosening metabolizable rather than merely memorable.

But what are those practices? And what does it mean that some of the things that actually loosen the loop are not formal practices at all — not meditation or therapy or psychedelics — but a camping trip, a project at work, an encounter with a friend?

This post is about the surprisingly wide territory of what counts as a practice of unselfing — and about what all of it, from the most rigorous contemplative discipline to the most ordinary moment of absorption, has in common.

— — —

Amara came to therapy having landed her first management role — a genuine achievement, earned through years of competence and care. She had all the skills and knowledge the job required. She was also, in every team meeting, paralyzed.

The fear had a familiar shape: What if she said the wrong thing and people thought she was incompetent? What if she made someone angry? She managed the fear the way she had always managed it — by working harder, preparing more thoroughly, leaving no margin for error. The long hours kept the anxiety at bay, just barely, until they didn’t. She arrived in therapy burned out and resentful, running a loop that had sustained her for years and was now costing more than it returned.

We looked at the childhood that had taught her she needed to be agreeable in order to be loved and safe. We got to know her young, fearful, perfectionist parts — the child who had learned that love was conditional on performance and that disapproval was genuinely dangerous. The insight was real. The understanding was genuine. And the loop persisted.

She tried mindfulness. The anxiety was too strong; sitting with it without props pulled her further in rather than loosening anything. The very act of turning inward with the observing mind activated the same apparatus that maintained the loop. More self-examination, applied to the problem of too much self-examination.

The first shift came from somewhere she hadn’t expected.

— — —

A new project at work required her to collaborate closely with a small group over several weeks. It was not designed as a therapeutic intervention. It had deadlines and deliverables and the ordinary friction of people working together under pressure.

What happened in that group was something Amara had not experienced in the consulting room, not because the therapy was inadequate but because it could not produce this particular thing: she began to feel the support of her colleagues. Not their approval — their actual presence alongside her. And in that presence, she started to notice something she had been too inside her own loop to see before. They were worried too. The colleague who always seemed so confident was quietly terrified of giving a presentation. The one whose feedback she had dreaded most was himself carrying a fear of being misunderstood that he managed through precision and apparent certainty. They were all, in their different ways, running some version of the same loop.

This recognition was not an insight she arrived at through reflection. It arrived through contact — through genuine encounter with other people’s actual experience, which the loop, by definition, had been keeping out. The self-preoccupied mind cannot receive this kind of information because it is too busy managing how it appears to notice what is actually there.

What followed was not dramatic. A small movement toward self-compassion — not produced by a formal self-compassion practice but arising naturally from feeling less alone in the difficulty. The loop hadn’t dissolved. But it had loosened, slightly, in a way that months of insight work had not managed to produce. Something had finally come through from outside.

— — —

The second shift came on a camping trip with friends, deep enough into the mountains that the usual signals — phone, notifications, the ambient noise of professional life — were simply absent.

Amara had not gone to the mountains for a breakthrough. She had gone because her friends were going and she needed a break. She went without expectation or agenda.

She found herself immersed — in the light on water, in the physical effort of hiking, in the smell of woodsmoke and cold air, in the particular quality of silence that fills the space when the self’s usual preoccupations have no place to gain traction. And in that immersion, she had an experience she later struggled to articulate: she could see her thoughts. Not from inside them, running their familiar weather, but from a slight distance, as if watching clouds cross a sky. The anxious story about the team meeting and what people thought and whether she was adequate — she could see it as a story. Not the truth. A story her mind was spinning, with great conviction and very little relationship to what was actually happening around her.

This is what Murdoch was pointing at with the kestrel. The self’s brooding does not stop through effort or intervention. It stops when something outside the loop — a hovering bird, a mountain, another person’s genuine difficulty — interrupts the management project with its simple, immediate reality. There is nothing now but kestrel. There is nothing now but the quality of light through trees. There is nothing now but the recognition that your colleague is afraid too.

When Amara returned from the camping trip, she found she had a slightly different relationship to the breath practice she had previously found intolerable. Having had the experience of her thoughts as clouds, she could use the practice to return to that perspective — briefly, imperfectly, but genuinely. That practice became available because the oblique experience had created a little room. The room is what makes the practice possible. Usually it is the other way around in the therapeutic imagination — we assume the practice creates the room. But for Amara, and for many people I have worked with, the sequence runs the other way.

— — —

What All of It Has in Common

Amara’s story points toward something that I think the therapeutic and contemplative literature tends to understate: the loop loosens through a surprisingly wide range of experience, much of it not formal practice at all.

Meditation. Certain kinds of therapy. Psychedelic experience. Creative absorption — the writer or musician who disappears into the work. Working as part of a genuine team. Being in nature. Physical practice carried to the point of exhaustion. Ritual, religious or secular. Grief fully felt. The sudden presence of another person’s actual reality. A piece of music that undoes something.

These look nothing alike on the surface. And yet they share a single structural feature: each of them creates conditions in which the self’s management project is temporarily interrupted. Not overcome. Not dismantled. Interrupted — by absorption, by encounter, by being genuinely moved, by something larger than the self’s current preoccupations.

When Murdoch watches the kestrel, the anxious self-occupied mind is simply gone — not because she worked at it but because the bird’s reality was more immediate than the story she was running. When a musician is fully inside a piece of music, the self that worries about how it sounds has stepped back into the service of something larger. When a team is working well together, the individuals’ self-preoccupations soften in the presence of a shared purpose. When the body is genuinely exhausted — at the end of a long swim, a hard climb, a day of physical labor — the narrating mind runs out of road. In each of these, what interrupts the loop is not introspection but contact: with another person’s reality, with a natural world that doesn’t care about the self’s story, with a physical demand that exceeds the management project’s capacity to supervise.

Michael Polanyi described this as indwelling: the knower inhabiting the known rather than observing it from a safe distance. The musician who thinks through the music rather than about it. The climber whose body knows the rock before the mind has named the hold. The therapist absorbed in genuine contact with a patient, no longer monitoring their own performance. In each of these, knowing becomes direct rather than mediated. The self is still present — it has not vanished — but it has stepped out of the way.

— — —

The Practice That Becomes Another Loop

This is where a crucial distinction needs to be made, because the same activity can be a genuine practice of unselfing or a refined extension of the same self-management project it appears to be loosening.

