Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Religion and Spirituality in Community Building 205
situate our programs. If we develop smoking cessation programs and disregard the
fact that the community leaders openly sell dangerous tobacco products to minors,
it is clear that our preventive interventions will be less successful (Rhodes & Jason,
1988). The larger implications are clear: programs that involve Buddhist practices
and principles might be best integrated into those settings that are value concordant
with the overall philosophy of Buddhism. If one develops prevention programs in
the schools that are geared toward helping youngsters not engage in risky behaviors
such as smoking, or if we teach youngsters meditation practices, values and supports
within the schools and local community need to be understood. If schools feature
competition and authoritarian decision making, such values might be incompatible
with Buddhist principles, whereas as those settings that support cooperation and
more egalitarian values might be more value consistent with the messages within
transformational interventions. When the mores and values of such contextual
variables are supportive of the interventions, there is greater opportunity for the
development and maintenance of transformational skills, interests and practices.
Buddhist Influenced Therapies
These foundational ideas from Buddhist thought have had their greatest
influence in psychology at the more individual level, and in particular influencing
several forms of therapy. One of the more popular forms in Japan is called
Morita therapy (Reynolds, 1984). Practitioners of Morita therapy offer clients
a variety of meditative strategies (e.g., counting the breath, mantras, prayer) that
they might constantly return to an awareness of their immediate circumstances.
The three key principles in this approach concern the importance of accepting
one’s feelings, knowing one’s purpose, and doing what needs to be done. The
richness of life comes from living it, not through thinking about it. Of course,
such principles could easily be adapted to more community-based interventions
by, for example, using the media to transmit these ideas to larger audiences or by
teaching such principles in primary preventive school-based interventions.
In the mid-1970s, Ron Kurtz developed Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy,
which was heavily influenced by Taoism and Buddhism (Johanson & Kurtz,
1991). Rather than analyzing and talking about life, clients are encouraged to turn
their awareness toward the present moment, thus cultivating the state described in
the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Clients practice staying with an experience
(e.g., feelings of anxiety); and as they report on it, the experience deepens and
then one experience will lead to another and the process will move from surface
experiences to core beliefs which generate and organize these experiences.
(Johanson & Kurtz, 1991; p. 14). Such practices could also be extended to neighborhoods
and community groups, and by doing so, these generative principles
could be considered useful in community interventions.