Contemplative Psychotherapy: Cultivating Brilliant Sanity by Karen Kissel-Wegela, Ph.D.

from the Buddhism and Psychotherapy Conference, 1994

Let me start by saying that Contemplative Psychotherapy - which is what I teach at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado - has two parents. One parent is the two wisdom traditions of Buddhism and Shambhala. Shambhala is a tradition of warriorship and bravery with an interest in creating an enlightened society and traces its heritage to Tibet. It was started in the west by Trungpa Rinpoche. The particular school of Buddhism that I train in is Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. So, Shambhala and Vajrayana Buddhism is the first parent. The second parent is western psychology with its particular understanding of the stages of development and the approach of working intimately with people.

What gets in the way of our experiencing our fundamental, unconditional sanity, is the habit of believing and acting as though we have a solid reference point of self. Buddhists call that 'ego,' which is a little different from how we use that word in the west. The idea of ego in Contemplative Psychotherapy is as some kind of solid, unchanging self. From the Buddhist point of view, there is no such thing as a solid self, so trying to hang onto, protect and nurture such a concept by pushing away the things that get in the way of maintaining that notion of ourselves, is what causes suffering.

In this approach, we are always interested in recognising and cultivating sanity. We are interested in understanding the obstacles to recognising our own sanity and the sanity of our clients. Sanity, here, means openness, clarity and compassion and the recognition of our nature as connected rather than being separate. The implication of this is that any state of mind has the potential to be experienced in a sane way. It is not the content that is the issue therefore, it is the process.

Even if we are experiencing great confusion, we could still be quite sane and open to the experience of confusion in that moment. We need only be precise and clear with it and have a quality of friendliness or compassion towards our own experience. That is already sane. We do not have to get rid of anything to be sane. That is what the idea of 'unconditional' means. We do not have to wait until tomorrow to be sane, we do not have to work towards it. It is more a question of uncovering that sanity and that could happen in any moment.

Relationship 'exchange'

When we look at relationship within the context of Contemplative Psychotherapy, we focus on an idea that we call 'exchange.' We regard this phenomenon as something that happens all the time, quite naturally. It is simply our direct experience of someone else. From the contemplative point of view, since we are not separate, we are all interconnected. Everything in our experience is the result of all kinds of causes and conditions coming together interdependently, all of which are changing all of the time. Our relationships with others also have this quality of interdependence and they are changing all the time as well.

When we sit in a room with someone else, we tend to pick up on how they are feeling. In the west people sometimes say, 'That is evidence that we have bad boundaries and are getting too caught up with the client.' From the contemplative point of view, we regard that as evidence of our sanity, evidence of the fact that we are connected to others. We are more interested in how to work with that, than how to get rid of it.

'Exchange' is our word for this direct experience of someone else. Like all of our other experiences, it tends to get filtered through ego. There are always parts of our experience that we push away, parts that we try to hang onto and parts that we ignore altogether. We do the same thing with others. Our experience of others is always somewhat filtered in this way.

Sometimes we use the expression, 'exchanging self and others.' We talk about this as our experience of someone else, not our thoughts about him or her, but our experience of that person when we are with him or her. This is a little different from empathy. Empathy involves what you imagine the other person feels based on what you might feel or know about the person. Exchange is more direct. It is what you actually experience about your connection with this person.

For example, I had a client years ago whose husband asked to come to see me. He came, with her permission, because he wanted to tell his side of the story. He complained about his wife, worrying that there were things she had not really told me. As he was sitting in my office, I noticed that I was getting increasingly agitated and anxious. I was starting to feel frightened and it made no sense to me. I had not arrived feeling anxious, I did not consciously feel anxious about this man, yet here was this anxiety. At some point, I realised that he was anxious and that I was picking up on that. I stopped asking him questions because he was only getting more anxious with each question. The situation then started to calm down and he began to talk about his own pain. My experience of anxiety in that moment came by way of exchange. It would be a mistake to say that I was experiencing his anxiety. Whatever I was experiencing was what I was experiencing.

Working with emotions

The way that we work with exchange when it arises, is the same way we would work with anything else that arises. From the point of view of working with emotion, there are three strategies that we might use to do this. The first two are not recommended, but they are the ones that we usually use, so I think they are worth describing.

The first strategy that we usually use with emotion is suppressing it; we push it out of awareness, push it down, push it away. We get out of our experience, we do not even know we are feeling it any more. At least, that is what we are trying to do. We are trying not to be aware of it, but that does not work very well, as you probably all know. Suppressing emotion is not very efficient, because it does not get rid of anything. The energy goes somewhere else. Some little thing will set us off into a big explosion or it will show up in our dreams or some other unexpected place. Whatever it is, it will show up somewhere, somewhat disguised and usually inconveniently. From the Buddhist point of view, emotion is regarded simply as energy, together with a storyline. The energy is kind of like water, it is neutral, there is no problem with the energy. The energy of emotion is the same as the energy of our wisdom, according to the understanding of Vajrayana Buddhism. In Contemplative Psychotherapy, we have no interest in getting rid of emotion, because it contains our wisdom. We would only be putting our most valued treasures into the garbage. Therefore, we do not recommend suppressing or trying to get rid of emotion. This emotion is energy, but this energy gets mixed together with a storyline through which we grasp onto the energy and try to manipulate it. We have a story about 'what it means,' 'where it came from,' 'how I feel,' 'you caused it,' 'I did this' and 'you said that' and so it goes on. The story is, of course, ego.