Meditation is the clearest example, because it is the practice most widely recommended for exactly this territory — and the one most vulnerable to being colonized by the very structure it is meant to loosen.

The goal-oriented mind does not surrender easily. Given the instruction to meditate, it immediately begins to meditate correctly. It evaluates the quality of the sit. It tracks equanimity as evidence of progress. It compares this session to the last one. It notes, with satisfaction or disappointment, how well it managed the wandering of attention. The person who finishes their morning sitting and thinks — consciously or not — I did well today, or I was distracted today, or I’m getting better at this, is practicing something real. But what they are practicing is not quite unselfing. It is the self-as-project in contemplative dress, which is a sophisticated and entirely sincere form of the same loop.

What distinguishes genuine meditative practice from its double is not technique. It is the quality of relationship to the practice itself. Is the sitting oriented toward arriving at something — a state, a capacity, a measurable improvement? Or is it oriented toward meeting what is actually there, without an agenda for what that should be? The former keeps the self in charge, even when the self is trying very hard to relinquish control. The latter creates the conditions in which something the self cannot produce might occasionally arrive.

The instruction that Joan Sutherland gave me — which I quoted in an earlier post and which I return to often— was not to practice better but to sit with things as they are, with kindness and curiosity. That is a fundamentally different orientation. It is not asking the self to perform a state, or to do something right. It is asking the self to stop performing — which is a much harder and less legible instruction, and one that cannot be evaluated by the part of the mind that evaluates.

What is true of meditation is true of all the practices named in this series. Therapy pursued as self-optimization produces a more articulate, more self-aware loop. Psychedelics pursued as guaranteed transformation produce impressive experiences that the unreconstructed self absorbs and narrates and ultimately organizes around its existing project. Creative work pursued for recognition produces a self-conscious product rather than an absorbed maker. The determining factor, across all of these, is not the form. It is whether the self’s management project is genuinely interrupted by the practice — or whether it has simply found a more sophisticated way to run.

This applies with particular force to anyone facilitating these experiences in others. The therapist, teacher, or guide who has not genuinely encountered their own loop — who uses their training or their credentials or their accumulated clinical hours as evidence that their own work is done — brings something structurally limited into the room, however skilled their technique. The protocol holds the container only up to the point where the guide’s own unprocessed material begins to run the session. After that, it is not the protocol that matters. It is the quality of presence. And that, as this series has been arguing throughout, is a function of the guide’s own unselfing — not their certification.

— — —

A Lifelong Orientation, Not a Program

I want to offer something here that is not a program — not a sequence of steps toward a measurable outcome — but an orientation. A way of approaching the territory of unselfing that is itself consistent with what that territory requires.

The first movement is noticing. Before any practice, before any intervention, before any decision about what to do, there is the simpler and more foundational act of noticing the loop. Where is it most active in your life right now? Not as a problem to be solved — not yet — but as a landscape to be known. The relational situation that reliably activates the management project. The emotional weather that arrives before you have time to prepare for it. The way the self contracts around particular kinds of threat or uncertainty. Noticing is not analysis. It is the beginning of a different relationship with what is there.

The second movement is finding the oblique entry. For most people, the direct frontal approach — sitting down to meditate, going to therapy, attempting to observe the loop in the middle of it — is too activating at first. The loop tightens around the attempt to loosen it. What tends to work better is the sideways approach: finding the practice or experience that interrupts the loop without targeting it. For some people that is nature. For some it is physical exhaustion. For some it is the absorption of creative work, or the particular quality of attention that comes with being genuinely useful to others, or the experience of being part of something larger than themselves. The question is not which practice is correct. The question is which practice actually moves you — which one creates even a brief experience of the loop loosening, of the self’s grip on the story relaxing, of something outside the familiar weather arriving.

The third movement is using formal practice to deepen what the oblique entry opened. Once the loop has loosened even slightly — once there is a little room — formal practice becomes genuinely available in a way it may not have been before. Meditation practiced after an experience of thoughts as clouds is different from meditation practiced from inside the clouds. Therapy that follows an experience of genuine connection with others has more to work with than therapy that is the only place the defended self is asked to meet itself. Psychedelic work that arrives after a sustained practice of returning — whether through nature, through meditation, through the relational container — tends to integrate more fully than work that arrives without that ground.

The fourth movement — and this is the one most often missing from accounts of transformation — is returning. The loop does not loosen once. It loosens, and then it reconstitutes, and then it loosens again. The charcoal fire that Tozan describes — the return to ordinary life after everything — is not a destination reached once and kept. It is a practice of returning, daily, to the quality of attention that the unselfing work makes possible. Noticing when the loop has tightened again, without judgment. Finding the way back to the oblique entry. Staying with the formal practice, not as performance, but as the ongoing renewal of the conditions that make presence possible.

This is not a program with a completion date. It is a lifelong orientation — available at any point, entered from any direction, never finished and never failed. The person who notices their loop today and does nothing dramatic about it has already begun. The person who finds the oblique entry that works for them and follows it even briefly has already begun. The person who brings even a fraction of genuine curiosity and kindness to what they find there has already begun.

That is enough. It is, in fact, exactly enough — because the loop does not require a heroic intervention. It requires something much simpler and much harder: a willingness to keep showing up to the territory, again and again, with less agenda each time.

— — —

There is a Zen instruction that I have been returning to throughout this series, in different forms. Dogen: to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

All things. Not all meditation cushions. Not all therapy sessions. All things — the kestrel, the mountain, the team meeting in which you suddenly see your colleague’s fear, the physical exhaustion that runs the mind out of road, the piece of music that arrives before the self can organize its defenses. The territory of unselfing is everywhere the self’s management project meets something that doesn’t care about it. Which is, it turns out, almost everywhere.

The practices are not the point. The loosening is the point. It is inherently joyful. And the loosening is available in more places, and through more doors, than any single tradition has ever been willing to admit.

— — —

This is the fourth post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The concept of unselfing originates with Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). The concept of indwelling as the structure of genuine knowing comes from Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966). The clinical composite of Amara is drawn from themes common to many cases and does not represent any single patient.

