Zen Meditation in Psychotherapy

Techniques for Clinical Practice

C. Alexander Simpkins, Annellen M. Simpkins

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118159330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

"The world and all that is in it expresses reality. Every therapy session, each moment in your life, is a koan to be solved, an opportunity to learn about your deeper being. How you respond is your choice. You always have the option to respond with your most enlightened nature."
— from Zen Meditation in Psychotherapy

A thoughtful and pragmatic guide for integrating Zen meditation into traditional psychotherapy

Grounded in both neuroscientific and clinical evidence that supports the use of Zen meditation to improve clients' mental health, this inspiring "how-to" guide encourages creative use of its techniques to suit your personal therapeutic style as well as your clients' needs.

Zen Meditation in Psychotherapy provides you with methods that can be seamlessly integrated into ongoing treatments for a broad range of psychological problems, as well as with ways to enhance your own life, both professionally and personally.

It covers:

• General protocol for integrating meditation into treatments at every phase
  
  

• Applying meditation for problems such as depression, anger, addiction, and weight management
  
  

• Meditative ways to reduce anxiety, stress, and burnout
  
  

• Meditative training to enhance therapeutic sensitivities
  
  

Filled with vivid case examples and writings from traditional texts, modern interpretations, meditation research, and illustrative legends, Zen Meditation in Psychotherapy encourages a therapeutic process in which clients move their attention from outside concerns to inner mindfulness. With a range of techniques that embrace the diversity and uniqueness of clients, this book offers methods and tools for seeing feelings and problems directly and objectively, which can lead to a profound shift in perspective.

I

Research and Efficacy

We are living in exciting times, when science shines illumination on enlightenment!

—(C. Alexander Simpkins & Annellen M. Simpkins)

People have been talking for millennia about the profound effects of meditation on the mind, body, and spirit. But it is only in recent years that the West has been listening. We are now applying our most advanced scientific methods to explore meditation and, as a result, our understanding of this seemingly ineffable practice is coming into focus. Today we see a flood of high-quality studies that reveal what meditation does and how helpful it is for therapy. We now have a better sense of some of the psychological mechanisms and the impact on the nervous system. We bring you the latest research findings about meditation, its efficacy, and its psychological effects in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 provides the neuroscience findings about how meditation changes the nervous system.

With Zen's long tradition of meditation practice and science's recent research supporting its use, you can be confident in adding the meditation methods provided in this book for a powerful set of tools to help yourself and your clients develop to the fullest potential!

1

The Psychology of Meditation and Its Efficacy for Clinical Practice

We are living in exciting times, when science shines illumination on enlightenment!

–(C. Alexander Simpkins & Annellen M. Simpkins)

Zen offers a way to overcome psychological disturbance and become healthy and happy, to live well. The method is based on concentrating the mind in particular ways. Zen teaches these methods through the practice of meditation. Contrary to our Western perspectives that are based in doing something with a goal in mind, this practice centers on a special way of doing things that is goal-less, referred to as emptiness. This story about one of Buddha's disciples, Subhuti, introduces the concept.

One day Subhuti was meditating under a flowering tree, experiencing a calm and quiet consciousness, empty of thought, present in the moment. A gentle breeze shook the tree and its flowers began to fall down all around him.

The breeze seemed to be saying, “We are praising you for your clear statement about emptiness.”

“But I haven't said a word,” answered Subhuti.

“You have not said anything about emptiness and we have not heard anything about emptiness. This is true emptiness.”

The blossoms showered down on Subhuti as he smiled (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Cherry Blossom Nature

Source: Photographed by C. Alexander Simpkins, Jr., Washington, DC, Spring 2011

This book opens you to the practice of emptiness. As Western healers, we are not content to simply experience a helpful method to use with our clients. We also need to place it under the watchful eye of science to ensure that the experience does indeed help people in measurable ways. And yet, how can you measure emptiness and the wordless experience of meditation that brings it about? Obviously there is something happening, because people have been discussing it for millennia. And intuitively, we feel the importance of such experiencing since some of our greatest insights have come in a flash.

Now, a large body of research has revealed repeatedly that the wordless, empty experience found in meditation has healing effects. Meditation can truly move people, opening possibilities for new potentials to emerge, and these changes can be measured. This is enormously important for psychotherapy, because now we have a whole new set of tools to add to our practice, tools that can truly help clients to benefit fully from the therapeutic treatments we provide.

