Buddhist Psychology

Buddhist Psychology's fundamental principle is that our basic nature is intrinsically healthy but our awareness of this is often obscured. Uncovering this health or basic goodness comes about by being present with whatever arises in the moment. Our actual experience then becomes the doorway to self -acceptance and authentic change. From a Buddhist perspective psychotherapy is not a matter of self-improvement but more a matter of releasing the temporary obstructions that thwart our ability to manifest our pure, wholesome, and intrinsic nature.

Grief, anger, pain, depression are part of the human experience; it is also part of the human experience to self protect, turn away, and resist these difficult emotions. Unfortunately the degree to which we are successful at separating ourselves from them is the degree to which we are also separated from our joy, contentment, and sense of well being. To make matters worse, anxiety, anger, and fear often fill the gap between our pain and our effort to separate from it.

Staying with our experience as it unfolds moment to moment can be one of the hardest things we'll ever do. Facing the emotional traumas embedded in the body requires intention, commitment, and a great deal of courage. In staying with our experience we learn to open to the actual quality of the feeling, instead of expending energy trying to control or reject our difficult feelings. We then learn to move with them, ride them out.

Since it is often not a matter of what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us, Buddhist Psychology views all suffering as an opportunity for growth and positive change. As a result of the fundamental belief in the self being basically healthy, psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective shifts the focus away from pathology and towards our human potential.