Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

When Buddhism,

Went from India into China, it encountered the indigenous culture of China.

And the indigenous philosophes of China through the.

Cross fertilization of Indic Mahayana Buddhism.

And the Taoist Confucian culture of China was born.

Uh.

A new direction in Buddhism, called Chan or Zen.

There is historically.

Precedent for Buddhism, coming into a culture and interacting with what already exists there to produce interesting new results.

Now we have Buddhism coming into the Western world.

All 3 vehicles of Buddhism mindfulness practice, which is representative of the small vehicle. Zen, which is representative of the large vehicle and the Tantric practices, which are representative of the diamond vehicle. It's all coming here and we would expect that it would interact with Western culture.

Many facets of Western Culture, one of them is neuroscience and another one is physics. Those are areas of particular interest.

But there's also the religious interactions specifically with Christianity, primarily Catholicism and with Judaism now.

Then there's the interaction that it is having with psychotherapy.

100 years ago, William James predicted.

That.

Within 100 years, Westerners would be learning their psychotherapy.

From Buddhists.

An amazing prophetic.

Statement because at this point in history. I would say that the dialogue between mindfulness practice and western therapy.

Is?

Central to therapy.

It's not just some marginal thing that's being done by a few people with special interest. It's like it's the hot topic.

Which is an utterly amazing because I can remember reading books? When I was a kid in the 50s books by psychiatrists. And so forth who basically pathologized Buddhist meditation considered it to be a form of mental illness.

And now

You know within 50 years.

We're talking about major influence from Buddhism into therapy, particularly from mindfulness into therapy, particularly into the more hard. Nosed forms of therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy. This is just amazing that this is occuring so it's a natural question.

What is the relationship?

Between these 2 modalities.

It's V question these central question that is now being investigated. We don't have the answers yet, but I can make some conjectures if I had to summarize the difference.

I will with an oversimplification.

I would say that in some sense.

Western therapy and mindfulness practice.

Seemed to be rather similar at least if you look at the key concepts and the buzz words. There both in favor of being aware as opposed to being unconscious. They both want you to be aware of the influences from the depths that may be influencing the surface. Now they both ask you not to hold an inappropriately to things from the past.

But to move forward into the present.

Without holding complexes from the past they both ask you to not be conflicted not fight with yourself.

They both talk about having a hard experiences inside experiences and so forth so from a certain perspective. They seem to hold rather similar ideas.

Where I would say that the primary difference?

If I were allowed to over simplify things.

Is that although the ideas are the same?

Or roughly similar let's put it this way.

Mindfulness practice implements those ideas at a much finer timespace scale.

And at a much more intense level.

So that

Mindfulness practice.

Has a quantitative difference?

And that quantitative difference is so great that it leads to a qualitative difference.

So similar type things but.

At a very fine time scale second by second. The Holdings that you let go of in mindfulness practice. Our second by second inappropriate Holdings as opposed to the Holdings that you let go of in psychological practice, which is from last year or last decade or your early childhood or so forth those are sort of Macro Holdings.

Mindfulness asks for letting go of Micro Holdings, the clarity that you're asked to develop in mindfulness is moment by moment ability to resolve experiences into feel image talk and to resolve the feeling too.

A spectrum of flavors and resolve the flavors into individual location arisings. It's a whole. Other level of being aware of what you're experiencing or quote knowing what you're feeling in that moment, it's like.

Totally different level of resolution and detail and the way of reaching the unconscious difference.

Typically, in psychotherapy, I call it the dredge up. You just approach. You sort of reach down and you dredge up 1:00 or 2:00 important pivotal things to look at whereas in mindfulness practice. It's a trickle down the awareness trickles down through all of consciousness and the subconscious rewires itself without the surface, even needing to know and that's global.

That's throughout the entire T of consciousness.

So I would say roughly speaking that that the basic.

Ideals are the same but because mindfulness implements them at a more finer scale and with much greater intensity. This is a quantitative difference. That leads to a qualitative difference. However, the differences are complementary one needs to know the brick and mortar structure of the building. In addition to knowing the atomic structure if you just know the atomic structure.

You don't have the whole picture.

You need to know gross anatomy as well as cellular Histology.

So the 2 pictures pictures compliment for the large structure of personality and behavior. That's the specialty of psychotherapy for the transcendence of limited existence an suffering for insight into the nature of all.

Cells.

As opposed to insight into the nature of a particular self.

For understanding the nature of all self.

Mindfulness is the specialized vehicle.

So.

It's good, they complemented each other, they give different scale picture of the same phenomenon. So you get the big picture, the gross anatomy, so to speak clarified and the behaviors dealt with with the therapy and then you get the micro structure. The spiritual essence dealt with mindfulness and you have a perfect complementarity.