Contemplative Psychotherapy

Contemplative psychotherapy is an approach to psychotherapy that incorporates personal contemplative practices and insights informed by the spiritual tradition of Buddhism, in which the therapist brings qualities of mindfulness and compassion to the therapeutic relationship to help clients access their own sense of fundamental goodness and natural wisdom. The practice emerged from a dialogue between the Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Western psychologists and psychiatrists, leading to the establishment of the Contemplative Psychotherapy Department at Naropa University in 1978, founded by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Edward M. Podvoll, a student of Trungpa. It draws two primary influences, the wisdom tradition of Buddhism and the clinical traditions of Western psychology, particularly the humanistic school: from Buddhism it takes mindfulness and awareness meditation and an account of how the mind functions in both sanity and confusion, and from Western psychology it takes the investigation of human developmental stages, a precise language for discussing mental disturbance, and the intimate, client-centered approach of psychotherapy itself. Its foundational teaching is the concept of "brilliant sanity," the assertion that everyone possesses an innate dignity and wisdom that a practitioner is trained to recognize even within confused or distorted states of mind and to nurture in both themselves and their clients.