“You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.”
—Buddha
Tag Archives: buddhism
Doing What You Like Is a Reflection of Knowing Who You Are
20 Jun“The greatest gift you can give to the world is when you discover who you are and manifest that.” Here’s an interview with Zen Master Bon Soeng, guiding teacher at the Empty Gate Zen Center in Northern California.
According to Bon Soeng,”the biggest wisdom comes from not knowing, because if you admit you don’t know, then you’re willing to look.”
Mindfulness Meditation Takes Off
26 MayBuddhist psychotherapy — shrinking with a dose of mindfulness meditation– has been well embraced in California for years. Jeff Kitzes, Zen Master of the Empty Gate Zen Center in Berkeley California, is well known in the Bay area for his practice of integrating Zen Buddhism and Western Psychotherapy. You can read some of his teachings here: Psychotherapy and Zen
Now, people across the country are taking note of Zen therapy’s growing popularity.Benedict Carey reports in today’s New York Times that "mindfulness meditation has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade."
Here are excerpts from the May 27, 2008 article:
"…Mindfulness meditation, as it is called,
is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince,
Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the
attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic
researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see
all the hallmarks of another fad.
For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by
reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior
or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their
despair and anxiety.
The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients
endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and
ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words
cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel
Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in
Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think
a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some
form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”
At workshops and conferences across the country, students, counselors and psychologists in private practice throng lectures on mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health
is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up
from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive cravings,
improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes.
Some proponents say Buddha’s arrival in psychotherapy signals a
broader opening in the culture at large — a way to access deeper
healing, a hidden path revealed…"
Read the full article here: Lotus Therapy
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