Many Ways to Work with the Mind

Lynn McDaid is a counselor and psychotherapist in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has been a Buddhist for 20 years. She graduated in 1969 as a psychologist from Queens University in Belfast and as a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Master of Science in Psychology. She worked as an educational psychologist, had a baby, then worked as a counselor to both staff and students at the University of Ulster. For the past 15 years she has had a private practice as a counselor and psychotherapist in London and Belfast.

Lynn is a student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Ven. Lama Panchen Otrul Rinpoche. Panchen Rinpoche lives with her and her husband at Tashi Khyil outside Belfast; he has a center in County Cavan where he also spends much time. Tashi Khyil runs a registered charity for Tibetan refugees, taking care especially of the Gungru Khangtsen at the Gomang College of Drepung Monastery in south India, where the monks are in urgent need at the moment of the most basic requirements.

Ven. Robina Courtin talked with Lynn McDaid in Belfast in April about her work.

Tell us how, as a Buddhist, you work as a therapist.

I trained for seven years at university as a psychologist. All the time within that straight-forward Western approach to psychology I was looking for the human being – where’s the bit about the people. Then I began my own therapy and trained in psychotherapeutic and counseling skills. That gave me really good insight into how to work with myself, how to clear things, to get better, and all the rest of it.

Then when I was about 27, a dear friend had been hearing teachings of Lama Yeshe, and she repeated his words back to me, and immediately I knew: yes, yes, yes. I didn’t actually receive teachings from Lama Yeshe but I read a lot and heard a lot about him, and this led me to my own teacher.

After all my training in psychology and psychotherapy, what I found was that Tibetan Buddhism went further, it went all the way; and the psychotherapy that I had done myself was very useful in helping me understand Buddhism. Gradually I just married the two together.

How do you work with people?

Whoever sits down in front of me would have a wish inside them to clear something or make something better, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. My aim is to help that person reach where they want to reach at that time – and that could be to just clear a parent/child relationship. That is a good motivation. So, that is as far as I would go with that person. For me, as Tibetan Buddhist, that is absolutely brilliant: the wish to simply improve a relationship or to have better behavior is wonderful.

Another person who sits in front of me might have some spiritual insights, the ability to practice, might even have a wish to hear Buddha’s words. In my room I have pictures of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Buddha. Occasionally people say, “Who is that?” I answer purely on the level at which they ask the question. Others might be beyond that, perhaps have had some teachings from a lama, and as part of trying to sort themselves out, they come to me. All sorts of people sit down here with all sorts of needs, and I try to respond to their needs, but always from the Tibetan Buddhist practice I have inside me.

There is no conflict for me, no contradiction between Tibetan Buddhism and psychotherapy – it is all one process of changing the mind. I am coming from the point of view of a Buddhist, but the tools that I use, particularly for Westerners, are those of counseling and psychotherapy.

As a Buddhist you would be working from the assumption that a person could, for example, get rid of all of their attachment completely, so how do you work with that?

Try to perceive where a person is at. For some, even to reduce the level of their attachment, for example, in their marriage, is good. I’m coming from the point of view that they can remove all their attachment but that they are not able to. The tools of psychotherapy help alleviate some of their attachment in an immediate relationship. If they work where they’re at, it will open the door to removing more layers of attachment.

As a Tibetan Buddhist one would sit and listen to the teachings about, say, Buddha’s model of the mind, about karma, compassion, and so forth, then you would take these theories away and through meditation and working on your mind in your life they would become experiential. Basically, you would be your own therapist. In your work, how do you help a person transform their mind?

I try to help them see that they have responsibility for where they are at, for who they are, for what’s going on. Lots of Westerners feel like victims. It’s a matter of empowering them to see that they have choice, they have responsibility, and that they can change.

So, we would talk, and in and out of the conversation would flow: Where do you want to get to? How do you want to feel? Where is that for you? Where do you want to reach? Then we work out strategies, and these are working with the mind, getting them to understand that they have control; choosing: do you choose this or do you choose that? Yes, you are really, really angry and vengeful and you want to kill this person, but what is that going to give you? Will that really get you where you want to be? What’s going on inside you? What is underneath that wish to kill? What is underneath that hurt?

