A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine by Robert Mankoff portrays a psychoanalyst addressing his patient. The analyst, says, “Look, making you happy is out of the question, but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery.” At heart, both Buddhism and psychotherapy address the same fundamental issue: human suffering. Both promote methods of selfobservation. The Buddha saw himself as a physician and might have seen himself as a psychotherapist had that concept been around 2,500 years ago. Buddha was both psychoanalyst and cognitive-behavioral in his approach, looking deeply at the conditionings that give rise to emotions and changing the behaviors that give rise to suffering.

Buddhist meditation practice and the process of psychotherapy are not instant fixes. Each practice takes time to mature. In other words, one therapy session or one seated meditation session will not change much — unless of course a curiosity and faith are born that bring you back to the couch or the cushion. A synergy can arise if both processes are engaged concurrently.

Both meditation and psychotherapy address the sense of lack that many people feel. Psychotherapy attempts to construct a better functioning self while Buddhist psychology aims to deconstruct that self into noself (anatta). Psychotherapy can help to identify patterns that can become obstacles in your meditation practice, and meditation can show you where you are holding on to painful identifications with stories and attachments to things that are changing.

In the West, there is a lot of attachment to having a self (a “thinker”) and difficulty grasping what means to have no-self. This idea strikes the Western mind as counterintuitive: “Of course, I have a self, who else is having this thought?” What the Buddha meant, though, is that there is no fixed self that is unchanging over time. The self, rather, is a set of processes that in the aggregate give the appearance of an enduring entity that you would call your self.

What is this collection of processes? They are called the skandhas (translated as “aggregates” or “components”). There is the physical body (rupa) and this body is comprised of the four elements (earth, water, fire, and air); feelings (vedana) that arise from sensory contact with the world (that is, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and thought); perceptions (samjna) that put sensory experiences into categories of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (telling you whether to approach, avoid, or ignore any experience); and habitual mental patterns (sankharas) that are conditionings that arise from experience. These are the results of local karma — things that happened in the past affect how you feel in the present; and the final aggregate is consciousness (vijnana) that arises when the elements of body and mind make contact with the world around you.

Learning to sit through the rise and fall of thoughts can bring about a profound realization: I am okay. Despite the tendency to believe that obsessively thinking about something will actually change it, the realization dawns that thinking isn't always necessary. Whether or not you obsess over the dent in your new car, the car will either be fixed or remain unfixed and rumination will not change that. With the increase in Buddhist practice in the West came a willingness on the part of psychotherapists to explore the possibilities of using Buddhist practices for therapy.

Thoughts Without a Thinker

Mark Epstein, author of Thoughts Without a Thinker, is a therapist who practices Buddhism himself. He tells a story about the great psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), who thought that Buddhism would be a major influence on Western psychology. James was lecturing at Harvard when he noticed a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk in the lecture hall. “Take my chair,” he said to the monk. “You are better equipped to lecture on psychology than I.”

Epstein explains that meditation, often misunderstood to be a retreat from emotional and mental experiences, requires that you slow down to examine the day-to-day mind. And, he concludes, “This examination is, by definition, psychological.”

There are also many different and new forms of Buddhist-inspired psychotherapies. These include Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Positive Psychology

Buddhism is also enjoying a dialogue with the emerging field of positive psychology. For much of its history, psychology focused on psychopathology rather than on optimal states. The Buddha had quite a head start in that his psychology is explicitly what would now be called positive psychology. Buddhist scholars Shauna Shapiro and B. Allan Wallace point out, “The goal of Buddhist practice is the realization of a state of well-being that is not contingent on the presence of pleasurable stimuli, either external or internal.” Contemporary research studies are confirming this insight. Transient things like material wealth, praise, and pleasures cannot provide enduring happiness. It turns out the Buddha was right about clinging and aversion: they lead to misery. And this still holds true today. Happiness from internal mental training, that is, meditation, is more durable than stimulusdriven pleasures.