"Both psychotherapy and Buddhism seek to provide freedom from suffering," writes Bruce Tift, "yet each offers a completely different approach to this intention." Each way of working contains valuable tools to help us heal, grow, and find happiness--but how can we know which one to choose when these methods appear to contradict each other? Already Free opens a fresh and provocative dialogue between these two profound perspectives on the human condition.

In Already Free, therapist and Buddhist practitioner Bruce Tift examines how psychotherapy's "Developmental" approach of understanding the way our childhood experiences shape our adult selves both challenges and supports the "Fruitional" approach of Buddhism, which tells us that the freedom we seek is always available. Here he offers unique wisdom and imminently practical guidance on:
-- Therapy and meditation--the strengths and limitations of each practice, and how you can use them together effectively
-- What is freedom? How our assumptions about personal liberation often undermine our ability to experience it.
-- How we can stop generating unnecessary anxiety for ourselves without numbing our emotions
-- Why we use "neurotic organization" to limit our life experience, and how to challenge this self-perpetuating process
-- Cultivating a healthy state of mind regardless of our history or current circumstances
-- Uncovering and untangling codependent dynamics, the four evolving stages of relationships, and much more

Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Bruce Tift, Sounds True, Paperback, 344 pages, 2015, $19.99

Bruce Tift, MA, LMFT, has been in private practice since 1979, taught at Naropa University for twenty-five years, worked in a psychiatric ward and as a family therapist with social services, and has given presentations in the United States, Mexico, and Japan and has made remote presentations in the UK, Korea, and Thailand. His book has recently been translated into Thai. In his twenties he traveled for two years by motor- cycle in Europe, North Africa, and overland to India and Nepal. He has worked as a laborer, clerk, postal worker, longshoreman, painter, school bus driver, paper mill worker, miner, and truck driver. A practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism for more than forty years, he had the good fortune to be a student of Ch�gyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and to meet a number of realized teachers. He and his wife, Reva, are now empty-nesters living in California.