You’re helping them, and a lot of it is helping them to detach so that they can see the other person as separate. Often we think that the people around us are just fodder or that they are completely focused on getting at us. They begin to become detached, begin to see that other people have feelings, begin to see how what they do affects others and affects themselves; begin to see that they can change the whole pattern of energy in their families, their relationships.

So you have a dialogue. And for your part of it, you are coming from some comprehension of this person’s mind, which gives you the skill to ask the appropriate questions. You have to have some wisdom, some insight, to do this, don’t you? In other words, the skill of your therapy is based on the amount of work you have done on yourself.

There is no doubt about that. I am the product of everything that I have been through and am still struggling. And I will, of course, continue to struggle. I always feel that the lamas are at the top of an enormous adder, but at least I can see the bottom rung. I know there is a ladder there.

Also, I continually receive instructions from the lama. And every single patient who comes to see me is my teacher. Every one of them. Often I am so humbled by what I see in front of me. I am in tears sometimes because of people’s ability to come through things, their ability to change.

Occasionally someone is sent to me by a doctor, or someone comes because their wife says they will leave them if they don’t, and then it’s like banging into a wall all the time. Then I basically tell them that they are okay, but nothing actually happens because that person doesn’t have the wish to change.

When someone has the wish to change, they’re putting their hand in mine and I say something like: “If I feel like the right person for you, to walk this next bit of your journey with, we will do it together. But if not, then that’s okay.” I put the responsibility onto the person all the time. “You see what feels right for you, check. Don’t take anything I say for granted. Don’t take anything on my say-so. Check it out.” (I can hear Buddha’s words here, but this is what I feel.)

For me there is no contradiction between this approach and the Tibetan Buddhist approach to developing a good heart, to developing what’s happening inside, to releasing from attachment and ignorance and aversion and the rest. This is the on-the-ground way to do it. You can’t change by sitting on a cushion thinking high thoughts. You use every situation, every relationship, whatever is in your face. I don’t need to say to people, “This is your karma.” To some, of course, I would say this. But to others I would say, “This is where it’s at for you, so don’t complain about how it’s not. Let’s face how it is, and let’s see how you can use the situation you are in right now in order to change, to move, to grow …”

A lot of people do past lives therapy. I’m not interested in that at all. Maybe there is some purpose there; but I have never heard anyone come up with a past life as a worm or hell-being; they’re always human. And people get caught into it. Why? What about now? That’s the tough stuff. And I think that is what the lamas would teach as well. Here and now. Get on with it.

How do you deal with things like wanting to have an abortion, for example?

I have clear instructions from my lamas about what is correct and what is not correct; that’s the bottom line for me. And in the case of abortion, it is not right. But, within that, again on their instructions, different people have different needs. When someone comes to me wanting to have counseling on abortion, I would be very open to where that person is, of course. But if they ask me what I think about abortion, I would say I don’t think it is right because it is killing another sentient being.

Then someone might say, “Abortion is right for me and I need to do it.” Actually, a couple of times I’ve been a bit naughty and saved a few lives by saying, “Okay, that’s grand, have an abortion. But before you do it, you and I are going to talk to this baby. Because if you are going to do this, it is very important that you prepare this little being for what is going to happen to it. You should send this little person that is inside you on their way in as kind and gentle a way as you can.” I am confronting them with the reality, which they don’t have to pick up on. They can just say, “This is a load of baloney; I’m not doing this.”

You don’t bring your own morality into these issues?

I cannot. And anyway I wouldn’t, because everyone has to find their own way, their own level. I don’t know what is right for another person. I don’t know! A lama would know. I help people listen to their own voice inside, which we all need to do anyway – hear that voice inside, get a feel for it.

With abortion, for example: if someone can actually get a feel, a deeper understanding of what they’re doing, that it’s right for them to have the abortion – and I’ve known people who have spoken to lamas and still gone ahead and had an abortion – then at least there has been a softening of the energy and a little more awareness of something purposeful that has come out of the experience.

