Sandra García: «The Self is not something fixed or solid, it is constantly changing»

Meditation and psychotherapy have many points of connection, both in their potential to improve mental health, and in their implications for adopting healthy habits.

This is precisely the topic that we will address in this interview with the psychologist Sandra García Sánchez-Beato, Director of Adhara Psychology and expert in meditation, which proposes an integration between this practice and the principles of psychotherapy through the Insight Light method.

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Interview with Sandra García Sánchez-Beato: knowing the Insight Light method

Sandra García Sánchez-Beato is a psychotherapist and meditator, as well as Director of Adhara Psychology and Director of the Awakening, Psychotherapy & Meditation project. In this interview she talks about Insight Light, a method that offers the benefits of integrating meditation into the therapeutic process.

What is the Insight Light® method you work from?

It is a method based on some important pillars, such as Contemplative Psychotherapy. In turn, it integrates the path of

Buddhist philosophy about the idea of ​​the self and the essence of our mind; the resources of Humanist Psychotherapy and the latest advances on the neuroscience of meditation.

We start from the basis that all beings share a subtle mind that resides beyond mental phenomena and whose nature is goodness. Its inherent qualities, according to the studies of Buddhist philosophy, are lightness, spaciousness and its lack of elements that obstruct it.

These aspects, in turn, bring us closer to positive qualities such as compassion, equanimity, joy or benevolent love, which we have to promote.

With the Insight Light method we start a journey that takes us back home. It is created to help us realize our potential. It allows us to direct the light of our attention to our interior to discover, through consciousness, what happens in our mind-heart.

On the other hand, it contributes to exploring the true nature of our mind, beyond conditioning, concepts and mental processes, and to find that internal space more luminous, open and spontaneous than all we share.

Insight Light offers us a way to go, focused on comprehensive personal growth, contemplating the spiritual dimension. In the professional field, it provides us with a working method that we can integrate as a resource in the therapeutic process and in other contexts, related to health, well-being and education.

In its development there are a series of premises on which the method is based associated with the mind, both as a container of mental processes and their nature.

First, the insubstantiality of the self. We need to do a research approach to the concept we have of the self. From Buddhism, it is considered that the self is not something fixed, but that it is configured by a series of aggregates that offer us the idea with which we build our identity.

It does not mean that it does not exist, but that it exists in a different way from how we perceive it. It gives us the vision that our mind is a continuum in which moments of consciousness are happening that give us the sensation of being something solid, but in reality it is not.

This vision is very inspiring and revealing, as the emotions and sources of conflict become more difficult to maintain if it is explored that the self is something conceptual and imputed made up of aggregates.

Second, letting go of clinging to the idea of ​​self. By believing that our self is something fixed, we relate to emotions, concepts and mental processes by grasping and holding them in us. By freeing ourselves from this grasp progressively the emotions do not feed back and dissolve spontaneously.

This allows us to relate to our conditioning from a freer perspective, since we can let go and transform them without getting hooked.

Third, the emptiness of phenomena. Deepening the emptiness of emotions, mental processes and external and internal phenomena, helps us not to solidify our experience. In reality, there is nothing we can hold back. We need to internally coalesce and integrate, freeing ourselves from duality, to create a flow of consciousness that allows us to live fully.

Finally, the qualities of the nature of the mind. Spaciousness, lightness and non-obstruction are inherent qualities of our mind. If we train ourselves to glimpse this subtle mind, it will be easier to open that internal space when we feel prisoners of conflicting emotions. We thus avoid solidifying them, and we learn to let them go. They lose intensity and prominence if we see them within an unlimited space.

To explore this vision of our emotional world, we will work with practices that will be integrated: mental calm, deep vision of phenomena, the deconstruction of the concept of the self and the cultivation of compassion as a quality that permeates it everything.

To what extent are meditation and psychotherapy part of different fields?

In my view, they are two complementary paths that allow us to approach the mind from two perspectives.

From psychotherapy we work with the most ordinary mind and its sources of conflict: our personal history, the root of traumatic experiences, their manifestations, beliefs, models of attachment ...

Everything that has been integrated into our mental continuum activating a series of tendencies, beliefs or attributions about ourselves. We explore how the outside world has conditioned us and created frames of reference from which we have learned to relate.

What the vision of Buddhist psychology and the practice of meditation gives us is the observation of the mind subtle as the container of mental processes, with its qualities of spaciousness, lightness and not obstruction.

These processes arise from the mind, but they are not an inherent part of it, and their nature is insubstantial. That is why they can be transformed and we can eradicate the causes of suffering.

Why do you think it is important for people to be trained in the theory and practice of this therapeutic proposal?

If we work in a complementary way the sources of conflict with psychological resources and we train our mind to observe these processes by disidentifying ourselves from them, negative tendencies are losing strength.

If in a parallel way we cultivate qualities such as compassion, benevolent love, equanimity or others, the Negative tendencies dissolve like an ink drop in an ocean and the most deeply rooted ones can lose strength and frequency.

With mindfulness and other meditation practices, the mind is trained to observe how our negative internal dynamics work and to be able to let go of clinging to those mechanisms. In reality, the negative experiences that we keep from our history are part of some memories and still images that we feed back with thoughts or emotions, and yet they are quite fuzzy.

They have no interest in staying with us. It is the clinging and the difficulty we have to let go that entangles us over and over again in the same emotional tangle.

