How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? On this episode, we're talking about how to harness two incredibly powerful modalities to deal with your inner critic.

or frankly to deal with any difficult part of your personality. My guest has been working for years in both psychotherapy and in Buddhism, and she very skillfully blends these two disciplines. Specifically, she combines Buddhist meditation with a kind of therapy called internal family systems or IFS. It was invented by a man named Dick Schwartz, who's been a guest on the show a couple of times. The basic idea of IFS is that we all have an inner cast of characters.

In IFS, they're called parts, and there are ways to identify and work with these various parts, including your inner critic, so that you're not owned by your parts all of the time. My guest today is Amita Schmidt. She's been working for decades as both a Buddhist meditation teacher, in fact, she was a resident teacher at the Legendary Insight Meditation Society for years. And also as a licensed psychotherapist. In this conversation, you'll hear us talk about how psychology and Buddhist meditation can work together, the basics of internal family system, her own personal path through trauma, depression, and then a pivotal insight that changed everything, why states like depression are not as solid as they may feel, how to work with your inner critic, simple ways to access the sanest and wisest version of yourself.

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