I have a lovely bush in my garden planted by a little baby whose mother decided to keep him. She said that this baby wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.

Would you say that you guide people?

Well, I would like to think that I don’t. I always recognize that I have an influence, a huge input, in fact, but there is a purpose in that person being in front of me and not with someone who says, for instance, in the case of abortion, “That’s great! Go for it!” There must be the karma between me and that person, so I take that, not as a license, but as part of how it is.

I try not to guide people but to be guided by each person. I try to listen to what is in their heart and reflect that back to them, so they can hear their own voice, their own wisdom. But this can happen only when they start to calm down, when things are quiet enough, when they’ve got the space to be heard.

Sometimes, in order for them to hear that voice inside, they need to be given permission to voice all the garbage, just spew it out, which is healing on its own. When we are allowed to have the garbage, we are also allowed to have the voice.

People often feel that Buddha is saying that it’s inappropriate to express negative energy like this. “I shouldn’t be angry, therefore I should not express it.”

I know that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has spoken correctly about this, but I’m just working from where I’m at. There are a lot of therapists who work with anger, who encourage all this shouting and what-not. Actually, that has never been very purposeful for me. What I always say to people is, “You sound really angry.” I explain that it is really a smoke screen; that underneath there is invariably hurt or fear. “What is your hurt, what is your fear, behind all this anger?” Generally very quickly bypass the anger and talk about the hurt underneath.

Occasionally, I might get people to thump cushions, for example. One person I can think of, whose father had been sexually abusing her for many, many years really needed to thump something in order for her to feel her own strength and power, to say, “I don’t want this, it is wrong! I want this out of my life.” However, I always make it very clear: “This is not your father that you are thumping, but we’ll use him for a focus at the moment.” It’s in fact to help the person feel empowered: “I don’t want this, it is wrong!” Because when someone is feeling like a victim, they need to feel that power, that strength.

So, basically, it’s not the delusion of anger as defined by Buddhism: the wish to harm someone; perhaps you could call it the energy of anger?

Yes, it’s important that the person feel the might of their bottled-up energy and put it out. People feel empowered after that. They’ve been allowed to say something that they’ve maybe held inside for ages. Scared. “I’ve really hated my father.” Just to say those words when you’ve held them inside for many years and they’ve been poisoning you is a great freedom.

I always say to the person, “Keep all this for me here. Don’t go home and say it to your father. Let it stay here with me.” Many therapists would encourage the person to go home and confront the father about all the awful things he did, but I do not feel that is always the most helpful thing to do. What the person really wants is to confront this part inside themselves.

So, from the Buddhist perspective, it’s all a question of motivation. You could be shouting and yelling but with the wish to understand your own anger and to change. Or you could be shouting and yelling with the wish to hold on to the anger.

Yes, we need to let it go and get on with our lives, stop holding on to stuff, release it.

Occasionally people who come to me say they cannot get rid of the wish to harm or their anger, and they want to know what to do. Partly, what they are saying is that they don’t want to harm because it’s not right, and they are scared that they might actually do something. First, they have to acknowledge the feeling, then talk about the hurt beneath it. Even then they might not be able to let go of it.

Many people feel there is a contradiction between Buddhism and psychology, that it’s an either/or situation. Buddhists fee that the Dharma, because it is more far-reaching than psychotherapy, is superior; and that Western psychology is limited, narrow, therefore inferior. Others say that Buddhism is too traditional, that it doesn’t help people deal with their immediate problems, therefore psychotherapy is better.

First and foremost, of course, I am a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner who uses the tools of Western psychotherapy and psychology, and I bring these tools under the umbrella of Buddhism. What motivates me is the wish to gain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient being, to have an understanding of emptiness and develop compassion. That is my motivation in my therapy.

That’s for you, not for your patients.

But that’s what they get when they come to see me. It’s who I am. I don’t find any contradiction. There are various ways to work with the mind, and it’s not a question of choosing psychotherapy or Buddhism. When someone comes to see me, I just respond to who that person is, where they’re at, what they want.

