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Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha, would be glad to see how many professional counselors actually practice authentic Vipassana or Zen meditation. He’d be even happier to see how many of them apply the principles of his Four Nobel Truths and Eight-Fold Path to share more wisdom with their clients. Buddhist counselors give clients personal experience with insight into the impermanence of all the mental and physical phenomena that drive people into treatment in the first place.

If you want to get the most for your therapy time and money, you need to understand the contrasts between Buddhist counseling and traditional Western psychotherapy styles like cognitive-behavioral therapy. To understand more, read Buddhist Psychology and Counseling by Padmasiri de Silva (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Here are the primary distinctions between Buddhist and Western therapy styles:

Buddhist counseling offers immensely practical tools for maneuvering through what most conditioned people call problematic life situations. Its goal is to arrest the compulsive thinking that plagues therapy clients who look outside themselves for the answers to their unhappiness and self-harming behaviors.

The anxiety-producing people, places and things we allow to enter our experience form our physical, mental and spiritual conditions. These include alcohol, drugs, pornography, violence, anger, criticism, dishonesty, selfishness, greed, unhealthy foods, casual sex, inadequate sleep, workaholism, media addiction, lack of proper exercise, poor air quality–the list could go on forever. The desperate attempt to control all these external issues exhausts most people. The result is the need for more wisdom gained through quiet meditation and the guidance of an authentic Buddhist counselor. As Zen Therapy (John Wiley & Sons, 1995) author David Brazier says:

“Although we tie ourselves up in knots with our ideas and feelings, the way through generally begins with acting purposefully now. Know your purpose at this moment and there is no difficulty knowing what to do….Action and experience as direct transmissions of the truth outside of words and texts.”

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