Embodied Contemplative Psychotherapy: Transforming Trauma into Freedom and Well-Being

by Joe Loizzo, MD, PhD

embodied psychotherapy

Today’s confluence of breakthrough neuropsychological research and diverse methods of mind/body health and well-being has coalesced in a new multi-disciplinary consensus and a historic confluence of distinct therapeutic approaches. Centered around a positive new science of human nature and a radically optimistic framework of plasticity, learning and change, this watershed has prompted a dialogue about mental health and well-being that not only crosses the lines between distinct schools of psychotherapy, but also the lines between Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, scientific and spiritual approaches to mind/body healing. Nowhere is the promise of this watershed more apparent than in the surprising convergence of the latest neuropsychology and embodied approaches to trauma with the timeless embodied contemplative psychology and transformational arts of the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras.

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by Elizabeth Rovere


Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Rovere is a longstanding member of our faculty and board who has devoted her career to exploring the fertile intersection between the collective dimension of psychic healing and the spirituality of self-transcendent experience. Find out about  Elizabeth’s contemplative reading group, Everyday Epiphanies: When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary running May 4, 11, 18.


When I was in graduate school for clinical psychology in the late 1990’s, I worked with refugees and wrote my dissertation on betrayal trauma. Initially, I was in awe of the resilience, perseverance, humility, as well as the gallows humor, of the people I met — Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, as well as Azerbaijanis and Armenians — the latter two groups, displaced by war wound up together at a make-shift refugee camp
in Moscow’s Red Square. Despite the different nationalities, cultures and religions, and, of course, the war, they got on together, not perfectly, but like they were stuck with each other, as they had been neighbors for years. These people I happened upon in Red Square, in the worst of times, found their common humanity and reestablished a shared trust in order to survive and even thrive after losing their homes and livelihoods. Their deep shared sense of common humanity proved more powerful than all their differences.

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