If you follow what people are writing about in psychology and spirituality, as I do, you may have noticed the growing number of crossover books and articles that are neither spirituality nor psychology but live at their point of intersection. There is also, understandably, a lot being said right now about how inner work, whether therapeutic or spiritual, is not where our focus needs to be, and that we should instead be looking at the crisis of the planet. What could be more important than the fate of the Earth and its inhabitants? This blog takes a look at these three approaches—which we could call, in shorthand, working on yourself (psychotherapy), getting over yourself (spirituality), and repairing the world (activism).

It’s generally agreed that understanding why you kicked the cat might stop you from doing it again. This, roughly speaking, is the basis of therapy, which offers clients a chance to “work through” an issue, usually by talking about it. Psychotherapy has branched into many forms, but they all assume there is a “you” with a problem to solve.

Meditation comes at our issues very differently. It doesn’t concern itself with them directly, but rather with improving our immediate inner environment without waiting for solutions to our problems to come along. It invites us to disidentify to some extent from the person who “has problems.” This is not as schizoidal as may sound. Let me explain why.

Most philosophies of the East, where many of the most powerful meditative practices originate, draw the valid distinction between mind and consciousness. A popular metaphor for that distinction describes consciousness as the ocean and the mind as the waves. From this perspective, our thoughts and feelings–our guilt, pride, longing, and anger –are just ripples on the surface of something vast and deep, the energy of consciousness itself. You can welcome these surface disturbances, ignore them, try to quiet them, or simply watch them—there are many techniques, but the general idea is to let the waves be and focus on the ocean. Personal problems and individual suffering are real, but only from the point of view of the individual. In the depths of consciousness, so they say, there’s no “you” to suffer.

Easier said than done.

There is a long shelf of books on how to bridge these two approaches, East and West. The late psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood thought and wrote a lot about this apparent conflict between therapy and spirituality. He coined the phrase “spiritual bypassing” to describe the tendency some of us have to think we’re getting past our issues when what we’ve really done is cover them over with a heavy layer of bliss. His excellent book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, looks at how to integrate psychotherapeutic and spiritual approaches to healing in ways that are authentic and effective. In fact, many therapists now include some form of meditation in their practice.

Of course, you could say that psychotherapy is a form of bypassing, too. We prefer the familiar terrain of our issues, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, to the higher ground where, let’s face it, you and your problems are just not that important. In Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman is tormented by an inner conflict between her devotion to a leading figure of the Resistance and her love for her old flame, Humphrey Bogart. Until Bogart, the worldly-wise owner of Rick’s Café, tells her to stop focusing on the waves so much. “Isla.” he says, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

Yes and no.

I once watched with amazement and admiration as John Welwood helped someone move from experiencing himself as someone with a problem to feeling the underlying consciousness in which his ”problem waves” were arising–without suppressing or bypassing them. Gradually–this took thirty minutes or more–as the young man released the tension he was holding, his whole visage changed, and he looked like someone who had just returned from a weekend at Omega Institute. The whole room felt the shift. Instead of sitting in the midst of his story, he was now seated in consciousness.

All well and good, but how do we get from one individual making that shift to healing the world? Well, there is in fact, a very direct path through Buddhism to social action. That path runs through the practice of compassion. Compassion not as an act of charity or generosity but as a kind of recognition, a way of seeing reality more clearly, without the static of egoism. This way of being in the world may take some steeping in the dharma, but it isn’t hard for many Buddhists to turn their compassion for all sentient beings into an interest in social and political activity.

There a path through psychotherapy, too, for actively working to change the world, because the process of peeling away the layers of cause and effect behind your personal issues can lead you to a broader analysis, not just of yourself, but of your society and, how it contributes to individual dysfunction, and how it needs to do better for your sake and the sake of your kids.

A recent book by Ivan Fuchs with the hefty title of The Evolutionary Mechanisms of Human Dysfunctional Behavior traces the way a relaxation of natural selection has many sorts of mental disorders to survive and even thrive How did this happen? Instead of ruthlessly allowing weaker members of our communities to get “selected out,” our expanded brains developed over millions of years a new capacity, empathy, and its sister, compassion.

Empathy and compassion are as close as the strands of a molecule of DNA. With empathy, you know what someone is feeling—you feel it yourself. Compassion is the natural response to that.

We are more than individuals; we are woven out of nature and woven back into it. And whether you’re working on your self-esteem or your lotus posture, both are linked intimately to how your fellow sentient beings, your own self in another form, are doing.