... and we should be observant and loving to ourselves, and to others!

So suggests Judson Brewer of the Brown University Mindfulness Center, interviewed in Joshua Rothman's "Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change Our Minds?" (New Yorker, 10 July 2023). Rothman explores Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (C.B.T.) and suggests that it might be (sometimes?) helpful to gently examine one's own beliefs, without judging (too much!) or clinging (maybe!). His essay concludes with a lovely metacognitive metaphor:

The mind is an alien place; it's impossible to describe anyone’s completely and accurately. This only makes it more powerful when a therapeutic model offers you a way of describing yourself to yourself. Do we really have "core beliefs"? Are we really shaped by our "automatic thoughts"? Simply by proposing such ideas, we can make them almost true. It's by believing in descriptions that we allow therapy to slide from theory into practice. Scaling the rock face of our own problems, we can carve the rock in fresh ways, inventing handholds; we can create new routes where none seemed to exist. ...

... shades of Richard Wilbur's poem "Mind", eh?!

(cf Present-Moment Reality (2008-11-05), Mantra - Notice and Return (2014-11-30), Befriending the Self (2015-05-15), Wakeful, Open, Tender (2016-08-25, Intuitive Eating (2019-12-20), ...) - ^z - 2023-07-17