When I think of His Holiness the Dalai Lama – and I am not comparing myself with the lamas, but I am learning from them – it seems certain that it’s irrelevant to him whether the person sitting in front of him is a Christian, a Jew, a nobody; what matters is that they are working with their minds. He just takes them where they’re at.

That’s how I feel about the people in front of me. I am thrilled to see them, glad they want to change something inside, glad they want to work on themselves. So let’s see what tools are going to be useful to them for where they’re at. If they want more, they will ask for more; and if they don’t, I won’t offer anything. Some people ask, some people don’t ask. It’s as simple as that.

Psychotherapy and Buddhism differ in scope and also in techniques. The fundamental practice, as we discussed, would be that a Buddhist would listen to the teachings, then go away and gradually learn to integrate them in their lives and transform their own minds. Then there are all the practices for purification and the accumulation of merit, including deity yoga, which are said to be the most potent levels of practice, without which one can’t make much progress in the long-term transformation of one’s mind, which of course means future lives. And then there is the practice of the taking and keeping of vows of morality, which on its own, is said to be a powerful way to transform the mind in the long-term. What techniques do you use to help people change their minds? And do you see them as having any long-term benefit?

Many of the people who come to see me are not Buddhist, of course, but I can help them in an ordinary way to accumulate merit by encouraging the development of a good heart. Purification is helped by their accepting responsibility for actions, remorse and the decision not to repeat the actions, with apology perhaps to the person or persons involved. I cannot really talk to them about refuge, meditation, making offerings, etc. unless they are interested in Buddhism, though I might mention these things in passing if it seems appropriate. So in this way, at least, people’s focus is going in a positive direction, and they can perhaps invoke a holy being who is important to them, for example Jesus, to help an sustain them as they work things out.

The techniques I use: first of all, I can only take people to wherever I’ve managed to reach inside myself. What I am trying to do is help people see that they have delusions and miseries but that they are not those miseries; to make a separation inside themselves, as opposed to being absolutely engulfed by them.

There is a technique that millions of people are familiar with called Gestalt, which is a way to talk to different parts of ourselves, to work on our relationships with self and others. Gestalt is very useful for beginning to make a map of what’s going on inside. “I have a real wish to kill my husband, but I am not that wish.” What a person would do, then, is put that wish on a separate cushion and talk to that part of themselves, start to understand that part.

Often, what first happens is that a person just wants to get rid of it. But that’s not how it works. You can’t just get rid of it, and that’s my opportunity to talk about transformation. “Transform” is the word we use in Buddhism, but here we talk about making friends with that part of themselves – to understand what is going on in that part, to have that part sit on their knee. I get them to put their arms around that part. And then the transformation, the healing, starts to happen.

How can you love a delusion? How can you love something that is essentially harmful?

I am talking about it grossly, but it puts it on the ground. We need it on the ground. Some people can understand “delusion,” but some people can’t. You need to get across to the person that this is a part of yourself that is suffering, that is in such pain that it wants to kill. What’s going on underneath this wish to kill? What is this part of you? You don’t want to get rid of this part of you, so let’s try and understand this part of you.

In this way, I encourage the person to take responsibility for all parts of themselves, to look after all the parts of themselves, and then to heal and transform what is going on in those parts.

Actually, I am not a typical Gestalt therapist. I trained many years ago and have scrambled many things together into my own omelet. For example, let’s say I am having difficulty with my relationship with you. I would imagine you sitting on a cushion and I would talk to you, saying all the things that I am having difficulty with. Then I would sit on your cushion and pretend to be you and try to feel what it is like to be you, in the way that His Holiness would talk about trying to get some understanding about what is going on in the other person. You try to see the other person and some of their feelings, not just someone who is making you feel like a victim.

This is a way to get inside the other person, to feel what they feel, and to say back, “I don’t like the way you say so and so; I feel such and such when you talk to me this way; I wish …” This begins to give a bit of space, a bit of understanding: my goodness, this person has feelings in the same way that I have feelings.

These are the things I have borrowed from Gestalt techniques. The way I try to incorporate them, I hope, is from His Holiness.

How about Freud?

