When our sense of being fully alive is lost through stress, injustice, or trauma, remembering our deep connection with the world can invite us back into our bodies — and back into the fullness of life.

Buddhist Psychology offers a frame for orienting to experience that supports both personal and collective well-being. This includes developing an understanding of our interdependence with other people, systems, and the natural world through meditative awareness and inquiry. The kind of awareness we cultivate, sometimes called mindfulness, is associated with emotional well-being, healing trauma, increasing motivation, improved health behaviors, coping, and better interpersonal relationships (Neff and Davidson, 2016).

Buddhist Psychology differs from Western Psychology in may ways, including an emphasis on liberation at both collective and personal levels and an understanding of the self as a fluid process in continuous interaction with other complex systems.

The type of attention we learn to cultivate can disrupt our habitual patterns of mind, generate healthy nervous system regulation, and impact brain function and structure, with areas of the brain corresponding to stress and trauma potentially decreasing in volume — and areas of the brain associated with well-being growing.

Psychotherapy informed by Buddhist Psychology includes both cognitive (mind-based) and somatic (body-based) practices, along with generative and relational practices where compassion and generosity are cultivated to heal trauma and feelings of shame and improve relationships.

Engaging these contemplative practices through a frame critical consciousness helps ensure its most mature expression. A practice focused on self-improvement or behavior expectations in children misses the mark completely. Mindfulness itself is incomplete until it includes bringing the practice into the world, for the benefit of the greater whole and the natural world.

Appropriately expressed, practices informed by Buddhist Psychology utilize a decolonial, anti-oppressive, liberatory praxis, helping to foster social and racial justice and ecological consciousness.

Learn more about Buddhist Psychology here.

Learn more about my approach here.