Anxiety can be a pretty reasonable response to times of widespread disease, environmental disaster, social unrest, and polarization. Associate editor Chris Pacheco talks to Bruce Tift, psychotherapist and author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, about attempting to control feelings of anxiety, why that only makes it worse, and what to do instead.
Sandra Hannebohm: Welcome to the Lion’s Roar podcast from the publishers of Lion’s Roar Magazine and Buddhadharma, The Practitioner’s Guide. I’m Sandra Hannebohm.
Longtime practitioner, psychotherapist, and author Bruce Tift wrote Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, full of useful advice for dealing with anxiety. In it, he says, “Anxiety is a completely legitimate and valid, if not pleasant, aspect of being human.” I know how wild that sounds. It definitely does not feel enjoyable. Who enjoys feeling threatened or in danger?
Lion’s Roar’s Chris Pacheco dives into this question and more. Why it’s so hard to stop when anxiety tightens its grip on your mind and body, how to deal with anxiety when it arises, why attempting to control our anxiety only makes it worse, and how the act of just noticing is the first step toward freedom.
Chris Pacheco: Hi, Bruce. Thanks for taking the time to be here with us.
Bruce Tift: Sure thing, thanks for inviting me.
Chris Pacheco: Anytime, you’re always welcome. So, you know, I’ve wanted to talk about anxiety for a while now, and for today’s purpose specifically, I’d like to dive into anxiety and embodied awareness, but specifically from the point of view of your book, which is titled Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation.
So your book has been out for a few years now; it’s 2015, I believe. It’s not, it’s not new in that sense, but it’s such an important piece of literature on this subject that I really wanted to dive, um, a little bit deeper into it. So, you know, um, I’ve read, I’ve read the book multiple times, and each time I do so, I come away with something new, you know, that I either initially overlooked or it was just something that I didn’t fully internalize. And I think that’s probably just part of the journey. So I really believe in the book. I love everything about it, and I think it can really change some lives.
So I, I like what’s great about it is I love the breakdown of, you know, Western therapy and Buddhism, because it’s so remarkable in the sense that, you know, the information is, is actionable, but it’s also clear and concise. Um, so it’s, it’s, it’s a really, you know, I just want to really give you some praise on that because it’s really such a great book on the subject.
Bruce Tift: Well, thank you. And I’m glad it seems like it might be useful.
Chris Pacheco: If I can sum it up, I’d kind of call it, you know, the guide to total exposure, essentially because it really forces us, or at least me, you know, to open yourself up to what it truly means to be present with your life and, you know, whatever experience that unfolds within it.
So I kind of wanted to start with the idea that, for most of us, anxiety, um, it can feel incredibly overwhelming, um, so much so that it seems like it’s almost a problem that we need to fix, we need to solve.
And, um, as you say in your book, which I’m going to be quoting you now, you say, “Anxiety is a completely legitimate and valid, if not pleasant, aspect of being human.” So if you could expand on that, I think that’d be really great to put some perspective on what that means and how we can apply that.
Bruce Tift: Like everything that’s important, uh, there are going to be a lot of different opinions, a lot of different approaches. So this is just one among many ways to, uh, try to, uh, understand and work with, uh, uh, difficult experience that all of us have, uh, as humans.
Well, my best guess is that anxiety has been on the planet for millions of years, um, for higher-life forms. Um, so it’s not unique to being human, and out of millions of years of evolution, it seems like it’s very much at the heart of our, uh, uh, the hard-wiring of our nervous system because it seems likely to me that anxiety and fear, uh, have been essential to, um, pretty much any of the, uh, you know, higher, uh, life forms, uh, survival as a species because, uh, it operates to grab our attention, uh, and force us to look for a threat.
And without that, who knows, you know, if our species would be here or not, but, um, if it were something that were very pleasant, we might not pay so much attention to it. So I think there’s a, a reason that it’s so disturbing. Um, and just to say one, um, way that some people, um, discriminate between fear and anxiety is to talk about fear as being a response to an immediate perceived threat, whereas anxiety could be understood as, um, a perception of a potential threat.
So fear tends to be much more sort of an, uh, an immediate acute experience that comes and goes quickly. But because anxiety is about a potential problem, um, there’s always a lot of room for us to project our fantasies, our fears, our conditioned history, our, uh, various identity dramas into that sort of open space between immediate experience and the possibility of a threat that we’ve sort of been alerted to.
