The Odyssey Movie, Zen Meditation, & Myths of Perfect Motivation

Please note: the following contains plot spoilers for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

I've seen The Odyssey twice in theaters, and I found it a moving story. I tend to be an empathic person, which is partly why I became a therapist: I'm sensitive to other people's emotions and can almost feel them as my own. And it's hard not to feel for Odysseus. He's thrown through one trauma after another: ten years of war, followed by ten years trying to get home as his men are wiped out in a terrible series of trials and tribulations. 

Seven of those years are spent in a kind of forgetfulness, ensnared by Calypso and the lotus flower that makes Odysseus forget himself, his family, and his home... although Calypso helps him see that part of him wanted this delay, too. As a viewer, I found that really frustrating! Seven years seems so long, such a waste of time away from the people he loves. It was one of the hardest parts of his journey to watch, harder even than the disturbing pig-transformation scenes with Circe.

What The Odyssey Has to Do with Therapy

But it's also one of the most human parts of his story, and it connects to what I see as a therapist helping men work toward their goals: the detours are part of the journey, and how we treat ourselves during them matters as much as how quickly we get home. Pretty much all of the men I work with are dealing with some kind of mental health condition: depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, ADHD, substance use, or something else. Our work focuses on easing those conditions and getting them closer to the life they want. 

It’s not always easy or fast. Change doesn't happen overnight. And when it doesn't come quickly, it's easy (and human) for my clients to lose sight of themselves and their goals and do things that set them back. Maybe for one man, it's giving in to the urge to wash his hands twenty times in a row, three pumps of soap per wash, because he's worried about the coworker's hand he shook earlier in the day. Maybe a client working on anger management loses his cool and cusses out one of his parents, and now they're upset with him and he feels even worse. Or he takes a hit or has a drink because it's Friday night, the end of a long work week, and he just wants to unwind...even though he swore off alcohol or weed the week before. It's not so different from Odysseus, who can't stop himself from shooting an arrow at the cyclops after he's already escaped the cave, a moment of anger and ego that needlessly costs more of his men their lives.

And what happens when my clients do these things? They tend to get rocked by guilt, shame, and anger... all directed at themselves. They despair and lose hope: Will I ever get a handle on this? Will things ever get better? Why do I keep doing things that hurt me?

Self-Defeat and The Will that Works Against Us

I studied philosophy and religion in undergrad, and in these moments I often think of Augustine's inner conflict in The Confessions: "I longed to do the same, but I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains." How often do we fail to do the things we aspire to, and do the very things that take us further from our aspirations? We procrastinate, we get moody, we neglect self-care, we don't do all the things we know we ought to be doing. We aren't in perfect possession of ourselves, and we aren't perfect automatons either. Yet so many of the men I work with, and I myself, expect to be perfectly motivated and always making progress, and when that inevitably fails, we blame ourselves.

Progress and motivation are tricky things, in therapy and in life. I've helped clients make real progress and become less symptomatic, but it very rarely happens in a straight line, and it usually takes longer than the client (or I) would like. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Understandably, clients don't love hearing this. We want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get home as quickly as possible. But real life isn't like that. We are beset by the Fates, by Cyclopes and Laestrygonians, by the many things outside our control...and by our own selves. So what do we do?

Convalescing Is Not Quitting

Here I think of Professor Jeffrey L. Kosky, a close mentor who taught one of those aforementioned religion classes, and his commentary on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra in his memoir, From the Heart. Kosky describes how Zarathustra's vocation, his purpose, is teaching. So Zarathustra goes among the people to teach, but over time he grows weary: "Feeling himself slipping away in the pity that draws him outside into the marketplaces, streets, and classrooms where they gather and his teaching fails, he withdraws, grows reticent and steps back to the solitude of his sheltered cave on the mountaintop – where he convalesces and there recovers… recovers the need that drives him to go down again."

The world is a hard place to be in, to work in, to make a life in. We have stretches where we can live up to our callings and make real progress, and then we get tired and need to step back. So I try to help clients see that a lapse in motivation isn't a failure; often it's a sign they need to convalesce. Instead of kicking the tired dog, feed it, pet it, care for it. And wait: wait for the need that drives you, your purpose and motivation, to carry you back down into the world and to your projects. 

