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Spiritual vs Psychological Health - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 28, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Spiritual vs Psychological Health

The question for this talk is: what is the relationship between psychological and spiritual health?

There are different hypotheses around this. One is what teachers sometimes refer to as the "relative and the absolute," where those two levels are not really connected. They are different realms; the spiritual and the psychological are separate and not strongly correlated.

Alternatively, maybe they have everything to do with each other. One might make the case that spiritual and psychological health are not two things, and that enlightenment is just a very high level of psychological functioning and health.

A third possibility—noted by Jack Engler in that famous line, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody"—is the view that psychological health is a precondition, making the heart and mind fertile for a more radical letting go of self-identity. In this view, we develop psychological health, and that gives us the strength and stability to endure some of the more radical disorientation of the spiritual path.

In a fourth view, we might argue that spiritual and psychological dimensions are threaded together. As we deepen spiritually, there are more and more opportunities for psychological growth, and our psychological growth makes spiritual deepening more possible.

Why We Enter the Path

How do we make sense of these four possibilities? Even before considering that, we might ask why we get into this path. I would generally say it is usually for psychological reasons of some kind. It is usually a smaller intention, a more transactional intention that gets us into the path—which I am not disparaging at all. We wish to feel better.

The aspirations tend to begin small. We do not really know what we are doing when we set foot into the dharma world. If it was the first time you set foot into IMC, you could not really give informed consent for what the path was going to ask of you and do to you. That sounds a little weird, but one of my teachers, Shinzen Young, would say, "There is no informed consent for enlightenment."

You do not know exactly what this thing is. It almost always starts in a more compartmentalized manner. Then we see: okay, this is deep. This is vast. This is about my conditioning, all my behavior, all my suffering, all my love.

So, the first point to make is that how we think about the relationship between the spiritual and psychological changes over the course of practice.

Hypothesis 1: The Relative and the Absolute

Looping back to that first hypothesis—the relative and the absolute. In the absolute, it is sometimes characterized as all one, unity, total peace. Then we say in the relative world, "Please don't wear your shoes home, not mine." There are two dimensions of the path: psychological growth is about healing ourselves, and the absolute is about knowing some other realm of truth.

I have always been a little suspicious of the use of language to hide conceptual confusion. We can honor what is ineffable, what we cannot speak. We can honor the apparent paradoxes of the path, the dynamic tensions of dharma. But in the end, there is just one world of experience. As hard as it is, I think we should be able to speak about it as one world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

I have had the sense that the need to invoke the absolute as some separate realm is a way of attempting to preserve our metaphysical commitments while trying to speak coherently about the ordinary, psychological growth, and differentiation. Sometimes the absolute and the relative are postulated as a way of explaining the divergence between those two—that you have somebody who seems really deep about something but is functioning poorly, maybe doing harm psychologically. It is meant to explain this lack of tethering between ordinary psychological functioning and deep wisdom.

To my mind, if deep wisdom doesn't change something about how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other—if the spiritual and the psychological are completely untethered—I don't know what those insights are worth, exactly. If spiritual deepening does not in some way catalyze changes in how we are with each other, I don't know how much it is worth.

Hypothesis 2: A Continuum of Health

The second hypothesis is that psychological and spiritual growth are continuous; they are part of the same process, and awakening is just a kind of extreme case of psychological flourishing.

Sometimes people who are interested in mindfulness or spirituality may be intimidated by some of this radical language around awakening and want to essentially graft awakening into a psychological framework. It is a little less intimidating. We just wedge some of the Buddha's vision into more traditional psychological frameworks.

I get that, and certainly, there is a lot of synergy happening between dharma and mental health. One prominent researcher in the psychological realm says we are witnessing "a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts to having it defined by our relationship to that content, and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing, and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves."

That sounds familiar. They should pay royalties to the Buddha.

There are a lot of ways in which there is continuity between the psychological and the spiritual. The basic currency of a lot of therapy is insight. We are at the Insight Meditation Center. The Buddha anticipated many different dimensions of psychotherapeutic healing. We can say that the dharma functions as a kind of cognitive therapy, an existential therapy, an attentional treatment, and an exposure therapy. The dharma really does function well in delivering some psychological healing.

However, at some point, psychological growth hits a ceiling. To become "better adjusted"—we are just fiddling at the margins. I could heal more psychologically, but it will not make dramatic impacts on my well-being. Freud, reflecting on the limits of psychoanalysis, said, "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

I am glad I am not hysterically miserable, but is my aspiration any higher than common unhappiness? I think the Buddha was right. What can be done with these existential realities and intensities? Even the psychologically well-adjusted life contains a tremendous amount of dukkha¹. Maslow said, "What we call normal in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and widely spread that we don't even notice it ordinarily."

