What is Contemplative Psychotherapy?
According to Buddhist legend, the Buddha was a prince on the Indian subcontinent who left his palace and family in a quest for enlightenment. After spending years putting himself through various ascetic practices that were in vogue at the time, he had a realization that neither the hedonism of his past nor the asceticism of his present was going to lead him to the insight he sought. He took a break for a snack, then picked out a comfy spot under a tree and resolved to remain there until he reached enlightenment. The legends tell the story of the Buddha wrestling with his mind in meditation through a metaphor about Mara, the god of death, who tried first to tempt him and then frighten him into wavering in his quest. But when all was said and done the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and then he began to teach people how to follow his example and achieve enlightenment for themselves.
The person thought to have been the historical Buddha is said to have died around 400 BCE, and about 1,100 years later a major revolution occurred in Buddhist thought with the establishment of the schools traditionally practiced across the Tibetan Plateau. These schools all assert that not only do we all have the capacity for ending our suffering–for reaching enlightenment–but we are in fact always-already enlightened: the vision of enlightenment shifts from being a promise of possibility to being an ontological reality.
“Brilliant Sanity” is the phrasing that Chögyam Trungpa—The Tibetan meditation master and refugee who created Contemplative Psychotherapy—used in his training program for psychotherapists to describe our always-already enlightened nature. From the perspective of Tibetan Buddhist psychology as interpreted by Trungpa, “[our] most basic qualities are positive ones: openness, intelligence, and warmth.”
It is not the goal of the contemplative psychotherapist to fix their clients, because there is nothing to fix. The goal is to help clients see that they are already healthy and whole, and with this deeply felt knowledge, the client can begin to have more and more confidence to face the challenges that life will throw at them.