So anxiety is sort of almost like, um, a preparation for dealing with an actual threat, but again, that preparation is very open, so, uh, it’s very understandable that as humans, anyway, we would, um, supply all sorts of, uh, possible explanations for what might be coming.
Chris Pacheco: So from my experience, um, sometimes we feel anxious, or we get anxiety, and we don’t even know where, where it originates from. How, how can we, you know, work with something we don’t really know the origin of it?
Bruce Tift: Well, my opinion is that, um, anxiety doesn’t actually have, immediate, uh, causes usually. And basically, it’s just because we’re human. We have a nervous system that, over probably millions of years, has evolved to a, uh, better safe than sorry, sort of default mode.
So it could be a smell. It could be somebody’s tone of voice. It could be we trip on the sidewalk. It could be any, anything that triggers the anxiety, but because it’s not actually an immediate threat in the way we’re talking about it. Um, I don’t think it’s usually helpful to look for a cause of anxiety beyond just being a sensitive biological life form.
So to me, because anxiety is just part of being human, it makes sense to commit to having a relationship with anxiety, expecting it to get triggered off and on, I would say every day, maybe many times a day, sometimes very subtly, sometimes in big ways until we die. Um, but for probably also evolutionary reasons, uh, when we feel that our survival is threatened, of course, we’re going to have a very strong impulse to look for the threat.
And so we’re going to try to find a cause because if we can find a cause, then the implication is that perhaps we can find a solution, and because anxiety is so unpleasant, most of us really would like to solve our anxiety.
Chris Pacheco: Yeah. And I remember you, you mentioned too that even if it was something that we can solve, where we solve one aspect of it, and then, you know, another aspect triggers us or something else causes us that anxiety.
And, and it kind of reminds me in terms of triggering, you know, with my understanding of Western therapy at least, it tends to focus on, the what, you know, what happened in my past. Caused me to be how I am now and kind of, how can I, work with that. While Buddhism is less concerned with the what or the why, and more focused on, on the, how, you know, how do we respond to the what that is happening, um, without, you know, added commentary or interpretation.
It’s, it’s more concerned with the how we relate to it, not so much as what’s causing it. How can we use both Western therapy and Buddhist teachings to, um, kind of combine them and help us understand better what we’re dealing with and managing these difficult experiences.
Bruce Tift: In my work as a therapist and also my personal life, I have found that Western therapy is much more effective in identifying patterns of experience that, because Buddhism has such a focus on immediacy that we can, um, just relate to a, a momentary sensation or disturbance.
And then when it’s passed, sometimes just we move on. Whereas Western therapy, uh, is much, I think, um, more, uh, likely to help us, uh, be aware of a pattern of unnecessary suffering or distorted thinking or relationship problems. Because it does look at very, usually very young family of origin, childhood origins.
Um, and I found that if we have some understanding that this, uh, unnecessary suffering we’re disturbing, our dealing with is something actually that’s been going on most of our life. We’re more likely to not claim that it’s some immediate, uh, relationship or life circumstance that is the cause, uh, or even the trigger. And also, we’re more likely potentially to be willing to take ownership that, oh, this is my issue. I’ve had it for decades, and I guess I’m responsible for working with it. So it can act as a bit of a corrective or an antidote to our impulse to blame our partner or the government or our parents, or, you know, whatever.
Um, so, uh, in very simplistic ways, I would say that, um, in terms of sort of patterns of experience, Western therapy is probably more useful than Buddhism, whereas in dealing with very fundamental existential type of life issues, I think Buddhism is probably better at that than therapy and especially, um, Western therapy.
I mean, there are individual practitioners, of course, but Western therapy as a whole does not, uh, uh, um, make freedom and intention. It’s usually improved quality of experiencing improved, uh, sense of self. Whereas Buddhism actually goes beyond that, or it goes deeper than that to, uh, having as a potential an actual experience of freedom in this life as we are, not as some future fantasy.
Chris Pacheco: So now, in terms of invited awareness, where does this come into play in all of, in all of it and experiencing, you know, these challenging or disturbing feelings, sensations, and anxiety as a whole?
Bruce Tift: Well, I’ll be a little long-winded about it. I think one way of talking about our experience in general, but let’s say anxiety is that we could talk about, um, there being different levels of experiencing of anything that’s important.