The second strategy involves acting out, or 'mindlessly expressing.' It is my belief that much psychotherapy makes use of this strategy of working with emotion. The idea, once again, is to get rid of it. 'Get it out' we tell people. 'Get it out so that you won't be stuck with it.' From my point of view, this is a problem. Once again it is treating emotion as garbage. The problem with acting out or simply expressing mindlessly is that it does not work. Rather than getting rid of the emotion it tends to build it up and feed it. From the Buddhist point of view, this approach simply plants the seeds of the future recurrence of the emotion. Thich Nhat Hanh says that just expressing your anger is actually not getting rid it; it is practising your anger in the sense that you are getting better at it. You are getting more caught up and more lost in it. If you look at anger carefully, you will notice that it starts off kind of clean. There is not a lot of ego, not a lot of storyline involved with it. At some point, some little change happens, we grab onto it and start to really enjoy it, saying things like, 'I feel this way and you are terrible!' That is the suspect point. This approach is not recommended either, because it does not actually get rid of anything and it also tends to be harmful to you or to someone else. We tend to do things without much awareness.

The third strategy is the one that is recommended by Contemplative Psychotherapy. This is something else again. The idea behind this approach is that, generally speaking, we do not really experience our emotions. When we suppress them we do not experience them and, interestingly enough, when we mindlessly express them or act them out we also do not experience them. We get caught in the activity and do not actually experience the emotion. The suggestion is that we could just be really interested in our emotion and experience how it actually feels in this moment. We can see how sadness feels in this moment, how jealousy, envy, pride, stupidity - from the Buddhist point of view that is an emotion - dullness, rage, nostalgia, desire, or whatever it is, feels in this moment. The idea is to go ahead and really experience these emotions; get to know them. We often have a kind of love/hate relationship with our emotions - we want to know about them, we do not want to know about them - it is a little dance that we do. The suggestion is that we try to touch them completely and really experience them in terms of the energy in our bodies, in terms of what thoughts go along with them, what images come and go. Whatever the experience is for you, you get interested in it. The assumption is that there is some intelligence here, there is some wisdom.

We talk about this practice in three stages. The first one is acknowledging that whatever the emotional experience is, it is yours. There is a slogan in Mahayana Buddhism that goes along with this, 'Three objects, three poisons and three virtuous seeds.' The three 'objects' are people we regard as friends, people we regard as enemies and people we feel neutral about. The idea is that we free up the emotion from the object. We recognise it is ours. Normally, we are inclined to attach the emotion to someone else: 'You're making me angry,' 'You're making me jealous,' 'You're making me sad.' We free our emotions from the object, rather than engaging in passion, aggression or ignorance; rather than trying to hang onto the object with craving, desire or jealousy. Passion, aggression and ignorance are the 'three poisons.' The 'three objects' are friends, enemies and neutrals; the 'three poisons' are passion, aggression and ignorance and the 'three virtuous seeds' are the absence of passion, aggression and ignorance. When we recognise the emotion as our own, instead of suppressing or acting out, there becomes an absence of passion, an absence of aggression and an absence of ignorance toward our own experience and toward the objects of that experience. That plants the seed of virtue rather than the seed of further confusion. Passion, aggression and ignorance are really more about the storyline than about the basic energy itself.

When we work with 'exchange,' we work with whatever has arisen in the same way; we experience it as completely as we can. We touch it, taste it and then allow it to go along. Emotions are temporary. We mostly do not believe that, but they are. Everything in our experience is impermanent. It is coming and it is going. The more that we are willing to experience things directly, the more we will see that our experience is, in fact, impermanent.

This is something that we are not really eager to find out, but it is a tremendous relief once we get past the initial hurdle of understanding that our emotions are coming and going, our thoughts are coming and going - all the time. There might be this big moment of energetic upsurge about something, together with a story about it. We get interested in it, let ourselves feel it, experience it completely and it tends to go. It might arise again in the next moment, it might not, but usually we do not notice how it is changing. We are so busy either getting rid of it or expressing it that we do not actually, really see what is happening.

Fully experiencing emotions does not mean that all you ever do is sit there and feel things. Having felt what is happening completely, you are in a position to have some intelligence about how you express yourself. It need not be blame, because blame is not particularly helpful, it tends to escalate things all over again. If you just feel it completely, you can make use of your natural intelligence, your brilliant sanity, to decide what you are going to do next. It might be that you might yell, it might be that you say, 'I am not at a point in my life where I can deal with this in a way that is not going to hurt me or hurt you. Goodbye.' There is nothing in this approach that says you have to stay there or that you have to leave. The point is that most of the time we make those decisions without really experiencing our experience. We make them based on concept rather than on experience.

