Meditation and Budhist Psychology

In Mindfulness, we say “a miracle is something unexpected that happens.” Imagine being able to find the joy in a drop of water falling off a leaf… the laugh of a small child…a single ray of sunshine…or even the sadness of loss.

 

Mindfulness helps us work towards developing “fearlessness.”  This is different from how most people might view fearlessness. Traditionally this word means having no fear.  In mindfulness, it means that we can be OK feeling fearful. 

 

In other words, we can develop the ability to be fearless about experiencing fear…or, for that matter experiencing any other emotion.  Through mindfulness, we expand our willingness to feel emotions like shame, sadness, joy, boredom, anger, impatience, contentment, or anxiousness.

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When we learn how to sit with these emotions and any other experience, we can also learn how to experience life in its truest form.  We can develop freedom- freedom to let things be what they are. When we can do this, we don't have to fight with ourselves, our emotions, or our experiences.  This frees us up to be genuine and present.

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Buddhist Psychology is about studying the nature of reality so that we be deeply and truly alive. We can do therapy and no longer have mental illness, but there is another layer of difficult in our lives; the problem of being human with our attachment, aversions, and deep misunderstandings about the nature of reality. Buddhist psychology is the process of working through and being free of those problems, not so we can escape or bypass, but rather to deeply engage in all that life involves with a sense of peace, love, and joy.