Spiritual practice, at some level, picks up where psychological health ends. Different components of the path become operative. We find ourselves reasonably happy enough; we have what we think should make us happy, and yet there is still some very deep longing in us. At that point, there is a phase shift. The turn towards spiritual thriving entails deeper renunciation, a different kind of attentional development, samādhi², and a deeper surrender. We exit from realms of meaning-making where the currency is understanding, into realms where perception is shifted. There is a deepening ethical sensitivity as we make the move from psychological well-being into more and more spiritual freedom.

So, I am making the case that you cannot quite say it is completely continuous—that awakening is just a radical kind of psychological flourishing.

Hypothesis 3: You Have to Be Somebody to Be Nobody

The third possibility comes from that line from Jack Engler. He was asked a question about someone with a psychiatric condition involving a highly unstable sense of self, ownership, and boundary: "Is that person close to understanding not-self?" The famous response was, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." The implication is that you sort of have to have a solid sense of self before you can shed that self.

Many years later he was interviewed and asked where he stood on that quote. He said:

"In a general way, I'd stand by it... Although it's a provocative way of putting it. What I had in mind when making that statement was that if you're going to go to the depths of Buddhist mindfulness practice, it requires certain psychological capacities. What in the psychoanalytic tradition would be called certain basic ego strengths. And those ego strengths form around some stable sense of who you are, some stable sense of identity. And I still believe that's true."

Here the view is that psychological development essentially precedes spiritual development. I think there is something to be said for that. There are times when people sort of brute-force their way into certain states of emptiness, and our own historical psychological pain tends to get threaded together with even genuine insight, understanding, and selflessness. These realizations point towards health, but they often also bring along some of our own psychological complexity.

Angler's point is that we are cultivating a healthy home base before we leave home radically. The dharma really does function as a way of supporting the psychological health and capacity required to bear the disorientation of the spiritual path.

Our suffering is normalized. The First Noble Truth—that there is dukkha, that it did not begin with you, that it is not your fault, that you do not govern that—just hearing that can be like medicine. We grow in self-standing. We learn more about what voices are trustworthy inside of us. We talk about being present, but a lot of what practice does is allow the past to be re-experienced in the present. Memory returns to us, and what was undigested or incomplete in our own psychological history—what left an electrified trace—returns to us in the present moment and begs to be blessed by awareness and love.

Over the course of a dharma practice life, we heal more and more of that. It feels safer and safer to be able to let go. We become healthy enough to weather the storms—the intense, evocative, emotional storms of the spiritual path where all the ordinary tethers on our "okayness," all the familiar reference points and soothing stories we pacify our mind with, are crumbling in the light of attention.

Hypothesis 4: Threaded Together

The fourth possibility is how I see it: spiritual and psychological dimensions are threaded together. It is not linear or sequential—we heal ourselves and then we do spiritual practice. Psychological issues highlight zones and motivation for spiritual growth. Psychological growth frees us up for the more radical rigors of spiritual practice. And spiritual practice shines a spotlight on zones of psychological pain that we have just maneuvered around without meeting fully.

The psychological healing of kindness, tenderness, self-care, self-love, and selflessness evolve together. Self-love is not the celebration of a permanent, self-existing entity that is "me" and is just good. Self-love is not an emotionally charged story about the essence of my being.

Self-love is a kind of forgiveness and a deep honoring of the totality of one's conditioning, and a recognition of the underlying innocence of that conditioning. To love oneself is not to cherish or elevate the self or to claim ownership. Self-love is an expression of non-clinging. It is the first taste of the emptiness of self—this very gentle way of holding the self-story. Self-love is the beginning of the unbinding of views that had been previously grafted into the self-model.

Researcher Chris Letheby says:

"In ordinary waking consciousness, representations that are bound to the self-model, including our deeply held, often unconscious beliefs about ourselves and our lives, typically don't attract explicit critical attention or reflection. They are experienced as reality itself or as that with which we see the world rather than a part of the world that we see.

When the binding of these stimuli into the self-model is disrupted, we disidentify with them in a very straightforward way, rendering them opaque. They're no longer experienced as part of me, but as something separate, an object or appearance in consciousness to which I can attend with some sense of critical distance."

Self-hatred is being very deeply identified. Self-love and self-acceptance are moving to the point where we are beginning to disidentify more and more with the self-story. We begin to move into this realm of insight into not-self (anattā³), which is actually just a more radical form of accepting the components of the self as they arise moment by moment. We could say that anattā is the deepest form of self-acceptance. The self that is loved is easier to forget than the self that is hated.

We have these radical breaks with identification where even what seemed unquestioned and transparent becomes opaque. We become disidentified with these assumptions and views. But that is not permanent. The self re-arises. Even deep insight into selflessness does not erase our psychological conditioning. Ajahn Sumedho famously said, "It's not your personality that becomes enlightened." There is some measure of continuity.

