The Monkey Is the Messenger

Starred review from September 24, 2018
In his perceptive debut, therapist and meditation instructor De La Rosa argues that, though the “monkey mind” has a bad reputation in Buddhist thought, it is not the enemy, but rather a natural physiopsychological adaptation for navigating trauma and everyday experience. De La Rosa draws heavily from his training in trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy, internal family systems therapy, and traditional psychotherapy to provide an effective reorientation to thoughts and feelings that can race with wild abandon. The distracted, repetitive, excessive thinking of the monkey mind is an opportunity to explore and resolve trauma from the past, he writes. His core guiding principle is that of “radical nonpathology”—that there is nothing wrong with the body-mind, and that one must practice multiple types of meditation practice to slowly uncover the basic goodness inherent to every human being. “It’s time you healed your life,” he writes. For De La Rosa, healing means skillfully activating emotions and then lovingly confronting relationships with those emotions through meditation practice. Newcomers and readers familiar with meditation alike will enjoy De La Rosa’s compassionate perspective on the intersection of Buddhist practice and psychotherapy.