Contemplative psychotherapy combines the mindfulness practices and principles of Buddhist psychology with contemporary Western psychology. From the contemplative point of view, human nature is intrinsically healthy, but awareness tends to be obscured. Through psychotherapy, the client becomes liberated from unnecessary suffering through experiencing and accepting themselves in the moment, exactly as they are.

Contemplative uses the wisdom traditions of East and West to help resolve inner dilemmas and connect the client with the world. By relating directly to personal experience and becoming aware of ingrained habits of body, speech, and mind, everyday occurrences become transformed into pathways of awakening.

This type of therapy uses mindfulness to help the client to be present with whatever arises in the moment as a tool to encourage healing and wellness. Being in the present moment can help to bring about authenticity, self-acceptance, and a deeper trust in the flow of life and the flow of oneself.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach.

Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied. It was by design a secular version, extracted like a gemstone from the many-layered foundation of Buddhist teaching, which has sprouted a wide variety of sects and spiritual practices and attracted 350 million adherents worldwide.

In transcendental meditation and other types of meditation, practitioners seek to transcend or lose themselves. The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.

Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.

Contemplative therapy has a foundation in the Buddhist idea of basic goodness and compassion for self and others. From the contemplative perspective, our basic nature is intrinsically healthy and good, but our understanding of this health has been hidden and obscured. Buddhist contemplative psychotherapy is a process of uncovering this goodness and helping the client be in a more aware and awake place. It looks at ways in which one creates suffering through unnecessary attachments and neurotic thought patterns.

The following, from David Lukoff and Francis Lu (2008), explains how a Buddhist Contemplative Therapist works, and how the theory is closely related to Transpersonal Psychology:

Buddhism has had a large influence on transpersonal therapy because Buddhist mindfulness practices involve training in the qualities of attention and presence required to do effective therapy. In addition, meditation trains self-observation skills, which can also be beneficial to the therapist: "Becoming aware of one's primary interrupting factors can be diagnostically and therapuetically significant because one can clearly see unhealthy, habitual mental processes" (Deatherage, 1996, p. 209). Buddhism also includes techniques for addressing anger, anxiety, forgiveness, and other psychotherapeutic issues. It can help patients go beyond merely recognizing their problems to healing them by complementing therapy and leading to new dimensions of wisdom and wholeness (Epstein, 1998). Meditation has expanded as a psychotherapeutic modality into a whole field of mindfulness practices used in the treatment of both somatic and psychological problems (Kabit-Zinn, 1990).

References
(To view, roll mouse over the "References" heading; to hide, click on the heading)