Today we’re sharing our view on how meditation can inform psychotherapy and help take it to the next level.
This isn’t only important if you’re a therapist of some kind or a patient but also if you’re just a growing human being and you’re unsure about how psychology and how meditation fit together.
We’ll ultimately talk about the insight that’s fundamental to any kind of personal transformation, the core human insight that is at the heart of the great spiritual traditions and we find that psychotherapy is sadly lacking.
We’ll also talk about how meditation can catalyze our psychotherapy and our inner work, and cover how that fundamental insight into the human being can change how we do psychotherapy.
A Bit About the ABS Team
We think that one thing that gives the ABS team a big advantage over traditional psychologists and therapists who’ve been through the standard training is that we’ve done a lot of meditation.
We’ve seen firsthand how our psychology works, we’ve deeply felt our emotions, we’ve deeply seen our minds and how they operate, and we’ve also seen the deeper truth of our identity.
To be honest, we don’t think psychologists and therapists have this level of insight. We don’t see it. So we’ll be talking about what meditation can bring to the traditional therapeutic approach.
Meditation Brings Direct Insight
The first thing it brings is direct insight.
What we find is that in psychology is that there’s a huge focus on the models and the theories and the academic stuff.
This is important especially when it covers areas of psychology that we can’t directly access as individuals or that aren’t immediately obvious with a bit of introspection, like the psychology of masses for example.
But let’s face it, much of psychology is focused on the individual and their first-person experience. In our opinion, without the first person insight that meditation and other spiritual practices gives you, you can never truly understand how your mind or your emotions or your psychology work, and you can’t understand how that works for other people either.
You can’t really be a therapist then. It’s kind of like being a maths teacher and telling everyone else how to do maths but you yourself can’t actually do it.
What happens is that we think about these things too much. We think about the topic of psychology too much. We don’t see it.
We rely on authority figures and the standard psychological corpus, and all our ideas and advice aren’t really rooted in any direct experience. We’ve met a lot of psychology students and even professionals and we felt just by interacting with them that they’d never really had a lot of deep insight into themselves and how they work
How can you do psychotherapy if you’ve not had any deep insight into your own workings? How can you then work with other people to help them have the same deep insight?
We think meditation can offer that to us, and what we’re seeing in practice is that when meditation is brought into standard techniques, like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, it’s like a catalyst. It supercharges the therapeutic effort. Treatments like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy are as effective as antidepressants for a range of conditions like anxiety, depression, and so on.
So we’re not just waxing lyrical about meditation. This is real. Meditation catalyzes therapy, and we think you need that first-hand experience as a therapist, otherwise how can you effectively lead others to change themselves?
Patients Learn Tools
The second point we want to make is that patients learn tools through meditation. Whenever we’ve had traditional therapy, it’s been sort of cathartic, and it’s helped us see our patterns more clearly, but it hasn’t taught us any lasting skills. We’ve always felt quite dependent on the therapist, because they’re following some standard technique, or methodology or algorithm, and we’re just on the receiving end.
It’s sort of like when you type something into Google. The results come out, and you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You just see the end result. That’s how we’ve often felt with therapy.
In therapy, you’re typically paying $150 or $200 for a session. Do you get any lasting tools from that? Do you get tools that you use for the rest of your life? Do you get transformative tools?
If not, where does that leave you after you’ve been working with them? It leaves you in no man’s land. You’re not learning anything lasting.
It calls to mind the old adage of “give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” Are we feeding people for a lifetime or are we just giving them a temporary solution?
If a therapist just helps a patient with their current problem it doesn’t guarantee in any way that the patient will be any more prepared for the next problem, unless they’re given some sort of permanent tool. And when we’re talking about mental health it’s really important to know if we giving people a temporary solution, like a plaster, or are we helping them address the wounds there and giving them tools to do so.
In meditation you do, by its very nature. It’s so hands-on. When you go to a class or do any form of guided meditation, the meditation teacher is usually doing exactly what they’re guiding you to do. They are in that very process with you, they are teaching you the skill that they are using and have mastered. You then learn that skill, you can take it away, you can use it whenever you want, and you can develop it whenever you want.
Later in life, weeks, months, years down the line when you need it, you’re going to know what to do because you’ve got the tools there. And you can train them up in advance: you can meditate whenever you want, you don’t have to be sitting with a meditation teacher, so long as you have adequate guidance.
And most of all, no one can take this away from you. The skill of meditation doesn’t just go away when the session finishes. It’s in your hands, and unlike with medicine, no one can decide you’re not doing your meditation anymore. It’s fundamentally your choice, and that’s very powerful.
Meditation Becomes Permanent
We also want to say that meditation starts as something that you do for a certain amount of time per day, like 20 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes, whatever it is.
