Nothing Is Hidden (eBook)

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 fore-grounds 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.

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In this inspiring and incisive offering, Barry Magid uses the language of modern psychology and psychotherapy to illuminate one of Buddhism's most powerful and often mysterious technologies: the Zen koan. What's more, Magid also uses the koans to expand upon the insights of psychology (especially self psychology and relational psychotherapy) and open for the reader new perspectives on the functioning of the human mind and heart. Nothing Is Hidden explores many rich themes, including facing impermanence and the inevitability of change, working skillfully with desire and attachment, and discovering when "e;surrender and submission"e; can be liberating and when they shade into emotional bypassing. With a sophisticated view of the rituals and teachings of traditional Buddhism, Magid helps us see how we sometimes subvert meditation into just another "e;curative fantasy"e; or make compassion into a form of masochism.