to do so. No one can take away the feelings of another person, nor would it be good therapy to try. The practitioner's task is to listen empathetically to what the client is telling him or her. This alone is enough to help the client because it enables the client to feel heard and understood. Listening empathetically also helps the therapist differentiate him or herself from the client. It is not the clinician's job to take away the client's pain. In fact, it may be valuable for the client to experience the pain and accept it. The practitioner must simply sit with the suffering and contain it, but not feel it as his or her own.
This general statement affirms that therapists can benefit from inclusion of Buddhist concepts and practices in the therapeutic milieu.
Buddhism and Emotional Issues: The Case of Anger
Epstein (1998) has pointed out that Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy share the common goal of assisting the individual with getting in touch with emotions that have been closed off. Whereas meditation seeks nonjudgmental awareness, traditional Western therapy often assigns blame for suffering. Epstein (1998) suggests that Buddhism has always made the self's ability to relax its boundaries the centerpiece of its teaching, recognizing that the central issues of human lives require an ability to surrender that often eludes us. Psychotherapy turns humans in a reflective direction into a search for the cause for unhappiness in order to break free from the traumas of the past. What Buddhism adds to therapy is the recognition, said Epstein (1998), that suffering is often an artifact of excessive desire or the surrender of the individual to harmful emotions.
Similar comments were advanced by Lloyd (2005), who noted that Buddhist practice assists psychotherapists and their clients in maintaining an evenly suspended atten
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