But more and more your meditation starts to infuse your entire life, such that you’re not just meditating when you’re sitting down, you’re bringing it into your daily life. Your baseline skills eventually reach a point where they’re available to you no matter what, and in that sense it brings permanent transformation. It changes your baseline state of how you are in the world. We just don’t think therapy offers that to people, does it ever offer you permanent transformation?
In therapy we typically give people one fish to feed them for one day, whereas what we need to do is teach them how to fish. They need permanent tools, a new way of understanding themselves, a new way of seeing life and seeing themselves. This is not a temporary thing but a real empowerment: we give them these tools and say, “Take this and run with it for the rest of your life and see where it takes you.”
Meditation is a very powerful tool for self-knowledge and personal transformation, and patients and therapists need this tool. If we’re in therapy, we are trying to self-transform. If we’re not giving people tools that are permanent and help them work on themselves as much as they want for the rest of their life, we’re failing people..
Deep Insight into Our Identity
We’re getting to the real heart of the message here.
The final reason we want to incorporate meditation into psychotherapy is to gain deep insight into our identity. In our opinion, without this therapy is incomplete. No matter how well it works it’s still incomplete, because it’s not showing you the greater context of your psychology and of who you are, and this is what meditation really gives us.
It’s an insight that meditation and meditation alone will give you, and it’s been doing so for centuries and millennia very effectively. But in the west we’re quite ignorant of it, unfortunately. Meditation can give you a very different perspective on your identity, your sense of who you are.
Essentially, the thoughts and emotions, body and mind, and the habits that you experience, all create a person that you identify with, a person that appears to be there, but when you look closer it’s not actually who you are.
The insight stated very carefully is that there is no thing that is our self. It’s not that we don’t have a self at all, but it’s that our true self is not actually a thing. It’s empty, pure emptiness, pure beingness. It’s really our identification with the objects of our consciousness, with our mind and body, that creates a solid sense of identity. The solid sense of identity is really an illusion.
Frankly, we see very, very few therapeutic systems or therapists who incorporate this insight, and without this perspective you can’t really do therapy. It may be effective as a kind of plaster, but you’re going to be missing the bigger context of all this.
As Sasaki Roshi, one of the greatest Zen masters of all time, said, “All your problems go back to your belief that you have a self. There is no thing called a self.”
How can we possibly change our relationship to our problems, how can we work through our problems without understanding that there is no thing called a self? To us it’s astounding that this isn’t part of therapy.
For one thing, how can a therapist help someone without at least intellectually knowing that this is true about human beings? How is that possible? How can you possibly help someone when you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the human identity, how the identity works, and how none of it is actually who we are?
This knowledge has been around for thousands of years. It’s formed the backbone of all the deep forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Sufism, and of any major spiritual system that you can name. It’s been rediscovered over and over again.
This is really just a deep fundamental truth about who we are as human beings. Truly when you get down to it, we are not our mind and our body. We are not who we identify to be. We are not this character we are playing. We’re something much deeper than that.
All therapy that fails to incorporate that perspective, and that is 99% of therapy, is all just window dressing. We’re rearranging the accoutrements of the self. We’re changing our thoughts, we’re releasing stored emotions, we’re understanding the patterns in our lives better. But actually we’re not understanding the deep core, the underlying fact of the matter, which is that our very identity is not what we think it is.
“There is no thing called a self.” How can you possibly do therapy effectively without that insight?
Training Therapists in Meditation
We’re not advocating that therapists become Buddhist monks, and that if you’re not a monk then you can’t be a therapist. But we are saying that therapists need some serious training in meditation. If you’re not getting that, you’re missing out some crucial insight into yourself and into the human condition that will fundamentally change your view of all therapy.
At Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Centre, all employees, from the receptionists to Jon Kabat-Zinn himself, all must have a regular meditation practice. All therapists could be the same: when you’re going through an undergrad or Master’s degree or PhD, you have to undertake meditation training. It should be mandatory.
As we’ve said psychology, in the world of science, we’re very good at accumulating knowledge and theories. But it doesn’t mean that as a therapist you have any real self-understanding or embodiment, and often therapists are just regurgitating the theories and the sort of the common practices and systems that are out there.
They’re not really, they’re not speaking from a place of knowledge like a spiritual master would. They’re not really embodying what they’re telling you, and there’s nothing deep there.
But we don’t have to throw away all the theories. We can take psychotherapy and combine it with meditation, and one will inform the other. The stuff that meditation can’t get to, psychotherapy will show us. The stuff that the fundamentally flawed perspective of psychotherapy can’t show us can be healed and upgraded by meditation.
We can bring in the perspective of no-self, the fact that the mind and the body is not really who we are anyway. That our identity based on this attachment to the mind and body is really false, it’s a construction. All this will just accelerate the therapeutic process, along with the permanent transformation of the patient.