The Secular Buddhist Network, a new global hub for secular Buddhism in all its various manifestations, invited me to write a piece on EFMT’s secular Buddhist roots, particularly its relationship with Stephen Batchelor’s reinterpretation of the Four Noble Truths as four interrelated tasks we can weave into our practice and daily lives.
Category Archives: Blog
Therapists Need Therapy Too
Marian Platta writes in her (2018) article “Therapists Need Therapy Too” in Vice: “Acknowledging and accepting what haunts me has helped me become more empathetic towards my patients’ emotional suffering.” Many of us including myself were not aware the extent to which we were drawn to be a psychotherapist because of our own inner pain […]
Touching the Earth
I love this description from Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, of how she integrates Australian Aboriginal ways into her Buddhist practice, in “Indigenous Dharma: Native American and Buddhist Voices,” an article she co-authored in Inquiring Mind: “When you know the place where you are, practice begins,” says Dogen. One could say that every stage […]
There are Many Different Forms of Buddhism and Psychotherapy
This (Spring 2018) article, which Tricycle magazine is resharing through its multimedia platforms, by C.W. Huntington, Jr., a translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhism, raises interesting questions, but is hampered by the way the author treats Buddhism and psychotherapy as singular entities, making sweeping over-generalizations about both. The categories of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism […]
Empathy, Compassion and Genuine Relationships
In exploring integrating self-compassion more deeply into mindfulness-based interventions, I have learned that compassion is one of a number of overlapping and deeply inter-related factors, including empathy, congruence (transparency), positive regard and warmth, and responsiveness, key in developing genuine relationships with oneself, others and the world. In this blog, I reflect on the relationship between […]
Emotions Are Adaptive
I gave a talk yesterday at 4 a.m. on emotion-focused mindfulness therapy to One Mindful Breath, a secular Buddhist group in Wellington, New Zealand, at the invitation of Ramsey Margolis. It was 8 p.m. their time. I was labouring under the misconception that they were in Auckland which Ramsey freed me at the end of […]
On Being Somebody and Being Nobody
“You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,” Jack Engler wrote back in the 1970s. In his influential (2003) paper, “Being Somebody and Being Nobody,” he explained he had coined the phrase to emphasize how engaging in mindfulness meditation requires certain ego strengths and capacities:
Collaborative Emotional Processes Supported by Brief Psychoeducation
There is nothing like a safe, empathic, therapeutic relationship to help people learn to become aware of, express and make sense of feelings. This is foreign terrain for lots of us and it makes sense that people need help and support in learning how to do this. A study indicated collaborative emotional processing with a […]
Free to find out what works for you in meditation
We can be ferocious in the way we try to get things right and most of us bring this tendency into meditation, attempting to suppress feelings of vulnerability and to push forward to meet our own or others’ rigid expectations. But there is no one correct way to be human or to meditate — life […]
What matters to us
Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy encourages us to explore navigating meditation and life oriented to our values and what works. Carl Rogers taught that if we respond to people with empathy, prizing, and genuineness, people have deep capacities for orienting to their own growth and direction in life. People benefit from a sense of safety and encouragement […]