Introduction

In this article, I seek to convey how my evolving conception of mindful flourishing has been influenced by various types of contemplative practices and personal experiences rooted in Asian cultures, including my study of Chinese language and culture while a high school student and my travels in India while in college. Those experiences also include the practice of Buddhist forms of meditation and mindfulness that have been transmitted in Asian countries and cultures for more than two millennia but which have, much more recently, become popular in American society.

While my life and sense of being in the world—especially my sense of human connectedness—have been deeply impacted by these diverse Asian experiences (formative travel, immersion in culture, and engagement with contemplative practices originating in Asian countries), in this article, I will focus on how these rich moments of Asian exploration as a youth have helped me realize a basic disjuncture between the societal pressures and expectations felt by many undergraduate and graduate students in American society and living a fully engaged life filled with a sense of connection and flourishing. I draw on those Asian experiences to explore the concept of mindful flourishing, the subject of this special issue of ASIANetwork Exchange, taking a comparative approach between Buddhist philosophy and contemplative psychotherapy—it was training in the latter that led to my decision to begin a master’s program at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. In making this comparison, I will explore these approaches to human flourishing from both the perspective of a client, or patient, and also of a graduate student trained in contemplative psychotherapy while pursuing a degree in clinical mental health counseling. Holding in mind the distinct separation and potential for synchrony between the field of psychotherapy and the practice of Buddhism at large is an effort inspired by many clinicians and researchers who have already delved deeply into these questions (e.g., Aronson 2004, Eigen 1998, Jennings 2010, Molino 1998, Safran 2003, Epstein 2013).

This article describes several key moments from along this journey that began with my stumbling upon, early in life, contemplative paths directed at promoting human flourishing. As I describe below, those paths have opened up an exciting future of possibility in which I hope to find my place in the Texas Christian University (TCU) CALM (Compassionate Awareness and Living Mindfully) Studies group’s vision to promote well-being and flourishing by working to reduce the many forms of individual and collective suffering in our society. I hope that my journey will be of interest to teachers and students alike who may be just starting to explore their own meditative path by highlighting how my own exploration of the vital richness of Asian cultures and their many ancient contemplative traditions has broadened my own sense of being human. I conclude by framing my graduate studies as a counselor-in-training in the broader context of engaging with these contemplative practices, mostly Buddhist, on a path toward mindful flourishing.

Cultivating Flourishing through a Daily Mindfulness Practice

For me, cultivating a life dedicated to mindful flourishing has included a commitment to a daily contemplative practice, which has focused on mindfulness, meditation, and yoga techniques that originated in India. That practice provides both a conceptual framework and ethical core from which to orient myself on this path and to make sense of being in the world, whether at home, at work, or in the classroom. As my practice has developed, I have been experiencing, as is true of many meditators, fruitful but occasionally disorienting internal dialogue between what I have learned from texts and meditation teachers and the distinct and highly individualized experience of applying those concepts to my daily life. This is especially so as it relates to cultivating healthy and nourishing relationships with others, something Buddhist ethical teachings value greatly. By way of example, I am reminded of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of considering another sentient being as one’s own mother from a previous life for the sake of cultivating compassion. This is also the central spiritual orientation of the Theravada Buddhist practice of metta, or loving-kindness, meditation, which encourages us to look at another sentient being as if they were our only child. These relational practices are increasingly being taught and popularized by many contemporary western Buddhist teachers (in addition to scholars and clinicians) in America (e.g., Chodron 2017, Neff 2003, Salzberg 2011).

When I first started to study these Buddhist practices that seek to cultivate positive affect for others, even for those whom we consider difficult, I will admit to having felt mixed emotions. While I was encouraged by the promise of this compassion-infused approach to viewing our relationships with others, I was also intimidated by the basic emotional and spiritual reorientation that such a change would require in my daily life. Even so, I have been slowly working to cultivate through my contemplative practice the capacity to see other living beings through the “eyes of compassion,” as the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (2001) would often say. This practice has brought me poignant moments of connection and clarity, serving as a welcome reminder of the challenges—but also the truly transformative potential—for those who take up a contemplative path directed at human connection and collective flourishing.

