It’s to become less entangled with that whole question, so that you get to spend your time on more meaningful things instead. The goal, in a refreshing counterpoint to the excesses of a certain way of thinking about therapy, isn’t to reach the state of feeling glowingly positive about yourself and your life.
These differences also help explain the characteristic ways in which each approach goes wrong - as in the case of the lifelong therapy patient who’s fascinated by his own problems, yet still as neurotic as ever or the moony meditator engaged in what’s been termed “spiritual bypassing,” attempting to transcend all earthly concerns so that she needn’t look too closely at her own pain.īuddhism’s critical insight, though, is that those personal stories are just stories, as opposed to nonnegotiable, objective reality that the selves to which they occur are much less substantial than we tend to assume - and that freedom lies ultimately not in understanding what happened to us, but in loosening our grip on it all, so that “things that feel fixed, set, permanent and unchanging” can start to shift. Show up at a meditation center, by contrast, and you’ll be encouraged to see all those thoughts and emotions as mere passing emotional weather, and the self to which they’re happening as an illusion.
Show up on the couch of a traditional American shrink, and you’ll be encouraged to delve deep into your personal history and emotional life - to ask how your parents’ anxieties imprinted themselves on your childhood, say, or why the way your spouse loads the dishwasher makes you so disproportionately angry. THE ZEN OF THERAPY Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life By Mark Epsteinĭespite often being lumped together these days in what gratingly gets called the “wellness sector,” psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation might be seen as almost opposite approaches to the search for peace of mind.
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