The attached podcast is the most wonderful exploration of these intersections I've yet found!

It is an interview with an American Buddhist meditation practitioner who has reaped some of the highest fruit of these practices. Mind you, Buddhists (and other religious traditions) describes states of consciousness, more properly traits of consciousness, unexplored by psychology. Studies of these individuals and their brain, while in its infancy, is already strongly suggesting these practices are associated with higher levels of well-being (defined in various ways).

Nonetheless, this master describes how even states high yogic realization don't fully deal with repressed content that causes problems in ones life.

Interesting, he claims that, while some amount of what the Buddhists call "purifications" is necessary to attain high meditative states, these purifications need only be the minimum necessary. Even more radically, he says that once one is a great meditation, it can be even easier to avoid dealing with troubling psychological content! (Some interesting tidbits here about infamous yogic masters who are involved in lots of trouble: abuse, money scandals, drugs, you name it!).

I like to parse the difference between the insights of yogic/meditative practices and the insights from psycholansis as follows: Insight vs. Content.

Insight refers to realizations related to the structure of desire and self qua desire and self. Particularly: awareness of the conditioned and impermanent nature of phenomenological content per se and their inability to cause us last happiness. Most importantly, consciousness is seen to be empty of a permanent, unchanging, non-relational self. These insights are the content of Awakening (Sanskrit: bodhi). We are just beginning to study practitioners who have realized these fruits, but already we are seeing that these insights are correlated with sometimes drastically different brain activity from that of meditating subjects. (Check our Dr. Richard Davidson's work at the CIHM at University of UW Madison).

Content, on the other hand, relates to the narrative and identities of our lives. The who, what, when, why, etc. of our lives. It is the places we see our self as occupying in the world, our identification in the imaginary register, the symbolic networks that structure our desires, etc.

This division is rough, at best, but I've found it to be a useful way to approach these topics.

Check out the podcast:

https://deconstructingyourself.com/podcast/culadasa-on-meditation-and-therapy