Mitra Bishop Roshi is the founder of Mountain Gate-Sanmonji, a Rinzai Zen temple nestled high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico where she offers a uniquely American approach to practice. 

Her own training was more traditional: starting in the mid-1970s, she studied at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Philip Kapleau, and later spent four years at Sogen-ji in Okayama, Japan, training with the Rinzai teacher Shodo Harada Roshi. She urges students to address their buried trauma—using psychotherapy, if necessary—to deepen their Zen practice. 

Mitra Roshi also leads nonsectarian retreats based on Zen principles for women veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress, called Regaining Balance. She explores all this in her new book, Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation.

How would you characterize your teaching style? I don’t teach classic Eastern Zen. I teach a really American format, which is not something that a lot of Zen centers in America do. They still stick to the straight and narrow. What I’ve learned through working with students and my own observations studying at Sogen-ji and Rochester has shaped my way of teaching in probably a more radical way than that of most Zen teachers in America.

What did you hope to achieve with your new book? It’s for the dharma, and to let people know that there’s not just one way to do Zen practice—that people’s histories and experiences have to be taken into account. There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice. That’s how we were taught in the old days, and I’ve seen so many people crash and burn because they didn’t get a chance to work with things in a way that would have enhanced their practice, taken them deeper, and helped to transform their whole lives in a positive way. There have been so many instances of misbehavior among Western and Eastern teachers who have trained in that way. They have had the straight and narrow [approach], and so they have shoved their issues aside, putting them in a drawer somewhere. There were issues in their personalities that they never had a chance to work with and clean up, so to speak. That is probably the greatest fault of most American Zen today. The emphasis on “just this”—there are very few people who can handle that.

Zen practice is often associated with a distinctly masculine energy. As a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, do you bring a different, uniquely female perspective to the way you teach? Probably. Since I can’t transform into a male persona, I probably do. I understand trauma. I’ve had trauma—it took me a long time to work through it with a lot of psychotherapy—but I also was doing a lot of Zen practice at the same time. I recognize that trauma can impact your Zen practice. There are people who can’t do Zen practice effectively because they can’t remove themselves from dissociation. So that already was telling me something. 

Did you encounter that masculine approach in your own training? Rochester Zen Center was called “the boot camp of Zen.” And it was. Roshi Kapleau’s last teacher was Yasutani Roshi, who was from an old samurai family. It was all very dynamic and intense. Then I went to Sogen-ji, which was really different. You have this idea that with Japanese Zen you’re at the tip of a spear all the time. At Sogen-ji, while it was very strict, there was also a deep sense of compassion. I also saw over the time I was there that [the practice] is [more] flexible. 

There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice.

In the book you often mention susok’kan (“extended breath”) practice. Could you describe that? It is the fundamental practice in Rinzai temples. We call it the “extended breath.” You are relaxed in your shoulders and belly, sinking deep within. You let yourself breathe out normally, and when you get to the point where you would automatically breathe back in, instead, you take it further out, focusing on your body. What it does is eliminate the possibility of thought. You cannot focus to that degree and also carry along other stuff. 

And as you go deeper— and I’ve added this aspect to it, because it’s important—you have a sense of openness to possibility, what Seung Sahn Sunim called “don’t-know Mind,” or Suzuki Roshi called “beginner’s mind.” It’s as if you’ve landed on some different planet that you’ve never heard of and you’re exploring what it is like to be there. There are no preexisting assumptions about it because it’s so different. For many people there’s a sense of yearning to return to “don’t-know what,” and you can put that sense of yearning to return also into that extended outbreath. It is extremely powerful and extremely effective for Zen practice, but this is where the whole thing about working with your history comes in. You cannot do it effectively if you are holding back in any way. And if you’ve been traumatized, you’re going to hold back. If you are dissociated, then it really is impossible. But it can be worked with, and this is what I’ve discovered both in my own practice early on and in working with students. I did a lot of psychotherapy all along the way, which helped a lot, and I gradually became aware of what was going on inside and was able to work with it. And, of course, the practice goes much deeper as a result of the work you do in psychotherapy.

Could you talk about the significance of kensho (seeing one’s true nature) versus what Torei Enji, the 18th-century Rinzai master, called “the Long Maturation”? Kensho is important. You can work on the Long Maturation from the get-go, but kensho helps you move toward it faster. It’s as though you’re finding your way up a mountain path in the pitch-black dark, and then there’s a flash of lightning, and suddenly you can see the path ahead. You have a much better sense of where you’re going and what you need to do. And that’s what kensho does. 

Most people who have kensho these days don’t have a very deep one. That’s why it’s so important not to stop there. A kensho will allow you to become more aware of your behavior, and then you have a choice. You can elbow it out of the picture, which is what traditional Zen practice will do, or you can choose to open to the bodily experience of that and explore it beyond words and release its hold on you. That is part of the Long Maturation. It’s becoming aware of our behavior patterns—all of them, not just the dysfunctional ones—and going down through the clouds to our true nature, which is unattached to anything. 

