Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 from 8-9 PM Pacific Time.

The topic of the episode will be: Overcoming Resistance to Change

In this episode, Dr. John Deri will show you how to overcome obstacles to achieving your highest purpose. Dr. Deri is a psychiatrist and an Ironman triathlete. Drawing on his athletic experiences, as well as from his lifelong immersion in Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism, John will share with you techniques for integrating psychological tools, spiritual practices and physical activity in order to achieve wholeness, emotional well being and personal power.

To listen to the show you can:

Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560

OR

Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body

Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 from 8-9 PM Pacific Time.

The topic of the episode will be: Overcoming Resistance to Change

In this episode, Dr. John Deri will show you how to overcome obstacles to achieving your highest purpose. Dr. Deri is a psychiatrist and an Ironman triathlete. Drawing on his athletic experiences, as well as from his lifelong immersion in Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism, John will share with you techniques for integrating psychological tools, spiritual practices and physical activity in order to achieve wholeness, emotional well being and personal power.

To listen to the show you can:

Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560

OR

Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body

Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 from 8-9 PM Pacific Time.

The topic of the episode will be: Overcoming Resistance to Change

In this episode, Dr. John Deri will show you how to overcome obstacles to achieving your highest purpose. Dr. Deri is a psychiatrist and an Ironman triathlete. Drawing on his athletic experiences, as well as from his lifelong immersion in Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism, John will share with you techniques for integrating psychological tools, spiritual practices and physical activity in order to achieve wholeness, emotional well being and personal power.

To listen to the show you can:

Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560

OR

Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body

“Before we can generate compassion and love, it is important to have a clear understanding of what we understand compassion and love to be. In simple terms, compassion and love can be defined as positive thoughts and feelings that give rise to such essential things in life as hope, courage, determination and inner strength. In the Buddhist tradition, compassion and love are seen as two aspects of the same thing: compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to have happiness.

Self-centeredness inhibits our love for others, and we are all afflicted by it to one degree or another.” (The Dalai Lama, Buddhadharma, Summer 2010, p. 25). As Santideva, an eminent 8th century Buddhist scholar, wrote:

“Cherishing the self is the cause of all suffering. Cherishing others is the source of all happiness.”

Suffering

The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha. The root word Kha means sky, or space. The prefix du means unhealthy. So dukkha, suffering, is a condition in which our relationship to space is unhealthy. We suffer when we feel disconnected and alone. An experience of emotional trauma may cause us to retreat into a “fortress self.”

We unconsciously imprison ourselves in a state of psychic “solitary confinement.” This condition perpetuates endless suffering.

Bliss

The Sanskrit word for bliss is sukha. This connotes a healthy relationship to space. We are open. We feel related to others. We are connected to our own embodied selves, to others and to spirit.

The key to the transformation of suffering into bliss is to open our hearts. “Through hardness and selfishness the heart grows rigid. This rigidity leads to separation from all others. Egotism isolates people.” (The I Ching, Wilhelm/Baynes edition, p. 228).

Opening the heart leads to love and compassion. Compassion means participation in the suffering of others. Passion, in Latin, refers to both suffering and affection. Participation in the suffering of others is a form of love. An openness to suffering is a prerequisite for complete, unconditional love.

Compassion and Openness

Compassion in Sanskrit is Bodhicitta : literally, the mind of Enlightenment. In Tibetan Buddhism, relative bodhicitta connotes compassion. Absolute bodhicitta refers to the wisdom of emptiness, or openness. All phenomena are seen as being virtual, “like a dream, like an illusion.” From this standpoint, the apparent boundaries between self and others dissolve. The reality of our interdependence, our interrelatedness with all other sentient beings, comes fully alive. We become fully alive, both the subject and the object of all encompassing, nonreferential love.

The Way of Love

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. 1 Corinthians 13

Like all of us, I am in a transitional state. I feel an increasing sense of urgency to articulate my beliefs in regard to the relationship between psychological healing and spiritual growth. The rigid, categorical thinking that pervades psychiatry feels more and more oppressive and confining to me. The “medical model,” which consists of eliciting “symptoms,” establishing a “diagnosis” and formulating a “treatment plan,” is mechanistic, soulless and heartless. All too often, the treatment offered consists of psychiatric medication, with minimal or no psychotherapy. It seems to me, that with each passing year, the doctor-patient relationship is approaching a limit of zero.

Perhaps this trend within psychiatry is of a piece with the evolution of our overall communication and relationships, from embodied to virtual. Dissociation seems to be increasingly pervasive and characteristic of our society. We have moved from speech to text messaging, from emotions to emoticons. There is a loss of soul in our society that is causing immense psychic distress.

