Awakening in buddhism and psychotherapy. Milan, 2012

A talk for Psychotherapists

Noûs, Scuola di Specializzazione in Psicoterapia Cognitivo-Costruttivista, Milan

9 November 2012

James Low

Transcribed by Lingkhempa K. Dorje
Edited by James Low
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Excerpts
…Thoughts, feelings and sensations have no energy of their own. They are like balloons. They arrive inflated with the unpredictable creativity of the winds of the open infinite hospitality of the ground of being. These arisings are already on the point of deflation, the point of vanishing, when we become conscious of them. If we don’t blow more air into these balloons they won’t float and fly, but generally when a thought comes we breathe our life-force into it, inflating it with our sense of its meaning, value and function…

…You cannot make solid ground in this world; it is a flow that never ends, there is no full stop. Life is just comma, after comma, after comma. Experience is movement. If you try to stop the river of experience you will only get trouble. If you want something stable and reliable you have to get to know your own awareness…

…I remember when I was a teenager saying something to my mother about how she was with my father. She said, “James, what happens between your father and me is something you can never know because I am not married to your father. I am married to my husband. You call my husband ‘father’ but for me he is my husband and he is married to his wife. I am his wife but you call me ‘mother.’ These stories don’t meet, so you will never know.”  That was very helpful to me…