Personal Background

Currently in my late twenties, I recently moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Austin, Texas, to begin a three-year master’s program in clinical mental health counseling at Seminary of the Southwest. After completing an undergraduate degree in business information systems at TCU, I entered a two-year management training program at a large multinational pharmaceutical company in Chicago but quickly started having doubts that this sort of work was for me. The ultimate decision to make the dramatic shift from the business world to graduate school and the study contemplative psychotherapy came into focus slowly through my meditation practice. It was moments of calm introspection that helped me see this by reframing how I view my relationships with and responsibility to other beings. When I was able to drop into a stillness of mind during meditation, I experienced moments of clarity that reinforced my desire to become a psychotherapist, which is, of course, a career that focuses on connecting with other human beings who are struggling and working to alleviate their suffering—a central part of Buddhist teachings. I have been studying those teachings for about five years with several teachers and have, through their instruction, maintained a daily meditation practice and engaged in regular retreats in western Buddhist communities.

My understanding of Buddhist teachings and contemplative practice has also been shaped by completing a two-year program in contemplative psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, which I revisit below. Many of the students and instructors in the program identify with one of the many Buddhist traditions and meditative practices, thereby offering a wonderfully diverse model of how we can, in the context of modern American society, make a lifelong commitment to pursuing a Buddhist path. My conversations with this group helped me discover the exciting resonances between Buddhist thought and psychotherapeutic approaches to flourishing, offering two historically disparate traditions of healing united in their focus on transforming our minds in healthy, integrated, and compassionate ways.

Early Impressions of the Rich Vitality of Asian Cultures

Looking back, I now see that the opportunity to study Mandarin Chinese in high school was a deeply transformative experience because it exposed me to a distinct worldview that was rooted in a set of cultural traditions and expressed in a language so vastly different from American culture and the English language that I had grown up speaking. Even as a beginner, I started to notice subtle differences as my class learned how to talk about harmony and other key Chinese cultural values while we also discussed the mundane activities of daily family life, including ritualized eating habits. As I reflected on these differences, I also started questioning how American culture and language seems, at times, ill-suited to express the nuances of the basic Buddhist doctrines I had been learning, such as impermanence (anitya), suffering (duḥkha), and interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda).

After one year of language study as a high school freshman, I traveled with my Chinese language and culture program to several cities in mainland China and immersed myself in the country’s language and ancient culture. This experience brought about a fundamental shift in my mindset and sense of being in the world. When my friends and family later asked about the trip, I beamed with excitement and regaled them with stories of wonder and discovery. But I often found myself sharing with them one particularly transformative experience, which took place when the group visited Emei Shan—one of the sacred mountains of China with spiritual resonances for Buddhists, Daoists, and others.

Chinese Buddhists view the mountain as a sacred place because of its connection to the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, who is closely associated with Buddhist meditative practice. According to Tenzin L. Mullin (2013), Emei Shan is likely one of the earliest sites where Buddhism was practice after its teachings had been brought to China from its Indian homeland during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). And in Stairway to Heaven, A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei, James Hargett (2006) describes the mountain as a “complex amalgam of distinct physical environment and diverse human experience,” noting the rich interplay between the mountain’s natural beauty and the obvious human influence in the very materiality of the temples and monasteries that dot its craggy surface, which thrusts skyward as it towers above the surrounding peaks (3).

When we arrived at the mountain, I was unfamiliar with the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva (literally, wisdom being) but quickly became mesmerized by the artistic renderings of the bodhisattva path and Buddhist enlightenment (nirvāṇa) that we explored in those beautiful temples. Little could I have imagined that several years later, in summer 2022, I would be participating in a Buddhist meditation retreat hosted at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies that focused on unpacking the ways that the bodhisattva ideal and contemplative prayer could inform caregiving roles in social work, counseling, and chaplaincy. The Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva—particularly popular in East Asian forms of Buddhism—takes a vow to postpone final enlightenment and liberation from suffering until all sentient beings have been emancipated from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, which is referred to as saṃsāra in Buddhism.

I also did not realize during the trip that these wonderful artistic renderings had sown in me a spiritual seed. I now see that seed that was planted in the stream of my consciousness as a perennial plant that has nourished and healed me, just like so many plants found in traditional Chinese medicine. As I now look back on this trip to China, I can see how that plant has bloomed again and again, revealing insights in the depths of my consciousness that have helped me make sense of this deeply transformative experience on a sacred Chinese mountain. It was this experience, moreover, which set me on a path to investigate the potential of religious experience to engender psychospiritual growth.

The TCU CALM Studies Student Group

Even so, my desire to pursue an alternative way of being in the world did not take on great momentum until a serendipitous series of encounters. The first occurred about halfway through my undergraduate studies at TCU when I met Mark Dennis, a professor of Buddhist studies who teaches in the university’s Department of Religion. While completing my business degree, I was trying to squeeze in as many liberal arts classes as possible so that I could engage in deep conversations—infrequent in business school—about the sorts of spiritual experiences I had had in China on Emei Shan and elsewhere. At the same time, I had become increasingly curious about how to develop a committed meditation practice.

