Sati Center for Buddhist Studies

If mindfulness is the heart of Buddhist psychology, what exactly is therapeutic about it? Mindfulness brings us into experiential contact with that which is painful and causes distress, or dukkha. What we are able to do from there depends on having a therapeutically-appropriate container for processing the energies and emotions of distress. Both Western and Buddhist psychology have the same principle at their core: that relief from a painful pattern requires feeling it and then understanding how it interacts with our sense of self and our relationship with others. This means that mindfulness is a kind of exposure therapy.

Drawing on the Bhayabherava Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 4), we will explore a body-based approach to confronting fear through mindful exposure and somatic awareness. In this discourse, the Buddha recounts his own journey of facing terror in wilderness solitude, revealing principles that remarkably parallel modern somatic trauma resolution and nervous system regulation techniques.

We’ll see how the Buddha’s method of deliberately provoking fear in order to process it with mindful awareness offers a template for resolving anxiety and other difficult nervous system patterns through the body. Through meditation, text study, and inquiry we’ll explore the relationship between the Buddha’s solitary, ascetic approach and contemporary understandings of emotional patterns, nervous system physiology, and somatic trauma resolution. You will learn to recognize your own nervous system patterns and develop skills for approaching anxiety, fear, anger, and other distressing patterns with the same courageous mindfulness the Buddha modeled.