Episode AI notes
- The focus of Zen and psychotherapy differs. Zen focuses on understanding the way things are and practicing with various aspects of existence, while psychotherapy focuses on discussing symptoms and personal fantasies.
- Zen Buddhism teaches the relief of suffering without analyzing its root causes. The practice involves observing suffering and allowing it to change and subside.
- The process of maturing involves gaining awareness and insight by observing reactions and patterns. This repetition can lead to detachment and ‘cure’ obsessional neurosis through boredom.
- Meditation can help address self-criticism by bringing meditation experiences into therapy sessions. This can lead to distancing from critical thoughts and reducing depressive symptoms.
- Zen teaches that thoughts are not the enemy but encourages attention to sensations and perceptions beyond thoughts. Opening up to the bigger universe can reduce suffering.
- Zen practitioners constantly remind each other of death and loss to appreciate the brevity and rarity of human life.
- The speaker realizes that society’s notions of achievement are ultimately meaningless. Buddhist philosophy discusses the fiction of the self and offers insights into impermanence.
- Zen practice becomes a way to explore existential questions about human existence. (Time 0:00:00)
Diferencias entre el acompañamiento terapéutico y como profe de meditación. Transcript: Speaker 1 What we talk about is meetings where together we touch some aspect of the Dharma. And the Dharma really means nothing fancier than the way things are. So we touch something about existence, about human life, about the universe, about how the world works, different from talking about the symptoms of my depression, or my anxiety, Or my fantasies about my coworker. That can come up. But what we talk about it from a Dharma point of view, if you will, we talk about how do you practice with it? How do you practice when you’re sitting on the cushion and you become obsessed with the person sitting next to you different from what you do with an obsession in a psychotherapy interview? Speaker 2 Right. And your response to let’s just use that example. Someone’s obsessed with the person sitting next to them and they’re obviously troubled by it. And they’re looking to you for counsel advice. Is it different for each person? I don’t know how well you know these people. So whether you can personalize it like that? Speaker 1 It is different. And there’s a lot of similarity depending. So I’ll tell you that if someone comes in saying the person sitting next to me is driving me crazy, I can’t stand the way they sniffle during meditation. I can’t stand the way they cough. And I’m furious about it. What I would say is that’s something you get to practice with. So go back, sit on your cushion, and be the Buddha of angry annoyance. Just let yourself be consumed with it. I would never say that to a psychotherapy fiction. (Time 0:16:27)
meditación práctica psicoterapia
meditación práctica psicoterapia
Diferencias en el abordaje del sufrimiento psíquico entre psicoanálisis y budismo. Transcript: Speaker 1 What you’re talking about is how we’re trained to think about what may be the root of this anger, this obsession, what may be driving it, fueling it, perpetuating it. Zen doesn’t care about that. Zen’s not interested in, you know, the Buddha has a wonderful analogy. He says that, you know, when a man is shot with an arrow, he doesn’t spend time wondering who made the arrow and where it came from and what kind of Oh shot it, he wants to get it out. And so the Buddha said, I am about teaching suffering and the relief of suffering. So what we notice in meditation practice is that looking at the causes and conditions behind somebody’s angry annoyance at a sniffler isn’t where we go. We go to practice with it, watch it build, watch it come. And then what you will notice is that it subsides as everything does that it changes that it morphs into something else. And maybe as you sit there on the cushion, maybe your hypochondriacal mother will come to mind. Fine, not a problem. But that will not be the focus doesn’t have to be the focus practice. She can be there for a while and then she can leave. And then you watch the kaleidoscope of mental activity. (Time 0:19:38)
2min abordaje budismo meditación práctica psicoanálisis sufrimiento
abordaje budismo meditación práctica psicoanálisis sufrimiento 2min
Matar a la neurosis de aburrimiento. Transcript: Speaker 1 We don’t think of it so much as maturing out of something as really watching and shining. What we talk about is shining the light of awareness. So you say, oh, when I start getting angry at somebody for being sick, you know, whoa, my mother comes to mind and you watch it happen over and over again. And there is a kind of distancing that can happen. And we see this in our clinical work as well, right? I mean, I think it was Helena Deutsch, her Greta Bieber, one of them, when she was asked, how do you cure an obsessional neurosis? Her reply was, we bore the neurosis to death. So there is something about the endless repetition that over time creates some distancing for some people from the content, from the affect that’s driving it. (Time 0:21:52)
2min conciencia meditación neurosis sufrimiento síntonas
conciencia meditación neurosis sufrimiento síntonas 2min
