RP: Sometimes people think that Buddhism should somehow resolve all our problems. It’s more that the path will bring those issues out. It’s when we deny them or ignore them or cover them up with a veneer of spirituality—that’s the problem. The more that we can really be authentic and true to where we are and what’s going on, the more we can transform and go forward to encounter the next piece of the journey.
Snow Lion: In your experience as a teacher, running retreats and so forth, do you see people use meditation to avoid themselves rather than to transform themselves?

RP: In the process of teaching meditation it’s been very apparent to me that people fall into two almost opposing camps, one group that gets lost in and drowns in their emotional life and another group that is cut off from it and doesn’t want to be in touch with it. In both cases it can be very tempting to use meditation to escape from relationship to the emotional life, to go to a peaceful place. The key ingredient in guiding people in meditation is to help them to connect to the body and body-feelings in a way that enables them to witness the process of the emotions with a kind of proximity that is neither getting lost in them nor splitting off from them. It’s not easy to do this, but it’s a key element.
—excerpted from an interview with Rob Preece (psychologist and author of The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra and The Wisdom of Imperfection), The Snow Lion Newsletter, Spring 2006 (full interview here)