And it might sound a little abstract, but in a Buddhist view to me, uh, sort of implies that there actually is no objective essential nature to any of our experiencing that we can discover. On a social level, we just take that for granted that, you know, if we say there’s anxiety, well, we know what we’re talking about. Or, uh, if we say there’s a tree, we know what we’re talking about, but actually, upon investigation, we’re never going to find a generic tree, and we’re never going to find generic anxiety.
So a Buddhist type of view, I think, is that not only do we focus on how we relate to our experience as even more important than what we’re experiencing, which is important, of course, but how we relate to our experience actually, uh, has a co-creative function in terms of what it is that we are experiencing.
So it’s not just that it’s, it’s not just how we relate to something that has its own independent existence, but how we relate actually gives rise to our experience. So the way I think about it anyway is that unlike science, which tries to give the best approximation of objective reality as possible, to me both therapy and spiritual path work are focused on or are not, are experiencing a reality without any claim about the nature of reality.
But I think there’s a lot of confusion. So, uh, we can say, well, how do I relate to anxiety? But how I relate to it actually, uh, helps to form our actual experience of reality itself. It’s not like there’s something there, like a, uh, like a coffee cup, and I’m just going to approach it from different angles. So, uh, so a Buddhist sort of view is, is very, uh, disturbing, uh, to our Western culture because it, it, uh, asserts that there’s no actually essential nature to any of our experiencing. And, of course, by implication, that includes ourselves as well. No essential nature to ourselves. So we tend to, uh, unconsciously even take Buddhist teachings as if it’s referring to actually real existed experience.
Like we say, uh, the truth of suffering as if that’s a part of reality, but if it were a part of reality, there would be no path of cessation. So obviously, if you look at it, we’re talking about our, the way we experience reality, giving rise to unnecessary suffering rather than it being some objective part of life.
So anyway, long-winded, but, uh, to return to anxiety, one way of talking about it is we could say there’s a biological, physical experience of anxiety, there’s a psychological experience of anxiety, and there’s a way of relating to anxiety from a spiritual path. At the physical, physiological level, we’re just going to have anxiety every day because we’re sensitive biological life forms and we’ll get triggered by any number of things, and our heartbeat will go fast or stomach will contract. Maybe we’ll feel a little nausea. Maybe our breathing will get a little shallow, uh, things like that. And that’s just, um, it’s just experience. It doesn’t have any essential meaning to it, perhaps. One of my clients found it very helpful just to tell themselves adrenaline anytime they got triggered, just to remind themselves, oh, this is just my body doing its thing.
But especially because of anxieties, sort of, uh, open-ended uh, apparent, uh, causality this possible threat that’s coming. Um, it’s very, uh, vulnerable. Our experience of anxiety is very vulnerable to our unconsciously adding all sorts of interpretations and reenactment issues from our history, uh, hopes and fears, things like that.
So at the psychological level, we tend to, um, uh, fill in a, an apparent cause of that anxiety and mistake a trigger for a cost. A hundred thousand years ago on a, just a biological level, it was probably very much in our species interest to look for a cause. If you’re out in the woods and you hear a big noise, you should check it out, you know, can I eat it or is it going to eat me? You know, you want to find those things out.
But let’s say in the last 7,000 years, with the arising of cities and societies, our biology is not such a good guideline, uh, for living a complex social life now, and certainly not a psychological and certainly not a spiritual life. So, uh, most of our apparent, uh, explanations for our anxiety are not only inaccurate, because we don’t know actually it’s open, not only are they not accurate, but they usually have a negative quality because anxiety is a negative experience for almost everybody. So we’re going to come up with a negative explanation. And the explanation we usually come up with is very conditioned by our history. So if we have a history of abandonment and somebody we’re dating or getting to know doesn’t return a phone call, we might get anxious that we’re going to be abandoned. If we have a history of a smothering parent and they don’t return our phone call, we might feel relief.
And, uh, some types of therapy, um, work at the level of interpretation, like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is very useful, uh, if we’re going to have a story about our experience, I think better to have an accurate, good story than an inaccurate bad story.
But, uh, I think the Buddhist view goes deeper. And at this level, at the psychological level, a lot of Buddhist practices like, uh, are, you know, uh, let’s say mindfulness of body. It’s a very central, Buddhist type of approach that we return our attention over and over again to some immediate non-interpretive body-based experience. And often, it’s the breath, but the basic principle is to come out of any interpretation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good interpretation or a bad interpretation. We come back to non-interpretive embodied presence and then check it out for ourself. Where is this apparent problem?
