Bruce Tift is a licensed Psychotherapist and the author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. He is a long-time practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Bruce's website: https://www.brucetift.com/

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:51 What is freedom?
4:21 What is conscious participation in open awareness?
6:29 Is this the fruitional view?
8:51 The western therapeutic perspective of healing core wounds
11:01 How do the fruitonal view and the developmental view relate?
14:15 Committing to experience sense of problem without trying to resolve it
18:55 The path of Vajrayana Buddhism
29:27 Belief is a substitute for groundlessness
34:05 I give myself permission to never experience what I most want in life
37:56 What is non-divided reality?
43:22 Freedom is not synonymous with positive feelings
47:30 Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity
51:20 Falling through the air with no parachute
52:10 Challenging our identification with hope
55:02 Bruce’s gradual shift towards freedom
57:44 Being profoundly limited
1:02:47 Asking if what you most want is available right now
1:04:30 One taste
1:05:40 Impermanence and dependent origination
1:10:11 Enlightenment
1:13:09 Trying to experience no-self can be motivated by fundamental aggression to experience
1:14:40 Maintaining a center through problem maintaining
1:18:37 The function of neurosis
1:25:44 What’s fundamentally disturbing about our experience?
1:32:48 How does groundlessness fit into freedom and nirvana?
1:34:15 Do we know anything?
1:38:47 What does it mean to be “Already Free?”
1:43:05 Neurosis is a clever way to pretend to ourselves we’re addressing our life while guaranteeing nothing happens
1:46:50 What’s always available?
1:47:47 Final words from Bruce
1:50:12 Outro