This week provided me with a convergence of opportunities that constituted an antidote to this illness of our times. I had the great good fortune to receive teachings from the Dalai Lama, on a Buddhist text known as the Heart Sutra, in Bloomington, Indiana. At the same time, my trip to Bloomington offered me the possibility of a reunion with family members, with whom I had not spent time in many years.

The Dalai Lama’s Teachings

I am in no way qualified to relate the substance of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. Let me, instead, share with you the atmosphere and the spirit of the occasion. Thousands of people, from all over the world, converged on Bloomington, a quintessentially American small university town. Tibetan Buddhist monks, as well as lay people, from all over the world were in attendance. Despite the diversity of  nationalities and backgrounds of the audience, there was a powerful experience of the relatedness of a spiritual community. The Dalai Lama, with every breath and gesture, simultaneously honors the differences among peoples, and draws them together through the force of his brilliance, love, compassion, humility and spiritual depth. His driving motivation is to relieve suffering among all sentient beings. Through the strength of his motivation, he held all of us in his embrace. We were as one family.

Family Reunion

I was reunited with three members of my mother’s side of our family. During the time we spent together, we connected with each other at a level of depth that far exceeded any of our previous encounters with one another. A great deal of healing took place, both in relation to old family wounds and in regard to the  larger trauma of the Holocaust. Expressed emotion, face to face, catalyzes healing. Speaking the hitherto unspoken, responsively, in dialogue, releases the iron grip of ancient family, religious and cultural scripts or roles. This release engenders a freedom that allows for genuine openness to one another in the moment, with mutual compassion for self and other.

Openness and Compassion

These themes, openness and compassion, pervaded both my experiences with the Dalai Lama, and with my family. Openness and compassion are forces of unification, of healing and of integration. Inspired by the spirit of the Dalai Lama, it is my aspiration prayer to do my best to relieve the suffering of all beings, for as long as space endures. It is my intention to use every internal and external resource within my reach to inspire others to manifest their highest calling, to experience meaning and purpose in their lives, and to recognize our true identities as indivisible spirits constituting one human family.

Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 from 8-9:00 PM Pacific Time.

The topic will be: The Human Family

In this episode, Dr. John Deri will discuss the dissociation that pervades our society. He will elaborate on this theme as the illness of our times.

The practices of openness and compassion will be presented as the antidote to this illness. Openness and compassion are forces of unification, of healing and of integration. Through engaging in these practices, we can come to recognize our true identities as indivisible spirits constituting one human family.

To listen to the show you can:

1.    Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560

OR

2.    Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body

Wisdom in Healing

From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows.  It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness.  Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions.  Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.

Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side.  Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor.  It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.

From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.”  I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings.  So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion.  We all construct our own “psychic reality.” 

This realization is very powerful.  It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points.  We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances.  We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.”  We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion).  We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation. 

Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.

Compassion In Healing

Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism.  Narcissism is the root of all suffering.  When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed.  When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.

Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird.  In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight.  The darkness of our delusions is dispelled.  The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded.  We are free.

“Nothing can be created or destroyed”

I remember having this thought, with great conviction, at the age of three. I was gazing intently at a large rock covered with green moss.

Not the thought of a three year old ….

Valentinus, a second century Gnostic, wrote:

“What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became, where we were, whereinto we have been thrown, whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth.”

From the age of five, I have been inexplicably drawn to and mesmerized by Tibetan mandalas.

Throughout my life, I have experienced external reality as a projective field. What we apprehend through our five senses, and our sixth sense, is a highly idiosyncratic construction.

This perspective motivated me to study anthropology and psychology in college. I wanted to learn how culture, language, memory and desire shape perception.

During graduate work in psychology, I investigated the physiology of perception. Concurrently I did research at Rockefeller University, on the localization of opiate receptors in the brain.

My interest in higher integrative functioning remained a passion throughout medical school. Inspired by Wilder Penfield’s “Mystery of The Mind,” I decided to become a neurosurgeon.

Three thousand miles (New York to San Francisco) and two years later, I had an epiphany: I truly wanted to be a psychiatrist. As the British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, wrote:

“Home is where we start from.”

The manifest context for my felt urgent need to choose psychiatry included an impassioned reading of Goethe’s Faust, a spontaneous total immersion in philosophical Taoism and a resurgent compelling interest in the life and work of Carl Jung. Jung’s autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” had made a searing impression on me as a fifteen year old.

The reading of a book, “The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self,” by the Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, crystallized my decision.

Some years later, my connection with Tibetan Buddhism resurfaced. I was drawn to seek out teachings from a few Tibetan lamas, notably the Dalai Lama and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.

The twin principles of Tibetan Buddhism are compassion and wisdom, “like the two wings of a bird.” I have come to experience compassion as the life force, Henri Bergson’s “Elan Vital.” This force sustains me. It infuses my work.

As Santideva, an 8th century Buddhist, wrote in “The Way of the Bodhisattva:”

“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world.”