Sharing gifts with strangers

• Silence in the Art of Therapy by Bruce Brown bbrown@pepperdine.edu, 4/24/98
  
  

Hippocrates advises us, "Never treat a stranger." By the time we reach the point of choosing interventions, we are making decisions based on our understanding of an individual, and our relationship with that person. Although I have practiced various forms of meditation (intermittently) over the past 25 years, it has only been recently that I have begun explicitly to recommend them to to others. Relaxation techniques are a valuable tool that have seemed to me to be fairly low-risk to introduce, and in working with trauma patients, I have offered them for years. Somehow, making a commitment to developing self-awareness through meditation practice has seemed a more advanced step, and one that I have only begun to discuss with people who are really looking for it. I have tried to direct the focus toward practice and application, and minimized cultural context. I'd be really interested in hearing how others actually introduce and teach meditation as part of the treatment relationship.

• Hesitation vs Boldness in Teaching Meditation to Patients by Jim Spira, 7/10/98