Love is what we long to receive and to give, yet our intimate relationships are conflicted and often painful. Psychologist John Welwood looks at the difference between absolute and relative love, and the wound within each of us that no other can heal. Again and again it defeats me— This reliance on others for bliss. —from a poem by the author While most of us have [...]
The “Difficult Person” Exercise
Karen Kissel Wegela introduces a tool that helps us skillfully focus on and work with one particular challenging person in our lives. “You're not helping me. Nothing you tell me does any good. You are the worst therapist I’ve ever seen! No matter what I tell you, you don’t get it. All you do is criticize me. I’m trying as hard as I can, and you’re never satisfied.” I am [...]
Where Buddhism and Science Meet: Teachings, Commentary, and News
Now more than ever, Buddhists are using scientific tools and scientists are using Buddhist wisdom to uncover truths about the universe. Here, we present a collection of articles on the fruits of those collaborations. Featuring the Dalai Lama, Daniel Goleman, Karen Kissel Wegela, Vincent Horn, Judy Roitman, Jack Kornfield, Judy Lief, Sam Littlefair, and more. Buddhist [...]
The Bardo of Breaking Up
The notion of bardo — the in-between state — from The Tibetan Book of the Dead is very helpful for anyone dealing with the end of a relationship. I was just eighteen and in my first year of college. I had been going out with Sam for about four months, and it was the first important relationship I’d been in. I was already fantasizing our future life together. One evening [...]
You’re Basically Good — The Benefits of Contemplative Psychotherapy
Karen Kissel Wegela on therapy that starts with your basic sanity, not your neuroses. Elliot knew from our first session together that I saw him as basically a good person. As he remembered it later, he had told me his personal saga of relationship and work failures, and he expected I would conclude, as he had, that he was pretty hopeless. Instead, I said something like, [...]
How Your Mind Works
What is this thing we call “self”? We assemble it ourselves, according to Buddhist psychology. Gaylon Ferguson breaks down the five-step process of ego development. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that our earliest experience of the world is of “a great blooming, buzzing confusion.” While modern research shows that newborns have more [...]
Emotional Alchemy
Tara Bennett-Goleman describes how the transforming power of mindfulness can be applied to our painful emotional patterns. ‘‘Each thing has to transform itself into something better, and acquire a new destiny,” Paulo Coelho writes in his novel The Alchemist. Coelho describes the world as only the visible aspect of God, with invisible spiritual forces at play that remain [...]
Now that I’m doing Buddhist meditation, should I give up therapy?
I’m in psychotherapy and it’s been very helpful to me. Now that I’ve started doing Buddhist meditation, I’m wondering if I should give up therapy. Is meditation all I need to deal with my issues? This is something that’s hotly debated in the Buddhist world. Purists say that the wisdom and compassion we develop in meditation is all we need because it addresses our suffering [...]
A Buddhist psychoanalyst puts our divided country on the couch
Psychoanalyst Robert Langan traces the current climate of demonization to the three poisons: greed, aversion, and the ignorance of self-righteous certainty. In this election year of 2016 you may have decided that the country—if not the world—has gone crazy. We have war and mayhem abroad, teetering economies, millions of refugees, and an ever-hotter planet. At [...]
Waking Up Bipolar
Chris Cole's first psychotic break was a religious experience. Many years later, he learned that recovery meant understanding his bipolar disorder medically as well as spiritually. I was an eighteen-year-old freshman, one month into a summer semester at the University of Georgia. I wanted to get to school early, mostly because I was sick of getting grounded for my drinking. [...]