Spiritual practice, in some sense, makes our psychological pain more vivid. It makes the moments of compulsivity and psychological dysfunction feel stark. We have seen it a million times, and still, it feels like I have been commanded by God to act it out at Christmas dinner. Spiritual practice is not an erasing of that; it is a dramatizing of it. We now see just how unfree that is. That is humbling, confusing, and motivating. But often it motivates us in a way that contracts the mind, mobilizing our willfulness to try to manhandle our psychological pain.

Chris McKenna, Megan Cowan, and I condensed a few lines to say:

"The repetitious quality of conditioned patterns and core wounds is like the dirty secret of long-term spiritual practice. Difficult as it is to admit, any honest assessment of our own path is likely going to include a reckoning with a short list of conditioned patterns that we seem to be experiencing and learning through over decades. Not weeks, not months, not years—decades.

Any inner arising that comes deeply coupled with intense doubt and confusion is a place where we have not yet let clarity penetrate completely and totally. By going into the place where we get most psychologically and energetically disorganized over and over again, we find a depth of knowing and freedom that's simply unavailable through any other means."

The healing process actually gets interesting precisely when we gain the confidence in our ability to connect with ourselves deeply and intuitively, and read how to meet what arises moment by moment. We see it as something we have been given to truly study.

Touching the merit of our practice in these realms—where we get so energetically disorganized and overwhelmed, and the line between awareness and complete collapse into rumination is very thin—is profound. It is almost like to touch that object is to be lost in it. Spiritual practice illuminates the patterns of our compulsivity. There is enough mindfulness to see the collapse of mindfulness. There is enough mindfulness to see how awareness becomes completely absorbed in that psychological material.

This is a realm of deep compassion—of willingness rather than willfulness. We have tried to will our way through that or practice our way through that. But this is such a state of vulnerability, often of desperation. Even if it is subtle, you can feel how unfree it is and how desperate we are to actually heal. Yet it unfolds not over months or years, but decades. Michelle McDonald called it a "karmic knot"—it is with us for this life, and our job is to begin to make a relationship with it.

Even one degree of freedom in those realms is worth a lot.

We want to get interested in how the energy of this particular psychological knot absorbs awareness. If we could have healed it in an ordinary psychological way, it would have been healed. It is asking for our spiritual attention, but with a great deal of patience, tenderness, and reverence. Gil Fronsdal says we have to develop "reverence for our clinging."

We are learning about old things in our own ancestry, our genetic lineage, deeper into deep time. We are learning about what it is like to be an animal, conditioned by millions of years of evolution. Everything in our being says, "I must enact this." There tends to be a great deal of aversion and self-harshness. In a way, the self-harshness is almost preferable to the truth of opening to the ungovernability and helplessness in these trenches of psychological pain. The self-harshness is a palliative—as if to pretend, "I just have to try harder." That is easier to swallow than the truth of helplessness.

We try to rally our spiritual strength: "Let me be willing to experience this helplessness with some vividness." This engenders a commitment to continue to grow and develop a relationship with these dimensions of ourselves.

In this fourth hypothesis, spiritual growth and the deepening understanding of self are always threaded together with psychological healing. We just keep going until we are free. Sometimes the spiritual will act like a magnet for our psychological pain. Sometimes the psychological healing will act like a magnet for our spiritual growth. In the end, it is just conditioning pointing towards suffering or freedom—yours, mine. So we keep going.

Q&A: Solving vs. Dissolving Problems

Question: Gil sometimes says that on the path we don't solve our problems, we dissolve them. I was wondering if the psychological path is closer to solving, and the dharma is closer to dissolving? I am never really satisfied with dissolving my problem; I feel it's like a mix of the two.

Matthew Brensilver: I agree with how you put it. I do feel like often in spiritual practice, what we thought our problems were dissolve in the light of awareness. It is not that we got an answer; it is that the question dissolved, or we saw that the framework that made that thing a problem—that made it a burden on the heart—shifted. Something about the view shifts, and then you really can live a kind of "problemless" life.

It is not that one doesn't have pain, unpleasantness, questions, grief, and a million tears for the world. But in some sense, there is no sense of life as a problem, but life as a kind of massage of sorts.

That is real, but I would also say we probably don't want to be too rigid about it. Sometimes dharma is very good at solving problems—being analytical and being able to actually predict what can work or not work. And some psychological healing for sure also does the same dissolution process.

When something does dissolve, it must be thoroughly dissolved. We are not being asked to pretend like something doesn't bother us when it does. The dharma never asks us to pretend. We cannot get too doctrinaire about how it is supposed to work. It requires a radical honesty with whatever knots or space there is in the heart in the moment.