Tag Archives: Psychology

The process of working with difficulties

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As a practice, this process can be summarized. First of all there is the matter of view.  This means acknowledging……that the anxiety……however reasonable, is causing you suffering. There’s a tightness in your chest, an unsettledness in your belly, a tendency to go into red alert. Now the point is not to say “I shouldn’t worry” or  “It’s a natural concern” but just to acknowledge your feeling of anxiety. Then there’s the practice: you are actually experiencing anxiety as it is happening, as an embodied feeling, with no should or shouldn’t about it. The next aspect is to steady your awareness around that feeling and let go of interpreting it, dismissing or trying to fix it. Just be with that feeling. Then breathe into the feeling, widen and soften your awareness. Relax a little, give yourself time, ease the energies associated with that feeling. Then tune into the spaciousness, the empathy and the direct clarity of the awareness of that feeling and let the feeling do what it needs to do in order to be felt.

 Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

Here and there

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Toward the end of his writings, the Catholic monk Thomas Merton seems to have come to a position which admitted the uselessness of us seeking a “true self” as a strategy, rather than just working with where we are in each moment at any given time. A lot of self-help books and even some psychology approaches set up this distinction between “me here” and “a better me there”, with a gap in-between and an emphasis on changing ourselves in order to get to that desired, truer place. Although ongoing reflection is a good thing, often all this urge for improvement reflects a type of aggression  towards ourselves, rather than helping us with our fundamental task – befriending ourselves and life as it is. It paradoxically can even reduce any capacity for growth, which starts with self-acceptance.

The time has probably come to go back on all that I have said about one’s “true self”, etc., etc. And show that there is after all no hidden mysterious “real self” other than or hiding behind the self that one is, but what all the thinking does is to observe what is there or objectify it and thus falsify it. The “real self” is not an object, but I have betrayed it by seeming to promise a possibility of knowing it somewhere, sometimes as a reward for astuteness, fidelity and a quick-witted ability to stay one jump ahead of reality.

Thomas Merton

and not trying to be different

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Our unconscious organizing principles most clearly reveal themselves when we find ourselves stuck,  imagining that our happiness is conditional on having a certain kind of experience, on being or becoming a certain kind of person, or on being treated in some special manner. …Practice allows us discover that our happiness is not dependent on any of the things which we once thought so crucial. The old organizing principles that forever were warning us, “Do it this way or else!” are suddenly found irrelevant. Life offers us the unexpected pleasure in our own aliveness, vitality and responsiveness. Being just this moment, we learn that we don’t have to become anything new, or somehow jettison all those shameful parts of ourselves in order to partake of this newfound bounty.

Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind

Simple awareness, not fixing, is the key

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The crumbling of the false self occurs through awareness of its manifestations, not through the substitution of some underlying “truer” personality. The ability to become aware of self- representations without creating new ones is, psychologically speaking, a great relief. It does not mean that we drop the everyday experience of ourselves as unique and, in some way, ongoing individuals, but it does mean that whenever we find ourselves entering narcissistic territory, we can recognize the terrain without searching immediately for an alternative.

Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

The not knowing which is somehow right

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Most western therapies are based on theories of personality; they are geared toward knowing, rather than not-knowing. An unspoken assumption in the therapeutic world is that we should always know who we are, and if we don’t that a real problem. So when an old maladaptive identity starts to break down, this may be frightening for client and therapist alike…. At times like this I rely on my own realization that none of us really knows who we are, that this is the nature of our being, that if we have a true self at all, it somehow lies in the heart of the unknowingness that opens up when we inquire deeply into our existence, and that we can hang out on the edge of this unknown, we may discover how to let ourselves be, without having to be something.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

More scientific evidence supporting health benefits of mindfulness meditation

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Although meditation practices in different wisdom traditions and religions have been around for thousands of years, there has been an increasing amount of scientific interest in their effect over the last decade or so. It is true to say that for a good part of the last century, the psychological community had a low opinion of religious practices, as can be seen in Freud, who regarded them as an attempt to control the outside world and sometimes as a regressive infantile delusion. However, in more recent times,  a significant amount of attention and research has been conducted on both the medical  and psychological benefits of religious practice and on the health effects of secular meditation programmes such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)  and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT ).

One recent study, published just this week in the July 2012 Journal of Psychiatric Practice,  was conducted by Dr William R. Marchand of the George E. Wahlen Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and found that there was “convincing evidence that such interventions are effective in the treatment of psychiatric symptoms and pain, when used in combination with more conventional therapies“

Dr Marchand set out to review published studies evaluating the health benefits of mindfulness-based practices. His conclusion was that both MBSR and MBCT have “broad-spectrum” effects against depression and anxiety and can also decrease general psychological distress.

Based on the evidence, MBCT can be “strongly recommended” as an addition to conventional treatments (adjunctive treatment) for  depression. Both MBSR and MBCT were effective treatments for anxiety and Dr Marchand states that from a medical point of view “the available evidence indicates their use is currently warranted in a variety of clinical situations”