Guides
Buddhist Psychology in Therapy
Centuries-old ideas about attention, compassion, and how hard feelings come and go—offered as practical tools, with no beliefs required.
Approaches I draw on
Buddhist psychology is a way of understanding the mind that’s been developing for roughly two and a half thousand years, give or take, and a lot of what we now call mindfulness grew out of it. My most recent training, listed with the rest on Meet Lauren, is Spirit Rock’s Buddhist Psychology Training: Integrating Mindfulness, Science, and Clinical Practice (2026). Spirit Rock is a meditation center in Northern California, and as the title suggests, the training brings these ideas together with science and clinical practice.
I want to be clear up front about what that means for you—I use Buddhist psychology without asking you to adopt anything spiritual. You don’t need to be Buddhist, become Buddhist, or know anything about Buddhism. What I take from it is a handful of practical ideas about attention, compassion, and suffering, which sit comfortably alongside the rest of my approach.
What Buddhist psychology offers therapy
I’ll keep this modest. Here are a few of the ideas it offers, in plain language:
- Attention: learning to notice what’s actually happening, moment to moment, before the story about it takes over
- Compassion: meeting suffering, including your own, with warmth instead of a verdict
- Impermanence: the observation that difficult states arise, crest, and pass, even when they feel permanent from the inside
- Curiosity: approaching your experience with interest rather than judgment, as if you’re meeting it for the first time
The second arrow
There’s a well-known Buddhist teaching about two arrows. The first arrow is the painful thing itself—a loss, a rejection, a body that hurts. The second is what we add on top: the self-blame, the “this shouldn’t be happening,” the replaying of it at night. You often can’t do much about the first arrow, but the second is worth getting to know, because it can be the part that keeps the pain going.
In therapy, that might look like noticing that you’re anxious and also furious with yourself for being anxious, or sad and also ashamed that you’re still sad. We don’t have to argue with either layer. Simply seeing them as separate can take a surprising amount of pressure off.
A natural kinship with IFS
There’s a natural kinship between Buddhist psychology and Internal Family Systems, which is my primary lens. Both start from the idea that you don’t have to fight what’s happening inside you in order to change your relationship with it. In IFS, we approach your “parts” with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment, and we work toward a stronger connection with your core Self—the calm, wise, and grounded part of you.
Buddhist practice cultivates a similar steadiness, a way of staying present with difficult experience without being taken over by it. When the two meet in a session, it isn’t mystical. It looks like a little more space between you and a feeling, and a little more kindness in how you hold it.
What it looks like in our work
Most of the time, you wouldn’t know it was there—I won’t be quoting scripture or sprinkling Sanskrit into the conversation. It shows up in how we pay attention: staying with a hard feeling long enough to notice that it changes, catching the second arrow as it lands, and treating whatever comes up with interest instead of alarm. If you’d like something more structured, we can also use short, optional meditation and breathwork practices in session.
If Buddhism or spirituality is part of your life, or something you’re curious about, there’s room to talk about it directly, and if it isn’t, nothing in our work depends on it. Practically speaking, this is woven into individual therapy: 45-minute video sessions, as long as you’re in California or Massachusetts when we meet.
If you’re curious how this might feel in practice, a few lines through the contact form are all it takes to arrange a free 15-minute video consultation.
A few common questions
Do I have to be Buddhist, or believe anything in particular?
Not at all! You don’t need to hold any particular beliefs, and nothing here is an invitation to convert. Everything we do can be understood in plain psychological terms, and it sits alongside whatever you already believe, or don’t.
Is Buddhist psychology the same as mindfulness?
Not quite. Mindfulness is one practice that comes out of it. Buddhist psychology is the wider body of thought around it, about how suffering arises in the mind and how attention and compassion can ease it. There’s more on the practical side in mindfulness-based therapy.
What if I have my own religious tradition?
That’s welcome here. Nothing in this work asks you to set your faith aside or trade it for something else. If your tradition matters to you, it can be part of our conversations, including how it shapes the way you understand yourself and the people around you.