Beyond Happiness: Deepening the Dialogue between Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Mind Sciences

208 Pages·2008·1.137 MB·English

by  Gay Watson

BEYOND HAPPINESS

BEYOND HAPPINESS
DEEPENINg tHE DIAlOguE BEtwEEN
BuDDHISm, PSYcHOtHErAPY AND
tHE mIND ScIENcES
Gay Watson
KARNAC
First published in 2008 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright© 2008 Gay Watson
The rights of Gay Watson to be identified as the author of this work
have been asserted in accordance with §§77 and 78 of the Copyright
Design and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other
wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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A.C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-85575-404-1
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contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii
PREFACE ix
PART I: VIEW 1
CHAPTER ONE
View from within and without:
first and third person perspectives 3
CHAPTER TWO
The contemporary explanation: the mind sciences 15
CHAPTER THREE
Psychotherapy: explanation in action 31
CHAPTER FOuR
The earliest explanation: the Buddhist view 49
PART II: MEDITATION 61
Introduction 63
CHAPTER FIVE
Embodiment 67
v
vi BEYOND HAPPINESS
CHAPTER SIx
Emotion 81
CHAPTER SEVEN
Environment 97
CHAPTER EIGHT
Selves and non-selves: I, mine and views of self 109
PART III: ACTION 131
Introduction 133
CHAPTER NINE
Attention, receptivity and the feminine voice 135
CHAPTER TEN
Inconclusion: creativity, imagination and metaphor 147
APPENDIx 1
The enactive view 165
APPENDIx 2
The Mind and Life Institute and other resources 169
BIBLIOGRAPHY 177
IndEx 185
ABoUt tHe AUtHoR
Gay Watson, PhD, trained as a psychotherapist with the Karuna Insti-
tute of Core Process Psychotherapy, a Buddhist-inspired psychother-
apy. Concurrently she attained a first class honours degree followed
by a doctorate in the field of Buddhist Studies at the School of Ori-
ental and African Studies of London university. She is the author of
Resonance of Emptiness: A Buddhist Inspiration for a Contemporary Psy-
chotherapy (Routledge Curzon, 1998. 2001 pb.) and co-editor of The
Psychology of Awakening (uK: Rider, 1999; uSA: Samuel Weiser, 2001).
She is currently associated with the Karuna Institute and Sharpham
College of Buddhism and Contemporary Inquiry, and a member of
the editorial board of Contemporary Buddhism. She lives in Devon,
uK, and is a Trustee of the Dartington Hall Trust.
vii

PRefAce
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May they all be free from suffering and the causes of suf-
fering.
May they never be separate from the sacred happiness un-
tainted by suffering.
May they abide in great impartiality, free from attachment to
close ones and aversion to others.
* * *
I n this book I will try to open out the discussion between
Buddhist thought and psychotherapy and the new findings of
neuroscience in the context of our search for wellbeing. Buddhist
teachings are concerned with a way of living and engage most res-
onantly with practice rather than with theory, thus the conversa-
tion between Buddhism and psychotherapy has been a particularly
fruitful one for as long as dialogue has existed between Buddhist
and Western disciplines. In search of a way to happiness, Buddha
set out to explore our experience and in so doing presented what
may well be called the earliest “psychology”, an experiential explo-
ration of subjectivity. In the West, for much of the twentieth century,
ix