The Simple Power Of Naikan

Naikan:

Ouch. It wasn’t the news anyone would want to hear.

My client had been embroiled in major domestic turmoil for weeks. Her husband was uncommunicative and had taken to sitting in front of the TV nursing a bottle of scotch every night. She was on the point of taking the kids and leaving him.

The previous week I had given her an unusual assignment drawn from the practice of Naikan, a Japanese-based insight meditation.

I had assigned her the task of saying “Thank You” to her husband 10 times a day. She couldn’t say it gratuitously, just to fulfill her quota, and she couldn’t say it sarcastically. She had to notice when he did something that served her and thank him from the heart.

She took a second before she accepted this unusual task and I could tell she had misgivings about it. But, to her credit, she was willing to give it a try.

And now here she was on the phone a week later saying that they had had the biggest fight of their marriage – a rip-roaring, high-octane, drag up everything you ever did wrong from the past kind of a fight! And she attributed it directly to her daily shows of appreciation.

I was taken aback.

“So,” I said “ I guess you’re not going to be doing that again any time in the near future.”

But she surprised me.

“I sure am,” she said. “I found that I need to do it for me no matter how he reacts.”

This brave lady had discovered the gentle power of Naikan.

Naikan, the word means introspection, in Japanese, is a deceptively simple practice of self-reflection and insight meditation which can lead to lasting shifts in perspective. Although it originated in the East and was, in fact, drawn from the principles of Jodo-Shin Buddhism it is secular in nature and particularly appropriate to busy, self-involved Western lives.

To understand how it works we need first look at how we each come up with “The Story of Me.”

We all create the narrative of our own lives. We do this little by little, day by day, incident by incident. This endlessly-fascinating story encompasses all the slights, deprivations and grievances we experienced as kids as well as the triumphs we achieved in adulthood. It’s the sum totality of everything that ever happened to us and everything we ever felt. It’s usually a great story which we know by heart. After all, we’re the main protagonist. We wrote it and we’re the only ones who get to edit it!

Periodically, we may re-work part of our story in the light of current events. But essentially it remains calcified and unexamined. After all, we know what happened. We lived through it. Right? Eventually we come to accept it as the “reality” of our life.

But is it? Or is it our interpretation of reality and a perspective we can switch at will?

Let’s say your father disappoints you, or yells at you, when you’re 7 years old. You file that memory away as a 7 year old would. You don’t have the maturity to see the big picture. Your dad may have been working 2 jobs at the time. He may have been going through a rough patch with your mother. But all you feel is a child’s hurt. Worse, this unhappy memory can be used as a building block for a belief system that “dad was never there for me.”

When your relationship turns sour that’s often all you see. You forget the sweetness of the early days, or if you think back on them you may often re-write history to make the past congruent with the present. You always “knew” it would end up like this.

When you look back on your achievements you remember the thrill of success. You got where you are because of your efforts and hard work and you’re justifiably proud. But what about your parents who pushed you to do homework every night so you’d end up in law school? What about your classmates in your study groups, the boss at the video store you worked at in High School who let you hit the books in between customers, your financial aid counselors? Where do they figure in your story? Do they even have walk-on parts?

Naikan works from the premise that in Reality there is no such thing as a “self-made man”. We got where we are with the support and actions of others. In fact, we have an interconnectedness that is so pervasive it’s easy to overlook.

This isn’t a perspective that comes naturally in a society which values self-reliance and independence and rewards the pioneer spirit. Although, when you think about it even the pioneers relied on intrepid map-makers as well as each other. Nevertheless, it’s a more balanced realistic view of the world as it actually functions.

So how does it actually work? A classical Naikan exercise is to choose a person from your life, (usually starting with your mother or father) and ask the following questions:

“What did I give to this person?”
"What did this person give to me?”
“What trouble did I cause this person?”

The third question is the one most people balk at. The idea that they may have caused trouble to someone else often seems to be an unnecessarily negative viewpoint to take. But a looser translation of trouble as inconvenience, worry or hardship will help to make this question more palatable. Also, there is no implication that the trouble was deliberately caused.

For example, looking back over your life you may perceive that, in fact, all the help and support that your parents gave (which you had taken for granted) came at the expense of time to themselves to relax or took attention away from siblings.

An unbiased adult re-evaluation of all that has been received, but unacknowledged so far, can be a humbling experience. It’s not unusual for people applying this kind of exercise on those closest to them to come to the startling realization that they actually received far more than they thought they gave back!

These reflective exercises are also wonderfully effective in helping to shift perspectives on difficult relationships such as pesky co-workers or demanding bosses.

Now let’s take it a step further and apply Naikan to strangers. Try it on your mailman. What have you given to him? Probably nothing. What has he given to you? Timely delivery of things which are important to you in all weathers? What trouble or inconvenience have you caused him? How about all those catalogs you order? Think they’re fun to lug around?

Or, if you’re like me you have a dog who lives for the daily mail-delivery. He thinks my mailman shoves things through the door every day just to mess with him. And he lets him know that in no uncertain terms. By the way, the rationalization that your mail carrier is only doing his job and is paid to do what he does doesn’t cut it here. He’s still providing a valuable service to you which may not even be on your radar of appreciation.

Taking things for granted is another way for us to go unconscious to our lives. The object in any Naikan exercise is to look around with fresh eyes and to drop any pre-determined notions of what may be due by obligation or habit.

So back to my battling spouses.

My client had taken her assignment seriously. As she turned her attention to finding instances of services rendered by her husband she became more aware of little things she had taken for granted. He emptied the dishwasher so she didn’t have to when she came home from work. He lowered the volume on the TV when she went to bed early.

Her heart began to soften and she began to shift her perspective to allow for the possibility that he wasn’t a monster at all but a man in a great deal of distress who wasn’t communicating very well with her right now.

Most importantly, she clearly saw the rigidity of her belief system and how she had been reinforcing it by selectively reacting to only the negative things in her marriage. This is how she eventually came to see that the exercise was more about her and the way that she saw the world than about her husband’s behavior.

And the fight? Well, that came out of the blue. Her husband saw that she was being nicer to him and couldn’t figure out what was going on. He felt caught off-guard and wary. So he went to his comfort zone of picking an argument.

This time she bought into it. The very next day she went right back to noticing and appreciating any kindnesses he did for her.

Later on she added in an exercise where she did secret services for her husband. She had to do one a day. If he noticed she did it and thanked her for it, it didn’t count and she had to start over. Later still, she tackled the larger assignment of “re-seeing” their entire relationship in the light of what he had given to her and what difficulties she had inadvertently caused him.

She essentially re-wrote “The Story of Us” and, in doing so, also revised “The Story of Me.”

Last time I checked on them they were still married and she had shared her Naikan “secret” with him. He loved it so much he started using it at work and, of course, on her.nn nn nnn