And so at the psychological level, the level of interpretations, my bias is to make use of that sort of Buddhist practice, uh, of returning our attention to immediate sensation level experience. Absolutely no interpretations at all. No commentary, no explanation, no identity drama. Just my heart’s beating fast. My stomach’s tight. Hang out with it and see where is any evidence that my survival is being threatened. A hundred thousand years ago, we should probably go into our fight flight freeze response. We might not be in the gene pool anymore, but especially increasingly in the last couple of thousand years, especially for those of us with fortunate life circumstances, I’d say 99 out of 100 times, we’re not going to find that our anxiety is an accurate signal of a real threat.
And so we can have the luxury of actually training ourself to not let our biology run our state of mind or our behavior, but it requires a counter-instinctual discipline where we go against millions of years of biology and maybe our culture, or maybe our conditioning history to be willing to tolerate staying, present and embodied while our body is saying we’re going to die, we’re going to die, we’re going to die, get us out of here. Cause that’s a very strong impulse. And as you mentioned, if somebody takes on that sort of practice and finds it valuable, we can even extend that to proactive practices and not just wait for life to trigger our anxiety, but every day, once a day, 10 times a day, we could come up with a memory or a fantasy that triggers our worst fear. Let’s say abandonment or inadequacy or failure or something. Come up with something that triggers that sort of panic and intentionally, then, stay at the level of sensation. What we usually find on a biological level is that there is this sort of wave-like life of its own that our emotional intensity, our body-based intensity has.
Somebody said that the life of an emotion in the brain is about 90 seconds. I don’t know. It’s not my thing, but I’m pretty sure that if we train ourselves just to ride this panic through, we discover that it takes care of itself. We don’t have to heal it. We don’t have to understand it. We don’t have to process it. We don’t have to be understood. We don’t, you know, basically, we just have to discover, is it accurate that it’s very likely that when I feel anxious, I don’t actually have to do anything about it except stay in body and keep a company so that I actually gradually develop a confidence that I don’t have to organize my life around the avoidance of anxiety.
Chris Pacheco: So what I’m thinking about that is essentially, we’re not, we’re not allowing our feelings to, to determine our behavior or our decision-making and we essentially are accepting that we may feel this way. This is anxiety, this trigger, this, this feeling off and on for the rest of our lives and that there no inherent problem or anything that needs to be done aside from staying embodied so that we can build the confidence to withhold that space and with practice and I suppose with training, so to speak, we can kind of reframe our experience of anxiety and see that there really is nothing to fall, then that that’s just part of being, you know, I think Pema Chödrön said, you know, groundless, we’re groundless, and it’s just being open to, to the present moment and, um, that groundlessness, that comes with it.
Bruce Tift: Yes. I think that’s well said. And, um, just to make it clear though, that it’s not going to have a transformative potential if we just take this as an idea and start talking to ourselves this way, like a mantra, no, we actually have to stay in, as you said earlier, we have to stay in that exposed, vulnerable, panicky experience, um, which we do not want to do and are never going to want to do as far as I know.
Um, but we can discover that it’s not actually harming us to do so. But that’s where the potential for transformative change happens when we learn that we can live a more than biological life, that our immediate experience is not necessarily the best guideline for engaging skillfully with our life.
Chris Pacheco: When we’re experiencing these difficult emotions or anxiety or whatever it is that that’s kind of triggering these intense sensations when we try to suppress it or run away from it or tell ourselves, I’m not panicking or whatever, it almost trains the brain to fear it so that it’s almost better to experience the anxiety initially, as terrible as it is, because in the long term, our brain kind of sees that, hey, you know, it’s not, it’s not that big of a deal.
Bruce Tift: Of course. Um, and in the West, I think the closest sort of parallel, uh, view would be that of desensitization. So let’s say somebody is attacked by a dog when they’re a little kid, and they have this phobia, this panic around dogs, they could potentially go through a sort of an exposure, uh, treatment where they just gradually approach a dog maybe it is first in another room, and then maybe it’s in a pen, and then maybe it’s on a leash and, but the person just approaches and then they stop at the level of panic and just stays present. And then hopefully, step by step by step, re-educates our nervous system, the brain, that what feels like, uh, something really harmful apparently is not.
