Introduction to Mindfulness_349810_bookemon_ebook.pdf Coaching and Practising Mindfulness | Page 36

subjective sense of a stream of consciousness. We have simply
learned to connect the snapshots together into a coherent narrative.
This is like the illusion of continuous action that our minds create out
of separate frames in a movie. Among the great insights of the
Buddhist tradition is not only that this is all happening below the
threshold of ordinary awareness, but also that this process can unfold
in either healthy and unhealthy ways, depending on the skills of its
handler.
This analysis of human experience has important and radical clinical
implications. It suggests that our reality, including the sense of “self”
around which so much personal psychology is centered, is based on a
fundamental misunderstanding. It is as though we believed that a
powerful automobile like a Ferrari was a living being—until we saw it
disassembled on the floor of a workshop. When we know the
component parts and how they’re put together, we can never look at
a Ferrari in quite the same way. Similarly, seeing the way the “self” is
constructed can help both us and our patients loosen our
identification with the changing kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings
that arise in the mind, allowing us to live more flexible, adaptive,
happier,
productive
lives.
A Physician of the Mind
The Buddha sometimes refers to himself as a physician, and to his
teaching as a kind of medicine. The illness he is treating is the fact
that consciousness is continually influenced by patterns of
conditioning that inevitably result in unhappiness, frustration, and
disappointment. This is certainly an observation familiar to the
modern psychotherapist. Rather than changing brain chemistry by
pharmaceuticals or probing past traumas arresting normal
development, however, the Buddha’s approach is to help the patient
gain direct insight into the nature of experience.

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