27 Jul 2009
meditation and free association
In meditation practice we learn, for example, to be aware of our breath. We learn that when our mind wanders, when thoughts appear, we take note of those thoughts without becoming involved with them, and we return our awareness to our breath. Thinking is part of our nature, the wandering mind is part of our nature, so we haven’t failed in our meditation. In a sense, the most important lesson of meditation practice takes place in the return to our awareness of the breath. I heard a Zen teacher say that if we maintained perfect unwavering focus on the breath, it would be little more than a circus trick. We bow to each thought of our wandering mind, we bow because we have no way of knowing the magnitude of the mystery each thought contains. We bow and return to our awareness of the breath.
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we learn to let go of our tendency to be immersed in discursive, logical, controlled thought. We learn to let go of shame and reveal in our free association where our wandering mind is going. Each association may seem, on the face of it, trivial or meaningless or embarrassing or confused, but we nevertheless bring it to conscious awareness and speak it. This becomes our door to the unconscious, to our connection to a realm larger than our limited conscious self.
These two practices can inform and reinforce each other. In meditation and in therapy, we learn to be sensitive to every fluctuation in our awareness, to not become lost in the pull of the storm of our thoughts, to honor our thoughts and remain centered as we learn who we are. I recommend that my psychoanalytic clients practice meditation as a tool to increase the freedom of their associations in therapy. I would also recommend that meditators have a taste of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a way of opening to the mystery of thoughts we bow to as we return to the breath.