On Buddhist Psychology
Tara Brach is a leading western teacher of Buddhist meditation, enotional healing and spiritual awakening. She has practiced and taught meditation for over 35 years, with emphasis on vipassana (mindfulness or insight) meditation. Tara is the senior teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. A clinical psychologist, Tara is the author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha.
Tara is nationally known for her skill in weaving western psychological wisdom with a range of meditative practices. Her approach emphasizes compassion for oneself and others, mindful presence and the direct realization and embodiment of natural awareness.
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
Dr. Amen is a physician, psychiatrist, teacher, and four time New York Times bestselling author. He is regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on applying brain imaging science to clinical psychiatric practice. He is a board certified child and adult psychiatrist and the medical director of Amen Clinics, Inc. in Newport Beach and San Francisco, California, Bellevue, Washington, and Reston, Virginia. Amen Clinics have the world’s largest database of functional brain scans relating, totaling 70,000 scans on patients from 90 countries.
Dr. Amen is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (the highest award given to members) and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.
Dr. Amen is the lead researcher on the world’s largest brain imaging/brain rehabilitation study on professional football players, which not only demonstrated significant brain damage in a high percentage of retired players, but also the possibility for rehabilitation in many with the principles that underlie his work.
Psychology in Palo Alto, is internationally known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness (particularly altered states of consciousness), as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in scientific parapsychology. His two classic books, Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.
Harville Hendrix, Ph. D. is a Clinical Pastoral Counselor who is known internationally for his work with couples. He and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. cocreated Imago Relationship Therapy and developed the concept of “conscious partnership.” Their partnership and collaboration has resulted in nine books on intimate relationships and parenting.
Harville holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and Theology from the University of Chicago and has received an honorary doctorate and two distinguished service awards. Harville has appeared on many national television shows including seventeen guest appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show. One of his appearances won her an Emmy award for the “most socially redemptive” daytime talk shows and was included by Ms. Winfrey in her top twenty shows. In addition to many radio shows, Harville’s work has been written about in numerous newspapers and magazines internationally, including the November 2005 issue of The Oprah Magazine where he was referred to in an article as the “marriage whisperer.” He is a member of the Redbook Marriage Institute, serving on the magazine’s team of marriage experts.
This distinguished Texas physician, deeply rooted in the scientific world, has become an internationally influential advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare. Bringing the experience of a practicing internist and the soul of a poet to the discourse, Dr. Larry Dossey offers panoramic insight into the nature and the future of medicine.
Upon graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Dossey worked as a pharmacist while earning his M.D. degree from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, 1967. Before completing his residency in internal medicine, he served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. Dr. Dossey helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association, the largest group of internal medicine practitioners in that city, and was Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital in 1982.
An education steeped in traditional Western medicine did not prepare Dr. Dossey for patients who were blessed with “miracle cures,” remissions that clinical medicine could not explain. “Almost all physicians possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science,” says Dr. Dossey. “A tally of these events would demonstrate, I am convinced, that medical science not only has not had the last word, it has hardly had the first word on how the world works, especially when the mind is involved.”