by Nalanda Institute
What is Contemplative Psychotherapy?
Contemplative Psychotherapy is a shared journey of deep learning and transformation that prepares therapists and non-therapists alike for an ongoing practice harnessing the healing wisdom and arts of both Buddhist and Western psychology. Contemplative Psychotherapy teaches us how to show up in the world from a more mindful, compassionate, and fully embodied place. It is an invitation to find your own path to deep personal and psychosocial change, rooted in the cultivation of self-awareness, healing dialogue, heart-opening compassion, and embodied intuition and flow.
What is Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program?
Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program (CPP) explores this space through three separate years focused on:
- mindfulness-based individual psychology
- compassion-based social psychology
- embodiment-based transformational psychology
Rather than needing to be chronological, the years can be taken independently, in any order, at any time, providing students with the spaciousness to complete modules of the full program when it best suits their personal needs and timeframe. Students are also welcome to join for only one year of the program – no commitment to the full three years is required (although we do recommend that students have some contemplative experience before joining the embodiment year).
The program provides a safe and brave learning community and engagement with eminent Buddhist teachers, social justice scholar-activists, leading contemplative psychotherapists, and distinguished neuroscientists. Past faculty have included: the late Professor Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg, Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams, and Lama Rod Owens, to name just a few of the inspiring teachers who have visited the program. Our Contemplative Psychotherapy Program is also offered in Spanish and Portuguese.
Who is the program for?
The Contemplative Psychotherapy Program is appropriate for clinicians and practitioners of all disciplines looking to infuse Buddhist psychology, ethics, and meditation into their life and work. It is intended for people from all walks of life seeking a new way of being, living and working informed by the confluence of contemplative science and practice with contemporary psychotherapy, neuropsychology and the pursuit of psychosocial change.
In short, the program is for anyone who aspires to go deeper and further into the transformational work of contemplative learning. It is for those who want to belong to a thriving community and seek a path to personal growth, professional development, and compassionate leadership. Past students within the program have included clinicians, personal coaches, professionals, therapists, educators, yoga teachers, caregivers, and many others.
How does CPP support individuals?
The Contemplative Psychotherapy Program supports individuals in developing an open mind, warm heart, embodied intuition, and an altruistic way of being in the world. Delving into the ongoing confluence between Buddhist and Western Psychology allows participants to get a solid grounding in the power of mindful attention, wise compassion, and embodied flow. Learning how to harness these skills helps students transform the isolating, fear-based way of being that plagues our world today into the connective, compassion we need in order to thrive on planet earth.
How does CPP support our communities?
Beyond its many benefits for individual students, this hybrid approach to healing and transformation offers students vital new perspectives and capacities on how we can collectively transform the future of our society, human community, and planet today. The many crises we face — racial and gender oppression, extreme health and economic inequity, rampant hate crimes, violence, loneliness, polarization, and the imminent threat of climate change — all stem from a destructive mindset and culture of hyperindividualism, greed, and hate. We must transform together as concerned and engaged communities.
Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program helps ground students in the self-transcendent wisdom, compassion, and embodiment we need to be partners in global transformation.
In conclusion
As individuals and as a global community, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment, facing myriad personal and collective challenges whose primal root is an unsustainable, survival-based way of being. Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program weaves together the key change disciplines from the Nalanda tradition and from the contemporary West that offer a transformation of mind, heart, and body and a connective way of being. Both are needed to flourish in today’s increasingly complex, interdependent and fast-changing world.