What is Applied Meditation Therapy?

Applied Meditation Therapy® (AMT) is a skillful behavioral life practice that integrates the findings, insights, and strategies from Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, Bodymind Medicine, Cognitive Psychology, and Biofeedback with a 5,000 year old human science known as "the original body of living meditation". Applied Meditation Therapy® is a powerful therapeutic "Way of Life" for promoting health, healing, longevity, compassion, wisdom, clarity, creativity, peak embodiment, personal growth, interpersonal harmony, and inner peace.

The venerable therapeutic tradition of embodied life meditation is based on a timeless cross cultural truth that all human beings have access to a deep trustworthy Source of Wisdom that penetrates all Creation---a Still Inner Core of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, healing, growth, and guidance. This Source of Vast Wisdom, which is bodily present in each of us, can be intuitively discerned, consistently experienced, and empathically understood through the daily application of the skills and principles which constitute Applied Meditation Therapy®.

Applied Meditation Therapy® can also be viewed as a self-directed form of cognitive therapy that helps the daily practitioner to unravel unhealthy distortions in core beliefs, unconscious prejudices, rationalizations, denials, and other dysfunctional perceptual filters while developing healthier, creative, and more balanced ways of viewing and evaluating self, others, and the true nature of human experience as a whole.

All counseling and training in Applied Meditation Therapy® rests on the fundamental principle that the body, mind, heart, and spirit are mutually interdependent and function together as One Psychobiospiritual Unity, Integrity, and Wholeness.

How Does AMT® Empower the Individual?

The application of the behavioral and cognitive skills of Applied Meditation Therapy® provides a deeply embodied means for practicing a compassionate relationship with your true self while faithfully listening to that Inner Source of Wisdom at the Core of your mental, emotional, and physical life. Through this marriage of self-compassion and deep bodily listening you will identify an innate preverbal awareness that is capable of objectively witnessing mental content, behavioral dynamics, and subtle psychoneurophysical interactions that previously were inaccessible to your conscious awareness.

As you begin to experientially validate your innate ability to consciously witness the dynamics of your personality, ego-consciousness, and embodied self, you will gradually become more aware of causal connections that exist between your mental life, emotional states, behavioral patterns, and your daily experience of wellness. This compassionate witnessing of "inner causal connections" empowers you to decisively implement the psychobehavioral skills of Applied Meditation Therapy® for promoting your own health, healing, growth, wonder, creativity, and peace.

What are the Ancient Roots of AMT®?
How Does AMT View Other Types of Meditation?

Applied Meditation Therapy® or (AMT), represents the distillation of fourty years of my educational, psychological, and empirical research and practice into the deepest prehistorical root of the enduring human science known as "embodied life meditation". The seated practice & lived principles of Applied Meditation Therapy® are based on my findings of an Original Root of Meditation that has an embodied practice longevity of over 5,000 years. This Root Body of Meditation was originally indicated in the daily life embodiment of the Taoist Ancients in prehistorical China. The meditation life Way of the Taoist Ancients is alluded to in 2 major psychological and philosophical texts. First is the "I Ching", or the Book of Changes which was written in approximately 2500 BC. Second is the text known as the "Tao Te Ching", or the Book of the Way & Its Virtue was which was written in approximately 500 BC.

The same Original Root Body of Meditation also emerged in India in approximately 531 BC. However, rather than being alluded to in various Indian texts, a human being intuitively realized, embodied, and exemplified the same meditative Root Body of the Chinese Ancients. This person from India became known as the historical Buddha and his body of meditation became known as "Dhyana". Around 520 AD, the Buddha's Authentic Body of Meditation was transmitted to China by a monk named Bodhidharma. When Bodhidharma taught the Buddha Seal of Meditation in China, it was readily accepted because it reflected the Original Meditation Body of the Chinese Ancients. This unity or merger between the Buddha Seal of Meditation and the Meditation Seal of the Chinese Ancients can be understood as One bright mirror seeing and embracing it's own reflection. In that historical embrace, the Buddha's Body of Meditation became know as the Way of Chan in China. When Chan was transmitted to Japan, it became known as the Way of Zen. Thus, Chan, and Zen both refer to the Buddha's Authentic Body of Living Meditation".

According to the Applied Meditation Therapy® paradigm, all of the ancient and modern forms of meditation are modified expressions of the prehistorical root body of Chinese ancients and the historical embodiment of the authentic Buddha's seal. AMT views all other meditation forms as living branches of an Ancient Tree that draws its life energy from this deep root body of original meditation. Thus, AMT provides a radical or original frame of reference that helps individuals to evaluate, refine, and align the mental, emotional, and behavioral postures within their unique practice of embodied meditation.

Will AMT® Impact My Religious Views or Beliefs?

Applied Meditation Therapy® supports all religions and is not contrary to any spiritual life views. The psychobehavioral tools of Applied Meditation Therapy® are objective procedures or skillful methods for working with yourself and the interdependent dynamics of your body, mind, heart, spirit, & relationships. If you are religiously inclined, Applied Meditation Therapy® will help you to clarify and fulfill your unique experience of faith and the practice of your cherished beliefs. On the other hand, whether you have religious leanings or not, Applied Meditation Therapy® will help you to embody compassion, confidence, clarity, creativity, wisdom, and fulfillment in this Only Moment just as it is.