Jennifer was a hospice nurse who used meditation as a pivotal part of her therapeutic treatment. She was tall, heavy-set, and large-boned, with curly brown hair softly framing her round face. Her gentle blue eyes and soothing voice emanated warmth. She was a caring and compassionate person who believed in helping others, which was why she had chosen to be a hospice nurse.

Jennifer had been overweight all her life, and now she carried at least 60 extra pounds. Her family doctor had recently warned her to get serious about losing weight. As a nurse, she was well aware of the health benefits of weight loss, but had never been able to do anything about it. Following her doctor's warning, she tried again to lose some weight on her own, but couldn't make any progress. Frustrated, she decided to seek therapy. She had heard about the benefits of meditation, and so she came to us for treatment. A meditational approach seemed an appropriate choice since it would use her compassionate nature to help others to help herself.

As she began therapy, she revealed a number of weights she carried besides pounds. Working at the hospice, she had to face death on a daily basis. She told us that she grew close to her patients, and then they died. She could literally see death creep up on them. Watching people she cared about waste away deeply disturbed her. Grief weighed her down. Then, when a patient finally died, she found it difficult to stop thinking about that person.

Therapy involved her practice of several forms of meditation. First, she learned how to use her attention meditatively by practicing focus meditations. She was surprised to learn that she could direct her attention at will. As she gained skills with her attentional focus, she said, “Wow! I never knew you could do that!”

We also taught her mindfulness meditations: to follow her experience moment by moment and nonjudgmentally, which she was encouraged to practice between sessions as well. Her mindfulness practice set a process in motion. And it helped to moderate the strong emotions of sadness that she experienced. Research shows that meditation helps to balance affect, lower reactivity to negative emotions, and foster better self-regulation as later sections of this chapter describe. But still, she was not losing weight.

Next, she learned Zen meditation, to simply be empty of all thought. When a thought or feeling arose, we told her to notice it, think about it if needed, and then let it go as soon as possible. This was helpful to her in learning another important lesson from meditation: how to let go and allow nature to take its course. As she practiced this form of meditation, focusing on nothing and letting go of any thoughts that might intrude, she found that thoughts and feelings of death kept interrupting her meditation.

The thoughts seemed to be about her hospice patients. But then, one night she had a frightening dream. She saw her parents dying at the hospice, shriveled up, and deformed, like frightening monsters. She felt intense grief and horror. She told us that she was surprised about these feelings, because she thought she had gotten over their death long ago. Her parents had both died from cancer in Eastern Europe when she was a little girl. Following their death, she had been sent to the United States to be raised by an aunt, and lived here ever since.

Mindfulness had revealed that she had deep emotion about their death. She recognized feelings of anger that arose, since both had contracted cancer from carcinogens they had been exposed to from living in a polluted industrial city in Eastern Europe. Meditation allowed her to recognize that these feelings were still unresolved. And every time she lost a patient at the hospice, she was living the horror, all over again.

Using the sensitivities and objectivity she was gaining from meditation, she began to recognize a distinction between her love for her parents, her sadness from losing them, and her anger about why they died. Even though these feelings felt strong and real, they were just her reactions. She could sense how the painful emotions of anger and sadness that seem so intractable were not her love for her parents, but were her reactions to their death. And through meditation, she was learning that she could do something about her reactions.

In a certain sense, these painful emotions were no more than passing fantasies, fleeting moments. And yet, even though they were impermanent, for that moment when they did exist, they were real, solid, and enduring enough to require that she find some personal resolution of them. Jennifer took a hard look at the nature of life itself, with its inevitable death. She had to recognize that her parents had been victims of their country's mistakes, and that she could do nothing to change that now. She learned to accept her grief as a natural response, and in its acceptance, she found the feelings comforting and even helpful.

