On my use of Buddhist psychology…
Concepts and practices found within Buddhist psychology are often a part of what I offer to clients, although they may not be explicitly identified as such because they are simply common therapy practices and concepts utilized by many therapists of various orientations. Buddhist psychology informs the way I think as a provider of psychotherapy services and how I approach my work as a psychotherapist. Therefore, I’d like to share a few thoughts on this topic.
I have personally observed the positive outcomes of embracing ideas and practices contained within Buddhism. Therefore, I incorporate elements of Buddhist psychology into my work with therapy clients where it seems applicable and likely to be helpful – as do many psychotherapists these days, whether they think of their actions in those terms or not. A fair bit of what therapists do is consistent with Buddhist psychology, though different things may be emphasized at different times, depending on the therapist and their orientation. What are recognized as elements of Buddhist psychology appear in quite a number of therapy approaches, techniques, and teachings, though they may have arisen independently rather than being directly drawn from the Buddhist world. The fact is that the enterprise of psychotherapy is largely focused on alleviating human suffering. There are many paths to that goal and what Buddhist psychology offers is one such path.
As a psychotherapist and a human being, I have come to the conclusion that the teachings of Buddhist psychology are consistent with how I experience my inner world and the world around me. There are of course equally valid alternate ways of understanding and interpreting human experience and of helping people live happier and more well-adjusted lives. I believe the Buddhist approach is one very helpful way, among many available, of conceiving how our minds work, where by ‘mind’ I mean both intellect and emotion. I believe it’s also a sensible and meaningful means of striving towards self-improvement, better functioning, and happiness that can assist people in reducing anxiety and worry, impact depression in positive ways, help us re-evaluate and modify the impacts of our past, and find more satisfactory ways of being in the world.
Does this mean that to work with me as my therapy client a person must embrace Buddhism or lean away from their personal spirituality, religious beliefs, or world orientation? Absolutely not! Anything I offer as your therapist must be tested against your own experience and beliefs – evaluated by you to see if it fits for you or not and feels helpful to you or not. The ideas I introduce in my work with others are tried and true, netting positive outcomes for many people, but you have to be the judge of what seems embraceable for you. Often, I don’t specifically reference the Buddhist framework because I’m offering common and generally helpful therapy-oriented skills. What I offer more typically sounds something like “A lot of people have found this to be useful when facing problems like yours – how about I teach you about it, you give it a go, and you let me know if it’s helpful?” I, in fact, don’t call myself a Buddhist, but rather an admirer of Buddhist ideas who has found them to be personally useful in chasing my own happiness and contentedness in a world that can be troubling, tumultuous, and fraught with psychological perils. I find Buddhist psychology to be accessible and useful and see that incorporating elements of it into daily life does not necessitate embrace of Buddhism in the way we think of it as a religion.
So, what is meant by Buddhist psychology?
Buddhism and today’s discipline of psychology have many parallels and points of overlap. These include the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person viewpoint, a focus on mental states, emotions and behaviors as well as concern with perception and unconscious mental factors, and efforts to seek and understand transformative experience, healing and existential meaning. Many modern psychotherapists understand that Buddhist practices and ideas derived from Buddhism offer clear therapeutic benefit as well as complementary knowledge and practices that can be paired usefully and meaningfully with Western psychology’s more traditional approaches and methods.
Buddhism itself is, to a large extent, a psychology. Traditional Buddhist thought draws a map of the mind that includes normative human mental states, but goes beyond this to describe states of spiritual awakening. Although less so in recent decades, Western psychology largely concerned itself with pathology – mental “illness”, its symptoms, causes, and cures. Buddhist psychology has always assumed that human beings generally operate at a psychological deficit, but that better mental health to the point of transcendent human happiness, based on ultimate human potential, was possible, and was the goal of Buddhist practices.
Buddhist psychology is a 2,500-year-old framework based on direct experience and observation that is focused on understanding the mind, emotion, and behavior in the midst of changing life circumstances. It concerns itself with the goals of alleviating human suffering and cultivating mental well-being. It combines mindfulness, self-inquiry, meditation, and ethics as elements that can help people shift from suffering to liberation. Buddhist Psychology theory asserts that our psychological states are influenced by our inner behavior and how we engage with the world in addition to our particular circumstances, and realizes that how we relate to what life brings our way matters greatly. It acknowledges that pain – whether physical or emotional – is an unavoidable part of life and with that pain comes some suffering. It also observes that as human beings we tend to add additional layers of psychological suffering by how we engage with our experiences. Specifically, it’s a desire to control things that gets us into trouble – our efforts to force or hang on to what we want, our efforts to push away what’s unpleasant, and our refusal to accept when life delivers something different from what we wish for. Buddhism has a core objective: To move from a state of suffering and delusion toward harmony with one’s environment, self-acceptance, and compassion, where compassion for self and compassion for others are emphasized equally. This is seen as a pathway to liberation from unnecessary suffering.
People often move through life lost in a limiting perspective, constrained by conditioning. We may experience heightened stress, emotional reactivity, or habitual patterns of thought and behavior that negatively affect well-being. This can lead to a diminished sense of internal comfort or balance and impede our functioning. Buddhist psychology understands that there are possibilities of being more open, loving, wise, compassionate, and balanced, and it provides a pathway for pursuing the conquest of our constraints. It emphasizes possibilities for cultivating a more flexible and present-centered way of relating to experience, where we are less caught in worries, fear, impacts of our history, and troubles of the past.
Buddhist psychology concerns itself with the human range of emotions (identifying states such as compassion, loving-kindness, acceptance, joy, greed, hate, and anger). It deviates from the typical Western division between intellect and emotion, where Buddhist psychology offers that both are functions of consciousness that are ever-present and constantly influencing each other. Importantly, Buddhism proposes that emotions can be cultivated, where purposeful choice-making can encourage what might be called more desirable emotions and gently discourage emotions that impede optimal functioning or magnify pain and suffering. The cultivation of emotions that are uplifting and contribute to peacefulness, joyfulness, and contentedness is a crucial dimension of the Buddhist spiritual path. Buddhism embraces a view of the internal interdependence of aspects of ourselves, emphasizing that mental states are changeable and interconnected, where there is a flow between emotion and cognition and the self is a dynamic process rather than a permanent entity.
In Buddhism, mindfulness and presence within the current moment are emphasized. This means living in the present moment with effort to be fully aware of and receptive to immediate experience, allowing feelings to occur without imposing judgment and cultivating a “beginner’s mind”, or openness to fresh experience, to avoid being trapped by past conditioning. Buddhism encourages use of actionable tools, where ethical living, meditation practices, and contemplation of the nature of being are employed to transform patterns that are unhelpful or block happiness and peacefulness into qualities that are life-enhancing and helpful to self and others. Cultivating gentle self-awareness and the habit of daily mindfulness provides a way of being with our thoughts and emotions non-judgmentally and honestly, seeing how and what they are and how they work. Watching emotions rise and fall, we begin to see patterns of suffering and understand what influences happiness or contentedness. Watching thoughts come and go, we begin to see how they impact emotion and influence how we interact with the world.