psychoanalysts are the Amish of the mental health profession. What we do is deliberately slow. It asks us to sit (or lie) still, to spend long hours immersed in our feelings, to enter into a view of life that is process-rather than goal-oriented.

In my own life, Zen and psychoanalysis have been practiced in tandem now for thirty years. Each continues to challenge, inform, and enrich the perspective of the other.

metaphysical abstraction, it is the all too down-to-earth experience of a person divided against herself in the pursuit of a curative fantasy. All too often, or perhaps I should say, inevitably, one side of a person takes up arms against another side and enlists practice itself as the weapon of choice. We do this, of course, in very high-minded

What we have to do is really feel the motivation that arises, not from trying to change ourselves, but from always trying to be ourselves as fully as we can. That motivation doesn’t have anything to do with better or worse, faith or doubt. When better and worse, faith and doubt burn away, the verse tells us, we’re left with “A withered tree in the

Norman Fischer, a former Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, has emphasized our resistance to leaving everything alone, and the temptation to turn zazen into a technique: “The problem is that we actually are incapable of seeing zazen as useless because our minds cannot accept the fundamental genuineness, the alrightness of our lives. We are

Anger, anxiety, judgment, and expectation are all habitual ways in which we try to set up a boundary and say, “that’s not me, that’s not the way I want life to go.” Rather than just trying to jump across that boundary, the first thing we have to do is to pay attention to the boundary itself, the anxiety itself, the anger itself, the desire itself.

Too often, our inner emotional life and our thoughts were, implicitly or explicitly, treated as obstacles to attention, rather than being themselves appropriate objects of the same loving attention we lavish on cleaning the toilet.

“Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement.” Suzuki Roshi marvelously summed up in one line what the rest of us take whole books trying to say. What he’s saying may sound paradoxical unless we see the true relationship between “perfection” and “improvement.”

We practice leaving ourselves alone and just being this moment. Fully being in the moment entails, psychologically, re-owning those parts of ourselves that we’ve split-off or dissociated from and, spiritually, reconnecting with the whole of life.