Dr. Lee Lipp on Transforming Depression and Anxiety
In 2005, Lee Lipp, ended ten years as a resident of San Francisco Zen Center and re-entered the job market. At that same time one of her Buddhist teachers requested that she begin to teach classes on working with depression. Unsure that she could be helpful, Dr. Lipp at first declined. But, her teacher persisted and, says Dr. Lipp, “when your teacher asks you three times, you say 'yes.'” Since then, she has taught the workshop at numerous Buddhist groups and other venues throughout the Bay area.
According to Dr. Lipp, depression and anxiety are becoming increasingly prevalent in our culture. They are, she says, “the way we express our suffering.” She says the mental patterns that seem to carry some of us irresistibly into emotional suffering are as if we are “caught on a train of associations in a boxcar with dragons!”
Dr. Lipp reports that she has experienced depression and anxiety in her own life and has found the methods she teaches to be very helpful.
Her workshops are intended to slow the train, uncouple the boxcars, and tame the dragons. She combines Buddhist mindfulness practices with therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, as ways to help us to see our mental habit patterns more clearly. The key is to learn to be responsive to our experience rather than reactive.
For those who feel stuck in their patterns, Dr. Lipp points to neuroscience for evidence that change is not only possible, it's inevitable. “The most recent research points to what the Buddha noticed over 2500 years ago. That is, that everything changes. We’re now able to see images of our brain as it is changing throughout life. It’s not static; it’s always changing”.
Stephen Colgan The Examiner, April 26, 2010
San Francisco Psychology and Spirituality Section
