Hey Shame and Death, 'Go F@#% Yourself'

Hey Shame and Death, 'Go F@#% Yourself' -- An Interview With Dr. Arnie Kozak
Huffington Post
Jaimal Yogis
Author, 'Saltwater Buddha' and 'The Fear Project'
Posted: 10/10/2012

Dr. Arnie Kozak has an aphorism for you that you probably won't hear from your average psychotherapist: "Freedom from fear is nothing more than telling shame and death to go fuck themselves." A psychologist, author, mindfulness teacher and snowboarder, Dr. Kozak has been a great influence on my work, and I was honored to get a chance to interview him recently about fear, psychology and mindfulness.

You've been a Buddhist practitioner and a psychologist for decades now. Can you talk about how Buddhist practice and psychology overlap in their approach to dealing with fear/anxiety?

Both Buddhist practice and psychology have the same aim -- the relief from suffering. They differ in how they approach this aim. I use a cartoon from The New Yorker in my teaching. It shows a psychoanalyst talking with his patient. He turns to him and says, "Listen, making you happy is out of the question, but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery."

This captures one distinction between the Buddha's and Freud's approach. Psychology can transform the narrative in a healing direction, yet it stays at the narrative level.

This narrative level is still suffused with suffering, so in some sense the analyst in the cartoon is right. To get to happiness we must have the capacity to transcend stories, and this is where the Buddha's teachings come in. He taught a way to recognize how we are caught in stories and how the valence of these stories is irrelevant. Good or bad, they still separate us from the life around us.
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