This is adapted from a dharma talk I gave on Friday evening of the Original Face Retreat — a four-day ketamine-assisted retreat for clinicians held at Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg this past April. I’m sharing it here because the ideas feel larger than the room where they were spoken. I’ve written it in second person, addressed to the people who were there — but I’m inviting you in.

I want to begin by acknowledging what happened earlier today.

You meditated, and you lay down in a room with other people — with music and intention and something that temporarily altered your brain chemistry — and maybe something in you loosened. Something shifted. Perhaps you were surprised. Some layer of the defended, organized, effortful self became less defended, less organized, less effortful.

For some of you that was beautiful. For some it was strange or disorienting. For some it was both. For a few, it may have felt like not too much happened — a gentle practice of presence.

All of that is the practice.

What I want to do now is offer a frame — a set of ideas from the Buddhist tradition — a context in which to hold what happened. Because one of the ways we can accidentally close back down after an opening is to not have a frame for what we encountered. We reach for familiar vocabulary and concepts, and the experience gets smaller.

Buddhism has been mapping this territory for twenty-five hundred years. I want to introduce you to some of that map, and to how it may help in living in our Original Face.

What Buddhism Actually Says About the Self

Buddhism doesn’t actually say there is no self. That’s the popular version — the idea that enlightenment means you disappear. But what the Buddha actually pointed at is something stranger and, I think, more interesting.

He said: look carefully at what you call self — really look — and you won’t find the thing you expected. A body, yes. Feelings, yes. Perception, thought, awareness — all present and real. But the central, permanent, self-possessing you who owns all of it? Look for that one and the looking comes up empty.

What you find instead is a river.

I grew up going to the Russian River. I know that river — the particular smell of it in summer, warm water and willow and something alive underneath. I remember tossing a football there with my uncle Phil when I was seven, swimming with my sister, ducking under and coming up and floating on our backs. I still go back. Kayak it, swim in it, sit on the bank with my feet in. There is something about that river that feels like a presence, like a place that holds deep memory. And yet every drop of water I swam in as a child has long since dispersed — into the Pacific, into clouds, into rain somewhere far from here. What I move through now is entirely different water, different light.

The river is real. You can love it your whole life. And it is also not a fixed thing — it is a movement, shaped by the land and the season and the year. A verb that has learned to answer to a name.

The self is like this.

And then there is rain.

Rain happens when conditions come together — temperature, moisture, the shape of the land. When those conditions are present, rain falls. When they shift, rain stops. It doesn’t go anywhere. There is no rain waiting in reserve between storms. There is only the meeting of conditions, and then the falling, and then the ceasing.

The self arises this way. A body, a nervous system, a particular history, a relational field, a stream of memories and perceptions — when these conditions are present, this self occurs. Vivid, suffering, hoping, remembering. And when the conditions shift — in sleep, in stillness, in medicine — the sense of a solid, bounded self softens. Doesn’t go anywhere. Just stops occurring in quite that way.

The Buddhist tradition calls this dependent origination. Nothing arises alone. Everything that exists arises in dependence on conditions, is held in being by them, and ceases when they change. The self is not exempt from this. In fact the self is one of its most vivid examples.

What makes the self feel solid — more solid than rain, more permanent than a river — is perception. Perception categorizes. It takes the flowing stream of experience and sorts it into things: objects, events, selves. It makes a noun out of what is actually a verb. And then we weave a story.

The self most of us live inside is a narrative. Who I am, where I came from, what I’m good at, what I have to protect. The tradition names three root afflictions that run this machinery: clinging, aversion, and ignorance. Clinging is the reaching — toward pleasure, security, identity, the next thing that will finally make us feel okay. Aversion is the turning away — from pain, from uncertainty, from the evidence that we are more porous than we thought. And ignorance is the background assumption that holds it all together: that the story is who we actually are.

The self that suffers is the one gripping its own story.

And here is what I want to say carefully, because it matters for how we hold what opened today: understanding the cage doesn’t open the door. What actually shifts something is shifting our center of identification — from the weather and drama and incessant loops of the small self, to the spaciousness and flow of Original Face. The ketamine didn’t explain the default mode network to you. It quieted it. The koan doesn’t offer a theory of selfhood. It opens something that the grasping mind doesn’t know how to hold. Which is exactly the point.

Dogen — the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master — put it in three lines that I find almost unbearable in their precision:

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self;
to study the self is to forget the self;
to forget the self is to be awakened by all things.

Each line is a step. The first move is simply turning toward. Orienting inward with genuine curiosity, without agenda. And in that honest turning, the self begins to reveal its nature: a process, a flow, a verb.

When the small mind forgets itself — even briefly — it is suddenly awakened by everything it had been filtering out. The people in the room. The quality of the air. The grief held at arm’s length. The connection it had been afraid to feel. Awakened by all things — not just lit up by them, but made more awake through contact with them.

The Koan as Technology

Which brings us to the question at the center of this retreat.

What was your original face before your parents were born?

A koan is not a puzzle. It is not asking you to come up with a clever answer. It is not a riddle with a solution waiting on the other side.

The Rinzai tradition understood that there is a particular kind of knowing the conceptual mind is very good at. Taxonomy, analysis, comparison, inference. This is the kind of knowing that got many of you your degrees and your licenses and your clinical sophistication. It is genuinely useful. It is also only one kind of knowing.

A koan works on the mind in two directions at once. On one hand, it disrupts the analytic habit — the question keeps slipping through the fingers of ordinary thought, and in that slippage, the small mind is invited to loosen its certainty about how knowing works. On the other hand, a koan is generative. It opens something. It invites the mind into a creative, associative, imaginal process — closer to dreaming than to analysis, closer to poetry than to diagnosis.

This is why koans have been carried in the body, not mainly held in the head. You sit with a koan. You walk with it. You let it move through you during your day, at the grocery store, during the long quiet of a retreat. The question doesn’t resolve — it ripens. And in the ripening, something in you opens that ordinary thinking keeps closed.

Before your parents were born — before the genetic inheritance, before the family system, before the relational field that shaped you, before the culture, before the language that gave you the concepts through which you experience yourself — before all of that, what was here?

You are somewhere right now. You are seeing colors, shapes, the quality of the light. All of that is perception — the mental overlay. But underneath all of that seeing, there is bare awareness. The capacity for experience itself, prior to its contents. You didn’t create that awareness. You didn’t learn it. It was there before your first memory, before language, before you knew that “you” were a you.

That is the original face.

Not a special experience. Not a mystical state reserved for advanced practitioners. The thing that is reading these words right now, before the words become thought. The one that was here before you knew your name.

Unselfing

There is a philosopher — not a Buddhist, but someone who was paying very close attention — named Iris Murdoch. In a slim, radical book called The Sovereignty of Good, she introduced a concept I’ve returned to many times.

She called it unselfing.

She wrote of a moment when she was looking out a window, agitated — caught in a resentful, anxious loop of thought about something in her personal life. And then, suddenly, she noticed a kestrel hovering in the distance. In the moment of genuinely attending to that bird — the quality of its stillness, the extraordinary suspended precision of it — the self that had been churning in anxiety simply wasn’t there. It had stepped aside. Not because she decided to let it go, not because she performed some act of will, but because her attention was genuinely drawn outside of itself.

She called this unselfing — and she understood it as one of the primary mechanisms by which we become capable of moral clarity, of real love, of genuine seeing. As long as the anxious, defended, story-maintaining self is running the show, we see through its lens. We see confirmation of what we already believe, evidence for the threats we already anticipate, reflections of our own fears and needs back at us.

When the self steps back — even briefly, even slightly — we can actually see what’s there.

Murdoch wasn’t saying the self is bad or needs to be destroyed. She was noticing that the small, defended self has a monopoly on attention it doesn’t quite deserve. That there is more to us than it. And that when its grip loosens — even momentarily — something more spacious can see.

The Buddhist tradition has been saying this for twenty-five hundred years. And now we have a neurological account of the same thing: the default mode network — that hum of self-referential activity, the background noise of me and my story and my worries — quiets. The self that was colonizing awareness steps back. And other things become available. Connection. Sensation. The quality of light in a room. A grief that had been waiting. The sheer fact of being here.

Three traditions. Three languages. One gesture.

And what all three point toward is that unselfing is not mainly a shift in understanding. The kestrel didn’t give Murdoch a new philosophy of the self. It simply drew her so completely outside her own loop that the clinging found nothing to grip. The craving mind lost its purchase. And in that gap, however brief, something that had been there all along became visible.

That’s what unselfing does at its most alive — it thaws what was frozen. The clinging loosens, not because we’ve talked it out of its position, but because conditions shifted and it had nowhere to go. And what remains when the grip eases is not emptiness. It’s the original face — the awareness that was here before the story got written.

That awareness never went anywhere. It’s under the noise. You touched it today.

What Today Was

What the ketamine was doing — pharmacologically, in the most reductive terms — was temporarily reducing the activity of the default mode network. That’s the self-maintenance system. The narrative loop that is almost always running: am I okay, what do people think of me, what am I supposed to do next, how does this fit the story I have about who I am.

When that quiets — and for most of you, to some degree today, it did — what’s left?

Awareness. Sensation. Sometimes connection of a quality that feels different from ordinary connection. Sometimes grief, because what was being defended against was actually grief. Sometimes just space — an almost sourceless spaciousness that is hard to describe because we don’t have good words for it, because our words are built for the self-maintaining mind.

What was your original face before your parents were born? This is what the koan is pointing at. Not something exotic. This. The awareness that was here underneath all of the noise today. The one that was watching, even when there was no one left to do the watching.

Whatever you touched today is not separate from who you are. It is not a special state you accessed. It is not an addition to your ordinary self.

It is your ordinary self, minus some of the scaffolding that usually obscures it.

The practice now is not to recreate that state. The practice is to let what you encountered inform how you relate to the self that is re-consolidating. The defended self is coming back — it is supposed to come back, you need it to navigate the world. But you have touched something that knows it isn’t the whole story. Let that knowing be a thread.

How to Cooperate with the Process

A few practical thoughts for working with what has opened.

Don’t over-narrate it. This is a particularly relevant caution for clinicians. We are trained to put experience into language quickly. We conceptualize, we interpret, we build frameworks. Some of that is useful — it’s part of how we integrate experience and make it available for use in our lives. But if we narrativize too quickly, we close back down. We turn the experience into a story about the experience, and then we’re at a safe, managed distance from it again. Hold it loosely for a while. Let it stay somewhat unresolved. Let it be a little larger than words.

Notice when you are effortful. When you feel yourself efforting — bracing, managing, performing, striving to be adequate — that is the small self doing its job. The practice is not to criticize it for doing its job. The practice is just to notice. To say: ah, there it is. And then to sense — under the efforting — whether that older, quieter thing is still there. It usually is.

Let yourself be in the group. What happens in a room of people who are all simultaneously in an opened state is something I find extraordinary every time, even after many years of doing this work. There is a quality of field — a contact between people who have each, individually, loosened their grip on their own separateness — that produces something none of them could produce alone. The individual insight is real. And it tends to remain somewhat abstract until it is witnessed. Until another person who is also in an open state receives it. Then something metabolizes that couldn’t metabolize in private. This is why the sangha matters in Zen. This is why we don’t send people home after the session. Let yourself be seen. Let the people in this room be real to you.

Let me end with a poem.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error —
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

— Antonio Machado (tr. Robert Bly)

Something is happening in you that is turning old material — the defended self, the contracted self, the self that has failed and been afraid and worked so hard — into something else. Not eliminating it. Transmuting it.

That is the practice.

And the question at the center of the practice:

What was your original face before your parents were born?

Not the face you’ve been wearing to get through the world. Not the face of the clinician, the good student, the functional adult who knows things. The one underneath all of that. The one that was here before you knew you were separate. Before you knew there was anything to protect.

That face is not far away. It was here today, at some point in that room, looking through your eyes.

Let the question sit with you. Not to be solved. Just to keep the opening open.

— Dongshan, The Five Positions

The first two posts in this series established a certain limit of inner work. The self cannot transform itself by examining itself — the loop is self-sealing, insight re-enters the same system it is trying to illuminate, and more understanding tends to produce more sophisticated understanding rather than genuine freedom. And dissolution alone — the loosening that happens in deep meditation, in psychedelic experience, in the best moments of analytic work — isn’t transformation either. The loop loosens, something opens, and then many people close back up and return to the same self they left.

