Source:
https://www.academia.edu/26291242/The_Integrated_Heart_of_Cultural_and_Mindfulness_Meditation_Practice_in_Existential_Phenomenology_and_Humanistic_Psychotherapy CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) is what introduced me to meditation and mindfulness, and thus I find this analysis of the interplay between existential phenomenology and third wave CBT of interest.
Irvin Yalom, whose work is referenced here, was my first study of Existentialism.
Mediation is becoming part of our Australian culture. What role does it play? What form does it take? From where did it emerge?
I would be interested to hear your personal interactions with meditation. I wish to get a sense of how meditation and mindfulness exist in our culture, so that I can understand where it is heading. Looking at the place of mindfullness and meditation in our our culture may actually form part of my honours study.
The paper looks at Heidegger among others (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Rogers), from a therapy development perspective. It particularly focuses on the movement from the existential individualisation towards socio-cultural awareness. Obviously a therapy cannot properly treat an individual without reference to the phenomenon of the sociocultural world in which humans are imbedded. A human is not so individualised that culture can be discarded; think of the 'they' of Heidegger.
A therapy should not be reductive. How can it be individual but not a-cultural, because cultural is not fundamentally individual.
"Existential phenomenology and humanistic psychology (PHP) approaches have, after all, distinctively favoured individualized service to clients as whole situated persons in contrast to reductive views that client suffering is better addressed as decontextualized signs or parts that are to be served by symptom-based approaches to care. "
The writers are rather poetic at times, which I enjoy;
"…culturally situated experiences carried forward in the life-giving breath of countless present moments."
"Indeed, it is from the affirming, heart-rich, and sky-drenched earthiness of PHP’s mindfully meditative experiential perspectives that individual sociocultural experiences are safeguarded from being reduced to pre-judged categories of understanding or dominant race-based hierarchies of value. "
Third Wave Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
CBT lacks the integration of vipassana with bare mindfulness of the present. CBT lacks the integration of meditative insight into mindfulness, where insight can be understood as the exact thing philosophy aims for, wisdom.
The word meditation, as an English word, is used in association with philosophy, e.g. Meditations on first philosophy.
It is important to remember that 'meditation' is not Buddhist, it is an English translation of a Pali term (sati), or perhaps more exactly a catch all for multiple Buddhist terms (such as anapanasati and vipassana, translated respectively as breathing meditation and insight meditation).
Task: look at the history of the word 'meditation'.
In any case, meditation as it has entered our culture through CBT is bare. I have felt this bareness, which is why I left CBT meditation for Buddhist meditation. It should be noted that CBT plays a huge role in our society, as any person who has fallen from the norm, or otherwise has mental health issues, and has thus come under the care of a psychologist or psychiatrist, has most likely been introduced to CBT, and thus bare mindfulness meditation.
Which again raises the question, what introduction have you dear reader had to mindfulness?
" In a general sense, it is the integration of meditative experiential inquiry with the bare awareness of mindfulness that is relatively under articulated by the CBT third wave, but comparatively well developed in various existential phenomenological and humanistic core texts. "
"As Martin Lumpkin (2014) has alternatively observed, “When reading [Rogers] today, it is clear that he was writing from the perspectives and values of mindfulness before it was coined as a term” (p. 148)."
When was the word mindfulness coined? The term is not old? How were we mindful before we thought of being mindful?
"In comparison to CBT third wave mindfulness-based approaches, the empathic acceptance and nondirective stance of the PCT therapist allows for a relational experience of mindfulness in contrast to CBT third wave skill development through the techniques of guided mindfulness exercises or assigned mindfulness practices."
In CBT mindfulness always becomes an exercise, not a way of being (a way of dwelling).
"Mindfulness can be viewed as intrinsically phenomenological," which is why my study of phenomenology and my practise of Buddhism have developed in tandem.
'Husserl’s epoché requires abstention from viewing phenomena through the natural attitude biases and filters of personal, conventionally patterned, or scientific assumptions and judgments.'
A nice summery of phenomenological reduction. This can also be used to explain why Descartes was not radical enough in his reduction, he viewed phenomenon through a scholastic (? I don't concretely understand the term) and geometrical, mathematical and logical framework/pattern.
"At the same time, the MMHEP therapist may also want to simply notice the client’s style of being and communicating during sessions."
I like the term 'style of being'; It is linked to style of communicating, which is a commonly understood concept. My thoughts jump to the essence of technology as a determining factor for a specific style of being. I would say that my style of being has developed to be very meditative, letting be and letting go, abandoning my will to the self-stream of causes and conditions (which means not 'fighting', resisting or attaching). I can perhaps expand on what letting go means another day (the key is it is in no way resigned, nihilistic or negating).
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