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Book Review: Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius.

If you are like me, you will be pretty suspicious of anything that sounds a bit cranky. Primal scream therapy, rebirthing and neuro linguistic programming all fall into that camp for me. But what about meditation?

Over the last decade what is interesting has been the way evidence-based therapies have taken meditation on board. It is as if no self-respecting new treatment approach can afford to ignore it. There is good reason for this; the evidence shows meditation is really helpful in conditions as diverse as borderline personality disorder to depression, and anxiety to chronic pain.

What most of these treatment approaches do, of course, is separate meditation from its Buddhist cultural heritage. It is as if by dropping the ‘religion’, it makes meditation more palatable to the Western practitioner/client. Although this is understandable, in a way it's a shame. Buddhism's raison d'être is the alleviation of human suffering, and has developed sophisticated psychological models of how to do just that.

What is great about this book is that Hanson and Mendius don't drop the Buddhist heritage of meditation. Neither do they drop the scientific method. In fact Hanson and Mendius are deeply immersed in brain science, Rick Hanson as a neuropsychologist, and Richard Mendius as a neurologist. They draw on their scientific understanding of the brain to integrate Western science with Buddhist psychology.

This book isn't a hard read though. The authors skilfully explain the intricate workings of the brain in straightforward language. If you are interested in the relationship between brain science and Buddhism and meditation, but don't want something too taxing, this is the primer for you.

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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What is Happiness?

"Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them."

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

 

 

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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About This Blog

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The Courage of Compassion.

Anger is a cheap emotion. We don't have to work hard in order to get angry, it just manifests itself, almost automatically. Of course there is nothing wrong, as such, with anger. As an animal, it is our first line of defence against attack. But for far too many of us, our mental lives become clouded by an almost constant angry emotional tone. It is as if we are constantly angry at just about everybody almost all of the time.

For men, so it seems, anger can be a particular problem. Some men feel that anger is the only emotion they are allowed to express. All negative emotions, like anxiety, fear, dread, doubt, jealousy, insecurity, etc, get expressed as anger. As boys many men also had angry fathers. We learned that to be a man we had to be angry, and even follow through on our anger, into aggression and violence.

Compassion, on the other hand, is an expensive emotion. It rarely appears spontaneously. In fact we need to work hard to develop compassion for others. We cannot take it for granted. This is especially the case if we are caught up in our anger almost all of the time. In fact cultivating compassion, a sympathetic understanding of another person's situation, allows other more refined emotions to develop, like care, love and even joy.

For some men, those that believe that to be a man means being angry, developing compassion and goodwill towards others is itself a threat to who they think they are. But if you are serious about leaving your angry life behind, this is what you need to do. When anger arises, use this as a cue to understand, compassionately, the other person's point of view. Over time your anger will get transformed, and your perspective on the world will become improved, much happier and calmer.

To turn from anger to compassion is a bold step. It requires effort, yes, but it requires much more than that. It requires courage. The courage to leave behind a very powerful, but unhelpful, view of what it means to be a man. For some men it is the most courageous thing they will ever choose to do.

 

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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About This Blog

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We Move Furthest by Standing Still.

Most of us have an idea of the kind of person we would like to become. We want to be happier, more successful, have great relationships, etc. There is nothing wrong with having goals in life; the problem is usually in following through on them. It is as if every effort to change is greeted by an equal and opposite resistance to doing anything about it.

We are all familiar with this phenomenon. We resolved to lose weight, but despite our best intentions, we find ourselves eating just as much as we did before, and our attempts exercise never advanced further than a good idea.

It is as if we 100% want to change, and 100% don't want to change. In therapy, it is important to understand the nature of our resistance. Even people who are deeply unhappy seem to lack the motivation to get out of it.

One of the problems is the goal driven nature of the change we want to make. We become so fixated with what we want, we lose touch with where we actually are.  Of course all journeys start from where we are, but few of us take time to really understand where we are starting from. We may have low self-esteem, for example, but spend all of our time running from our experience, rather than staying with it.

At one level this is understandable; we don't like to stay with difficult feelings. So we focus on what will make us happy rather than understanding our unhappiness.

One of the paradoxes of personal growth is that if we abandon our goals and come back to our experience of ourselves in the moment, we stand to make the most progress. This means if we are depressed, being curious about our experience, staying with it, observing it, being it. Fully experiencing ourselves as a person who is doing depression right now.

The mind, of course, simply cannot remain still. Our awareness transforms our experience of who we are. We cannot help but change. We might not get the change we want, but we will get the change we need.

 

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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About This Blog

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