MEDITATION IN PSYCHOTHERAPY FORUM ARCHIVE
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Re:Mindfulness & Acceptance in Psychotherapy
Meditator · 04/27/04 at 9:05 ET
>>The piece missing is a complete understanding of acceptance itself. If you're having difficulty with a particular emotion, it may be because you haven't accepted the emotion. For example, we can deny anger and it will continue. But if we accept it, saying, "I'm really angry," we can give it the space it needs to transform into something else (which we then acknowledge in its own moment). Don't worry about higher consciousness, just be present with your experience. Thich Nhat Hanh has written eloquently about this. I recommend his books, "Peace is Every Step," "Being Peace" and "Teachings on Love.">> I don't practice Buddhism, or a Buddhist-style meditation, but I have made an enormous attempt to understand it, both its use of meditation and the ideology. I have many volumes of Thich Nhat Hanh. And, it took about ten years of meditation practice before I began to understand his meditations, and I do place them within the meditative experience rather than strictly within Buddhism. I still believe that to understand his meditation that it requires putting it within the context of the meditation experience and not only within the ideas of mindfulness, living in the moment, acceptance, and desire. Isn't Vientnamese Buddhism slightly different from that of Tibetan Buddhism? I think Thich is markable for his emphasis on love, always healing. I do understand acceptance, but acceptance can be very tricky. What appears to be acceptance can be avoidance. And, this can cause much confusion and frustration, not to mention more damage. This is yet another issue of mindfulness taught by therapists to be grappled with in psychotherapy. Getting back to the transforming experience of meditation, without the ideology attached to it. I have the sense that Buddhism often maintains that shifts in consciousness in meditation aren't as important as practicing Buddhist ideas, which are transforming. I can see where teaching people over many years awareness through living in the moment and acceptance transforms merely by practicing it in the regular conscious mind. However, for me, none of it made sense to me, until I could take my meditation experiences and apply them to Buddhist teachings, and at that point the "feeling" of living in the moment, acceptance, and the like made sense. It ultimately is about shifting emotion and awareness, finding "true self" from my experience that is what healed. And acceptance, if it is true acceptance, is often about finding what truly is, true peace, true happiness, true self. It is a "feeling" and not a "thought". It's my sense that people with profound emotional angst can benefit from intellectual acceptance. However, profound loss or trauma often create emotions, "feelings", that can't be rationalized. It's helpful, very helpful, to be aware of the feelings attached to trauma and loss. However, the healing doesn't take place in the regular conscious mind, from my experience. A shift in consciousness is required from my experience, and I suspect that this is what probably happens with EMDR, but the EMDR people don't particularly like to call it a form of meditation. Yet, I think, that there's a long tradition of using the gaze in meditation practice to deepen the experience. Meditation is a very broad topic that stretches so far beyond that of Buddhism, and I only understand a very small piece of it. Meditation has been very healing for me, and I started it as a hobby rather than as a therapy. I just question whether people, therapists, without the broad background in it can really use it as a therapy, and if they do what parts of it will they chose to apply and apply effectively? Many times its application fails in therapy, from what I have heard. But then again, therapy often fails. Well, I might not be getting it from the point of view of your experience or practice. I tend to meditate for the profound shifts in emotions, moving me more toward my "true self". I'm more of a mystic, if you can call me that. And I tend to understand Buddhism in those terms. Actually, I tend to understand all religions in terms of mysticism and ideology. And, not unlike Buddhism, Christianity also promotes acceptance, but it's framed a little differently in my mind. "Know the truth and the truth will set you free." Reframed by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science, "There's no life, truth, substance, or intelligence in matter. All is infinite mind." My limited knowledge of theology. Well, I realize that this diverges from meditation practiced in psychotherapy, but I hope that it helps to frame my original question, and illustrates the subject better. Maybe it's far simpler to use meditation in psychotherapy than I realize. These are my questions from someone outside of the field of religion or science, but I am profoundly interested in meditation and healing.
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