At the time, I thought of meditation as being well-suited for adepts, like Buddhist monks living in a temple or in seclusion atop a sacred mountain, but not for busy young Americans. These practices, which asked me to slow down and reflect, were at odds with the all-consuming busyness I experienced as an undergraduate business major, and what I had been warned would be the warp speed that would be my day-to-day existence once I entered a company for management training. Of all places, it was actually at a screening of an Iranian film that I met Mark because he was serving as the film’s facilitator for the Honors College. After the film, I asked him about his long-standing Zen Buddhist meditation practice, which he had described in his self-introduction. He explained that there are many different contemplative practices that I could incorporate into my daily life and offered to introduce me to a meditation group on campus. It was through this introduction that I joined a community of like-minded people who were aspiring to explore, as a community, the transformative potential of contemplative practices. Shortly after our meeting, Mark introduced me to several other TCU students who were also just setting out on their own contemplative paths, including Christine Pho, who went on to medical school, and Lexi Cole, who is, like me, in her first year of graduate school and has also contributed to this special issue on mindful flourishing.

It was Lexi, Christine, and I who decided to start the TCU Contemplative Studies student group in 2018 under the direction of the faculty group, which had begun in 2012. The student group decided to meet each week in the early morning before classes to sit together in silent meditation, a practice that is similar to the open-awareness practices found in Buddhist Vipassana. As I reflect back on that experience, the simple act of meeting each week to sit together in silence and then share hot tea and engaged conversation made me realize the valuable role played by the positive reinforcement of such a meditation group, especially when first setting out on a contemplative path. Indeed, I was energized by the positive feelings of support I received at these group meditations surrounded by my new spiritual friends, or kalyāṇamitra, to use a Buddhist term.

Over time, we expanded our student-oriented programming, hosting one-day meditation retreats where students could experience more deeply the impact that these practices could have on mind, body, and spirit amid the daily stresses of college life. These longer practice sessions could be challenging for those who had been socialized into thinking, like me, that they always needed to be doing and accomplishing things—to be constantly on the go so as not to be “wasting time.” Despite these challenges, the meditation retreats offered students the chance to explore their inner lives and experience an alternative way of being as part of a supportive community. We did so mainly through silent and guided forms of meditation practice, including the metta meditation that I mentioned above. Many in the group found the metta practice to be quite moving because it encourages us to wish others—even those whom we find difficult—happiness while recognizing their suffering, however it may appear. Stated otherwise, it is to look at their pain through the “eyes of compassion,” to revisit Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful phrase.

Through these weekly meditations and intensive retreats, we nurtured a wonderful samgha (community) of practitioners—some were at the beginning stage of meditation, while others had been engaged in a sitting practice for years. Regardless of their background, those who joined us often mentioned that they were seeking to reduce negative emotions and find a path of flourishing, one on which they could live a more fulfilling life with stronger and more intimate connections with others. This regular practice in a community of students reinforced my desire to develop a sustained practice but also led me to recognize the value of finding seasoned teachers and mentors. A skillful teacher can help newcomers navigate the many challenges and sense of disorientation that often arise when we begin paying close attention to our mental and emotional states.

The student group also practiced regularly with the faculty involved in the TCU Contemplative Studies program; faculty shared with the student group stories about their travels and studies in several Asian countries, including India, China, and Japan. Those stories of personal transformation inspired me to follow in their footsteps by setting out again for Asia to learn more about the contemplative path. My search led me to India, which is a land renowned for its long-standing contemplative traditions; I had learned from several of those faculty leaders that it had been the place that deeply transformed their own spiritual paths and understanding of the human potential to flourish. And so, after consulting with them about a trip to India, I set out for South Asia ready for another adventure, hoping to have the sorts of chance encounters and unexpected journeys that those faculty mentors told me about and which I had experienced, several years prior, on China’s Emei Shan. During the month that I was in India, I visited a handful of cities in the northern part of the country and completed an intensive yoga retreat—I had started practicing yoga several years earlier.

