Meditation, Therapy And Control

A client tells me that she experiences a sense of urgency regarding the need to make and sustain certain changes. These changes have to do with being able to meditate - she's a Buddhist - something she hasn't been able to do for some time now, because of a dreadful fear that if she sits to meditate and focuses on her breath, she'll never be able to stop focusing on her breath. This will, of course, drive her insane.

We talk about this sense of urgency, and desperation that she feels. We have identified that it stems, at least in "family of origin" terms, from a childhood in which she was burdened with many adult responsibilities, because the adults - her parents - were incapable. The strategy that she developed in order to ward off chaos and immanent disaster was to be able to focus intensely, and to build psychological and behavioral structures that would provide her with some sense of order and control. These strategies worked very well in accomplishing what they were designed to do, and she in fact survived the chaotic environment, and even thrived professionally, later, using these qualities to great advantage.

Now however, the baseline anxiety behind these control strategies dominates her life in ways that no longer work for her. It has gotten to the point of preventing her from doing things she wants to do in her personal, and spiritual life. What to do?

Since she is a Buddhist, we talk about meditation regularly, and a primary goal of therapy now is for her to be able to return to the formal meditation practices that she used to enjoy, without the debilitating fear of becoming trapped in a madness of breath watching. Something is going to have to change in the way she used to approach her meditation though. You see, she used to approach it the same way she approached everything else: desperately, as though her life depended on it, and with a focus, force and harshness that enabled some experience of control, but lacked real grace or peace.

To put it simply, she's going to have to practice letting go of/transforming the control, in favor of relaxing, trusting (a leap of faith, she calls it), and bare attention to her experience. She'll have to practice being considerably more kind to herself, after all.



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