This post is about part of what has to happen in the interval between loosening and return for the coming back to be genuinely different. It turns out that interval has two distinct movements, and many accounts of transformation describe only one of them.

— — —

When I first came to meditation, I wanted enlightenment.

I did not think of it that way. I framed it as Zen practice, as serious spiritual development, as something I had read about and practiced and felt genuinely drawn toward. But underneath that framing, to be honest, what I really wanted was to get away from myself. I was depressed. I was lonely. I was ending most evenings with a bottle of wine that had become less of a pleasure and more of a requirement. I went to retreats with the hope, barely covered by the language of practice, of transcending my problems. Of finding somewhere above the ordinary dreary weather of my life a place where I didn’t have to feel what I was feeling.

My teacher, Joan Sutherland Roshi, could see this. She has a gift for seeing through the spiritual presentation to what is actually driving the practice, and what she saw in me was striving — a barely covered desperation dressed up as aspiration. She redirected me, gently and with precision, toward something I did not want. She showed me that my practice was not to seek a higher state but to sit with myself as I actually was, with kindness and curiosity. To meet what was actually present rather than attempting to rise above it.

That redirection set me on a path of what she calls endarkenment — a word I want to spend the rest of this post unpacking. What I have come to see, in decades of working as a teacher and a therapist, is that I was far from alone in this configuration. Many people — perhaps most people — arrive at contemplative practice, at therapy, at psychedelic exploration with some version of the same hidden agenda—to escape the self. And the traditions, when they are doing their deepest work, eventually redirect them back home to the self.

— — —

Joan teaches that awakening — significantly, a gerund, an ongoing process rather than an achieved state — comprises two distinct movements. She calls them enlightenment and endarkenment. Neither is more advanced. Neither is complete without the other. And they point in opposite directions. Both are necessary in a life of practice.

— — —

Enlightenment: The Opening Outward

The first movement is the one we most readily recognize as transformation. It moves upward and outward — expanded perspective, the self becoming more porous and available, habitual patterns visible from a wider angle, even a sense of dissolving the self. The meditator who can see their emotional weather arriving without being swept away by it. The patient who notices the familiar loop beginning and has, for the first time, a moment of genuine choice before entering it. The person who comes back from a psychedelic session with a felt sense — not merely an intellectual understanding — that their life could be organized completely differently.

This is what the neuroscientists describe when the default mode network quiets: the narrative self steps back and the wider field comes into view. In Zen, it is the overview that koan practice can produce — the koan defeating the intellect’s grip and revealing, briefly and completely, what was always already present. In psychedelic experience, it is the capacity to see one’s life as if from altitude, to hold what felt immovable with a lightness that surprises.

Integration of this kind looks like the slow embodiment of insight and a wider perspective. It looks like noticing a pattern without enacting it. It looks like more compassion flowing naturally into interactions — not performed, but arising from a mind that is less preoccupied with managing itself. It looks like what the koans evoke when they show us flowers covering the mountains like brocade: the world arriving with a vividness and aliveness that the defended self keeps just out of reach.

This is real. This is worth everything the traditions have built to make it possible. And by itself, it is not the whole of what integration requires.

— — —

The Sophisticated Avoidance

The seeking of enlightenment — of equanimity, of an untouchable state, of transcendence — can itself become the most sophisticated form of avoidance available to a serious practitioner. This is definitely what I was doing when I arrived at meditation. It is what the psychologist John Welwood called spiritual bypassing: the use of spiritual practice and experience to sidestep the very territory that true practice is asking you to enter.

Winnicott’s concept of the false self illuminates exactly how this works. The false self, in his account, is the self organized around compliance and performance rather than authentic experience — constructed early, often very skillfully, to manage an environment that couldn’t receive what was real. The false self can take up meditation. It can sit beautifully, speak fluently about practice, report genuine insights, and accumulate years of serious commitment. What it cannot do is allow the encounter with what is actually there beneath the performance. It brings its management project into the zendo and runs it there. The equanimity is kind of real. And it floats above a basement that has never truly been entered.

The psychedelic world has an acute version of this problem. The opening can be so dramatic, the sense of expanded possibility so vivid, that the person mistakes the glimpse for the arrival. They return — sometimes session after session — to the same expanded state, while the unmetabolized shadow material remains sealed. Sometimes people mistake this expanded view with an exalted sense of self, and sometimes that can look like spiritual narcissism, and even abuse. When people do not truly address their own dark matter, so much is left out.

— — —

Endarkenment: The Necessary Descent

The second movement goes in the opposite direction. Endarkenment moves downward and inward — toward what has been avoided, toward the underground stream, toward grief and loss and unmetabolized material that the defended self has been organizing its life around avoiding. It is not the failure of enlightenment. It is, in Joan Sutherland’s vision, the other half of awakening.

Endarkenment is what happened when Joan redirected my practice. Instead of seeking a state above my depression, I was invited to turn toward it — with kindness and curiosity — and find out what it actually was. That turning took many years. And it produced something that the expansion I had been chasing could not possibly have produced: genuine contact with my own experience, rather than a view of it from a safe distance.

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas named what endarkenment is reaching toward with the concept of the unthought known — what is known in the body, in early procedural memory, in the pre-verbal architecture of the self, but cannot be symbolized or put into words. The unthought known cannot be reached by insight, because insight operates in language and the unthought known lives below language. It cannot be reached by the enlightenment movement, however genuine, because the wider view is still a view — it is still the observing mind looking at its material from a different angle. What reaches the unthought known is something more immediate: felt contact, in the body, without the narrating self mediating the encounter. We feel with our bodies, our nervous systems, our images. Endarkenment is the movement toward that contact. The huge key is compassion, rather than judgment.

In clinical work I see this most clearly in what I think of as the moment the managing stops. The patient who has been in therapy for years — articulate, insightful, genuinely committed — who one day simply stops running the session and allows something to arrive—tears, terror, vulnerability. The false self steps back, and what was underneath comes through, a breath of fresh air.

— — —

The Relationality of Endarkenment

Endarkenment is the movement into the repudiated and the unknown. It is usually difficult. It means truly encountering our own young, needy, angry, terrified, worthless selves. It engages with the sorrows of the world, with our many sufferings and limits. It takes courage and patience and lots of compassion. It’s slow tender work, rich and stark and beautiful. In the course of it we encounter our own humanity, our mortality, and the extent to which we just don’t know and can’t control.

