This work presents an exploration of Buddhist philosophy and practice as a potential resource for an approach to psychotherapy which is responsive to the needs of its time and context, and attempts to open up a three-way dialogue between Buddhism, psychotherapy and contemporary discourse to reveal a meaningful theory and practice for a contemporary psychotherapy.

In Beyond Happiness, Gay Watson deepens the discussion between Buddhist thought and psychotherapy and the new findings of neuroscience.

Buddhist teachings are concerned with a way of living and engage most resonantly with practice rather than with theory, thus the conversation between Buddhism and psychotherapy has been a particularly fruitful one. In search of a way to happiness, Buddha set out to explore our experience and, in so doing, presented what may well be called the earliest psychology, an experiential exploration of subjectivity. In the West, for much of the twentieth...

We often view emptiness as a negative condition, a symptom of depression, despair, or griefan assessment furthered by authors like Franz Kafka or the existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Offering an alternative view, A Philosophy of Emptinessreclaims these hollow feelings as a positive and even empowering state, an antidote to the modern obsession with substance and foundation.
Digging through early and non-Western philosophy, Gay Watson uncovers a rich history of emptiness. She travels from Buddhism, Taoism, and religious mysticism to the contemporary world of...

If there is one thing we are short on these days, it's attention. Attention is central to everything we do and think, yet it is mostly an intangible force, an invisible thing that connects us as subjects with the world around us. We pay attention to this or that, let our attention wander--we even stand at attention from time to time--yet rarely do we attend to attention itself. In this book, Gay Watson does just that, musing on attention as one of our most human impulses.

As Watson shows, the way we think about attention is usually through its instrumentality, by what can be achieved if...