And, uh, it, uh, because our brains are very plastic, we can, we have the potential of bringing ourself out of our conditioned history, uh, or at least our identification with our conditioned history into more current reality, which is one understanding of Western therapy, actually. Is that we’re bringing ourselves out of our identification with our conditioned history, how we took care of ourself as a kid, into our current adult capacities and adult realities, but it takes a much more, um, precisely and immediacy, isn’t just our current adult reality, it’s actually moment by moment by moment experiencing.
Chris Pacheco: We’re going to experience it regardless, whether we try to avoid so or not. So it’s almost better to just experience it, uh, with the intention to allow it, uh, rather than trying to suppress it, you know, anxiety doesn’t necessarily go away.
You had mentioned in the book, uh, chronic anxiety is the result of our ritualized refusal to stay fully embodied with our present experience. if we can relate that to how that’s caused when we, um, I love the term you had mentioned was binding anxiety, we kind of bind it to, to this thing or that thing and we think it’s going to solve our problem, and is this kind of how that chronic state of anxiety develops?
Bruce Tift: Well, it’s one component, probably. Um, I think most fundamentally, uh, if we actually have experience that continues to arise and we refuse to have a conscious and embodied and kind relationship with that experience, it’s still there.
And so if, uh, if I grew up with some unfortunate conditioning where I felt never adequate, um, that’s very deeply embedded, and I could devote my life to achievement, to always trying to be the best or to get recognition or be a success. But if I’m not having a relationship with that underlying sort of character logical organization, it’s still there.
And, so the fact that the painful vulnerable experience is there, but I’m not relating to it could be understood as one of the primary components of chronic anxiety or, from a Buddhist point of view, even more fundamentally, any effort to be aggressive to reality, uh, in a sustained way is almost guaranteed to create ongoing anxiety and unnecessary suffering because we’re not dealing with the truth of things.
And, uh, so we’re always sort of out of sync with reality, with our own truth, and so that seems to generate anxiety because it’s sort of like, uh oh, there’s a problem here, you know? Uh, but the binding anxiety is, is on a more relative level, and that’s, uh, comes out of an effort to, like you said, to identify a cause, because if there’s a cause, then I can solve it.
But it’s sort of like hunger, you know, if I eat some food, I don’t feel hungry, but you know, 10 hours later, the next day, hunger’s back. It’s symptom relief, but it hasn’t solved anything. And so with, um, when we bind our anxiety, basically, it’s an unconscious effort to put all of our, uh, vulnerability and anxiety, uh, in a certain issue.
Like, um, if only I get enlightened, then, you know, uh, everything will be okay. But even though that does have a sort of symptom relief quality, where it lets us pretend that the rest of our life is relatively free of anxiety beause it’s all about this issue because it’s not true because anxiety is part of our life unconsciously, in my experience, it turns out we have an investment in not solving the very issue that we claim we’re organizing our life around solving.
And so if somebody says, well when I lose some weight, then I’ll be, then I’ll be ready for intimacy. Well, sorry. Intimacy is inherently very anxiety-provoking. And if I’m not ready to include that as a valid part of intimacy, then it’s possible that mysteriously I’ll never solve the weight issue or I’ll never solve whatever, you know, fantasy I have that’s preventing me from being intimately engaged with my life. So we tend to postpone full, intimate engagement for some fantasized future where we’ve solved these various problems, but our actual investment is to make sure we never solve them.
Chris Pacheco: So when we, when we make anxiety or these intense sensations or problems, it almost seems to keep perpetuating the issue because our brains are continually trying to solve something that is essentially unsolvable or doesn’t need to be solved in the way that it’s trying to.
Bruce Tift: Basically, that part of us that wants an answer wants security, wants resolution wants a ground to stand on, wants our life resolved, freaks out when we are basically forced into some acknowledgment about how open and groundless actually every moment of our life is.
Um, so to me, from a spiritual path point of view, it’s helpful to think of anxiety as an accurate perception of the open nature of life and of a mind, but from the reference point of what we call our egoic process. And if that makes sense to somebody, then it sort of implies that we should plan on anxiety being a valid part of our spiritual path work, as long as there is a egoic process, and most of us could probably count on that for the rest of our lives.
