A108 From Psychological Healing to Spiritual Transformation

Buddhist awareness training cultivates two qualities that facilitate therapeutic healing and deep inner transformation: mindfulness and compassion. This course will explore how mindfulness--a clear and present-centered attention--allows the nonjudgmental recognition of habitual behaviors and unconscious experiences. It will also show how compassion naturally arises as we bring an embodied attention to suffering. Through discussion and guided meditation, we'll experience how these capacities of heart and mind can awaken us from a sense of deficiency to the beauty of our true nature. We'll also learn how to use meditation as a therapeutic strategy for addressing fear and shame, and how to assess the clinical situations in which using meditation techniques is appropriate. This course is recommended for clinicians who've had an introduction to meditation practice.

Meet the Instructor

Tara Brach, Ph.D., through teaching, writing, and audiotapes, has made a significant contribution to the clinical use of Buddhist meditation to address difficult emotions. A meditation practitioner for more than 30 years, she's led workshops and Buddhist retreats throughout North America. Her book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha has received critical acclaim and popular success. She's a clinical psychologist and the founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington.

Course Contents

Session 1: Understanding Buddhist Psychology and Meditation • The cause of emotional suffering from perspective of Buddhist psychology • Role of meditation in emotional and spiritual transformation • Radical acceptance and mindfulness • Awareness of body and breath • Meditations: Concentration, mental noting, and developing embodied awareness

Session 2: Developing Compassion and Mindfulness • Understanding strategies for resisting difficult emotions • Mindfulness and dis-identifying from thoughts and stories • Developing self-compassion • Meditations: Mental noting, releasing the story, awakening compassion

Session 3: Transforming Shame and Fear • Understanding how emotions proliferate through reactivity • The two lenses of awareness • Strategies for using meditation for post-traumatic stress • Psychotropic medication and meditation • Meditations:
Discovering a safe refuge; developing mindfulness in face of fear and shame

Session 4: Meditation and Relationships • Identifying unconscious strategies that create an "unreal other" • Five intimacy-enhancing strategies • Recognizing vulnerability and inherent goodness • Bodhisattva Path Meditations: Forgiveness and compassion

Session 5: The Fruition of Radical Acceptance • Trusting ourselves • Facing impermanence and loss • Becoming "intimate with all things" in daily life • Meditations:
Establishing aspiration; wise reflection and inquiry; sacred pause and embodied presence

Learning Objectives

1. Describe Buddhist psychology's perspective on emotional suffering and healing
2. Describe the basic principles of Buddhist mindfulness meditation and classical practices of loving kindness, forgiveness, and compassion
3. Describe how to apply Buddhist mindfulness and heart meditations as therapeutic strategies for fear and shame
4. List 4 common clinical situations in which meditation would have therapeutic value.

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