Bruce Tift - Psychotherapy, Relationships & Awakening
Nov 17, 2023
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Bruce Tift, a psychotherapist and author, discusses the relationship between psychotherapy and awakening, levels of psychological and spiritual maturity, understanding anxiety, the cycle of struggle, acceptance, codependent dynamics, and the practice of circling for intimacy and self-awareness.
Cultivating personal responsibility in couples therapy enables emotional closeness while maintaining individual integrity.
By developing a separate relationship with anxiety and embracing its uncertainty, we can navigate through it without being overwhelmed.
Awakening involves recognizing the fluidity of identity and embracing the paradox of being both separate and interdependent.
Deep dives
The Importance of Personal Responsibility in Couples Therapy
In couples therapy, a crucial starting point is personal responsibility. Many individuals come into adulthood with a tendency to look to their partner as the cause of their difficulties. By cultivating personal responsibility, couples can disentangle themselves from emotional fusion and codependency. This involves acknowledging that emotional reactivity is one's own responsibility and refraining from blaming the partner for one's pain. Personal responsibility allows individuals to be both connected and separate in the relationship, enhancing emotional closeness while maintaining individual integrity. Through this process, unresolved issues can be brought to the surface and worked through in an intimate relationship, leading to personal growth and transformation.
Navigating Anxiety: Understanding its Nature and Cultivating Mindfulness
Anxiety is a natural part of being human, arising as a response to potential threats. While fear is a response to immediate danger, anxiety revolves around potential dangers. Rather than seeking definite resolutions or explanations, it is beneficial to train ourselves to experience anxiety as it is, without attaching explanations or making it into a story. Cultivating mindfulness and grounding ourselves in bodily sensations can help us step out of our identification with anxiety and develop a separate relationship with it. This allows us to embrace the uncertainty and discomfort of anxiety without being overwhelmed by it.
The Paradox of Awakening: Embracing Non-Duality and the Fluidity of Identity
Awakening and liberation are often associated with seeing through the illusion of separation. While popular spirituality tends to emphasize the idea of oneness, a deeper understanding of non-duality reveals the fluidity of identity rather than a fixed notion of unity. Non-duality is not about oneness, but rather the absence of a fixed self. It is the recognition that we are both separate and interdependent, constantly shifting and evolving. Embracing this paradox requires direct experience and an exploration of the fluid and dynamic nature of our identity, rather than clinging to the concept of an unified self.
The Importance of Sensation Level Experience and Impermanence
Focusing on immediate sensation level experiences helps in disidentifying with stories and emotions, leading to a deeper understanding of impermanence. By strengthening the practice of deconstruction, one can recognize the absence of permanent sensations. Many people pretend to feel certain emotions like shame or guilt in order to maintain their identity dramas. However, staying at the sensation level reveals that the actual damage or harm is often nonexistent. Practicing embodiment and somatic experiences can help in recognizing and navigating through subtle sensations and interpretations.
Struggle as a Pretense to Avoiding Deep Emotional Experiences
Struggle can be a complex way of pretending to deal with life without actually doing so. Our struggles often reflect issues we have within ourselves rather than with our partners or external circumstances. If we grew up learning that being dependent is not smart, we may engage in a struggle to give and receive love, but deep down, we fear getting hurt or abandoned. The struggle becomes a stable psychic structure maintaining a reenactment pattern that ensures we never really get what we long for. Recognizing and investigating the underlying sensations and emotions allows us to let go of the struggle and open ourselves to a more authentic experience of relationships and life.
Bruce Tift is a psychotherapist, author, and long-time meditation practitioner. As a therapist he’s done his rounds – working in a psychiatric ward, social services, and maintaining a private practice since 1979. As a teacher, he taught at Naropa University for twenty-five years and lectured all throughout the world. He is also a Vajrayana Buddhism practitioner with over 40 years of practice under his belt. On his journey he has been fortunate enough to be a student of Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche and to meet a number of other realized teachers. He is the author of “Already Free” a fascinating book that explores the relationship between Psychotherapy and awakening. In this episode, we speak about the irresolvable paradox of relationship, what it means to be psychospiritually mature, stepping out of identification through immediate sensation, Individual vs couples therapy, nonduality & the Vajrayana view, and a healthier approach to awakening & liberation.
🔗 [Links & resources] 🔗
Bruce’s personal site - https://www.brucetift.com/ Already Free by Bruce Tift - https://www.amazon.com/Already-Free-Buddhism-Psychotherapy-Liberation/dp/1622034112 Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki - https://www.artemzen.com/book/zen-mind-beginners-mind-by-shunryu-suzuki/ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa What is Circling? - https://www.artemzen.com/what-is-circling/
📝 [Show notes] 📝
0:00 - Introduction 2:10 - The pivotal events that put Bruce on the path 6:32 - The relationship between psychotherapy (healing) and awakening 13:01 - Bruce pulls the chair out from beneath me 16:58 - The irresolvable paradox of relationship 18:10 - Is it possible to heal and develop psychologically without psychotherapy? 19:34 - What does it mean to be psychospiritually mature? 23:30 - Holding developmental models lightly 25:55 - Learning to experience story-free anxiety 35:23 - Stepping out identification through immediate sensation 42:30 - Why struggle is a way not to deal with our lives 53:43 - Individual vs Couples Therapy (navigating connection & separateness ) 1:06:29 - Using Circling/Relatefulness practice to understand your emotions and develop intimacy 1:10:29 - Diving into non-duality and the Vajrayana view 1:18:08 - A healthier view of awakening & liberation 1:26:11 - The hard problem of consciousness
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