Meditación como un camino para salir del “skull-sized kingdom”. Transcript: Speaker 1 However, much of the self-criticism didn’t seem to budge and it turned out that my patient had a neighbor who was an avid meditator and when my patient complained to him that life looked Pretty gloomy, my neighbor taught him to meditate and he started meditating for 20 minutes each morning and he began to bring his experiences on the meditation cushion into our therapy Hours and gradually we began to talk about how he might sit with and become the Buddha of self-criticism until he completely burned up with it and when he would do that he would find that It would subside and he could just be present for the sounds of the birds chirping outside his window and the feel of the cushion on his butt and what we found was that as he got more and more Distant from the self-critical thoughts and could open himself up to the bigger world in which he was his depressive symptoms subsided more and more so that it was the combination of Having me to talk with about it and feeling my interest in and caring about his life outside of achievement and that experience of meditation that really opened him up to a universe that He’d been locked out of he was you know David Foster Wallace has this great quote he said we are locked in our skull-sized kingdoms and that’s what my patient had been suffering from and What happened with meditation was it really showed him how to open up to the world outside of his skull-sized kingdom. (Time 0:27:03)
2min liberación meditación sufrimiento síntomas
liberación meditación síntomas sufrimiento 2min
En Zen los pensamientos no son el enemigo, pero te invita a ver más allá de ellos. Transcript: Speaker 1 So for Zen, whatever comes up is your life right that means thoughts come up and that’s your life that is what is right now in this moment right so not to be pushed away nothing is to be pushed Away and the more you push thoughts away the more they try to come back with events right so thoughts are not the enemy and in fact the teaching is thoughts are going to the mind is going To produce thoughts until you are dead and so one of the teachings that we constantly have to remind people of is that it’s not a good meditation when you’re having fewer thoughts it’s Not a bad meditation when you’re having more thoughts or wilder thoughts so no that really what Zen talks about is the limitation of just focusing on thoughts so most of the time we are Lost in our thoughts we focus exclusively on our thoughts with much less attention to sensations, to perceptions of the world, to the experience of what’s happening in the room right Now for each of us as we’re speaking to each other that we are mostly prioritizing our thoughts to me the analogy is like that little screen on zoom that shows you that tiny screen and then There there’s the rest of the screen which may contain another person or 50 other people right most of the time we are focused on that just that tiny screen that shows us right we don’t Need and what Zen says is there’s a much bigger universe that when we open to it allows us to suffer less and that thought is not a problem in fact it’s a way in to Zen and lots of other things (Time 0:33:18)
2min experiencia meditación pensamiento percepción sensación zen
experiencia meditación pensamiento percepción zen sensación 2min
En Zen se recuerdan constantemente la inminencia de la muerte. Transcript: Speaker 1 We are reminding each other all the time of old age sickness death and loss constantly in the in the chance we do at the beginning of every sitting of our Zen group and the retreats the the Last thing that happens after a long long day of hard meditation during a Zen retreat is that a ghost says several cautionary things and the last thing that the ghost says is do not squander Your life so we are constantly reminding each other of this but there’s a reason why we’re constantly reminding each other because it’s not like we get this and then we’re done the mind Keeps wanting to run away from this and so part of what Zen does is keep drawing our attention back to we are really going to die it’s really short this time on earth it’s really rare to have A human life in the first place so what are you going to do and that far from being depressing it’s actually exhilarating because it gives kind of an alive and depreciation of how amazing It is just to get up in the morning (Time 0:37:33)
impermanencia muerte práctica recuerdos zen
impermanencia muerte recuerdos zen práctica
El Yo es una ficción que nos tomamos demasiado en serio. Transcript: Speaker 1 I’ve been at Harvard my whole adult life you know talk about you know a set of people with massive achievement orientation right who jump through hoops and I was from the time I was a teenager Really aware of the fact that we’re always creating these imaginary hoops to jump through and these brass rings to reach for that don’t matter at all that nobody’s going to care 50 years From now what I did or did not do in my life except maybe a very small number of people that none of this lasts there’s a there’s a great New Yorker cartoon it’s um it’s two professors looking At a notice board and there’s a blackboarder notice it’s obviously a death notice and one of the professors says to the other poor Jones he published and published but still he perished And there was this feeling that I’ve had ever since I was a teenager that said most of what we care about and get all upset about and and strive for is meaningless and so these existential Questions kept nagging in me and the best thing that I found was Buddhist philosophy that sort of talked about the fiction of the self and how invested we are in shoring up this fictional Entity and impermanence and how impermanence is absolutely the way of everything not a problem except that we make it a problem and all of that seemed to me to be the most compelling framework I had found to deal with some of these big questions about what it means to be human and be in the world and then I kind of stumbled into a Zen group (Time 0:40:48)
deseo ilusión impermanencia yo zen