Contemplative Therapy and Meditation
This blog post was written by Orrin Johnson, MA, LPC. Orrin works with adults of all backgrounds and identities, with an emphasis on mindfulness and the healing power of the therapeutic relationship.
What is contemplative therapy, and how does it relate to meditation, or the practice of “knowing the self?”
Contemplative means to be curious about your inner world. Your inner life is highly personal; no one besides yourself knows what it is like to be you. No teacher, therapist, parent, or life coach ultimately knows better what you want, and what you care about, more than your own self. Therefore the role of the contemplative therapist is to facilitate and encourage this self-knowing, rather than coming from an expert position of advice giving. The contemplative therapist has done to some degree their own inner self-work. This consists of meditation and contemplative mindfulness practices that cultivate awareness of fixed worldviews or assumptions about the human experience, and the resulting subtle and gross agendas that manifest to “help” others align to those views. Instead the path of individual self-discovery, familiarity with the mind, and its myriad expressions are valued more than any self-help strategy.
Meditation is the practice of being with yourself. It is often misunderstood as a practice of obtaining and sustaining an altered state of awareness, but it is more basic and grounded than that.
Meditation is more akin to a scientific process, often comparable to going to the gym to train muscles. In meditation you are training the muscles of the mind, to come back from dwelling in troubling past and future thoughts. The mind has a natural ability to “settle,” or come back from wandering. This ability to “come back,” or reel in your attention, is a muscle that you can train over time, giving you more flexibility and freedom in relation to your thoughts and emotions. The practice of meditation and experimenting with labeling thoughts instead of immediately identifying with them creates natural spaciousness in the mind, which is an experience akin to joy. This joy of the mind at rest is not an emotional experience like being happy, but is marked by peacefulness, clarity, and non-fixation.
People who engage with meditation and contemplative therapy are encouraged to develop a spirit of curiosity, and suspend assumptions about who you are in relation to your thinking mind as you spend more time “researching” and getting to know your inner experience and the nature of awareness. “Coming back to the present moment” is a key instruction or reference point for breaking habitual thought cycles and identifying with disturbing emotions. In the present moment of awareness one finds that there is no dwelling in the past or future, and in this state of pure being there is a goodness or simple joy that is accessible at all times. This familiarity or accessibility of the natural ability of the mind to “settle” or relax into its own place is what is cultivated over time in meditation, allowing the practitioner to flash on their awareness throughout their daily lives, diminishing the mental anguish or suffering that comes from following habitual thinking patterns.
Meditation is the art of becoming familiar with the mind's myriad emotional and intellectual expressions, as well as its natural ability to rest in its own nature. Meditation is the space in which your principal tool of observing and engaging with the world shines its light on itself, and the nature of thought and your relationship to your inner world is contemplated and familiarized. The process of thoughts arising, abiding, and departing is observed again and again, creating more distance or space from personally identifying with them, which often manifests as lows and highs. When those lows and highs become extreme, in clinical language we label that as depression and anxiety.
Most if not all humans experience episodes of anxiety and depression in their lives. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems play an important role in keeping us safe. At the same time they can be “hardwired,” or too tight, due to having experienced past trauma or conditioning where the nervous system becomes hyper-vigilant, or despondent. Similar to meditation’s key instruction of “not too tight, not too loose,” extreme states of anxiety and depression are not considered the enemy or something to get rid of, but instead the focus shifts to understanding their origins, primary functions, how they become excessive, and methods to bring them into balance. Through gaining insight into how your system organizes and functions, the entire perspective on what anxiety and depression are, what your relationship to pain and suffering is, can shift in surprising ways. Through cultivating mindfulness in meditation and your daily life, it is possible to learn how to access the natural joy of the mind at rest in the present moment of awareness.
In contemplative therapy there are many parallels to the practice of meditation, although the practice of meditation itself may or may not be part of a client’s life or therapeutic path. Focusing awareness on your inner experience is what leads to insight, the foundation of making changes in your life and deepening your perspective. The role of the contemplative therapist is partially to support and encourage this ability to cultivate insight, and to model this in relationship. Bringing attention to the therapeutic relationship itself is used as a way to ground in the present moment, as well as becoming curious about how we experience our body and sensations, and the assumptions/narratives we unconsciously attribute to these body experiences.
The invitation in contemplative therapy and in meditation is to cultivate the habit of opening your mind and senses to what is, noticing the mental and physical habits and patterns that increase anguish in an outdated or ill-guided attempt to reduce suffering. I have seen incredible transformations when people begin to apply this spirit of awareness in their lives, whether they practice a formal meditation or not. The therapeutic session in a sense represents the meditation session regardless, where client and therapist together are becoming more familiar with our personal relationship to our minds, how we think, interpret, and view our relationship to ourselves and others. This intention is established in the therapeutic container, and heightened through the power of two individuals meeting in the spirit of paying attention to their inner experience, paying attention to the experience of being in relationship with others, and bringing an open wonder to the experience of the mind itself.