Chris Pacheco: I mean, it’s essentially this open nature, this openness to, to whatever presents itself, um, is, is, is counterintuitive because we play things in our head of how we want things to go or work out and, and it’s like, when we’re doing all this, we’re not really living openly, and, and we might feel like we have things in control, but it’s essentially a false sense of control.
Bruce Tift: Our investment is in trying to control something, but I would say that our investment is actually in the drama of trying to control, not in the outcome.
I might say, well, I’m trying to finally get unconditional love, but that’s not going to happen. So maybe moments, but not, you know, we’re not a little baby that we wouldn’t even receive it if somebody offered it, but nobody’s going to be our unconditioned loving parent, you know, but our actual investment is in the, uh, the, the, the drama of, uh, trying the project.
And we think our investment is in the outcome, but intuitively we know it’s not gonna happen. So the actual investment is in the process. It’s just like people talk about letting go as, as part of a spiritual path. It’s not that we’re letting go of something. It’s like if you have a, uh, a closed fist, it’s not like there’s something inside that we’re letting go of.
What we’re letting go of is the contraction. That’s what we’re invested in. It’s the contractive, uh, uh, apparent solidity that arises, you know, from that. And so, um, it’s like maybe you were saying that maybe we’re, uh, well, one image, let’s say that we’re on the edge of a cliff. And so our spiritual teachers say, oh, well, you should jump off the cliff.
Well, nobody wants to do that, but we don’t understand the cliff itself is falling through space. It’s all entertainment. So once we understand there’s no other option, we might be willing to just be more open and surrender to, open, to stay embodied with this groundless, never resolvable stream of experiencing that we are.
And also just to be precise, we should, I think we should assume that we will use meditation also as an avoidance strategy. So it’s not like meditation is a cure, but I think a Buddhist sort of view that makes sense to me is that we should assume all of our experiencing will inevitably have both the sane and a neurotic component that are very entangled with each other.
Yeah, a lot of people, of course, are going to use spiritual path work for what we call spiritual bypassing or spiritual materialism. Of course, we should just, we should count, it’s not just them that are doing it. We’re doing it. We need to just keep being very honest and kind to how we are using our spiritual practice to avoid openness instead of, you know, think that we’re not doing that.
I do have the personal experience that, um, practices that have the quality of sort of unconditionality, I think, are to me very resonant with sort of Vajrayana view, which is my training. And so I find that it’s very reliable, for example, to practice on, uh, a sort of embodied immediacy, not wait for a problem to practice it, but just start training ourselves either spontaneously or use some external structures at your phone, whatever, to just bring attention back to sort of an open curiosity. What am I actually experiencing at this moment? Not to be answered intellectually, but just as a reminder to bring attention to sensation level experience. And just sort of participate in that for a few moments as frequently as possible. I think that’s a very potentially powerful way to start making a type of, um, non-interpretive presence more and more, our reference point or ground.
And then equally important, I think, is a practice of unconditional kindness where we practice in some variety of ways, there’s different approaches people use, but basically a practice of saying yes to stay embodied with, participating in, opening our heart to, however we think about it, any, and every experience. Uh, so we’re just as kind to our aggression as we are to our compassion. We’re just as kind to our neurosis as we are to our sanity. That has more of an unconditionality to it, to me. And from a certain point of view, open awareness is without bias. It’s without agenda, it’s just open. So practices that have that quality of unconditionality, I think, can be very useful.
Chris Pacheco: I thank you for taking the time to be here today. And, you know, I hope that this discussion will be of benefit to some people who might be experiencing some challenging times, and it might give them, uh, a different perspective on how to, to work with, and look at their anxiety or their difficult sensations or emotions that they kind of, you know, have been stuck with for some time and they will probably be stuck with, like you mentioned, for the rest of their lives.
Bruce Tift: Yes. I would share your hope that, uh, our discussion and the sort of work we’re talking about can be a benefit to people.
Chris Pacheco: Well, thanks again, Bruce. I appreciate it. And once again, your book is titled Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. I highly recommend it. And, um, thanks again, Bruce. I appreciate it.
Bruce Tift: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Sandra Hannebohm: The latest issue of Lion’s Roar magazine features several articles from leading teachers on the topic of Finding Calm in Times of Anxiety. Go to Lionsroar.com and subscribe to get access to the Lion’s Roar mobile app, where you can find early digital releases of the magazine or have physical copies sent to your door.
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