Bruce Tift on Freedom, Open Mind, Psychotherapy, Buddhism, and Neurosis

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/ 

Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Mu_Podcast

Donations: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/lucasperry

Video episode: https://youtu.be/cESdYTKz0dM

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry


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