THE SITTING CURE
Suffering and awareness in meditation and psychoanalysis
BY LUCAS McGRANAHAN
Illustrations by Austin Hughes
It’s not hard to shut your mouth. It’s not hard to deposit your phone behind the front desk with Jen. The hard part is meditating.
It’s late summer and I am attending a silent retreat at a meditation center in the Midwest. I am one of twenty or so students who have sworn off our ordinary preoccupations—work, family, friends, sex, screens, booze, drugs—all the things that agitate and soothe us cyclically.
Whether seated on a firm cushion with legs folded or, as I prefer, on a wooden bench with knees bent in front, we meditate copiously: several sessions a day, an hour at a time, sometimes longer, together in the dhamma hall, which is divided down the middle by gender to keep passions at bay.
The instructions are clear. For the first three days we are observing the “touch of the breath” on the upper lip. Respiration is the sharpening stone for attention. Starting on the evening of Day 3, we will scan the body methodically using an ancient mental technique called vipassana in Pali, the language of the Buddha and his followers.
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There are many forms of meditation. I know little about them. What we’re taught to do is this: no self-talk, no mantras, no conjuring up images to contemplate. The only legitimate objects of awareness are extant bodily sensations: fleeting perceptions of heat, pressure, moisture, tingling, and the like. In the background, swells of emotion, neither indulged nor inhibited, arise and pass away according to their own intrinsic half-life.
Itch on the scalp? Noted. Excruciating lower back pain? Noted. Your worst regrets and most cherished hopes? Set aside, except for their corporeal residues—the hidden pockets of affect, the knots of agony held in the body’s trunk that exist on the same phenomenological plane as the itchy head and cranky back.
It’s all just sensation, whatever its provenance, and the good news is you can metabolize it.
“Embracing the emptiness of the ego may seem to contradict the psychoanalytic project of strengthening the ego, but that is a semantic confusion.”
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Our most important renunciation is speech. We practice noble silence, not communicating with one another, not even in gesture, not even if we need something.
Noble silence suits me fine—better than being buffeted by idle talk or the threat of it. Without silence, there is no settling of the mental sediment. Without silence, we would be trapped in the versions of ourselves we give voice to, trading rehearsed life stories around the red picnic table.
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Meditation is simple, unnatural, and difficult. Over and over, my attention flags. My thoughts wander. I become drowsy. I slump forward, backward, to one side. I adjust my leg. I dredge up memories or stoke desires or chart out some quixotic life plan to pass the time. Will draping one more blanket over my shoulders get me into the zone?
The recorded Pali chanting has begun, so this session will end soon, thank God.
Failure is inevitable. Judge yourself for failing and your failure multiplies. Best to smile and start again, righting yourself as you would a wayward child.
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I am undergoing this series of self-corrections for the sake of a deeper sort of self-correction.
I have just spent eleven years in sunny California which culminated in the gloomy abandonment of two things, a career path in academia and a marriage. After these twin engines of my adulthood suffered mechanical failure—too many years in, no longer under warranty—returning to the Midwest feels right. Appropriately, this retreat, held in rural Illinois, is downstream on the same river that passes through the small town in Wisconsin where I grew up.
I have done some sitting practice, in fits and starts, at home and at community meditation centers, but nothing like this. Bookish and verbose, I am better at dwelling on subjective experience than dwelling in it. Going deeper into the practice will turn out to have unanticipated effects.
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The curriculum is simple. Morning bell at 4 a.m. Two meals a day: breakfast and lunch. Lemon water with honey at 5 p.m. The rest is meditation and breaks from meditation in which we are free to shower or walk slowly or sit on a log.
Each evening we hear from our teacher, S. N. Goenka, the Indian-Burmese businessman-turned-guru who founded this international network of centers. Goenka speaks to us, not in the flesh—he died in 2013—but in dhamma talks that were videotaped in the 1990s. Thus, the only time anyone speaks to us at length during the retreat is from beyond the grave and behind the screen.
Still, any form of human connection feels valuable when you are starved of it.
These Buddhist sermons are my favorite part of the day. Each video consists of a single static shot of the round-faced, short-haired Goenka against a pale blue backdrop, apparently filmed at one of his retreats, his live audience laughing occasionally from somewhere off-camera at his shopworn parables and jokes.
Our teacher speaks of kindness, compassion, ethical resolve. His smile is radiant, his questions perennial. He is affable and wise and a passable father figure. He upholds a philosophy of love and I love him. Even when I don’t buy what he says—something about introspecting elementary particles?—I indulge him so that he, a dead man, approves of me.
I could even start calling myself a Buddhist if he would like that.
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The idea from these talks that sticks with me most is sankharas of suffering, layers of misery sedimented in the body that can be uncovered and released incrementally through vipassana. Goenka says every mental reaction of craving or aversion creates a little (or big) sankhara, which adds weight to and resonates with the existing stock. This is how the body, in Buddhist terms, keeps the score.