It’s worth noticing that endarkenment, like enlightenment, is fundamentally a relational process, and it is slow. Most of our wounds are formed relationally, and the process of true descent requires relational safety and containment.

Winnicott wrote that there is no such thing as an infant — meaning that wherever you find an infant, you find maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant. The self is not a private construction. It forms in relationship, through the quality of being received by another. And what was formed in relationship tends to need relationship to shift. The unthought known that was created in the presence of a caregiver who could not receive it — who flinched, or withdrew, or misread what was there — often requires the presence of someone who can receive it before it can be metabolized. Understanding this is not sufficient. Being met is what moves it.

Daniel Stern’s research on intersubjective contact makes this clear. Transformation happens not primarily through interpretation but in what he called present moments — brief, unrepeatable encounters between two people that are genuinely mutual, in which both are changed by the contact. These moments cannot be manufactured. They arise from genuine presence on both sides. And they are, in Stern’s account, the basic unit of psychic change: the moment in which the unthought known is finally met by someone who can receive it, and something shifts.

This is what endarkenment requires that very often solo meditation practice or psychedelic experience cannot always provide. The presence of someone who can remain — who can stay without flinching or fixing or making the material about themselves — long enough for the metabolization to complete itself.

— — —

Why Both Movements Are Necessary

What I have come to see, as a teacher and as a therapist, is that many people need to be with their own pain before — or alongside — the movement into expansion. The wider view, arrived at before the basement has been entered, tends not to hold. It may become a memory the person reaches for when things get difficult, a place to return to, a vision of something better. It does not reorganize the life because the life is still implicity organized around what is in the basement.

The reverse is equally true. Some people are drawn naturally toward endarkenment — toward difficulty, toward the depths, toward an identification with suffering. They trust the downward movement and are suspicious of the upward one. They may have done years of genuine therapeutic work, examining what had been avoided. And they remain, sometimes, unable to emerge, unable to carry what they have found back into ordinary life with any lightness. The grief has been genuinely felt. But the movement outward — toward genuine presence with others, toward the spaciousness that makes connection possible — hasn’t happened yet.

Psychedelic medicine tends toward enlightenment: the expansion, the overview, the sudden loosening of the loop. It can open insight, sometimes dramatically, but the field has been slower to understand how to truly integrate a full throated endarkenment into this. Zen is a slower path that actually works at the pace of the nervous system, and helps us organically blend enlightenment and endarkenment facets of practice. Psychoanalysis specializes in endarkenment — in working through, in mourning, in the slow relational encounter with what has been dissociated — but has been historically more cautious about the expanded perspective that enlightenment brings.

Together, and only together, they describe the full arc of what Joan calls awakening — a gerund, an ongoing process, never complete, always deepening. Which is precisely what integration means when it is honest about the time scale and the depth the process requires.

— — —

Dongshan’s poem shows us where both movements are headed.

Returning, I sit by the charcoal fire.

Not the summit. Not the basement. The ordinary warmth of a life, after everything. The person who has made both movements, at least a bit — who has been sick suffering and confused and joyful and content--fully human. Still with weather and friction and difficulty. But with less in the way. With more available for genuine contact with the people and the world in front of them.

That is what both movements are in service of. Not enlightenment as a permanent state, not endarkenment as an ongoing dwelling, but the ordinary Wednesday afternoon, lived from a slightly different center of gravity.

The charcoal fire. Coming home, imperfectly. The life, waking up.

— — —

This is the third post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The concepts of enlightenment and endarkenment, and of awakening as a gerund, come from the teaching of Joan Sutherland Roshi. The concept of spiritual bypassing was coined by the psychologist John Welwood. The concept of turning ghosts into ancestors originates with Hans Loewald’s ‘On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis’ (1960).

To study the self is to forget the self;

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

— Dogen, Genjokoan

Imagine a room lined entirely with mirrors.

Not one mirror, which shows you something useful — a reflection you can check and then turn away from. A room of them. Every surface reflecting, every angle covered. You can see yourself from the front and the back and the side, near and far, whole and fragmented. Nothing is hidden. The image is complete.

And yet you cannot see the room.

This is what it is like to live inside a closed loop. It is not the absence of self-knowledge. It is an excess of it — self-knowledge so thoroughly organized around the self as its own object that everything outside the loop stops registering. The reflection is real. The understanding is genuine. But a room of mirrors doesn’t show you the door. It shows you yourself, endlessly repeated, growing smaller with each iteration.

More mirrors don’t help. They deepen the enclosure.

Dogen’s line — which I keep returning to as the hinge of everything I want to say in this newsletter and in the book I’m writing — is not a riddle. It is a precise clinical observation. The studying that perpetuates the loop is real studying. It produces real insight. And it does not produce freedom, because the studying and the loop share the same ground. What produces freedom is something different: a forgetting, a setting down, a moment in which the self loosens its grip on itself long enough for something genuinely outside to enter.

This post is about why that is so hard. The next will be about what actually makes it possible.

— — —

Daniel is a man I’ve written about before. He was in his fifties who came to treatment because he couldn’t mourn.

(Like all clinical material, identifying information has been changed and composites have been made so no one is identified).

His mother had died two years before and he could not really grieve her loss. Paralyzed by anxiety, relentlessly self-critical, he was caught in obsessional loops of rumination. He had walled off his anger, his sadness, his neediness, his desire. He idealized his upbringing as perfect while the evidence of his own suffering accumulated quietly in the room: the hoarding of childhood objects he couldn’t release, the sexual withdrawal from his partner of many years, the inability to make plans for a future he couldn’t quite imagine.

He was also developing real insight. He could trace the origins of his patterns with increasing clarity — the volatile, humiliating mother, the gentle but absent father, the child who learned to keep his head down and please everyone and turn his remaining feelings against himself. He was becoming more comfortable. The therapy was working, in the way good therapy works: slowly, carefully, illuminating the architecture of a life.

And yet. The loops kept running. The self-criticism didn’t stop. The grief stayed locked. The patterns he could now name with precision continued to organize his days.

