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Last November, a small group of American Counseling Association members set out on a three-week journey to meet with the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the state and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.
Jon Carlson, Pat Love and Dan Eckstein traveled 28 hours by plane, 10 hours by train and drove three hours on treacherous roads up the Himalayas to Macloed Ganj to be part of an audience before His Holiness. Carlson and Love, both past presidents of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, went to ask for his participation in a special project on which they are working - applying Eastern and Buddhist ideas to Western relationships and marriages.
The group members exchanged ideas and asked many questions during their 40-minute visit. Though they were allotted only 20 minutes at first, the Dalai Lama was very interested in the project and extended the discussion, "we got a chance to ask him several questions, and he was very attentive, very focused and very excited about the project," Carlson said. "We talked about the crisis with relationships in North America and the breakup of family. We wanted to know if he would have some ideas about how to address these problems." The Dalai Lama agreed to collaborate with them on the project through future interviews and written correspondences.
"We talked about many aspects of relationships," Carlson said. "At first we talked about how the Buddhist concepts were going to be very helpful, but he didn't want us to use the term "Buddhist concepts." He said these are not Buddhist concepts, these are just concepts of healthy living that work for everybody. It's not a Buddhist indoctrination of the world." The group also discussed the importance of being "internally present." Most of Western psychology places emphasis on being "externally present," Carlson said, for example by leaning in toward a person and making eye contact. "But Eastern people focus on being internally present, to be totally focused and one with the other person," he said. "There is some research that even points to the fact that if someone is in...