Meditation and Psychotherapy: A Professional Training Course for Integrating Mindfulness into Clinical Practice

by Tara Brach

Course

Apply the R.A.I.N. technique in your work with clients
• Utilize mindfulness meditation to clear blockages that prevent living fully
• Discuss basic concepts of Buddhist psychology
• Recognize aspirations and intentions that support awakening
• Practice a variety of different guided meditations
• Adapt specific mindfulness practices to individual client needs
• Integrate mindfulness into your personal and professional life
Learning How to Face Our Tangled Emotions and Release Our Limiting Beliefs

There are many skillful means that we can use to train ourselves and our clients to become aware, teaches Brach, a psychotherapist and meditator of more than 30 years. But they all lead to one essential Can I be here in this moment?

Using her R.A.I.N. technique, a four-part process that helps us learn how to stop running away from our tangled emotions and start to lovingly face them, we'll investigate and unblock the beliefs that cause suffering. Guiding us through meditations and practices on mindfulness, loving-kindness, forgiveness, allowing, and more, Brach shares key tools and expert insights for moving through this liberating process so that we can open and allow our lives to unfold, moment by moment.

"Mindfulness can strengthen our attention, awaken compassion and empathy, and expand our acceptance of our own inner states," teaches Brach. Meditation and Psychotherapy draws on the strengths of mindfulness meditation and the practice of modern therapeutic methods to help clear the emotional blocks holding us back.



R.A.I.N., a liberating four-step process for learning how to end the suffering caused by clinging to our emotions
• How we all can awaken from the trance of unworthiness using mindful awareness and lovingkindness
• The alchemy of self-compassion and how it can help in our relationships with others
• Why we don't have to believe our thoughts―the transformative power of self-inquiry
• "Touch and go," an approach for gently disarming the energy of trauma
• Tips for adapting practices for your individual client's needs
• A new model of psychotherapy that emphasizes the client/therapist relationship as an unfolding partnership
• More than eight hours of expert insights, practices, and tips for using mindfulness meditation and modern therapeutic methods to help untangle our difficult emotions

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction, Psychology, Social Work, Mental Health, Meditation

8 pages, Audio CD

First published February 28, 2011

About the author

Tara Brach is a leading western teacher of Buddhist meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening. She has practiced and taught meditation for over 40 years, with an emphasis on vipassana (mindfulness or insight) meditation. Tara is the senior teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. A clinical psychologist, Tara is the author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, True Refuge: Finding Peace & Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart and Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of R.A.I.N. (Viking, Dec. 31, 2019).

Tara is nationally known for her skill in weaving western psychological wisdom with a range of meditative practices. Her approach emphasizes compassion for oneself and others, mindful presence and the direct realization and embodiment of natural awareness.

Reviews

[Mary]

I'm no stranger to meditation. I have practiced it since my 20s and suggest it frequently when volunteering on a crisis hotline. However, this might be the first time I've had Buddhist concepts brought home to me in a way that doesn't flat-out frustrate me (sorry, Dalai Lama!). I took so much from this, both new and refreshed, and I felt it to be an incredible resource for people in the healing arts.

[Lisa Butterworth]

in some way, it's all the same stuff, excerpt somehow it's also not. I'm not sure what magic Tara Brach taps into, but somehow she makes all the deep deeper and all the true truer.

[Cheryl]

I would listen to this book just to enjoy Tara’s voice. Especially on my hardest days, I have turned to Tara’s website or the Insight Timer app for her soothing and centering guided meditations and audiobooks. In addition to benefitting from the therapeutic quality of Tara’s presence, this course was an excellent overview for bringing mindfulness into our clinical works. Even if you choose not to teach mindfulness directly to clients, the teachings offer ways of being with suffering that are healing. She carefully and systematically teaches the power of being with the full range of our experiences with compassionate attention to reduce suffering along with the tools we need to skillfully do so. There are plenty of opportunities for developing our own practices along the way. RAIN is with me always and is one of my go to skills with clients and friends. A coherent and useful summary of mindfulness easily followed by new practitioners of mindfulness. In the end, you increase your capacity to help your self and your clients develop the affect tolerance (in the most expansive sense) we all need to be in the world with resilience and kindness. Thanks you once again Tara.

[Seawitch]

Sometimes Tara loses me because I’m not tuned in enough to her “deepness”, but I always feel she really knows what she’s teaching and the more I listen to her (she has a great website too) the more awake I feel. I think I need some more practice before I’d use much of this with my patients - some written materials would be helpful - but I liked it a lot for myself. I particularly liked the last section on grief.

[Matthew Rose]

This book, is tremendously insightful. It has humor, allegory’s, and many therapeutic methodologies. I have met many spiritual people who practice psychotherapy especially trauma therapy; DBT. Her approach is thought provoking, comforting, and guiding.
-thank-you Tara, I hope to meet you one day

[Megan Rosol]

Tara Brach and Pema Chodron are two of my favorite zen nuns. They are both wise, funny, calming, female-centric, and they both promote the type of lighthearted meditation that stick with me.

[Dr. JL]

Great ideas and validation about integrating meditation and psychotherapy.

[Abigail]

Radical Acceptance is excellent. Read that instead.

[Lisa W]

Chock full of useful insights, methods, meditations and beautiful stories of transformation. Brach delivers a mini manual on how to blend more Mindfulness techniques into my practice. Love this💕

[Rachel]

This collection is not just for therapists, but her teachings are for anyone looking for ways to deal with the gamut of difficult emotions we all deal with. We learn to be present and give space to emotions without identifying with them. She expounds on the acronym "RAIN," which stands for recognize/acknowledge when a strong emotion is present, allow or acknowledge that the emotion is there, investigate--not intellectually--but viscerally to witness what is happening in the body, and not identify with what is there, while giving it space to be. In one of her books she compares this experience to putting an ink drop in a thimble (resisting emotion and trying to put it down) or allowing the emotion to exist in a vast lake, where it spreads out as if it is barely there. The vastness of the space of compassion is like the lake.

Tara Brach is most powerful teaching I have experienced for dealing with "self aversion" with a balance of mindfulness and self-compassion. Tara's calming voice, genuine compassion, and refreshing humor keeps one engaged. The combination of meditations, techniques, and talks have been life-altering to my healing. After reading Radical Acceptance, I knew I wanted this workshop. It is best to spread out the sessions to absorb the material and let it percolate. She uses humorous anecdotes to make points. Her gentle nature and deep compassion in these techniques are almost visceral. I have spent years searching for techniques to heal emotionally, and most books tell you what to do, but tell you how to actually do it. They left me wanting more. Saying, "yes, I know WHAT to do, but HOW do I do it?" Tara was one of the first writers to give me graspable techniques that actually help me know that I am making progress towards emotional wholeness, ironically, not by resisting them, pretending they are not there, or even giving in to them, but by opening to them with mindful self-compassion.

[Lynne-marie]

As helpful for the layperson as for the psychotherapist, this work approaches meditation as a full-fledged and integral part of psychotherapy. The author presents the philosophy, the methods of use, some samples for meditation process and so on. Very helpful to me in my personal quest to improve my meditation experience.

[M]

Fantastic resource full of wisdom and beautiful teachings. Highly recommend.