Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy: Accelerating Healing and Transformation

According to tradition, present-centered awareness trained repeatedly over time through mindfulness practice produces several distinct mental qualities: relaxation, concentration, balanced sensitivity, mental clarity, and pliancy. In addition, mindfulness affords two key skills—recognition and choice. These skills are not well documented, but are t

Here one observes mental states as they emerge, for example noticing whether one is overstimulated or focused, afflicted or free. One learns to observe the states and qualities of awareness without being compelled by them on the one hand, or needing to suppress them on the other.

all. Elsewhere (Neale, 2011, 2012), I have coined the term ‘McMindfulness’ for the recent trend in the Western mainstream, overemphasizing mindfulness meditation to the exclusion of the other disciplines, diluting the potency of Buddha’s psychology. My critique is based on two observations. First, extracted from the curricula of wisdom and ethics,

The shift began when the first research studies of meditation, notably transcendental meditation (TM), inspired the groundbreaking clinical paradigms of the 1970s and 1980s: Herb Benson’s relaxation response and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) (Beary & Benson, 1974; Kabat-Zinn, 1982).

By optimizing the brain’s full capacity for social learning, these practices expand the mind’s openness to shared introspection and corrective dialogue; and by cultivating that shift in a stable, supportive social learning environment, they sustain that openness though repeated practice over time. As a result, they facilitate a gradual dismantling

The aim of this meditative pedagogy is to systematically strengthen one’s attention by applying it to four discrete domains of experience in order to refine the mind’s natural capacities for insight (wisdom) and behavior change (ethics).

all methods of meditation and psychotherapy work by deepening relaxation and heightening attention—

The fact that mindfulness increases affect tolerance and emotional sensitivity is supported by many studies, such as one that showed significant reduction in anxiety and panic maintained over three years as a result of an MBI (Miller et al., 1995).

the development of integrative structures and processes in the brain (Delmonte, 1995; Siegel, 2012).

Mind in the West is commonly equated with thoughts themselves, but in Buddhist contemplative science it is that spacious awareness in which thoughts arise, capable of reflecting on itself (meta-cognitive awareness) and recognizing the true nature of things (meta-cognitive insight).