New Article - "Mental Balance and Well-Being: Building Bridges Between Buddhism and Western Psychology."

Dr. B. Alan Wallace and Dr. Shauna L. Shapiro have written an article and it is being published in the American Psychologist.



Click Here to download the article or see below for the abstract.



Abstract:

Clinical psychology has focused primarily on the diagnosis
and treatment of mental disease, and only recently has
scientific attention turned to understanding and cultivating
positive mental health. The Buddhist tradition, on the other
hand, has focused for over 2,500 years on cultivating
exceptional states of mental well-being as well as identify-
ing and treating psychological problems. This article at-
tempts to draw on centuries of Buddhist experiential and
theoretical inquiry as well as current Western experimental
research to highlight specific themes that are particularly
relevant to exploring the nature of mental health. Specifi-
cally, the authors discuss the nature of mental well-being
and then present an innovative model of how to attain such
well-being through the cultivation of four types of mental
balance: conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective.
Keywords: mental health, Buddhism, well-being, mental
balance

© 2005 Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies