Over 2500 years ago, the Buddha discovered the roots
of suffering, and out of this awareness developed an articulate psychology that
elegantly describes the human condition. Buddhist psychology tells us that we
suffer because we are cut off from aspects of our experience as humans, grasping
at pleasure and rejecting pain. And as we engage in this grasping and rejecting,
we lose touch with what it feels like to be alive in the moment, cutting ourselves
off from the source of true joy.
Rather than experience our emotions directly, allowing them to rise and fall
like the waves on the ocean, we wrap them in stories. Instead of feeling anger,
we might deny it's there because we don't like the experience and we're afraid
of what might happen if we allow ourselves to be angry. Instead of enjoying
the happiness of the moment, we hold on to it, afraid of what will happen when
it goes away. We identify with our feelings: "I'm an angry person";
"I'm a failure"; "I can't feel this way because it isn't me".
When we deny ourselves the experience of our emotions, we constrict around them,
cutting ourselves off from parts of our experience as humans. But tucking those
feelings away doesn't get rid of them; if enough emotions are supressed long
enough, they'll begin to trouble us in a variety of ways, including affecting
our relationships, causing anxiety and depression, and even filling our minds
with obsessive, troubling thoughts.
But there is a way out of this cycle of grapsing and rejecting, and that is
to begin, gently, to notice and name what we're experiencing in the moment.
It may start with just naming one's sense that something doesn't quite feel
right. It continues with noticing and naming our emotions, including what we
experience in our bodies as the emotions pass through. It involves dis-identifying
from our emotions, which doesn't mean we deny our experience of them. On the
contrary, we allow ourselves to feel our emotions fully, but remember that we
are people who experience the feelings, we aren't the feelings themselves.
Although meditation is the primary method for engaging in noticing and naming
our experiences, we can practice moments of mindfulness throughout the day by
pausing and asking ourselves, "what am I noticing right now?". For
many of us, that's all we're able to do at first. People who are experiencing
strong emotions or have a history of trauma may need the support of therapy
before they are able to fully engage in mindfulness practices.
The use of mindfulness practices in psychotherapy is proving to be a highly
effective way to help people uncover aspects of their experiences that have
been supressed from awareness. Because these practices focus on the present
moment, they work well in conjunction with humanistic and existential psychologies.
© 2004 by Anne Ihnen
Buddhist and Western psychology