How we relate to them is up to us. Precisely because their inherent nature is insubstantial and not solid, we can transform and integrate them in our path by turning negative experiences into levers of change.

Insight Light offers us a roadmap. A new way of writing our history, which helps us become aware of that light that resides beyond pain and in which we have to trust. We begin a journey to be able to glimpse the true nature of our mind and trust that we can rest in it. It's like coming home.

Another interesting step is to work with the deconstruction of the self. From psychology we need to build a cohesive and strong sense of self. From meditation we learn to deal with our sense of self in a more realistic and fluid way. This feeling of identity is explored in a way that brings us cohesion and internal union.

However, we know from direct practice experience that the Self is not something fixed or solid, but is constantly changing and evolving.

This experience transforms the feeling of a solid and rigid identity into an experience not dualist with which we can move more freely. It opens up a new way for us to approach our mental labels and the self-concept we have of ourselves, which can be very limiting at times.

By transforming and working in parallel with these two perspectives, the relationship with the ordinary mind goes away. transforming, the sources of conflict are dissolving and we are becoming more connected with our true nature. Progressively achieving a state of greater mental calm and general well-being.

What is the way in which human subjectivity is understood from Humanist Psychotherapy?

From Humanist Psychotherapy, we work investigating the root of emotion and the sources of conflict.

Each of us is born in a certain environment in which different forms of relationships are manifested: attachment models, interaction with parental referents, the good or bad treatment we receive from our parents, the norms or limits that are defined in the systems we frequent, forms of behaviour...

All this is configuring an internal frame of reference from which we will interact with ourselves and with others.

From the therapeutic approach, we explore that subjectivity that determines the way we integrate lived experiences and how we relate to them. We need to know not only which were the conflict spaces, their causes and their manifestations, but also how each one decodes and perceives them.

These disturbing emotions are fixed through micro events that can become micro more complex traumas or traumas, coming to condition our lives in a very limiting way Present.

The type of emotions (their management, intensity and associated mental processes) will depend on the personal history of each one. Personal tendencies, attachment model, early experiences, traumas, family system ...

Through Insight Light, this subjective vision is integrated by contemplating it within a process of interdependence. There have been a series of causes and conditions for the experiences in our mental continuum to arise and be fixed in a certain way. But being something conditioned, it is considered that it can be transformed.

We can observe in a disidentified way the circumstances that occurred. Since our mind is not something fixed or solid, but a continuum with its inherent qualities, we can train ourselves to transform the relationship we have as those experiences.

Awareness plays a very important role and the perception of reality as an experience subjective, allows us to transform the vision of our history from a kinder place to us. Although the objective is to move towards a broader and more penetrating vision of reality.

Based on your work in training programs, what have been the aspects that have most interested or surprised students?

When students begin to meditate, they realize the enormous potential within them. They begin to feel more responsible for their own lives. At first it can be a bit dizzy, but then they appreciate the feeling of inner freedom that this brings them.

They discover that reaching a state of happiness and well-being does not depend on external phenomena. It is clear that what happens around us influences us, but they begin to be aware that the key to happiness is in their hands: in their mind-heart.

Another important element is the expansion of consciousness. They discover aspects of themselves and others that were previously overlooked. They feel freer when it comes to integrating internal changes because they are more aware of the impermanence and interdependence of phenomena and they live them more naturally and with less resistance.

I would highlight another aspect, which is perhaps the most important: they learn to integrate a much more loving and kind relationship with themselves. This allows them to have a stable base from which to implement the changes necessary to release the sources of conflict and interact with others from the same attitude of kindness and I respect.

The practice of compassion spreads like the scent of perfume. This is part of a process, but it is a common denominator that comes naturally, if practice is put to good use.

What are the main objectives that you have set for yourself when designing and promoting these courses?

There is an extensive path traveled by great teachers who have observed and studied the mind in depth for centuries.

My aspiration is to continue deepening the path of meditation and integrate its benefits into the practice of psychology.

Being able to provide resources and techniques that provide others with the possibility of achieving a state of well-being and fulfillment. Help sow those seeds so that they bear fruit and help mature the mind.

With this motivation, I have designed these courses. To offer a roadmap where we can learn to trust more in our innate wisdom and goodness.

Currently I have created several programs that help to walk this path:

• Transform your mind, awaken your heart. It is a nine-month personal development course, distributed in weekly sessions over three trimesters: get to know yourself, connect with yourself, reinvent yourself. We walk a path where we go deeper, in each one, in an integral way.
• Mental training in emotional management in five steps RIAST. It is an eight-week program in which we learn to manage and transform emotions using five steps.
• Psychomeditations: these are meditations that integrate therapeutic resources to help us become aware and transform sources of conflict in an induced way.
• Mentoring Mind: these are therapeutic sessions in which meditation is used as a resource, to train the mind in the face of certain conflicts or negative tendencies. From mindfulness and awareness, you learn to neutralize or replace them with positive ones.

I think that Western psychology still has a lot to learn from the vision that these contemplative practices give us.

They open up new perspectives for us that we can investigate and apply within our Western world. There is a great need to return to a simpler and kinder life, where we can regain a new way of relating to ourselves and to others.

Taking responsibility for our lives, developing qualities such as compassion and stopping looking outside for what we already have inside.