Han de Wit 0203
Question: Is there a relationship between psychotherapy and the path of meditation?de Wit: Perhaps I should first say something about practice in the Buddhist tradition, and how I see the practice of meditation. I see meditation as a form of inquiry. Sometimes I like to call it "first-person inquiry". We are inquiring into our own minds. Indeed, I can only inquire into my own mind, since it is the only one that I can experience. I am able to notice what I am thinking about, I am able to notice how I get engrossed in certain thoughts, etc. So this kind of inquiry is what meditation, in the Buddhist sense, is all about: the development of insight.
This insight can also be useful in a psychotherapeutic context. But there is still a difference between psychotherapy and Buddhism: in Buddhism, this inquiry is into the patterns that deal with the great existential questions in our lives. Or the great realities of existence, which each of us must deal with whether we are neurotic or not. The fact that life is unpredictable, that we do not know how things will be in a year from now... We think we know a lot, but things can change: there are the great realities of sickness, old age, and death, as these are called in the Buddhist tradition.
These are universal human problems: how to find an attitude to life that can embrace all of this, and be at peace with it. This is the great spiritual question, in Buddhism but also in all the other great religions. It is different than the question that is posed in psychotherapy. The question in psychotherapy is a call for help from people who are stuck in a certain rut, who perhaps suffer from phobias or other limiting psychic patterns, and who must liberate themselves from them in order to be able to live a normal life. So I sometimes like to say that Freud couldn’t have helped the Buddha!
People sometimes wonder whether psychotherapy and Buddhism are the same thing. Not quite: the kind of problems that are addressed in the spiritual traditions are universal problems, while psychotherapy deals with a different kind of problems which, it is true, everyone can face at some point, but which are nevertheless at the level of putting things back to normal, rather than delivering us from the blindness and fear of life, which is everyone’s burden.