John Baker's Articles on Lions Roar

John Baker says that group therapy can offer the insight, immediacy, and self-awareness that is the goal of Buddhist practice. One spring morning in 1971, my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, taught me how to teach meditation. We were outside the house my wife and I shared with Rinpoche and his wife in Fourmile Canyon in Boulder, Colorado. We sat facing each other across a picnic table in the bright April sunlight. What he told me had nothing to do with the technique of sitting meditation, which usually involves working with the breath as an object of meditation and dealing with the mental events that lead us away from the present moment. Rather, his instruction was about how to be an ordinary human being in relationship with other ordinary human beings. It was about honesty and intimacy, and it was a description of his relationship with me. He said that the teacher sits across from the student and shows the student his openness. The teacher lets the student know that he is hiding nothing and that he does not judge the student, understands and listens to the student, is there as the student’s friend. He said that the teacher opens to the student—a bit. This encourages the student to open to the teacher. When we are in the presence of someone who sees us accurately, without personal bias, and still accepts us non-judgmentally, we relax. We like the person and we are warmed by his or her uncritical affection. In the face of unqualified acceptance, we can drop our protective armor and show our hidden fears, our inner shames, our uncertainties. 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. I came to realize that Trungpa Rinpoche was inviting all his students to communicate in this way. Following his death, some of us began looking for methods to recreate the openness and compassion we experienced with him and discovered Modern Psychoanalytic Group Therapy. We are working to bring it into the Buddhist path, because it offers the kind of insight, freedom, and intensely intimate interpersonal communication he inspired. Frank is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous, is committed to the Twelve Steps, and two years ago joined a Buddhist center, where he has embraced meditation and a community of fellow practitioners. His involvement at the center has, by his own testimony, brought new support to his life. The victim of a traumatic, abusive childhood, he holds his body stiffly, his face expressionless as he speaks. Forty-five years old, heterosexual, he has been out of relationship since joining Alcoholics Anonymous and, despite his membership in AA and at the center, his life lacks intimacy. He is lonely and sexually frustrated. To deal with this alienation and detachment, he has joined our psychotherapy group. Helen is an aspiring singer, forty years old, living in a failed relationship with a man who is verbally and emotionally abusive to her but who supports her financially while she dreams and hopes for a better life in Florida. He recently had an affair with another woman, but stays in relationship with Helen, and she with him, out of convenience. Intelligent, outgoing, physically attractive, she is emotionally volatile, easily hurt, and expressive with her face and body when excited, which is often. She too comes from a traumatic childhood: an angry, abusive father and an unavailable mother. She is easily provoked to anger by male authority figures, and she brooks no criticism of her risky lifestyle. She takes menial temporary jobs, working for low wages while she seeks opportunities to perform, which seldom materialize. Frank and Helen are sitting next to each other this evening in a nine-member psychotherapy group, most of whose members come from a local Buddhist meditation center. The group is led by me and my wife, Natalie, in New York City. Frank has been silent since the beginning of the session, for almost an hour, but this is not unusual for him. With thirty minutes to go, another group member addresses him, asking if he is all right remaining quiet or if he would appreciate being drawn out. Frank replies that he has something he would like to discuss. In his life outside the group he is encountering a difficult situation. He has met someone at AA and is falling in love with this person, a “newbie” to AA, and he knows better. By AA rules and guidelines, both of them are early in the recovery process and are advised not to enter into relationship with anyone, much less another new AA member. But Frank is lonely, has been single for two years, and he yearns for someone to love and be loved by. The two went to the movies together, held hands, kissed. But now she tells him she wants only to be friends, that she is determined to make her sobriety work, and that they ought not to develop their budding relationship. She is more determined than he to resist. Frank feels terribly sad but says he knows he too must draw boundaries. And even if he doesn’t, she will. The other members of the group are startled by Frank’s candor and moved by his sorrow. Natalie, suspecting that Helen understands Frank, asks her what she feels as she listens to his story. Helen turns in her chair and addresses Frank. Speaking with sympathy and affection, she tells him that she feels touched and saddened by his story, that it resonates with her own unfolding story. A few weeks ago she reported that she had met someone new, that she cared for this new man, and that she had learned he has cancer. Now she tells the group that the doctors say his cancer is incurable. She is crying, because he is pushing her away and has become abusive as she persists in her efforts to maintain the relationship. The group is dismayed at her bad luck and amazed and shocked at her willingness to pursue a new relationship while living with another man, even though their arrangement appears destined to end soon. Frank tells her that he feels affection for her and admiration for her courage and sorrow for her pain. Helen, surprised, realizes that Frank is crying. She places her palm on her chest, as though to quiet a rapidly beating heart, turns to him and says, “I’m so moved! You’ve always been so quiet, I had no idea you had such feelings for me! I love your tears and feel so warmly toward you!” Frank, still with a wooden face and almost no expression but with tears coursing down his cheeks, looks at her and responds slowly, “You’ve always felt alien, scared me, because you’re so emotional. But I think you’re more like me than I thought. Perhaps we can be friends.” There are many such encounters in our group, though they can also involve expressions of negative emotions—anger, hurt, jealousy, irritation—as well as positive ones, and such communications can be just as powerful as the one described above. In each case, we are following the methodology of Modern Psychoanalytic Group Therapy as it has been elaborated, taught, and practiced over the last forty years by the New York psychoanalyst Dr. Louis R. Ormont. This form of group therapy is a method for training people to be aware of their emotions and to use them to communicate skillfully, with heart and intimacy. It is a set of techniques designed to help people see, understand, and drop their masks, their habitual patterns, their armor. It is a way to “give the gift of ego.” Those of us inspired by Modern Group have been working to describe it in Buddhist terms, in order to make it more congruent with Buddhism and available to Buddhist communities. I first met Lou Ormont in the summer of 1974 at the inaugural session of The Naropa Institute. I was the Institute’s CEO then, and I was also teaching a course in Tibetan Buddhism. One day after my lecture a man approached me, speaking excitedly: “This Buddhism, it’s …psychoanalysis!” He went on to explain animatedly a bit about his background, and I appreciated his enthusiasm, even though I knew nothing about Western psychology. Lou was prominent in his field and was unusual among psychoanalysts, in that he only did group treatment. He came out of the Modern Psychoanalytic tradition founded in the 1950’s by Dr. Hyman Spotnitz, a psychiatrist known for his curmudgeonly brilliance who did a lot of work with schizophrenics. Lou had been teaching at Columbia and Adelphi universities and had a busy practice in Manhattan. That summer he and his wife, Joan, had decided to explore a new approach to human potentiation and came to Naropa, where Buddhism and the practice of meditation so inspired them that in succeeding years Buddhism strongly colored the development of what has become the Ormont Method of group psychotherapy. Lou and Joan impressed the Naropa faculty, and the following summers they returned to teach in Naropa’s nascent psychology program. Their influence endures today in Naropa’s Contemplative Psychology program, where the Ormont Method is still taught. Today Lou Ormont is one of...

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