This is something we all yearn to do – drop our self-protective masks and armor, exposing the "real me" – because so long as we feel we are not truly seen, we cannot feel we are truly loved. Trungpa Rinpoche called such opening on the student's part "giving the teacher the gift of ego," because the student is giving up the self-protective mechanisms that constitute ego. It is a process that requires one to suspend self-doubt and to trust in the other person, and it results in intimacy, friendship, and love. The teacher, seeing the student open a bit, in return displays more openness in order to encourage the student, who – further warmed and delighted – can open a bit more, and so on, back and forth. But the teacher cannot open too much or too fast, because then he might become a demon for the student and frighten the student away, which would defeat the purpose. Rinpoche likened the process to negotiation between diplomats, to dancing, to making love. And he said that this is the main job, the most important part of being a guru and, for the student, a fundamental aspect of the Buddhist path.
Modern Analytic Group Therapy practice stresses "immediacy," which corresponds to the Buddhist idea of "nowness." Just as in sitting meditation we drift into dreaming from time to time and lose awareness of the present moment, so in group we can get lost in telling stories of the past or future, in discussing problems from times other than the present, and in trying to get other group members to do or be what we want. And just as in meditation the practitioner can awaken from dreaming and come back to the object of awareness in the present, so in group the members are enjoined to put into words their thoughts and feelings toward the other group members as they arise in the present moment.
Staying in the present with others in this way can be difficult: it exposes our inner thoughts and feelings and can be revealing and embarrassing. It does not confirm our versions of who we are, the way discussion of the past and future does. So group members tend to fall away from addressing each other intimately, from revealing their inner thoughts and feelings about each other. They slip into storytelling about events, problems, successes, regrets, worries, hopes and fears outside the present moment, or they try to change each other's behavior to make it more congenial to themselves. Mental health care practitioners call the ways we avoid the present "resistances." Buddhists refer to them as "habitual patterns." Hyman Spotnitz called them "mistakes in time," signifying that we apply a lesson – appropriate behavior learned in the past – inappropriately in the present. As we live them out again and again, they deaden us to the power and intimacy of the present moment.
Trungpa Rinpoche taught that we have not "met our emotions properly" because our habitual patterns insulate us from them. He said that, instead, we are continually either "repressing or acting out our emotions," and that both are ways of getting rid of them and resisting the often uncomfortable reality of the living moment. In a similar vein, Lou calls the work of group "emotional education." The idea is, first, to be aware of one's emotions (not an easy task), and then to put them into words instead of denying or acting on them. One of Lou's slogans is, "Observe it; don't fix it," an instruction appropriate to meditation practice as well as group psychotherapy.
— John Baker, "All Together in the Present", Shambhala Sun, January 2006, 68-75.
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