Are you interested in joining the Two Year Online Buddhist Psychology diploma Programme
Yes
What Buddhist sangha, if any, do you belong to? If none, write "none".
Triratna
Regarding Global Sangha, do you
Wish to receive GS Newsletter & Podcasts
Your history with Buddhism/Psychology & interest in this network:
I am 65, and have been a Buddhist in various ways since my 20's. I lived and worked in the communities and businesses associated with Sangharakshita's Triratna Community (previously the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order). I broke off all connection with Triratna in the late 80s, but about five years reconnected with old friends from my twenties and have also rejoined their ordination request program. This has led to a general re-engagement with that tradition - though I still have my criticisms. For many years I worked in inpatient and community mental health services as an Occupational Therapist. Now, in retirement, I am drawn to writing on themes of Buddhist psychology and have a website at https://mandala-of-love.com/. I am very engaged by the five skandhas and Five Wisdoms, and the corresponding ideas in the work of Carl Jung. While I love Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin, and have studied them deeply, I find that I need a psychology that is unapologetic about the existence of a transcendental or dharmic order in the universe and in Consciousness - a dharmakāya or dharmadhātu, if you will. While I am not very familiar with traditional Pure Land Buddhism, I feel totally in alignment with the practical and philosophic emphasis of other-power - and keenly aware that this is often missed or misconstrued in Western approaches. Indeed, it was the self-power emphasis of the Theravada (and the correspondingly fierce and overly heroic framing of Mahayāna and Vajrayāna) that led to my disillusionment with the FWBO in my late twenties.
My daily meditation practice is a form of the brahmavihāras. I have developed a very personal form of engagement with those practices, which is based on the mandala of the ten archetypal Buddhas. It is most definitely an other-power practice. It begins with a time of resting in the love of Amitabha, and then cycles through the devotion-receptive moods of the 'self-regarding' brahmavihāras - resting 'in' the benevolent transcendental reality, however tentatively. I then move on to the 'other-regarding' aspects - and to a sense of resting 'as' the benevolent transcendental reality, to the extent that I can. To be clear, I should emphasise that it is a humble, undramatic, and non-heroic practice. It is very similar to Eugene Gendlin's practice of resting 'as' the clear space - but uses the mandala framework as a way of getting consistently, in a systematic way, and to a place mental and emotional stability.
I have, in the past, also been a passionate student of Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, and find that this sits very well within a Buddhist psychological understanding. Although I am not an accredited teacher, I have explored these approaches deeply and have taught both NVC and Gendlin's 'Focusing' self-empathy practice, in a small way, and have explored the connection between these two models.
