background noise

Importance of both mindfulness and concentration

“Refusing to progress either on the path of concentration, by focusing the mind on a single object, or on the path of mindfulness, by moving from attention to content to attention to process, the meditator can be caught up in a fascination with psychological material without moving toward any resolution of conflict. Rorschach studies of experienced meditators showed no diminution of internal conflict, but only a marked “non-defensiveness in experiencing such conflicts” (Brown & Engler, 1986, p. 189), a rather paralyzing combination in someone who refuses either to seek therapeutic help in working through the conflict or to let go of the content of the conflict as demanded by the meditative path. Alternatively, there are those who find that meditation both reveals to them their need for therapeutic work and facilitates that work by decreasing their defensiveness. ”

— “Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective”, Dr. Mark Epstein M.D.

(Also clearly marks an importance of “letting go”, accepting “as is” is only the half of the deal  -df)

Mindfulness // Bare attention

“Preliminary practices of meditation, just like beginning psychoanalysis, require the meditator to take his or her own experience as the object of awareness. In Buddhist terms, the attentional strategy is called “bare attention,” while in psycho-analytic terms it is called “evenly suspended attention” or free association. Both require what Freud called the suspension of judgment and the giving of “impartial attention to everything there is to observe” (1909, p. 23). In Buddhist terms, bare attention is defined as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception” (Nyanaponika, 1962). In psychodynamic terms, this self-contemplation is defined as a therapeutic split (Engler, 1986) in the ego (Sterba, 1934), in which ego takes itself as object. As Freud commented in his New Introductory Lectures, We wish to make the ego the object of our study, our own ego. But how can that be done? The ego is the subject, par excellence: how can it become the object? There is no doubt, however, that it can. The ego can take itself as object; it can treat itself like any other object, observe itself, criticize itself, do Heaven knows what besides with itself…. The ego can, then, be split; … The parts can later on join up again. (Sterba, 1934, p. 80)”

— “Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective”, Dr. Mark Epstein M.D.