How do we support our clients in moving beyond limiting stories? How do we help them experience life’s rich complexity in the midst of what can feel like a never-ending barrage of emotional burdens? How do we help them focus on hard-to-face issues and make meaningful changes?
Here, some of the wisest souls in the world of psychology and psychotherapy share their answers to the biggest, most slippery questions we face—as therapists and humans.
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TARA BRACH: How Do We End Suffering?
Clinical psychologist and renowned Buddhist teacher sheds light on the shadow sides of therapy and the spiritual path.
IRVIN YALOM: How Do We Live Our Best Life?
Psychotherapy’s most famous storyteller believes we should focus less on symptoms and more on the great, timeless issues of freedom, meaning, and mortality.
EUGENE GENDLIN: How Do We Cultivate Wonder?
The developer of the mind-body approach Focusing highlights the value of tapping into the dynamic experience of the “felt sense.”
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: How Do We Change Bad Habits?
Nobel Prize-winning cognitive research psychologist explores the role of automatic responses in human thought, and just how instinctively unwise we can be.
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A version of this article was originally published in March/April 2013.
Tara Brach
Tara Brach, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, an internationally known teacher of mindfulness meditation, and the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. She is author of bestselling Radical Acceptance and True Refuge, and leads accredited workshops for mental health professionals interested in integrating meditation into the practice of psychotherapy. Tara offers meditation retreats at centers in the United States and in Europe. Her podcasted talks and meditations are downloaded about a million times each month. In addition to her public teaching, Tara is active in bringing meditation into DC area schools, prisons and to underserved populations, and in activities that promote racial justice.
Irvin Yalom
Irvin Yalom, PhD, is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and the author many books, including Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir.
Eugene Gendlin
Eugene Gendlin is best known as a pioneer in the development of mind-body approaches to therapy. He’s the developer of Focusing, an experiential form of psychotherapy that encourages clients to get in touch with a “felt sense” of their bodies.
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman, a cognitive research psychologist, received a 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work demonstrating that human beings tend to make decisions on the basis of fast, spontaneous, intuitive—often wrong!—reactions and subjective experiences, rather than objective facts, slow deliberation, and hard logic. His book “Thinking Fast and Slow” explores the role of the automatic response in human thought, and just how instinctively unwise we can be.
