Religion and spirituality are important aspects of the lives of most psychotherapy clients. Unfortunately, many psychotherapists lack the training to effectively and ethically address these issues with their clients. At times, religious or spiritual concerns may be relevant to the reasons clients seek treatment, either as areas of conflict or distress for clients or as sources of strength and support that the psychotherapist may access to enhance the benefit of psychotherapy. This article reviews persistent ethical issues and dilemmas relevant to (...) providing psychotherapy to clients for whom issues of religion and spirituality are clinically relevant. Ethical considerations include assessment, advertising and public statements, informed consent, competence, boundary issues and multiple relationships, cooperation with other professionals, and how to effectively integrate religious and spiritual interventions into ongoing psychotherapy. A decision-making process is presented to guide psychotherapists in their clinical work with clients for whom religious and spiritual issues are salient or clearly linked to their presenting problems. (shrink)

This paper juxtaposes Asian spiritual narratives on meditation alongside medical and scientific narratives that emphasize meditation's efficacy in mitigating distress and increasing well-being. After proposing a working definition of meditation that enables it usefully to be distinguished from categories of similar practices such as prayer, I examine meditation's role in Mind/Body medicine in the West. Here, I survey a number of scientific studies of meditation, including the work of Dr. Herbert Benson and his colleagues who examine a meditational variant they (...) call the ‘Relaxation Response', to examine the breadth of efficacy claims made on behalf of the complex and multidimensional grouping of diverse practices we have come to as ‘meditation'. Among other positive outcomes, meditation has been credited with reducing blood pressure, anxiety, addiction, and stress, while Relaxation Response has been shown to decrease sympathetic nervous system activity, metabolism, pain, anxiety, depression, hostility, and stress. I conclude the paper by suggesting that findings from cognitive neuroscience on the subject of visual imagery can be used to elucidate genres of meditative practice that focus on internal visualization sequences, and I use practices from the Rnying ma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism to illustrate why certain integral aspects of meditation forever will remain beyond scientific grasp. (shrink)

Religion and spirituality are important aspects of the lives of most psychotherapy clients. Unfortunately, many psychotherapists lack the training to effectively and ethically address these issues with their clients. At times, religious or spiritual concerns may be relevant to the reasons clients seek treatment, either as areas of conflict or distress for clients or as sources of strength and support that the psychotherapist may access to enhance the benefit of psychotherapy. This article reviews persistent ethical issues and dilemmas relevant to (...) providing psychotherapy to clients for whom issues of religion and spirituality are clinically relevant. Ethical considerations include assessment, advertising and public statements, informed consent, competence, boundary issues and multiple relationships, cooperation with other professionals, and how to effectively integrate religious and spiritual interventions into ongoing psychotherapy. A decision-making process is presented to guide psychotherapists in their clinical work with clients for whom religious and spiritual issues are salient or clearly linked to their presenting problems. (shrink)