Bruce Tift is a psychotherapist and longtime practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism. In his book, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path to Liberation, he lays out why he believes that the approaches of Buddhism and Western psychotherapy are fundamentally irreconcilable—and what we can learn from holding these contradictory energies simultaneously.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Tift to discuss the differences between what he calls the developmental and fruitional approaches to freedom, how attempts at self-improvement distract us from our fundamental liberation, and what it means to know that we’re already free.