Question
Dear Keisen…Does zazen have some effect like psychotherapy? For example, to work through or to release what people call “traumas”? Let’s say old emotional trouble and old perceptions that go with those emotional forms?
Kind Regards,
Jason Gosnell
Florida, USA
Jason
Answer from Master Kosen
When you sit quietly facing the wall, doing nothing except observing your breathing, your body and your mind, facing no risk, thoughts and emotions come. You can then see them without being caught by them. You can as well observe them, know about them and let them pass. Maybe psychotherapy try to heal these inner processus, by doing zazen it is not the same, these processus disappear finally by themselves because they have nothing anymore to fix themselves. They are without support, so they go.
Another way to express that would be to say: “It is not the answers to questions which come, this is the questions which disappear.”
Kosen