About Morita Therapy
Obedience to nature
- In treating nervousness, it is important to break through the contradiction between what one wishes ideally and what is actually a fact.
How can we cut through this contradiction? - Put simply, the artificial desired resolution to the problem must be discarded and the facts of nature obeyed. An attempt to assert one's ideals artificially is like trying to control the throw of dice. In such a case, it is quite natural that things do not go as one wishes, and anguish will needlessly expand beyond endurance.
What then is natural? It is natural to be hot in summer and cold in winter. To try mentally not to feel hot or cold is artificial. To take things as they are and to put up with them is natural. - Once upon a time, a Buddhist monk asked a priest named Tozan how to avoid the cold of winter and heat of summer. The priest Tozan answered "you'd better go to a place where there exist neither cold nor heat."
- The monk asked the priest where such a place could be. The priest answered "you will have yourself killed by the cold when it is cold (be chilled to death), and you will have yourself killed by the heat when it is hot." This means that you should engage yourself in feeling cold when it is cold, and you should engage yourself in feeling hot when it is hot. Then you will forget about both the cold and heat. In other words, there is a proverb that goes, "Clear your mind and you will find even fire cool." This is the "obedience to nature".
- To fear dying, to hate unpleasantness, to grieve over disasters, and to complain that things don't go as desired is natural to all humans, just as water flows downhill. Furthermore, to feel heavy in the head after oversleeping, to feel stomach distress after eating too much, or to feel one's heart pound with surprise are all subject to the laws of nature. They conform unavoidably to the laws of cause and effect. Nothing goes exactly as we wish. We cannot help but obey nature.
Shoma Morita.
The essence of nervousness and therapy.
Hakuyosha.