Could we take anxiety to be something that may be of importance, may even be meaningful? And it says something about your history, and could we learn to sort of hold it in a way that's more compassionate, to sort of bring the frightened part of you close and treat it with some dignity, and keep focused instead on what kind of life you want to live connected to what kind of meaning and purpose. That's going to be a quicker, more self-compassionate and more certain journey forward inside things like panic disorder.

It's pretty clear in how things are moving in empirically supported treatments that we're going to be speaking to the culture in a different voice. It's going to have some echoes of some of the deeper clinical and spiritual and religious traditions that had wisdom in it. If we're not going to get there through religious means and things of that kind, we're going to have to find a way to put it in the culture in a different way, because we need something right now other than yet another cable shoutcast or yet another Internet Web page showing us the cellulite on the actress's rear end.

If you aren't willing to have it, you will.

I think we're coming into a time where it has to do with how you stand in relationship to your own world within and in relationship to those around you in the world without. And I believe these are the things that we need to put into our schools, education, into our psychotherapy and into our culture more, finding a way to not be so harsh and judgmental, so objectifying and dehumanizing, constantly focused within and trying to get these difficult thoughts and feelings to go away.

But this cheap-thrill version, this sort of ease definition, the feel-good definition of happiness is an empty promise. Unless we get wiser as to how to carry the difficulties of life in a way that's self-compassionate and empowering, we can create this kind of world in which we'd rather sort of plug into the matrix with whatever pills or escapist tendencies we can think of instead of walking through a process of living that's going to include loss. It's going to include limitations on function. We need to learn and teach our children how to do that.

Your history's not going to go away; it isn't the same thing as dirt on the floor or paint peeling off the walls; it's not going to be solved in that way. It's more like learning how to carry it, to contact it, to see it. Because it's based on the psychology of the normal, the therapist is part of that too. And so they too are working with those very same processes. And so it requires a therapist just to see the value of it and to be willing to look at their own difficult emotions and thoughts and find a way to carry them gently in the service of the clients that they're serving.

Our children are exposed to 10, 20, 30 times the number of words that our great-grandfathers were exposed to. We're exposed in a single day or two to more horror on our Internet Web pages than our great-grandfathers were exposed to in decades of living. We have not created modern minds for that modern world. Science and technology has just dumped it on us. And I think people yearn for it. I think you see it in what's popular. Why are people wanting to learn about meditation and talking about a purpose-driven life? It's because they know more is needed in the modern world.