The Courage to Be Present

Ancient wisdom from Buddhism for today's therapists and clients.

by Karen Kissel Wegela, Ph.D.

My Mindfulness Practice Has Gotten Boring! What Happened To The Good Feelings?

Both as a meditation instructor and as a psychotherapist, I've had people tell me that mindfulness practice appears to work for awhile, and then nothing seems to be happening. They wonder if they are doing something wrong in their practice or if there's something wrong with them personally. The same questions may also arise for my clients with respect to their experience in therapy. Read More

Meditation: Practice in Not Knowing

I've been working in my psychotherapy practice lately with a woman, "Kathryn," who is trying to sort out what to do about her marriage. While she is committed to her husband, "Ray," she is also feeling trapped and unhappy. Over the years, they have seen several couples counselors, but it hadn't helped very much. Part of what's happening is that Kathryn really doesn't know wha Read More

Why Don't I Practice Mindfulness Meditation When I Know It's a Good idea?

"I know that practicing mindfulness meditation is a good idea, but I just don't seem to get around to it." Read More

Untapped Assets: The Hidden Potential in MindLESSness

All of us fall into mindless behaviors: fingernail-biting, hair twirling, day-dreaming, TV watching, computer games, and many more. I think we all know that these activities do not generally help us to become more mindful. Surprisingly, these very same mindlessness practices can potentially help us to become mindful if we know how to use them that way. Read More

The Most Important Moment in Meditation

The issue isn't whether we get distracted when we meditate. What matters is what we do when we notice. Read More

Taking a Fresh Start

One thing that I have learned from my meditation practice is how to "take a fresh start." It seems like a simple thing to do, yet I have found that it can have a profound effect not only on my meditation practice, but also on the rest of my life. We can always take a fresh start. Read More

Working Mindfully with Anxiety

A Buddhist-based mindfulness approach to working with anxiety suggests a couple of things. First, of course, if there's an easy way to relieve one's anxiety-a way that doesn't involve masking it or just distracting oneself-that should be used. The second approach is to work with anxiety by bringing mindfulness to our actual experience. For most of us, this feels counter-intuitive. We want to get rid of our anxiety, not get to know it better! Read More

Inter-Connection: "Exchange" Goes Both Ways

When you're feeling upset and in need of some company, who do you want to be with? Sometimes when I feel troubled, I choose to be with someone who can offer me wise counsel. Other times I pick someone who can help me figure things out for myself. I find, though, that most of the time when I feel unsettled, anxious or worried, I want to be with someone who just feels good to be around. Read More

"Exchange": Whose Feelings Are These?

Have you ever had an experience when you seemed actually to feel what another person was feeling? Maybe you were with someone sad, and you began to feel sad. Or you were listening to someone who was angry and you began to get angry even though what they were talking about didn't seem to you to be worth getting upset about. Read More

Finding Balance in Mindfulness: The Technique of "Touch & Go"

In mindfulness practice both "on the cushion" and in the rest of our lives, how can we find a balance between the extremes of too earnestly concentrating on (or even getting stuck in) our experience and too casually letting things go? It is valuable and important to learn both how to touch into our experience and also how to let it go again. Read More

Mindfulness and Self-Acceptance

In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness and awareness practices lead to knowing ourselves really well. At the same time, this self-awareness can lead to unconditionally accepting ourselves just as we are. Read More

Practicing Mindfulness Without Meditating

As a Contemplative Psychotherapist, one who bases my psychotherapy practice on the Buddhist understanding of mind, I am especially interested in helping my clients to develop mindfulness. While the most direct way to cultivate mindfulness is the sitting practice of mindfulness-awareness meditation, not everyone is ready for, or interested in, doing that. Read More

Should Therapists Teach their Clients to Meditate?

The question of whether therapists should teach their clients how to meditate is not as simple as it might seem. On the one hand, of course we'd like to share this powerful and practical technique with others who are suffering, but on the other hand lies the question of the appropriateness of therapists serving as meditation instructors to their clients. Read More

How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Cultivating mindfulness is the key to overcoming suffering and recognizing natural wisdom: both our own and others'. How do we go about it? Read More

A Gradual Path to Discovering Our Brilliant Sanity

The first three Noble Truths taught by the Buddha parallel the ancient Indian medical model of diagnosis, etiology, and prognosis. With the fourth Noble Truth, the last one, we come at last to the treatment. What did the Buddha prescribe? Read More

Ending Suffering: Tuning into the Present Moment

As we have seen, most of the time we are not in touch with our fundamentally awake, compassionate and open qualities: our “brilliant sanity.” Instead, we are apt to withdraw into a narrow sense of ourselves, preferring the familiar to the unknown. Read More

A Case of Mistaken Identity

In Contemplative Psychotherapy, we base our work on the idea of brilliant sanity. We have glimpses of our brilliant sanity quite often, but much of the time we turn away from it. Read More

Losing Touch with Brilliant Sanity

In Buddhist psychology we are taught that are basic nature is open, wise, and compassionate. What prevents us from experiencing ourselves that way? Read More

Allowing Ourselves to Recognize Our Pain

If we are all potentially as wise, awake, and compassionate as the man who became known as the Buddha, why don't we experience ourselves that way? If our nature is "brilliant sanity," why are we often so confused, distressed, anxious, depressed, or angry? What gets in the way? Read More

The Example of the Buddha: Seeing for Ourselves

Contemplative Psychotherapists follow the example of the Buddha by beginning our training with looking into our own experiences before we try to help others look into their own. Read More

An Early Psychologist: The Buddha

Buddhist Psychology is based on the example and teachings of the man who came to be called "The Buddha." In many ways the teachings of the Buddha, known as "the dharma," sound more like psychology than what most of us think of as religion. Who was he; what was his story? Read More

Being "Brilliant Sanity"

When I first began to practice Buddhist mindfulness/awareness meditation, I was just beginning my work as a therapist. It seemed to me that there must be some way to combine what I was learning from my meditation practice with my work as a therapist, yet I didn't really see how to go about it. Should I have my clients meditate instead of going to therapy? Read More

Making Friends with Ourselves as We Already Are

According to Buddhist teachings, we do not need to change who we are. Most of us enter therapy or begin a mindfulness meditation practice because we believe that we need to be different, better, more of something, or less of something else. Of course, in one sense, that's right. We do want to feel better; we want to stop making ourselves miserable. Read More