She discovered ways to celebrate the lives of those who passed, including her parents. She started a garden in her backyard, since her mother had loved gardening, as a way of honoring her mother's memory. We discussed how gardening could be done as a Zen art. She experienced her time spent gardening mindfully. She particularly enjoyed being able to nurture growth. She observed the natural opening and closing of flowers, the living and dying of plants as they passed through the seasons of their lifespan, perennials with their inevitable return, and annuals with their birth-death cycle. She found comfort in nature's order of eternal recurrence. Increasingly, the garden became a hub for her heart, not just the kitchen. As she stood in the midst of the flowers and plants, she experienced empty moments of joy and peace. As Jennifer's tensions eased, the pounds began to shed. She found that now she felt differently about life and death. And with that change, she fully embraced and enjoyed her life.

Insights are sometimes outside the range of conscious thought. Reaching for them rationally, we miss them. Meditation stimulates irrational, unconscious processes. You initiate the process by your meditation practice. As it begins to unfold, the formless takes form. You can bring a profound transformation on a deep existential level. Once felt, change happens. Then, all our useful therapeutic methods become easier to implement. Attitudes shift in healthier directions, behaviors become more optimal, and people find deeper happiness than they have ever known.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEDITATION

What are the psychological factors involved in meditation? Researchers have investigated the effects of meditation on attention and emotions, two key psychological factors so crucial for psychotherapy. You may want to refer back to the sections that follow after you have read Part II, where you can learn more about meditation and try doing it. We encourage you to keep referring back to your own experience, because this is where verification of many of these psychological principles is found.

Meditation as Special Qualities of Attention

Researchers (K. W. Brown & Gordon, 2009) have pointed out that meditation can be characterized as the turning of sustained attention toward an object. The quality of this attention is sometimes referred to as bare attention, meaning that it is not intertwined with abstract thoughts about the past or future or engaged in judgments and assessments about the quality of the attention. Researchers have also called this kind of attention meta-attention (Kornfeld, 1993) because, in a sense, it is attention to attention. In fact, mindfulness instructions direct practitioners to keep bringing awareness back to the present moment, and reflect on attention while attending, thus giving it a meta quality.

The focal point for attention can be narrow, as when attention is directed to breathing or to body sensations. It can also be broad, sometimes referred to as open monitoring, as in mindfulness, where attention is maintained on whatever is occurring in the present moment. Mindful attention is free to move to whatever emerges, and this skill, allowing attention to move flexibly, is a hallmark of mental health. When people are suffering from problems, attention often becomes stuck in redundant patterns of thought and emotion, out of step with what is actually happening, and thus unable to respond to the potential for something new that might be needed to solve the problem.

In both of these forms, attention is directed to something. But Zen includes another kind of meditation, also found in Daoism and Transcendental Meditation, a kind of attention that is directed to nothing—the empty moment without thought. This meditation is practiced by first noticing any objects that appear in the stream of consciousness, and then, letting them go. Usually, we are accustomed to thinking about something. Our consciousness is filled with thoughts, feelings, and sensations, along with our secondary interpretations and concepts about them. But the ability to focus on nothing can also be developed with time and practice if practiced correctly. We have had many clients tell us how surprised and pleased they were that they were able to learn these skills and sustain quiet moments without thought.

All three forms of meditation have healing benefits, as this chapter shows. Chapter 2 on neuroscience describes how these different ways of directing attention correlate with different patterns of brain activation. Each of these methods gives you a unique ability to work with your own consciousness, an invaluable skill for bringing therapeutic change.

Psychology of Emotions and How Meditation Affects Them

One of our mentors, psychotherapy researcher Jerome D. Frank (1909–2005), said that psychotherapy takes place in the realm of meanings. We would add that psychotherapy also takes place in the realm of emotions and the meanings we give to them. In general, emotions can be thought to involve an elaborate signaling system, tuned both to the external world and to our internal experience. The evolutionary theory of emotions is that they are important for our survival. We have automatic reactions to situations that are threatening to us, which bring automatic responses of fear, sadness, anger, or disgust that move us to action for self-preservation (Williams, 2010). This evolutionary theory gives us a helpful partial picture, but it does not explain the human capacity for symbolic processing that allows us to assess the level of threat and reinterpret the situation more realistically.

Labeling Emotions

Researchers have p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Research and Efficacy
• Part II: What Is Zen?
• Part III: Overcoming Clients’ Suffering
• Part IV: Facilitating Therapists
• Conclusion: Living Life as an Art
• Appendix: A Quick Tour Through the Brain
• References
• Index