What Daniel was encountering is not a failure of the therapeutic process. It is its ceiling. And to understand why that ceiling exists, we have to sit with something that Western therapeutic culture finds genuinely uncomfortable: the instrument we use to examine the self is the self. And the self, as currently organized, is very good at confirming what it already knows.

— — —

The brain has a network — the default mode network, or DMN — that activates when we are not focused on anything in particular. It is the network of self-referential processing: autobiographical memory, mental time travel, the narration of self and others. It is, in a very literal sense, the neural substrate of the self-as-story.

The DMN does not simply run the story. It actively maintains it. The brain’s higher-order structures continuously generate predictions about what will happen, what things mean, who we are — and then suppress incoming information that doesn’t fit. We see what we expect to see. We explain what we see according to models we already hold. New experience is metabolized into the existing story. The loop is self-sealing.

The clinical implication, stated plainly: insight — even deep, accurate, hard-won insight — enters the system through the very network that generated the problem. The story absorbs the new information and continues. I understand why I do this becomes part of the story. The examination becomes another loop. The prison acquires a new room with an excellent view of the prison.

— — —

Psychoanalysis has been circling this structure for over a century, approaching it from multiple angles, each adding something the others don’t quite reach.

Freud named it first, and most bluntly:

The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed,

but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it,

without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.

— Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”

The loop repeats not because the person wants to suffer but because the nervous system reads new situations through the template of old ones and finds exactly what it is looking for. The repetition is not failure. It is the system doing what it was designed to do.

Christopher Bollas named a subtler version with what he called the unthought known — what is known in the body, in early procedural memory, in the pre-verbal architecture of the self, but cannot be symbolized or reflected upon. The loop is maintained precisely by what cannot yet be brought into language. You can describe the pattern with perfect accuracy while remaining entirely inside it, because the description and the pattern share the same ground.

Bion’s contribution is perhaps the most unsettling. He describes attacks on linking — the mind’s active dismantling of connections that would threaten its existing organization. The closed loop is not passive. It does not simply filter inconvenient information; it destroys the links that would allow genuinely new understanding to form. This is why the most important moments in analysis are often the ones most strenuously resisted — not because the interpretation is wrong, but because it is right, and something in the system knows it and moves to protect the enclosure.

Winnicott gives the loop its most human face with the false self — the self organized around compliance and management rather than authentic experience. It was constructed, often very early, to manage an environment that couldn’t receive what was real. It functions, sometimes brilliantly, while generating a persistent sense that none of it is quite genuine, quite one’s own. The loop the false self runs is the loop of managing — and more self-examination, offered to the false self as its next project, is simply more managing. The mirror room adds another mirror.

— — —

Zen has known about this structure for over a thousand years. Its response to it is the most radical of any tradition I work in.

The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised.

— Sengcan, Xinxinming (Faith-Mind Inscription), 7th century

Preference here is not mere personal taste. It is the structure of the narrating self — the mind that continuously divides experience into what should be and what shouldn’t, what confirms the story and what threatens it. This division is not a moral failing. It is the architecture of the self-as-project. And it is self-sustaining: every preference generates its opposite, every seeking generates its avoidance, and the loop runs on its own momentum.

The koan tradition is built on a precise understanding of where that momentum leads. The koan is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a question the thinking mind genuinely cannot answer. What was your face before your parents were born? What is the sound of one hand? The point is not the answer — there is no answer the thinking mind can produce. The point is the encounter with the limit. The thinking mind reaches the edge of what it can do and, if the practice is working, stops. Not in defeat but in a kind of exhausted openness. The koan uses the loop’s own momentum to carry it past the point where it can sustain itself. This is not a workaround. It is a precise instrument designed to do what insight cannot: interrupt the loop from the outside by presenting it with something genuinely outside.

There is a teaching in Zen about what practitioners call the second arrow. The first arrow is the original pain — the wound, the loss, the thing that happened. The second arrow is what the mind does with it: the judgment, the story about what the pain means, the self-critical loop that extends the original wound indefinitely into the present. Most people who have been in serious inner work become skilled at catching the second arrow mid-flight — examining it carefully, understanding exactly where it came from. And then they are hit by it anyway. The examination of the second arrow is itself a form of the second arrow. The loop recognizes itself and continues.

— — —

What actually loosens the loop is not, in any of these traditions, more careful self-examination. It is something closer to its opposite — a crack in the enclosure through which something genuinely outside and other can enter.

In a paper called The Ice is Melting, the clinician and writer Leigh Lyndon describes the closed loop as something that gets inscribed in the body long before it becomes a story — a pattern traced and retraced until it is no longer a choice but a shape, a way the self holds itself together that becomes indistinguishable from the self. A torturous relief, she calls it: it hurts, and it holds, and the holding is why it persists. What loosens it, in her account, is not understanding the pattern. It is the moment the loop can no longer contain what it was built to contain — when the enclosure fails, and another person finally gets through.

That crack — the moment something outside the loop enters not through the door of understanding but through the failure of the walls — is what all three of my traditions are trying to understand and facilitate. It is not something the self can engineer for itself. You cannot decide to let the loop fail. You can only, perhaps, create the conditions in which its failure becomes possible.

What those conditions look like — in the consulting room, in the zendo, in the psychedelic session — is what I want to turn to in the next post.

— — —

One more image, to close.

Imagine you are lost in a thick forest. You cannot tell how large it is, or in which direction it ends. You move, but the trees don’t thin. You recognize a familiar formation — the same mossy rock, the same turn in the path — and realize you have been here before. From inside the forest, more careful attention to the forest does not help you find the edge. It gives you a more detailed map of where you have already been.

What changes things is not a better map. It is a different vantage point — a temporary climb to somewhere outside the loop, from which the whole forest becomes visible, including its edges, including the road beyond. You descend back among the trees. But you carry something you didn’t have before. Not a memory of the view, exactly. A different relationship to the terrain. The knowledge that the forest has an edge.

Dogen knew this. The forgetting he is pointing at is not amnesia. It is the moment the self stops being the only available lens — the moment, as he says, of being enlightened by all things. That is what the loop, by definition, prevents. And that is what the next post is about.

— — —

This is the second post in a series drawn from a book I’m writing: Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation. The clinical vignette of Daniel is drawn from a paper I co-authored with Karen Peoples, ‘Expansion and Regression in Oceanic Experience,’ published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (2025). The image of the loop inscribed in the body is inspired by Leigh Lyndon’s paper, ‘The Ice is Melting.’