How Can Applied Meditation Therapy® Benefit My Life?

1) Develop insight into the interdependent dynamics and unconscious causal connections between thoughts, attitudes, feelings, body states, perceptions, and behaviors.

2) Change unhealthy dependencies and actions into more wholesome life coping strategies and growth affirming responses.

3) Align the attitudes, intentions, skills, and motivations of your meditation life practice to facilitate its practical and fruitful applications in daily life and relationships.

4) Refine behavioral impulse control amidst obsessive thoughts, strong desires, and intense emotions.

5) Clarify how the teachings, skills, and rituals of your meditation practice can facilitate or obstruct health, healing, and inner growth.

6) Enhance your inner listening skills, empathy, intuition, self-knowledge, and interpersonal communications.

7) Nourish gratitude, compassion, forgiveness, and appreciation for yourself and others.

8) Diminish, manage, and transform the energies of stress and pain while enhancing the vitality and quality of your bodily experience.

9) Lower hypertension and high blood pressure while easing resting heart rate and quickening recovery time.

10) Increase concentration, self-esteem, creativity, spontaneity, and depth of awareness.

11) Restore original human values while clarifying vision, meaning, purpose, contentment, and passionate life goals.

12) Recover and nurture the experiences of wonder, sacredness, mystery, and peace.

13) Passionately live the Way of loving and being loved beyond resistance and fear.
14) Lucidly actualize all your dreams far beyond grasping, desiring, and expecting.

What Can I Expect in Counseling?

You will receive training, education, and guidance in Applied Meditation Therapy® as well as life counseling to help deepen your awareness of those mental, emotional and behavioral processes that can obstruct or liberate your human potential for creativity, joy, love, growth, and inner fulfillment.

Your counseling experience will provide you with a healthier and more fulfilling Way of practicing your life. However, the stratigies and practice of Applied Meditation Therapy® should not be viewed as panaceas for avoiding or transcending uncomfortable or painful feelings and life experiences. In fact, Applied Meditaiton Therapy® will encourage you to intimately embody the truth of your felt experience just as it is. This conscious practice of being truth, moment by moment, is the potent catalyst for any genuine learning, insight, change, healing, and growth.

What is a Counseling Relationship?

Counseling in Applied Meditation Therapy® is a safe teaching, listening, sharing, coaching and mentoring relationship where you can begin to intimately contact, clarify, and understand the intuitive wisdoming of your felt bodily experience moment by moment. Through the counseling process you will learn how to listen and intuitively discern the innate preverbal wisdoming of your only moment body while following its guidance toward healthier and more satisfying behaviors, experiences, and relationships.

The counseling relationship is an inner journey that will help you to clarify how your conditioned thoughts and behaviors can obstruct your natural birthright to a sacred, loving, and creative Way of Life. You will come to know the potent and empowering insight of quantum physics research which states that "the observer effects the reality observed". You will come to know this liberating truth first hand as you begin to see the potent experiential effects that Applied Meditation Therapy® has on the depth, quality, and richness of your daily life and intimate relationships.

How Does Healing and Growth Occur?

Healing and growth occur through the vital experiential interaction of counseling, training, education, practice, applied biofeedback, deep somatic awareness, and subtle insight into the causal dynamics of your mind, personality, and behavior. Through our work together and your mindful daily work with the skills of Applied Meditation Therapy®, the small and great miracles of life begin to appear. Fear yields to courage, tension to ease, urgency to calmness, envy to gratitude, aggression to compassion, sorrow to joy, and unconsciousness to the light of wisdoming.

What Skills Will I Learn?

The meditation relationship will teach you to embody and constantly refine these twelve therapeutic life skills.

1) Translate the language and guidance of vast wisdoming through your intelligent moment body awareness that exists before your ego-self, personality dynamics and conditioned thinking.

2) Develop an intimate and empowering relationship with core breathing that effects the felt daily wellness of body, mind, and heart.

3) Nurture mental clarity, emotional balance, vitality and equanimity through the skill of Ki generation, containment and extension.

4) Know self-integrity before the multiplicity of thoughts, feelings, needs, desires, and goals.

5) Clarify healthy self-boundaries while opening yourself to loving and healing relationships.

6) Apply a yielding, empowering, and adaptive inner posture to creatively overcome difficulties.

7) Learn how to center, ground, and blend with wisdoming during stress and pain in order to experience the moment body of ease and joy.

8) Experientiall learn how your self-concept and thinking mind effect the nature and quality of your reality.

9) Nourish a constant freshness or beginner's heartmind toward the felt wisdoming of sound, sight, touch, smell, taste, feeling, thought and intimate relationships.

10) Diminish self-judgment, indifference, and unconsciousness with constant wakefulness, faithfulness, bodymind intimacy, and self-compassion.

11) Embody truth and upright inner posture amidst all your activities and relationships.

12) Free yourself from greed, aggression, and ignorance through the practices of self-honest, humility, generosity, gratitude, inner freedom and self-integrity.

As you apply these Applied Meditation Therapy® mental skills and behavioral strategies to your daily life, you will begin to anchor your choices and actions in that potent inner reservoir where your innate wisdoming, self-fulfillment, and true humanity lies.