Back to Asia: Studying Yoga in India

In June of 2019, I boarded a Lufthansa Airlines flight that would take me on the long journey to New Delhi, arriving in India just one month before beginning my first full-time job at the pharmaceutical company. Several years before the trip to India, I had started studying the physical postural practices of yoga, called asanas, which had helped me cultivate a greater sense of calm and awareness of my own embodied existence. Like many college students who spend much of their day “living in their heads,” I had become detached from my sense of embodiment and had been regularly pushing my physical capacities to their limit—in fact, I had arrived, like many of my friends, on the verge of exhaustion. To flourish as a human being, I needed to make a radical change in the way I related to my body. Yoga was the initial gateway.

Not only did the practice help me slow down and cultivate a greater sense of equanimity and well-being, but it also led to other positive changes in my daily life. It enabled me, for instance, to better understand how the busyness of college and the ups and downs of daily life in the work world had been negatively affecting my eating, consumption, and sleeping patterns. Indeed, always being stressed and on the go had hampered my ability to get restful and restorative sleep, thereby preventing me from easily bouncing back from a hard day. My yoga practice also helped me to see with greater clarity my habitual patterns of thinking, especially the deeply grooved ruts of negativity that could often capture my mind. I noticed that with greater control over what I permitted to circulate in the stream of my consciousness undetected, I began to feel a slow and subtle shift toward a more positive and integrated way of being in the world. Indeed, it was a way of being that drew its vital energy from simply stretching my body and calming the breath, which naturally led, in turn, to deeper and more compassionate connections with other living beings. It was wonderful.

When I first became involved with the TCU CALM Studies group in 2018, I was struck by how its leaders welcomed everyone, practicing a form of radical acceptance and deep hospitality that seems, unfortunately, rare in contemporary American society. When someone joins the group, whether they come with a particular religious affiliation or not, they are invited to simply bring their authentic selves and share their stories.

As described above, I got involved in the group having already established an interest in the roots of mindfulness and meditation practices, particularly those found in Buddhism’s eightfold path and Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga. Both eightfold systems seek to synergistically combine meditative practices with ethically-grounded teachings. To learn more about the South Asian cultural and religious context from which these traditions arose, I started reading intensively about their history, teachings, exemplars, and so on, especially during the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic when face-to-face human interaction became nearly impossible.

While this study provided me with a useful base of knowledge, I was still yearning to have a direct, embodied experience of traveling in the land where these traditions arose and that still reveres, I had been told by my faculty mentors, all manner of psychospiritual paths. And while I had benefited greatly from practicing the physical yoga postures, I had also learned that these embodied practices were but a single part of a much broader path of spiritual flourishing that diverged in important ways from how they were often taught in a secularized American social context. To bridge this gap, I enrolled in a holistic yoga therapy teacher-training program in Rishikesh, which is located in the north of India and is well known as a thriving center of yoga practice. The teachers in this program helped me explore more deeply the questions I articulated above, and the calming practice environment they had created at the retreat center provided a needed respite after traveling solo through several north Indian cities, including New Delhi, Dehradun, Mussoorie, Varanasi, Guwahati, and Kolkata.

Like my experience traveling in China several years earlier, exploring the very different cultural context of modern India came at a time of transition as I was leaving Texas and the familiarity of TCU to head north to start working for a massive pharmaceutical company. In retrospect, I now see that even then there was an obvious incompatibility between the sense of calm, connection, and integration I had experienced studying yoga in India and the frenetic world of moneymaking I had just entered, which was fueled by marketing and networking, cutthroat competition, and profit-making. That is, my study in India had revealed to me a contemplative path and way of being in the world that privileges mindful presence and genuine human connection, which often seems in short supply in the business world.

During my travels in India, I just so happened to arrive in the northeastern city of Guwahati during a major Hindu religious festival known as the Ambubachi Mela. At the lively and colorful festival, I met many kind and hospitable people from all walks of life: some were pilgrims who hailed from the local area while others had traveled great distances to partake of the special spiritual energy generated by religious festivals and pilgrimages to sacred sites. The Kamakhya temple, which serves as the locus of the Ambubachi Mela, is well known in India as one of the sites where the Hindu goddess Sati’s yoni, or female genitalia, fell when her corpse burst into fifty-one pieces. Traditional texts say that those pieces had landed in different places, marking each as a sacred site. At the festival, I learned that what was actually being worshipped was not the goddess Kamakhya herself but the menstruation associated with the onset of the monsoon season. That process is closely connected to agricultural practices and fertility that bind the populace within this annual festival’s matrix of meaning and community connection (Das 2018).

Dream Yoga

After a wonderful month spent traveling and studying yoga in India, I had to face the harsh reality of coming home to a family dynamic in flux and the anxiety of being thrown into an unfamiliar work environment.

