Chapter 2: Clinical Practice as Contemplative Practice and a Force for Liberation

Mindfulness-based interventions and psychotherapies have transformed behavioral healthcare. In order to offer mindfulness-informed care, clinicians must train for years and develop ways of applying interventions. Minoritized clinicians may experience additional challenges, including identity stress and trauma, during their academic and clinical training. This autoethnography explores an Asian American clinician’s relationship with her professional training and practice, which evolved into a contemplative practice. In her struggle to be whole and efficacious, the author finds her way to third- and fourth-wave psychotherapy modalities (Peteet, 2018). She integrates these modalities into a dual framework to facilitate well-being for herself and her clients. Through contemplative practices (Magee, 2013) such as mindfulness training (Paulson et al., 2013), compassion training (Bluth & Neff, 2018; Neff & Germer, 2012), contemplative education (Magee, 2017), and other restorative practices, the author interrogates her fraught relationship with her master’s program, training, and industry. As a Korean American female clinician and doctoral student, the author grapples with the inextricability between her identity and the broader capitalistic and patriarchal mental health culture. She uses contemplative practice to confront her culture-bound patterns, such as self-criticism, chronic guilt, self-neglect, stereotype threat, and overvaluing achievement.