CONTEMPLATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY: THREE WAVES OF DEVELOPMENT

24 august 2021

A conversation between Joe Loizzo and Begoña Martinez

Joe Loizzo: Within the evolution of the mindfulness-based or contemplative healing, mindfulness is only the first of three great waves as I call them.

How do you maintain your sense of wellbeing and mindful presence in a world that's super stress driven and that's very busy and demanding? This is where the practice of compassion comes in.
The second wave of Buddhist psychology and contemplative psychotherapy is based on compassion. Integrating the specific use of mindfulness to cultivate what we call wise compassion and positive emotional regulation.

These are all just, again, slices of a huge tradition that went on for hundreds of years, which is now being the object of the next wave of neuroscience research. Learning how to use compassion training to transform the nervous system and the psyche and to transform our social stress triggered by trauma or difficult interactions with others.

Further the Nalanda Contemplative Psychotherapy programme takes a step forward by exploring yet a third wave of developments within the contemplative traditions: embodied practices and imagery approaches.

Through our research in trauma and the polyvagal theory, we understand now that a lot of the stuff that we suffer from, whether it's past traumas, conditioning, or certain types of reactivity that are instinctive, don’t really get targeted by talk therapy. Even compassion approaches may have a hard time dealing with it. We are starting to understand the power of embodied approaches, such as imagery, narrative, transforming narrative, and self-expression, breath work, movement and body posture.

The Buddhist tradition spent 4,000 years exploring how to use these techniques in powerful concerted ways that allow the deepest possible transformation of the nervous system. Further, the Nalanda University curriculum integrated the three aspects of mind, science and contemplative practice into a cumulative programme. A complete curriculum that spans all the different forms of Buddhist psychology and healing practice.

Begoña Martinez: That sounds so interesting, Joe. Thank you. In the current context that our society is going through, how do you see this program benefiting healthcare professionals or psychotherapists and coaches, social workers and society at large? What kind of tools can professionals add to their toolkit and what other tools can the man in the street acquire?

Over the last five centuries, our culture has increasingly divested itself of its own contemplative methods that contribute to self-regulation and emotional transformation. The education and healthcare systems of modern society lack the tools to learn how to regulate our own minds and nervous systems.

JL: One of the things that all of our students find powerful is to have access to a kind of a complete re-education from the ground up. It is not just about learning specific tools like mindfulness practice or compassion training, or embodied meditation and embodied breathing. It is also about understanding the many stresses that are on us in this digital age of information explosion and the increased global pace of change. Not to mention the social crisis that we're dealing in terms of inequality, racial tensions and climate change.

The practices we learn give us the capacity to protect our minds and nervous systems and to allow us to keep our own internal environment, resilient, peaceful, positive, so that we can actually engage in our very demanding lives.

Whether participants’ professions are within psychotherapy, teaching, coaching, or business, we teach people how to develop a deep, complete, and rigorous mindfulness practice, and how to understand it given the tradition it stems from.
The tools include the three waves of practice I mentioned before: mindfulness, or attention training; compassion, or emotional regulation training; and embodied practices, that help learning to regulate our autonomic nervous system.

At Nalanda Institute, we believe that in order to become fully creative agents of a much needed counterculture – a contemplative way of living and being – people need to understand the original thinking and science as well as the psychological wisdom about how the mind works, how consciousness works, how it relates to emotions and the body.

Therefore we ground people in the history and the traditional frameworks of psychology and transformation, from a multidisciplinary perspective that also includes the ethical and social dimension, the communal dimension of well-being.

We believe that although psychotherapy might be individually focused, pathology is not. Stress is an event that happens in connection with family, society and culture. Society-imposed stereotypes, roles and identities or an excessive focus on consumption place stresses on individuals, but need to be looked at from a systemic perspective.

BM: You have been running this program already in the U S in different locations. I think in New York, San Francisco, also in Spanish speaking countries. How long have you been running it for? You must have already a good sense of the reaction of people to this program. Now we are bringing it to Switzerland through German speaking world. We are super excited about that. Tell us a little bit about the experience you have already had.

JL: Indeed, we're on our ninth year of the contemplative psychotherapy program and the experience for everyone involved has been a transformational one.

Contemplative learning is an experiential transformational journey. When we gather a cohort of students, we also create a community of healing and transformation in which people experience a different way of learning and connecting to their peers. We see over the course of just one year, people going through very deep personal transformation.

Professional transformation may also occur. Participants apply and bring their experience out into the communities they serve, be it schools, hospitals, businesses, professional practices or research.

BM: Thank you, Joe, it has been such a pleasure to hear about the many aspects that this training has to offer.

We are looking forward to welcoming you and your team soon in October!

Did you enjoy reading this conversation? Then check out the first part of the interview ,where Joe and Begoña talk about what contemplative practices can bring to the world of psychotherapy.

The program that starts October 22, 2021, will be offered in a hybrid form combining online teachings and resources, weekly calls with residential retreats that will happen here in Switzerland, at Landguet Ried.

Have you been intrigued by the richness of the Nalanda Insitute approach?

Learn more and register here.

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