In late fall 2019, just months before our day-to-day lives would undergo the dramatic changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended an in-person retreat at the Kripalu Yoga Center led by Lama Migmar Tseten, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher from the Sakya lineage. He has served as a Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University since 1997 and also teaches at the Sakya Institute for Buddhist Studies. I feel fortunate that my first residential retreat was guided by this wonderful teacher who had been trained in a traditional monastic environment and exuded the sense of calm, equanimity, and joy I was seeking.

The focus of the retreat was dream yoga, a meditative practice found in several advanced Tibetan esoteric, or Vajrayana, traditions (Young 1999). At the beginning of the retreat, Lama Migmar Tseten explained to us how the foundational teachings of Buddhism would prepare us to better understand the nuances of dream yoga. These teachings opened up for me both an intellectual and a spiritual space in which dreaming, as a portal into the depths of our consciousness, could become an integral component of the contemplative and psychotherapeutic path. It also became clear that the interpretive framework he taught us to analyze dream states deviated from the often dismissive and, frequently, pathologizing approach to dreams I had encountered in Western traditions. In addition, Lama Migmar Tseten seemed to emanate from the core of his being a sense of warmth and complete presence as he taught us with great care and patience the basic Buddhist teachings on suffering and compassion. This training turned out to be another wonderful spiritual gift, bringing into greater relief a personal and professional path that could be rooted in Buddhism and oriented toward the reduction of suffering—I set the intention to follow it wherever it led.

The Value of Being Shaken Up

But this path that was slowly coming into focus also came with significant challenges. My meditation practice included moments of peace and clarity but others that shook me deeply. This process was playing out just as I started feeling the additional dislocations of being forced, like many others, to drastically alter my daily routine amid the pandemic’s restrictions on social interaction. These experiences with the value of being shaken up continue to inform my preferred theoretical orientation while training as a therapist. Practice with meditation taught me early on that any creative or generative change has an inherently disruptive effect as well (Hart 1999). As I continued with meditation practice in this uncertain new social world, I came to experience and become more attuned to the Buddhist teachings on suffering that I had just been studying with Lama Migmar Tseten. Amid these mental ups and downs and difficult social conditions, I had to decide whether to pursue this path by entering a socially engaged Buddhist studies program or a more traditional graduate program in psychology, counseling, or social work. Each of these academic disciplines offers insights on the causes and cures of human suffering and the ways in which we can transform our thinking and behavior to promote a flourishing life. A critical factor in my choice of clinical mental health counseling was reassurances from my mentors that I could still pursue a socially engaged and mindful path in a more traditional academic setting.

Among the many surprises brought on by the requirement to socially isolate during the pandemic was the chance to stay connected with TCU’s CALM community. Like much of American society, the CALM Studies group had been required to take all its programming—meditation sessions, retreats, speakers—online. Even though I had stayed in close contact with several TCU professors post-graduation, I had begun to recognize how living in Chicago had created a vast physical separation from the Fort Worth contemplative community that had welcomed me and had nurtured my contemplative practice and spiritual growth. It is where I had truly found my place—my spiritual home. This reinforced for me a valuable lesson that many just starting on a meditative path often overlook: the capacity of a like-minded community of practitioners to make us feel seen and heard, welcomed and valued. I had come to see how deeply I could rely on the support, advice, and generosity of the community’s members during these turbulent and deeply destabilizing times.

The Nalanda Institute: Contemplative Psychotherapy

In a conversation with Mark Dennis, I expressed the dissatisfaction with my career in management that I described above and also my aspiration to follow this alternative path. I did so because he had, some years earlier, shared with me a similar experience; that is, he too had become deeply dissatisfied in his twenties with the competitiveness and isolation of the business world and had set out on an alternative path, which he had discovered through intensive meditation practice. During our conversation, he introduced me to the Contemplative Psychotherapy Program at the Nalanda Institute that would become the foundational experience guiding me toward becoming a counselor working at the intersection of contemplative practice and psychotherapy.

The institute’s two-year program was divided into twelve-month sections: the first focused on a deep dive into mindfulness techniques while the second concentrated on practices for cultivating compassion. Participants were asked to commit to a daily contemplative practice and prepare extensive readings on these topics. Ira Helderman’s (2019) Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion discusses how the Nalanda Institute’s founder, Joe Loizzo, has successfully integrated Buddhist teachings into the practice of therapists. This integration demonstrates a rich convergence of Asian contemplative traditions with Western psychotherapeutic models, which was a combination that appealed to me greatly.

