Olivier Rouiller

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In my opinion, it's no coincidence that mindfulness is making its way into psychotherapy. Indeed, both disciplines (East-West) strive to understand human experience, how it produces suffering, and how it can be reduced.

At the heart of mindfulness, from a certain point of view, is a phenomenological approach: what are the objects of our experience. By observing the content of our experience, we thus distinguish sensations, thoughts, and emotions. In the practice of insight meditation (Kornfield, 1993; Young, 2018; Ingram 2018), we simply note these phenomena: "oh, a thought," "an emotion," "a bodily sensation,"... We can extend these classifications and notice more subtle phenomena: an intention, a memory, an image, a memory of an emotion. Or we can be interested in the qualities of phenomena: "this sadness is felt in the body, from here to there, it makes me think of something wet and cold."

We can also go in the opposite direction and note our states of consciousness: first, gross ones: wakefulness, waking up, drowsiness. When we continue to deconstruct experience, we can note other aspects such as the sense of being separate, or the sense of being one with something (Non-dualism), the sense of being identified with one's thoughts or, on the contrary, disidentification with them. Jeffery A. Martin, an American psychologist and researcher, has developed a classification of these experiences. (Martin, 2019, 2020).

Insight meditation, from which mindfulness largely originates, offers us a path through objects of experience towards non-dual states of consciousness, which can be analogous to the undifferentiated states of early development. As an adult, one can have a non-pathological experience of non-separation between inner and outer. And certain pathologies are characterized by an absence of distinction between inner and outer. This is perhaps one of the most striking links in the correspondences between Eastern and Western psychology, with important implications for psychotherapy. Meditation methods give us access to non-dual states through letting go, and these states also arise spontaneously in mindfulness-based therapies like Hakomi when early traumatic material is processed. This is not unrelated to regression in psychoanalytic therapy. Furthermore, these states are also found with psychedelics, which are also used for psychotherapy. These substances and non-dual states can then be seen as catalyzing relational therapies.

In psychotherapy, our patients will experience a whole range of experiences, some familiar, others perhaps less so. What is it like to feel the sense of inner emptiness described in the borderline psychic organization? To what extent is the patient, right now, in fusion with us? And how to use these observations to guide and help the observation of the patient's experience, to help them, through observing their experience in the moment, to engage their prefrontal cortex to introduce an awareness of non-separation, and therefore a certain separation.

Also during analytical psychotherapy, different states of consciousness will be observed: Is the person present as an adult, or have they regressed to an earlier stage of development? How to recognize this and how to respond? Perhaps they are dissociated, or frozen.

Having explored the diversity of human experiences for oneself and training through observation is, in my opinion, a valid path towards psychotherapy.

Bibliography

Ingram, D. M. (2018). Mastering the core teachings of the Buddha: An unusually hardcore Dharma book (Revised and expanded edition). Aeon.

Martin, J. A. (2019). The finders. Integration Press.

Martin, J. A. (2020). Clusters of Individuals’ Experiences Form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults. CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century, 8(8), 1‑25.

Kornfield, J. (1993). A path with heart: A guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life. Bantam Bks.

Young, S. (2018). The science of enlightenment: How meditation works. Sounds True.