That doesn't mean shrugging off every setback. When the slip is a drink you'd sworn off or a compulsion you gave in to, rest alone isn't the answer; the work is still to get back on course. But you'll get back on course sooner from patience than from self-punishment. Addiction researchers even have a name for the spiral that follows a slip: the abstinence violation effect, where the shame of one lapse makes the next one more likely. I don't have a magic pill or trick for motivation. Some things do help, like reflecting on your values, setting specific and realistic goals, and building good habits. 

When You Can’t Seem to Make Progress,
Sit and Wait

But even as a fairly disciplined person, someone who writes, meditates, exercises, avoids certain foods and drinks, studies, and reads on a consistent schedule, I've probably never kept a healthy habit going for more than six months at a stretch. I still have months when I do none of it. What's changed is that I now trust, and have faith, that I'll come back to these things. That self-trust has helped quiet my own inner monsters of self-criticism (though they still rear their heads now and then).

So my message for my clients is that Odysseus isn't a hero because he was perfect. He was certainly no god. He failed time and time again, he procrastinated, he wrestled with regret and shame over his past. He's a hero because, despite all of that, he didn't give up. He kept going, and sometimes keeping going means being patient with ourselves and doing some serious waiting.

How to Go About Your Waiting

But waiting for what? This is where my zazen practice, a kind of mindfulness meditation, has taught me something. I try to (and sometimes fail to) sit every day for 20–40 minutes. Zazen is unusual in that it claims not to be a style of meditation at all. You're not supposed to sit with any goal: not to become more relaxed or less stressed, not to improve your concentration, not to chase some perfectly still, thought-free mind. Just sit. Sit with whatever is and whatever happens. Experience what you experience. It can be an absolutely maddening practice, especially for someone as goal-oriented as I am. But zen teaching holds that if you just sit, as you are, there can be moments of sudden enlightenment. The irony of "achieving" enlightenment while doing a goalless activity isn't lost on me but I also suppose that is the point, if there is a point.

There's another irony in zen teachings: they often speak of enlightenment as happening only once. Once you're enlightened, you're enlightened. But as Matthew Juksan Sullivan writes in The Garden of Flowers and Weeds, "In fact, many different Zen traditions have sidestepped orthodoxy and admitted that awakening comes in grades. In Japan, they speak of an initial breakthrough (kensho) which is to be deepened over a lifetime of meditation." I see something similar in therapy. Clients, especially those new to therapy, can often make fast initial progress, and then plateaus follow. Those plateaus tend to circle the same themes: self-compassion versus self-punishment, meaning versus meaninglessness, movement versus stagnation.

Going Home is a Circle

There's a way of watching The Odyssey in purely linear terms: he leaves home and eventually returns. Beginning and end. But on my second viewing, I was struck by how many scenes echo one another; there are at least three instances, for example, of Odysseus and his men panic-running toward their boats. And a homecoming is a circle rather than a line: instead of going from point A to Z, it's going from A to B and back to A. For me and my clients, the deeper issues keep resurfacing, maybe in different settings and with different characters, but with the same underlying themes. That can be frustrating and leave clients discouraged, but I think it's simply the shape of human life. The goal isn't to defeat our monsters once and for all, but to get better at sitting with them, and maybe even break bread with them now and then.

We each need our own ways of convalescing. I've named some of the self-care practices that keep me going, but none of them is perfectly self-sustaining. In that sense, we're all indebted. I'm indebted to the teachers, therapists, and traditions that kept me going when I couldn't muster it myself. And that debt is part of why I became a therapist: to repay some of what I owe. Even Odysseus doesn't get himself home alone. He's only able to leave Calypso's beach, where he lost those seven long years, when he finally gives up control and throws himself on the mercy of the waves and winds of Poseidon and Zeus.

Enter The Paradox, or Listen to the Sound of One Hand Clapping

I suppose that's the final paradox. In some ways, we need to give up the battle for perfect motivation and accept that there will be times we can't do everything we know we ought to. But that giving up can't become resignation or quitting, the kind of giving up Odysseus never did. It should be more like hoping and trusting that even when things aren't going our way, the tide will turn, we'll get back to the things we want to be doing, and the waves will carry us home.