I don’t do anything with Freud.

Jung?

I did some training in transpersonal psychology and, again, it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten all the exact words. I use visualization, for example. Different things work for different people. For one person it is just talking; for another, dream work; and for some people, visualization is very, very powerful. Let’s say you have a pain in your shoulder. One visualization technique would be to image that you are very small and you travel in through your mouth and down inside and into this hurt area. What does it feel like? What’s going on there?

People for whom this is easy will describe caves and caverns and burnings and all sorts of things. And actually by being in there and looking around and seeing what is going on and talking to that hurt, they can actually begin to understand what caused it. People can even go back to their childhood by traveling into that part inside themselves.

I also work with drams. We know that dreams are in fact all ourselves, but people largely think that dreams just happen and flow in and out of the mind. I get people to talk about the dream and then I get them to identify with all the different parts of the dream.

Let’s say you are dreaming about a forest and a boat and people walking by. I would get you to talk as if you were the forest, the boat, the people, and gradually you would begin to realize that you are everything in the dream. And this is a way to understand that everything is within our own mind, which is what Buddhism says. This is a very gentle way of teaching that everything that comes up in the mind is actually myself; it’s about me. I am creating all this!

Perhaps I would get the person to imagine their own home, to go around it: What’s here? What’s there? What state is it in? Is this the state your mind is in? Is this where you’re at? Gradually they begin to realize that the external is simply a manifestation of where they’re at inside. In this way the mind expands, opens, broadens into a wider perspective.

Then there are guided daydreams. I would ask the person to lie down, relax. I’d say to imagine that you are in a meadow and you are walking down to a stream. Now you are walking through the stream and up a mountain. There’s a little house at the top of the mountain and a wise man is sitting at a table and on that table there is a book and it has the answer to any question that you would care to ask. You ask the question and he gives you the answer, and you come down the mountain, through the stream back to the meadow, and you again lie down. And this takes about 25 minutes, and I am guiding the daydreaming.

Then they tell me what happened, all the things they saw, the house, the man; they describe the book, and they tell the question. What that has done is allowed them to hear a question, and it’s usually a very deep question. They have asked a question that has come right from their heart. In this way they get a sense that they have some inner wisdom. They’re getting a picture of themselves, because the house they describe at the top of the hill will, in fact, be a manifestation of their own energy. The hill, the meadow, everything is individual. It’s a way to get a picture of where we’re at, of what we want, what we really need to know.

And it also gives a sense of self. In the West, a lot of people are victims, and this technique is so empowering. We can’t move until we ask a question. It is very useful for  some people.

Other techniques?

There’s body work and bio-energetics. Again, I use my own diluted form of this for releasing the energy, shifting the tight boundaries that we are caught in. Fomr some people, physical movement releases all the things they hold in the muscles; we hold everything very rigid a lot of the time. For instance, if a person is very, very angre, or just frozen solid, I’ll actually take their hands and I bend down with them and jump with them, bounce on the floor. And then I will get them to make a noise, rrr, rrr, rrr, shouting, anything, and this actually starts to release the energy, the boundaries become looser, and very often tears come. When a person can touch themselves, then they can begin to talk about what’s really going on, and that leads to talking about how they are in their body, how they hold energy in the body, how it’s all a manifestation of what they feel inside. Softening the body is a way into softening the mind; it makes things more fluid. Then it is possible for people to come out and invite me in if they want to.

I also use a lot of painting. Painting is wonderful! I get people to paint themselves. This is confronting for a number of reasons: first, people never sit down with paper and paints, so this is a totally, wonderful, exciting thing. I always make sure I have large pieces of beautiful paper and lots of beautiful paints and brushes. I make it a beautiful experience – beautiful because you are going to be painting about yourself, and that in itself is special and very precious.

Then the person starts painting. Sometimes they will do lots of lines, little figures, whatever. Later, we talk about it, this being another way into what is really happening inside, as it just slips out onto the paper and is expressed in a way that can never be described directly in words. There it is, all laid out. What might be stuck inside gets painted outside, so that we can address it, talk to it, own it, and start to change it.

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