Sanity and Sainthood

In a way, I'm probably not the best person to objectively review Tucker Peck's book about "Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy.  After attending his weekly eSangha classes for roughly three years, I'm not terribly surprised to find that there's almost nothing in the book I haven't heard him mention in conversation on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, this is hardly a critique; I wouldn't have listened to Tucker talk for ~150 hours if I didn't think his teaching was valuable.  But it does mean I can't come to these ideas with the same mindset as someone hearing them for the first time.  The book was still fun to read regardless because it compiles and organizes all these insights for future reference.  It also gives me something simple and tangible to hand to other people who are interested in quickly (it took less than 150 hours to read this) understanding what Tucker has to offer as a teacher.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is both a dharma teacher and a professional therapist, the basic point is that both modalities are useful and even complementary, but they serve different purposes.  Meditation helps us to become aware of the process of our thoughts, whereas therapy works at improving their content.  While this simple distinction seems pretty intuitive, it contains a wealth of wisdom.  Because on the deepest level, it helps us to give up on the craving to have perfect content -- to be perfectly happy -- all the time.  As Tucker repeats throughout the book, and I've seen myself, meditation has a lot to offer, but it does not show any signs that it will magically deposit me in a state of permanent bliss anytime soon.  And while that might sound disappointing, I think perhaps we should see it as a blessing.  Do we really want to do something that leads us towards being unable to feel human emotion?  In fact, while meditation does seem to improve life overall, it actually has a tendency to open me to a much wider range of possible emotion.  A lot of the book gives advice for dealing with this sort of destabilization in a way that leads towards a broader dynamic stability that lets us function as a better, more wise and compassionate person, both towards others and ourselves.  And if this isn't the point of life, then what it?