Listening to Goenka, I am reminded of the early Freud, for whom the unconscious is a stock of intolerable, emotionally charged ideas. Idea and feeling are two sides of a coin, currency that can be frozen by internal censors when a memory or fantasy is too much to bear. Unfreeze it—make the unconscious conscious—and you can bind it, abreact it, cash it in for a more easeful mental life.
Maybe we are all in the position of Breuer and Freud’s hysterics, whose bodily complaints were symptoms of mental suffering. Maybe hysteria was just a strange example, exploding for some reason in fin de siècle Vienna, of a more general phenomenon: the somaticization of psychic pain that remains stuck in the body until you find a way to look at it squarely.
For the patient to look squarely, according to the mature Freud, requires cultivating a habit of free association, the ability to follow the train of one’s thoughts without criticism or fear, complemented by an open attitude of even-hovering attention in the analyst. The two halves of the analytic dyad interlock in a poise of attentive, nonjudgmental curiosity.
Goenka’s description seems to collapse this dyad into one: liberation for him lies in a disinterested connoisseurship of one’s own raw inner states. The difference is there is no attempt at verbal expression. Merely accepting the sankhara as it is, without speaking of it or endowing it with a back story, can dissolve it spontaneously.
What Goenka calls the “ultimate goal”—more ambitious than Freud’s stated goal of replacing neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness—is to dissolve all sankharas, to stop generating new ones, to reach nibbana. If you believe in rebirth, as Goenka does, you’ll want to enter the next life with as few sankharas as possible, and it might take a few lifetimes to get rid of them all. If you believe in just one life, do your best with the time you have.
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Sunrise. Sipping hot mint tea. The proto-hallucinogenic effects of intensive meditation are setting in. A doe, browsing vines along a tree, spots me from the ravine. What kind of being are you? she seems to ask.
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Evening. We are being initiated into vipassana—surveying the body piece by piece. We are to observe extant sensations while noting their quality of annica, or impermanence.
Start with a calm and quiet mind, Goenka says. See that you pass your attention through each and every part of the body. Every sensation has the characteristic of arising and passing away. One may be experiencing solidified, gross, unpleasant sensations. And one may be experiencing very subtle and pleasant vibrations. It makes no difference. Both are welcome.
The more I scan my body, the less I find “gross sensations”—say, a straining shoulder—and the more I find transitory and nameless ones. The tractable body of the anatomy book is supplanted by a procession of flickering ephemera.
Although Goenka tends to mention the surface of the skin—the tingling here or the pressure there—such boundaries lose meaning. Surface gives way to depth, to interoception, to listening to the viscera glistening darkly.
An entrenched primordial knot prods into awareness on the left side of my chest. It seems to be trapping intense affect under pressure but leaking it slowly. I allow the liberated sensation to arise and pass through me as it seems to want to. The knot slackens dramatically, unleashing a tremor of reassociation that feels so holy and transfiguring that words fail, except to say: the face behind my face fits better now.
I leave the session, not enlightened, but ontologically lighter, righter in myself and the world, realigned. I stand up from my bench, slip on my shoes, and step from the dhamma hall into the moonlight.
Several years on, the retreat seems to have served its purpose, an existential reboot, including a different career and relationship, built in the psychic space opened up, at least in part, through vipassana. I’ve mostly kept up my meditation practice. I’ve also had a chance to read and think more about the relation between meditation and psychotherapy that first struck me then.
I’ve learned that psychoanalysis has been ambivalent about meditation. Freud said mystical experience engendered by meditation is a regression to an oceanic feeling of primary narcissism, and he thought the Eastern attempt to quiet the drives was antithetical to the psychoanalytic goal of expressing or releasing them. The tide turned somewhat in the mid-twentieth century, as Alan Watts, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney—all mentored by Zen master D. T. Suzuki—attempted to synthesize insights from Eastern and Western psychology to encourage people to lead more authentic or self-realized lives. Some recent commentators have continued working in this more synthetic vein, and I’d like to conclude by taking up a few of their ideas that are validated by my experience.
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First, meditation improves affect tolerance. The main benefit of meditation for me is not that I live in an ongoing state of mystical rapture or that I constantly uncover massive sankharas. No such luck. It is that I am more able to sit with what I’m feeling. I am more apt to see a spike in emotional response as a metal detector going off at the beach, a sign of something buried that could be profitably unearthed. I am somewhat more self-curious, somewhat less averse to my own aversion, somewhat less given to extraneous meta-suffering that takes first-order suffering as its object of concern. (One study showed that if you apply painful levels of heat to the hands of expert meditators, they feel it as much as anyone—but they anticipate the pain less and thus suffer less overall than control subjects. I’m not there yet, but the idea tracks.)
This ability is helpful, among other reasons, for therapy. Few things are more useful on the couch—for both analyst and analysand—than the ability to notice and tolerate what is normally held at arm’s length.
“Maybe hysteria was just a strange example, exploding for some reason in fin de siècle Vienna, of a more general phenomenon: the somaticization of psychic pain that remains stuck in the body until you find a way to look at it squarely.”