This newsletter is my attempt to have that conversation. What follows is a first example of what I mean.

— — —

She had been in therapy for eleven years.

Not dabbling — real therapy, with a good analyst, twice a week for most of that time. She had done the work. She understood, with considerable sophistication, exactly how her childhood had shaped her: the critical mother, the absent father, the way she had learned to be relentlessly capable and secretly convinced she was about to be found out. She could trace the genealogy of her anxiety with the precision of a historian. She knew why she chose unavailable partners. She knew why she overworked. She knew why she couldn't receive kindness without immediately deflecting it.

She knew all of this. And she was still doing all of it.

When she described this to me — the gap between understanding and change, between the map and the territory she actually lived in — she used a phrase I've never forgotten: I feel like I've been renovating the prison.

— — —

There is an assumption buried so deep in Western therapeutic culture that we rarely notice it's an assumption. It goes something like this: the path to transformation runs through understanding. You examine your patterns, you trace them to their origins, you develop insight, you integrate experience — and gradually, through this process of increasingly coherent self-knowledge, you change. The self is both the subject and the object of the work. It examines itself, understands itself, and thereby transforms itself.

It's a compelling model. It has genuine value. And for a certain range of human suffering, it works.

But there's a category of stuck — and most people who have been seriously engaged with their own inner life know exactly what I'm pointing at — where more understanding doesn't help. Where the insight is real and the change doesn't come. Where you can see the pattern with perfect clarity and still find yourself, again, in the middle of it.

What's happening there isn't a failure of intelligence or effort or therapeutic depth. It's something more fundamental. It's the self trying to transform itself using the very structures that need transforming. Renovation, not liberation.

— — —

What happened next with my patient was not dramatic. That's the first thing worth saying.

She made one small commitment: a self-compassion practice, ten minutes each morning, for two weeks. Not because she believed it would work — she was skeptical, as people who have been in therapy for eleven years tend to be skeptical of simple interventions — but because she had run out of reasons not to try it.

Two weeks later she reported something modest: a little more space. A little more kindness toward herself. Not transformation. Room to move.

From that small opening, a mindfulness practice became possible — ten minutes in the evening after work. She had tried meditation before and found it intolerable; the hamster wheel of her mind, forced into silence, had simply gotten louder. But something was different now. The self-compassion practice had softened the quality of attention she brought to sitting. She wasn't trying to fix herself. She was just watching.

And in that watching, something she already knew intellectually became experientially real: she could see the prison from the inside. Not with the analyst's interpretive distance, but from within it — the self-reinforcing stories, the loops, the way each thought confirmed the next. Seeing it that way, from inside and without judgment, was different from understanding it conceptually. It had a quality of — she struggled for the word — recognition. Like finally seeing a room you had been describing from memory.

It was only then, with that ground prepared — the self-compassion practice, the mindfulness, the developing capacity to sit with her own experience without immediately fleeing it — that we began ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

What the ketamine opened was not insight. She had plenty of insight. What it opened was her body. Sensations she hadn't known were there. A quality of relaxation she hadn't felt since childhood, maybe longer. Creative impulses, memories that arrived sideways, reveries. A felt sense of being connected — to herself first, and then, tentatively, to others. The top-down architecture of her mind — the explanations, the genealogies, the sophisticated understanding of her patterns — quieted, and something else became briefly available: a more direct contact with her own experience, bottom up, without the narrating self in the way.

She didn't emerge transformed. She emerged with a little more room. But that room, tended carefully, changed things.

— — —

Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, describes watching a kestrel. She is anxious, preoccupied, running the usual loop of self-concern — and then the bird comes into focus, and the anxious self is simply gone. She calls this unselfing: the moment when what she calls 'the fat, relentless ego' loosens its grip and reality arrives with sudden clarity. For Murdoch, this is as much a moral as a psychological event. What she didn't have — writing in 1970 — was a neuroscience to describe what was happening in her brain, a psychoanalytic language for what made it metabolizable, or a contemplative tradition's account of why it was not an accident but a capacity that could be cultivated.

Each of my three traditions has part of this picture. The neuroscientists who study psychedelics have shown that the default mode network — the brain's self-referential processing system, the neural substrate of what we experience as the narrating self — goes quiet in these states. The Zen tradition has known for centuries that the koan works precisely by defeating the intellect's attempt to remain in control. Psychoanalysis has learned, slowly and not without resistance, that the most transformative moments in the consulting room are not interpretations but something that happens between two nervous systems, below the level of language.

What these share is not that they produce insight. They produce a temporary loosening of the observer. And that loosening, it turns out, is where transformation actually lives.

— — —

But here is the problem — and it is the problem I most want to keep returning to in this newsletter, because it is the one the transformative experience culture consistently underestimates.

The opening is not the transformation.

Everyone I work with — in the consulting room, in the zendo, in ketamine-assisted therapy — has had openings. Moments where the self's grip loosened. Moments of clarity, of presence, of something that felt realer than the usual managed version of themselves. The opening is not the rare thing. The rare thing is what happens next.

Because almost everyone returns from the opening to the same self they left. The experience becomes a memory — vivid, precious, perhaps orienting in some abstract sense — but not a reorganization. The prison has been glimpsed from the outside for a moment. Then you're back inside, with a memory of the view.

My patient didn't have a dramatic opening. She had two weeks of ten-minute self-compassion practice, and then a little more space. What made that small opening reorganizing rather than merely memorable was the accumulation of conditions around it: the ground that was prepared, the container that held it, the ongoing practice that tended what had been loosened.

What makes dissolution metabolizable — what allows the self to return different rather than just shaken — is the real question. I don't think any one of the three traditions has the complete answer. I've been sitting with this question for thirty years and I wouldn't say I've solved it. But I've noticed some things.

That's what I'll be writing about here.

— — —

I'm working on a book called Unselfing: Zen, Psychoanalysis, and Psychedelic Transformation, which makes this argument at length. This newsletter is where I think out loud as I write it — clinical observations, Zen teaching stories, fragments from the literature. If you've had a glimpse of something beyond the usual managed version of yourself, and you're not sure what to do with it, you're exactly who I'm writing for.