Publisher's Synopsis
We all face two challenges in accepting who we truly are. The first challenge is to accept our vulnerabilities and all those parts of our self about which we have grown up feeling ashamed and guilty, and about which we may be in denial. The second challenge is in facing the paradox of our perfection amid a life of suffering. Western psychotherapy has traditionally been focused on the first challenge, Buddhist practice on the second. While each has found ways of engaging with both sides of our nature, therapy typically runs the risk of seeing our flaws, symptoms or deficits as central, while Zen foregrounds the realization of perfection, reaching down into the deep well of no-self, to a place beyond loss and gain-running the risk of emotional bypass. Koans show us the path to oneness in the midst of the fragmentation of everyday life as well as offer a way to embrace all those aspects of ourselves we typically experience in opposition to each other, and which effectively cut off our emotional from our spiritual life. We cannot be open to the whole of our life without simultaneously becoming open to the whole of our self. Magid's many years of experience as a psychoanalyst and as a Zen teacher have fostered a dialectic of mutual engagement and mutual influence between these two vantage points. As a Zen teacher, he reminds us that, at the most essential level, nothing is missing-and nothing is hidden. Meanwhile, as a psychoanalyst he explores the unresolved conflicts that lurk in the shadows cast by the light of realization.
