Bruce Tift is a licensed Psychotherapist and the author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. He is a long-time practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Bruce's website: https://www.brucetift.com/
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Video episode: https://youtu.be/cESdYTKz0dM
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
3:09 What is freedom?
4:39 What is conscious participation in open awareness?
6:47 Is this the fruitional view?
9:09 The western therapeutic perspective of healing core wounds
11:18 How do the fruitonal view and the developmental view relate?
14:31 Commiting to experience sense of problem without trying to resolve it
19:12 The path of Vajrayana Buddhism
29:42 Belief is a substitute for groundlessness
34:21 I give myself permission to never experience what I most want in life
38:13 What is non-divided reality?
43:29 Freedom is not synonymous with positive feelings
47:47 Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity
51:35 Falling through the air with no parachute
52:25 Challenging our identification with hope
55:17 Bruce’s gradual shift towards freedom
58:00 Being profoundly limited
1:03:03 Asking if what you most want is available right now
1:04:44 One taste
1:05:54 Impermanence and dependent origination
1:10:27 Enlightenment
1:13:24 Trying to experience no-self can be motivated by fundamental aggression to experience
1:15:04 Maintaining a center through problem maintaining
1:18:53 The function of neurosis
1:26:00 What’s fundamentally disturbing about our experience?
1:33:05 How does groundlessness fit into freedom and nirvana?
1:34:33 Do we know anything?
1:39:05 What does it mean to be “Already Free?”
1:43:24 Neurosis is a clever way to pretend to ourselves we’re addressing our life while guaranteeing nothing happens
1:47:08 What’s always available?
1:48:08 Final words from Bruce
1:50:30 Outro