Mindfulness and mindlessness

If you are working with your own mind and you bring friendliness (maitri) to your experience, that is what others will exchange with. Many times the most valuable thing that we may offer to clients is simply the atmosphere that we create by how we are in the room, how we work with our own minds. If you think of the people you like to be around when you are upset, it is not so much about what they do or what they say - it is simply how you feel when you are with them. It is also important for us to know what is going on within ourselves, so that we know what we have brought into the room, and we can track what gets brought up in us by the client. In some way it does not matter how it got there. We still work with it the same way, still touch and go, touch and go. But, in terms of understanding what is going on with the client, it is good to know what arose where, whether it came from the client or whether it came from you.

That is why mindfulness practice is so important. Interestingly enough, in the mindfulness practice, we are not actually trying to get rid of anything. If our minds are busy it is not regarded as a problem. The idea is just simply to 'be there with it.' In Contemplative Psychotherapy, we are particularly interested in developing our ability to 'be there' with the client. That is a mindfulness practice. So the more we know about both mindfulness and mindlessness, the more we can recognise what we are doing and when we are, in fact, not present.

From the contemplative point of view, mindlessness is the desynchronisation of body and mind. Awareness or 'mindfulness-mind' and body are separate in terms of our experience. It is particularly important, in working with clients, to become familiar with what their mindless practices are; how they leave the present moment. I tell my clients that I collect mindless practices and we get interested in what their mindless practices are. Mindless practices split our attention so that we are not completely present. There are degrees of this. Something could be a mindless practice if it completely lets us desynchronise mind and body. The mind is lost in sexual fantasy, or the mind is hallucinating, or the mind is caught in obsessive thinking.

This tendency to completely lose touch with the present moment is a form of mental absorption. Buddhism generally uses the word 'absorption' as a translation for samadhi, which in a meditative context means 'becoming completely absorbed in your present experience.' We use the term absorption in a different sense in Contemplative Psychotherapy, as a description of 'being lost in mindlessness.' Absorption means that you have lost track, you are lost in thought - you are 'out to lunch,' 'off the wall,' 'off your rocker,' 'playing with half a deck,' 'not firing on all your cylinders, 'a sandwich short of a picnic.'

These are all descriptions or metaphors for mindlessness, for not being completely awake. These are practices that happen entirely within the space of the mind - obsessional practices, fantasising, hallucinating, etcetera. If we are prevented from indulging in these mindless practices, what typically arises is some quality of anxiety. We tend to pull out these practices when we are feeling anxious, when we are seeking comfort. We use mindless practices as a way of going from contact to loss of contact. To the extent that we do it without awareness, it always carries a price and the price is loss of awakeness, loss of aliveness and vitality.

The hallmark of any mindlessness practice is if you are irritated when you get interrupted. This is a definite sign that you are not feeling open, that you are not interested in what the present moment is bringing. You would rather stay in your little world. When this occurs, the mind is sort of thick and not present, the thoughts are overlapping, we lose touch with the body and there is very little possibility of seeing any gap of sanity. I find it helpful when I work with clients who are caught in this kind of thinking, to ask them to come back to their breathing, come back to their body and simply ruthlessly cut their thinking. I have found that nothing else works for me, because if you get interested in the thought content of the thought itself, you are gone; you are lost in the process once again.

Another way of thinking about mindfulness and mindlessness practices is to talk about the Buddhist practice of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. A good practice of mindfulness consists of a Mindfulness of Body, where body and mind are synchronised and we are aware of our environment. It also consists of a Mindfulness of Feeling, an awareness of our tendency to grasp at things and try to create ego. If we bring our mindfulness to exactly what is happening, whatever it is, we do not have to get rid of anything. We can bring openness, clarity and friendliness to the symptom and then it is already sanity. It consists of Mindfulness of Effort, which is about naturally coming back to the present, without having to make an effort to be mindful. This presence lasts just a flicker of a moment, before we start commenting on it to ourselves, but before the commenting, there is simply presence. Last, it consists of Mindfulness of Mind, which is about being mindful of each moment of nowness and its freshness and uniqueness. Each moment is new and fresh and unique and we are always seeing things for the first time.

In summary, a good mindful practice highlights impermanence and change and shows us how each moment is different from the last and different from the next. A good mindlessness practice, on the other hand, disguises all that. It lets us believe that things remain the same. It gives us the illusion of a quality of permanence and solidness and reliableness and familiarity. When we feel a little like things are too fresh, we turn to a mindless practice so that we can feel familiar and know where we are. This is the kind of quality that keeps us repeating clearly dysfunctional patterns. Because they are familiar, we feel at home, we feel soothed. Because things are familiar, we know who we are; we know how to do things. We call that 'ego.' The price of it is that we miss our life in each of those moments.

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