When our sense of wholeness is lost through stress, trauma, and injustice, remembering our deep connection with the world can invite us back into our bodies, back into the fullness of life — and back to the fullest expression of who we truly are.

Psychotherapy informed by Buddhist Psychology seeks to support the remembering of this liberated, whole, and interconnected nature. This type of therapy might include both cognitive (mind-based) and somatic (body-based) practices, along with generative and relational practices where compassion, generosity, and an ethical framework for living are cultivated as the foundation of well-being.

Within this approach, there is an emphasis on fostering a specific kind of awareness that helps disrupt our habitual patterns of mind and generate healthy nervous system regulation. Many decades of research now reveal how these practices can influence brain function and structure, where areas of the brain corresponding to stress decrease in volume and areas of the brain associated with well-being grow.

All Buddhist Psychology supports a remembering of the self as a fluid, relational process arising in continuous interdependence with myriad complex systems. Within the school of Buddhism called Mahayana, this gives rise to an emphasis on liberatory practices — because, when we remember our interdependence with others and with the world, we are moved care for one another and the world.

As a lay-entrusted teacher within a Mahayana lineage, I believe that meditative practices focused on self-improvement or behavior expectations miss the mark — and that a more complete expression of these practices must also benefit others, uplift the marginalized, give voice to the silenced, and heal the natural world.

Within the therapy room, this then becomes decolonial and anti-oppressive work, aimed at raising critical consciousness (concocimeinto in Liberation Psychology), examining and disrupting the harmful systems we’ve internalized, and supporting well-being at the level of community.

Learn more about Buddhist Psychology and a collection of teachings called the abhidharma here.

Learn more about the integration of Western psychotherapeutic practices with Buddhist Psychology in this New York Times article featuring Mark Epstein, MD and this article with Tara Brach, PhD at the American Psychological Association.

Connect with me here.