Dharma Therapy A Therapeutic Intervention That Builds On The Buddhist Dharma With Mindfulness Practice As One Of Its Key Components

Mindfulness practice, as a therapeutic intervention, is becoming increasingly popular. However, respected scholars point out that mindfulness would be more powerful if it could be integrated with the other components of the Buddhist path of ending suffering from where it was derived. Dharma Therapy is a therapeutic intervention modelled after the Buddha’s path to awakening. Its theoretic foundation is built on the Buddhist Dharma, the core Buddhist teachings, together with mindfulness as one of its key components. This chapter discusses how these Buddhist steps to ending suffering can be applied in the modern day psychotherapeutic environment, and how the Buddhist Dharma can help enable a person to better understand his/her problems in a more realistic and constructive manner. Background In recent years, the relevancy of Buddhist teachings to psychology and psychotherapy has been of increased interest to academia and many respected scholars. The breadth of research and studies related to these topics vary from studies of Buddhist Psychology, as presented in canonical texts (Kalupahana 1987) to research in Tibetan Lama’s degree of happiness by Harvard-trained neuroscientist (Davidson 2003). From these studies, many interesting and encouraging results have emerged. These include the use of mindfulness meditation training in the management of stress and chronic pain, pioneered by KabatZinn (Kabat-Zinn 1982; Kabat-Zinn 1990), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for depression as developed by Segal, Teasdale and Williams (Teasdale 2003). In a review summarizing the literature on mindfulness training as a clinical intervention, Baer (Baer 2003) noted that the use of mindfulness training as a clinical intervention is described with increasing frequency, and its popularity appears to be growing rapidly. As of 1997, over 240 hospitals and clinics in the United States and abroad were offering stress reduction programs based on “mindfulness training” (Salmon 1998). Kabat-Zinn (2003) suggests that this increasing interest in studies of mindfulness and its clinical application is being driven primarily by the realization that new dimensions of therapeutic benefit and novel insight into mind/body interactions might accrue through its exploration. However, in the same article, he warned that: . it becomes critically important that those persons coming to the field with professional interest and enthusiasm recognize the unique qualities and characteristics of mindfulness as a meditative practice, with all that implies, so that mindfulness is not simply seized upon as the next promising cognitive behavioral technique or exercise, decontextualized, and “plugged” into a behaviorist paradigm with the aim of driving desirable change, or of fixing what is broken (p.145). Furthermore, Kabat-Zinn (2003) recapitulating from his intention in developing Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) back in 1979 that, although MBSR as an intervention needed to be free of the cultural, religious, and ideological factors associated with the Buddhist origins of mindfulness. the