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Meditation can do this because it offers a special form of self-relation, one that both resembles and differs from that sought after in psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Mark Epstein, a student of both the Buddha and Donald Winnicott, puts it like this: being mothered is like receiving therapy is like meditating. In each case, one’s inner states are recognized, but not reified, through a process of attunement. The good-enough mother does this for the child. The analyst does this for the patient. In meditation, you do this for yourself.
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This logic of meditative self-regulation makes use of a deflationary metaphysical attitude. After all, the traditional aim of Buddhist meditation is to attain insight into the emptiness—conditioned and impermanent nature—of all things, especially the ego. As clinical psychologist Jack Engler has argued, this insight is part of what makes meditation therapeutic.
Embracing the emptiness of the ego may seem to contradict the psychoanalytic project of strengthening the ego, but that is a semantic confusion. The ego denied by Buddhism is not a set of adaptive psychic functions that have developed over time—phylogenetically, ontogenetically, perhaps culturally—to help us get by in the world. The ego denied by Buddhism is a pure, unconditioned ontological core beyond the world of time and chance. These are apples and oranges, and the oranges are a hallucination.
Buddhism sees value in exposing the hallucination. Acknowledging that you are a contingent psychosomatic construction emerging within a circus of equally contingent constructions can make you more willing to face the reality of suffering because it takes reality down a peg. This is an interpretation of reality, not a denial of reality: my problems are real but not Real, not eternal; see how they erode in the temporalizing stream of awareness.
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These points in favor of meditation—that it replicates the logic of maternal and analytic care by deflating the ontological status of stressors and otherwise increasing affect tolerance—are considerable. They suggest that the talking cure isn’t the only game in town. There is also the sitting cure.
After all, untying the knot in my chest didn’t seem to require dialogue, interpretation, the electric dyadic rapport of the transference; I simply honed my concentration, opened myself to what was habitually ignored, and let go of a reflexive act of tightening. I did this in silence, without a copay, through a nondiscursive phenomenological investigation of the submerged structures of my lived body.
I am not claiming that meditation can replace talk psychotherapy. Perhaps dialogical free association can lead to sankharas that body scanning can’t find. And perhaps vipassana’s flight into mute sensory experience may itself serve as a defense mechanism, a way of avoiding ideas, wishes, and fantasies one is afraid to confront.
Plus, meditation is not for everyone. A patient experiencing pathological dissociation or derealization is the least ready, not the most, for a lesson in Buddhist metaphysics. As Engler put it, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”
In the end, I am a pluralist. Psychoanalyst Jeffrey Rubin’s “bifocal” metaphor seems apt: the self is both a product determined by its history (psychoanalysis) and an undefined process in the moment (meditation). Both lenses serve a purpose, and when to toggle between them is a judgment call based on who you are and what you want to achieve.
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For my part, the lens of meditation has been a useful one. I believe this is because it provides an oblique approach to psychical problems when—at least for individuals of a certain neurotic disposition—a frontal assault isn’t advisable.
I find meditation therapeutic, paradoxically, because it is not meant to be therapy. This could be an idiosyncratic thing about me, but maybe others will relate. If I directly seek to address my psychic tensions, my defenses circle the wagons to protect the status quo; I am being too transparent. Meditation disarms the defenses by not aiming to accomplish anything. Indeed, once I start trying to accomplish something other than observation, I am, by definition, no longer meditating, and it’s time to start over. The result, when it works, is not only greater equanimity but renewed sensitivity, aliveness, and levity. Such good-humored self-attunement, not emotional flatness or ascetic self-denial, strikes me as the hallmark of successful meditation.
I am not saying this is easy to achieve. I am often distracted, and my practice gets infected with craving for the psychospiritual fireworks of my first retreat. When this happens I take a breath and begin again, reinstating an attitude of pointless curiosity that we all seem programmed, with age, to forget—an attitude, not aimed at healing, which is intrinsically healing. ■
FURTHER READING:
Engler, Jack. “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Reexamination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism.” In Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue, edited by Jeremy D. Safran, 35–79. Wisdom Publications, 2003.
Epstein, Mark. Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. MJF Books, 1995.
Fromm, Erich, D. T. Suzuki, and Richard DeMartino. Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. Harper & Brothers, 1960.
Gunaratana, Bhante. Mindfulness in Plain English. Wisdom Publications, 2002.
Lutz, Antoine, D. R. McFarlin, D. M. Perlman, T. V. Salomons, and R. J. Davidson. “Altered Anterior Insula Activation during Anticipation and Experience of Painful Stimuli in Expert Meditators.” Neuroimage 64 (Jan 2013): 538–46. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.09.030.
Rubin, Jeffrey. “Close Encounters of a New Kind: Toward an Integration of Psychoanalysis and Buddhism.” In Encountering Buddhism Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings, edited by Seth Robert Segall, 31–60. State University of New York Press, 2003.
Watts, Alan. Psychotherapy East and West. Pantheon Books, 1961.
Lucas McGranahan, PhD, is a writer, editor, and quasi-academic philosopher. He is the owner of Isthmus Editing, managing editor of The American Psychoanalyst, and author of Pragmatism and Darwinism: William James on Evolution and Self-Transformation (Routledge, 2017).
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023