Today, I head into my Chaplaincy internship at the local mental health hospital.  It’s a place I’ve managed to avoid for a couple of decades – personally and professionally.  But I know some good people there and the Spiritual Care folks have given me a chance to dig deep into my practice.  I think this might be the edge where, as roles and realities collide, koans can be actualized.  But first, I have to get past the robes I wear.

No, I’m not talking about the Buddhist robes.  Psychologists get to wrap themselves in robes too.  Big, heavy, layered masses of psychic authority and kevlar-heart.  At least that’s how I was trained and, while I value the necessity of boundaries and authority, I like to strive for lapsing skillfully when required.  So I think this layer of doctrinal authority will be the first to set aside in the cultivation of the relational.

No, I’m not talking about working with the patients. They have fewer delusions and more keys to doors than I do and are skilled at moving snow with pine needles.

The professional hierarchy in institutions is obvious.  But the power structure is not.  See? I really was paying attention during the brief years I spent interning in a community general hospital and learned quickly that you always bring cookies for the folks on the front lines.  Appreciation and empathy being a rarity, it wasn’t the cookies as much as the opportunity to share a laugh over them that nourished the relationship.  On such ground, I can be open again to the question: which koans will surface, expand, and collapse?

Unmon said, “Look!  This world is vast and wide.  Why do you put on your priest’s robes at the sound of the bell?”

Why, indeed?  Why?

One of the struggles during Rohatsu was the question of continuing with the Chaplaincy program.  There’s definitely a lot of ego involved in the decision, which ever way it goes.  The typical way to approach this is to set up the scales that will weigh out the options.  If I were my patient, that’s certainly what I’d suggest.  And I definitely (knowing the kind of patient I am) would not expect compliance.  Which is good because the point of suggesting an exercise is not to get compliance but rather to see if comprehension can bubble to the surface.  But that requires a level of subtlety and trust in the unobservable process of mind.

Like a koan.

Jay Haley, master of prescribing the symptom and a mystic of paradoxes, would have made a great Zen master.  He would have sent me out of his office with the injunction that I was NOT, absolutely NOT to make any decisions – no peas or carrots decisions, no red or green sweater decisions, none.  Life would be reduced to one gigantic ball of indecision that I could neither swallow nor throw up.  Luckily, I could never afford Haley as a therapist and have to settle for me.

I’m more of the School of Sledgehammer Therapy.  Don’t get me wrong, I can do the subtle stuff: so what do you notice when you consider the possibility of going back for a second year?  But very quickly, as I watch my mind careen and collide against rapidly expanding if-then flowcharts in my skull, I lose patience.  Subtlety and support go out the window and the Big Stick of Reality comes out.

In this case, reality is not an actuarial count of yeah and nay.  And that makes it tough.  Reality is that comprehension requires indecision.  Unable to tolerate indecision, I take refuge in the intellect.  What symptoms could I prescribe to get under the intellectual grip of the problem?  10, 000 prostrations (not a bad idea; Enkyo roshi spoke of bows being good for a narcissist)?  Copying 108 sutras in Pali (sure; got all the time in world to do that for the next three months).  Circumambulate the Shwe Dagon Pagoda (not likely; the barn will have to do)?  Sit another 7 day sesshin (hah!  and develop another obsession with red toenails)?

Thankfully, I know me too well some days.  The decision will not surface as the endpoint of an intellectual exercise.  It certainly will not emerge through introspection or being open to the universe (all that does is have my brains fall out anyway).  Like the morning star that pierced Shakyamuni all the way through to the ancient layers of his being, comprehension will surface and work its magic in its own time.

In the meantime, a few prostrations, sutra copying, mindful trekking through the woods couldn’t hurt.