Central Story Therapy (CST)

I cutified Vipassanā, it’s going to enter mental healthcare, and it’s going to be huge.

Hi friend,
This one is going to be huge. I mean, H-U-G-E. Or your money back 😅

The Challenge

When people ask me what I am most passionate about, or what do I want to teach most in my life, I always say:

• the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program (DWEP), and,

• Vipassanā.

The DWEP is a program that empowers participants with daily self-care practices for mental and physical wellness. It’s a holistic, do-it-yourself approach to “ordinary”, “mundane” wellbeing.

The DWEP helps us to be relatively healthy and happy, and that is wonderful, but it does not address the deepest roots of suffering within our neurology.

Vipassanā* does. Vipassanā is a technique taught by the Buddha that means “analyzing”. Vipassanā invites us to explore and dismantle the foundations of suffering in our consciousness, brain, and nervous system. I won’t go into detail here — I’ve written a book about it if you’re interested, but basically, the roots of our suffering are identification, attachment, and reification, and Vipassanā shows us how to hack them.

(* Please note that when I use the word Vipassanā, I am always referring to the Buddha's original instructions, not to a specific course.)

The DWEP is mundane self-care. Vipassanā is transcendence. And we need both. Transcendence without mundane self-care is spiritual bypassing. And mundane self-care without transcendence is missing out.

But while I was happy with the packaging of the DWEP, the packaging of Vipassanā was always a big question mark in my mind. As I explained in my article Learning the DWEP From Home, section Designing a Viral Wellness Program, for a product to go viral, it should be both cute (i.e. inviting, adoptable) and powerful (i.e. efficient, helpful). If a product is cute but not powerful, people will smile at it, and if a product is powerful but not cute, people will be scared by it.

This is the problem I found with Vipassanā: it’s extremely powerful, but not cute at all. Many people, indeed, find Vipassanā scary, or hard to understand. I won’t go into detail here, because I don’t want to give the impression that I’m ungrateful for the Buddha’s teachings. I actually value Vipassanā more than you can imagine. If I had to choose between being born with two arms and two legs but never coming into contact with Vipassanā, or being born without arms nor legs but being able to learn and practice Vipassanā, I would choose the second option. This is how amazing Vipassanā is. It’s bliss training. Literally. But yeah, sorry, I do find the current packaging we have to be unappealing and ill-adapted to today’s mental healthcare, and in the past few years, I have been dreaming about cutifying Vipassanā, to make it fit to enter modern mental healthcare.

I hoped there could be a way to repackage Vipassanā that would be,

• simple,

• elegant,

• non-threatening,

• kind,

• secular,

• playful,

• interesting,

• modern, and, very important,

• therapy setting friendly,

• while still retaining tremendous therapeutic power.

And… I found a way!!

Lol.

This is my most precious discovery so far. After I found it, in the middle of a two-week solo meditation retreat, I couldn’t help but say out loud to myself, “This is amazing. This is amazing.” regularly, for an entire week. I have kept using this system since then, and can’t stop being awed by how cute and powerful it is.

And the wonderful news is, after only a few minutes of learning this system, you will be able to play with it and begin to experience its benefits.

Sounds too good to be true?

Read on, my friend. You’re about to discover Central Story Therapy.

Central Story Therapy

There is a story that we all tell ourselves. It is so centrally present in every moment of our life that most of us, most of the time, don’t even recognize it for what it is — that is, a story.

I call it “The Central Story”. And it goes like this:

“I am ______ and I need ______ to be happy.”

Our Central Story is easy to miss, yet it dramatically influences our quality of life.

I hope you will agree with me that our Central Story is a really useful story! And I also hope that a spacious part of you is curious to explore, “Could it be… just that… a story?”

Central Story Therapy (when practiced with an accompanying therapist), or Central Story Training (when practiced on one’s own) is an invitation to the individual to explore not just the content of their Central Story, but also how the context in which their Central Story operates. It is an acceptance- and mindfulness-based therapy that aims to loosen and untie the deepest knots in the human mind in a safe, fun, and easy way.

Practitioners do so through Four Core Explorations:

Please download the image above. Print it. And paste it in your hat! (Lol, sorry, I just find this expression hilarious and have wanted to use it for a long time… but yes, please do keep these instructions handy.)

Dear friend, I am not here to deceive you. This stuff works — if you practice it. Please take the time to regularly play with these Four Core Explorations, calmly and mindfully, in the order given, and see how they affect your experience of the present moment.

If you ever feel stuck, practice the Three Magic Breaths of CST, which is nothing but my Ultra Condensed Ānāpānasati technique (”Three Magic Breaths” sounds way cuter 😅). Try the Four Core Explorations again, slowly and attentively, keeping your mind awake and open, ready to let go of all struggle and accept everything in the present moment. After practicing the Four Core Explorations, practice the Three Magic Breaths again. And see if your mind makes progress in the following direction:

Please, do not make any decision based on what you find when Exploring your Central Story. The goal of Central Story Training is not to help you make better decisions. It is to help you make space around your Central Story, and experience more fulfillment, freedom, and flow, in the present moment.

I will tell you more about CST in future articles. You will learn about its philosophy, Additional Explorations, and Grounding Exercises, but the Four Core Explorations are the best place to begin your CST journey.

Conclusion

CST invites us to explore the content and context of our Central Story (“I am ______ and I need ______ to be happy”) in order to experience more fulfillment, freedom, and flow, in the present moment.

CST is presented simply and clearly using secular and modern terms, while being able to address the deepest roots of human suffering.

CST can be used both as a therapy, with a trained professional assisting the individual’s Explorations, and as a do-it-yourself training.

CST seems to me to be friendly to both youths and adults, clinical and non-clinical populations, and since it is so simple and straightforward, it should be quick to adapt to different cultural contexts.

CST can be used both for ordinary healing, to “defuse” from our Central Story and regain some “psychological flexibility” (to use ACT terminology), and for higher healing, the realization of stages of awakening, the permanent rewiring of our nervous system towards greater fulfillment, freedom, and flow.

For all of these reasons, I believe that Central Story Therapy is an amazing contender for a sweet, modern, and universal approach to Vipassanā in mental healthcare.

Please try it.

🙏💛

Thank you for being part of my life’s mission.

Everything I offer to this Mental Health Revolution is free and will remain free. I write all the articles, and only use AI to help me with the spelling, grammar, and word use. I welcome your concrete and specific suggestions for improvement.

The Nazi formula is, “You are all being threatened by [ABC] and if you refuse [XYZ] you are irresponsible and expose everyone else to danger.” Please recognize this message when you see it.

Take care of yourself. You deserve to be healthy, happy, and free — regardless of what parts of your subconscious may say. Taking care of yourself is a wise investment — when you feel better, you show up better and everyone benefits. There are simple, natural, and science-based practices that can make a real, positive difference in your mental health. There are ways to implement these practices that increase your chances of success. And you can learn about all of these.

1️⃣ The #1 thing you can learn from me is the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program (DWEP). Print a DWEP Sheet and get started.

2️⃣ The #2 thing you can learn from me is Central Story Training (CST).