The two-year training program included an absorbing and insightful cast of rotating speakers who offered their own perspectives on Buddhist mindfulness and compassion practices. Several faculty members were living as ordained monastics, while others had experienced monastic life but were now fully engaged in society as professors, clinicians, and so on. Still other speakers were lay Buddhist teachers actively trying to reimagine the role of the dharma teacher in American Buddhism. This diversity of paths oriented toward reducing human suffering reminded me how Buddhism’s teachings and meditative insights can blossom and take shape in widely varied contexts.

Back to Meditation Retreats

My ongoing work with the TCU CALM Studies group and training at the Nalanda Institute helped refine my own self-understanding and offered valuable insights for how I might navigate this exciting and fruitful intersection between Buddhism and American psychotherapy. These experiences have helped me better understand how I can incorporate my daily mindfulness practice, regular meditation retreats, study of Buddhist texts, and travels in Asia into my professional life, where I will work with patients whose lives are not filled with flourishing.

As the Contemplative Psychotherapy Program at Nalanda came to a close and the world began slowly opening up to in-person meetings, I again started attending meditation retreats offered by Dharma Gates, which is a nonprofit that organizes meditation retreats for young people interested in exploring a Buddhist path. One of those retreats, taught by Ayyā Dhammadīpā, focused on exploring our sense-experiences through silent practice and metta meditation. I saw how settled and clear my mind became through days of silence—a common occurrence among those who participate in a meditation retreat—and the benefits of cultivating these positive emotions toward self and other, despite the skepticism I noted above. The retreat also reminded me how many other young professionals are facing similar difficulties integrating their commitment to a contemplative path with the inevitable pressures and expectations of leading a life enmeshed in the social world.

I was so deeply moved by the Dharma Gates retreat that I quickly signed up for a retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, which was founded by the Vipassana Insight Meditation teachers Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. They did so to create a space for people to engage in a deep and ethically informed meditative practice as a community, building on their work in the Insight Meditation Society. Goldstein, Salzberg, and other Buddhist meditation teachers have used the society to bring the teachings of Buddhism and the experience of meditation retreats to a broader American audience. This experience was especially gratifying for me because I was able to meditate with other professionals—doctors, therapists, nurses, chaplains, and others—who had made a serious commitment to silent sitting and exploring Buddhist concepts and values in their everyday life. Participating in this retreat just before entering graduate school confirmed my commitment to following a path of flourishing, wherever it leads. It is a path that I feel in the core of my being is more clearly aligned with my sense of interconnectedness with other human beings, non-human animals, and Mother Earth herself.

Conclusion

As I have described, I am just setting out on a path that explores the intersection of Buddhist teachings and clinical mental health work. I hope that the stories I have shared about my own journey will be of particular value to those of you facing a similar challenge of trying to align your core values with the work you do, and to navigate skillfully the inevitable ups and downs of daily life while mindfully pursuing your own sense of flourishing. And while many such paths exist, of course, my conception of such a path has been forged by the wonderfully transformative experiences I have had with the Asian cultures, languages, and religious traditions described above. It is quite difficult for me to imagine the enormity of what I would have lost had I not had the chance to travel in Asia or had I not come to understand myself and my role as a future therapist through my encounters with the wisdom of Buddhist teachings about promoting a sense of flourishing.

As a student in a clinical mental health counseling program, I recognize that established and entrenched views about the self and mind, about diagnosis and treatment, may not welcome my desire, and those of like-minded therapists, to integrate Buddhist spiritual perspectives into the therapeutic process. In American psychotherapy, the established views about proper clinical practice have often privileged a medicalized model of diagnosing and treating mental illness that is at odds with the approach I have outlined above. But I am buoyed by what seems like a bottom-up movement in American society to reject this reductive approach and to reclaim our deepest sense of being integrated human beings who can, with practice, become still and mindful, who can connect and thrive. It is with much gratitude and excitement that I find myself at this juncture where multiple pathways of healing and wholeness, well-being, and flourishing are converging.

Finally, please feel free to share my contact information¹ with your students who might be interested in learning more about my Asian experiences.

Personal Photos:

China

Visiting the Leshan Giant Buddha, China.

Ascending Emei Shan, China.

Buddhist art in the temples of Emei Shan, China.

TCU

TCU CALM studies students and faculty gather together before graduation.

India

Viewing the mountains near Mussoorie, India

Visiting a temple in Varanasi, India

Enjoying the tea farms near Guwahati in Assam, India.

A view of the flower markets in Kolkata, India.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.