Already Free

I don't remember how I heard about Bruce Tift, but I've long been interested in the intersection contained in his book's subtitle, "Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation".  Tift is both a practicing individual and couples therapist, as well as a long time student of Chögyam Trungpa's Vajrayna Buddhism, so I imagined he would be drawing parallels between the two approaches.  Since we've already seen a couple of books that discuss psychotherapy almost as if it were a spiritual path in its own right, one that the authors seem to take as almost perfectly parallel to Buddhism, I was a bit surprised when Tift began his discussion by suggesting that perhaps the two cannot be unified.  

While it sounds provocative at first, Tift hardly thinks that Buddhism and psychotherapy are incompatible.  What he wants to point out is that they have distinctly different aims.  Very roughly speaking, psychotherapy aims to give you a better, more adult, self, while Buddhism aims to let go of the self entirely.  Tift thinks that both the "developmental view" of psychotherapy and the "fruitional view" of Buddhism are valuable and can be effectively pursued in sequence or in alternation, but he wants to first emphasize how these different paths with different aims.  Rather than merging the two, his conception of their relationship actually reminded me more of Tucker's mantra "process when you can, content when you have to".  If we are able to step back and see the process by which our sense of self and its problems arise and pass away, then these phenomena suddenly become much less sticky and problematic just through the opening of this space of Awareness.  However, we are not always able to do this, and in these cases, we need to work directly with the problematic content to try and uncover exactly where the problem lies.  In the book, Tift mostly treats the relationship between the two approaches as a sequence of development.  He outlines a map that moves from a pre-personal phase through personal and interpersonal phases before culminating in the nonpersonal.  But it would probably be a mistake to interpret the map as exclusively linear, and if we recognize that we are all still in the pre-personal phase with some things some of the time, the whole schema may not different substantially from process when you can, content when you have to.

Naturally, the book contains much more than this simple thesis about the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy.  In truth, it's more of a dharma book that you value for its many little nuggets of insight than a traditional non-fiction book that you value for its information.  Which perhaps somewhat excuses the fact that it felt a bit repetitive and could have easily been half as long.  Some of the things that will most stick with me are simple but powerful ideas that Tift repeated many times -- don't be aggressive towards your experience, don't try to make it change, don't look for the source of problems outside yourself but try to uncover an internal fear or need that converts an experience into a problem.  All these fit well with my current practice of expanding the scope of receptive awareness to include and even love more and more unwanted and disturbing (in the sense of disequilibrating) content.  

The other bit of the book I found particularly useful were the two chapters devoted to Tift's reflections on how our intimate relationships can be powerful vehicles for waking up.  For a couples therapist, he presents a surprising view of relationships as fundamentally disturbing.  These are encounters where we find our buttons pushed hard and repeatedly, which, if we let go of the idea that the aim of intimacy is a harmonious calm, makes it the perfect place to apply our spiritual practices.  In fact, Tift almost treats being part of a couple as a form of exposure therapy -- through it we widen our tolerance for feeling anxious, misunderstood, suffocated, and alone (as well as sometimes delighted and comforted).  This seems like a powerful reorientation to what's 'problematic' in our lives.  Take my wife ... please.  If she doesn't kill me, she'll make me stronger!  Just kidding honey.