What led you to focus on serving women with trauma through Regaining Balance? My own history. Women veterans are at the bottom of the pecking order, and often out in the cold. There needs to be something that will help them. Our Regaining Balance retreats are pretty effective, because we’re teaching them ways to help themselves get grounded. Susok’kan is known to be very grounding, and there were other things that I did in my own trauma work that I felt were extremely helpful. We teach them the extended breath meditation. They do it twice a day for up to half an hour each time. They also go for a walk in the forest, which is also healing—to be in nature. 

And we teach them tools to help themselves de-stress. There’s a wonderful app called ArtRage. It’s aptly named and it’s quite excellent. You have a choice of background colors and textures, and different kinds of brushes, pens, pencils, palette knives, and so on. You use your finger to translate what’s going on in your body energetically to color in form. It’s not about making a pretty picture. It’s similar to journaling, which we also teach them. Handwriting descriptions of the energies in your body keeps you from getting hijacked by your amygdala [the part of the brain that regulates emotions]. And so you are able to begin to process some of those feelings without knowing what they are necessarily—they’re just uncomfortable. 

Our third tool is to go outdoors and focus in a particular direction—we do the cardinal directions—and you write down three words that describe something that you’re seeing within that view. You come back and turn those words into a sentence. Each sentence comes together to create a poem. Then we each contribute our sentences to a group poem. It teaches awareness, focus, and attention. 

♦

Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation by Mitra Bishop Roshi is available now through Sumeru Books.

The post Deepening Zen through Poetry and Psychotherapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When he was a graduate neuroscience student, Jay Sanguinetti attended a two-day retreat in 2014 with Shinzen Young, a prominent meditation teacher who describes his unique blend of Theravada and Mahayana techniques as “algorithmic”—meaning he offers students a very precise set of “if, then” instructions for navigating their inner experience.

“Shinzen’s retreat was the first retreat I had been to in five or six years,” Sanguinetti recalls. “It was so radically different than anything I had experienced up until that point.” Afterward, he approached Young and told him that he was researching the effects of ultrasound stimulation of the brain.

“I pitched it to Shinzen: ‘What about ultrasounding the brain and trying to teach people meditation?’” Sanguinetti recalls. “Shinzen had the responsible answer, which is, ‘It’s not ready, we need to learn more about it.’”

But in 2017 the pair reconnected—and now Young was onboard. Since then, he and Sanguinetti, associate director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson, have been running studies to determine whether exposing meditators’ brains to targeted ultrasound energy can help them quiet their inner chatter and enhance feelings of equanimity, or an internal steadiness.

The pair, who have raised $480,000 in funding, mostly from grants or private foundations like the Evolve Foundation, have an audacious plan. They hope to translate their research into an app-based artificial intelligence-driven technology that they believe holds the potential to transform society.

“If we can enhance baseline levels of equanimity, that might serve as the basis for accelerating the learning of mindfulness skills,” Sanguinetti says. “Can we measure that elevation? Is it safe to move people in that direction? And if that’s true, does that help people learn mindfulness skills quicker? And the last question is, ‘Is that good for behavior in the world’?”

Young puts it more succinctly. They are in the business of “democratizing enlightenment.”

The project follows standard neuroscience research protocols. In the lab, study subjects (novices as well as experienced meditators), don something that looks like a hairnet studded with ultrasonic transducers. Over a period of five or 10 minutes, they receive intermittent pulses of ultrasound energy. Ultrasound frequencies are far above the threshold of human hearing, so the test subjects feel no sensations, and because this is a placebo-controlled study, some people receive no stimulation at all.

Participants may also undergo ultrasound stimulation while lying in an MRI scanner that enables the researchers to gauge how different brain regions respond to the intervention. “The biggest brain and subjective reports are at about 20 minutes post-ultrasound,” Sanguinetti says. “So there’s some change in the way the brain regions are talking to each other.”

Ultrasound is a relative latecomer to the field of noninvasive brain stimulation, Sanguinetti says. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation—which sends a small amount of electric current through the skull—have been extensively studied as treatments for depression and other psychiatric illnesses. But in the past few years Sanguinetti and others have established that ultrasound is safe.

“You can think about it as an acoustic field that’s focused into something like a pencil shape—it’s really long and thin,” he says. A technical challenge is that the skull tends to distort the field, so researchers have to adjust the beam to ensure it’s aimed at the right brain structure. “Once you do, you get millimeter resolution,” Sanguinetti says. “You can pretty much target any depth in the brain, which is a huge advantage over any other noninvasive brain stimulation.”

The primary target is the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a region deep in the brain that is massively connected with other structures and is associated with the default mode network—active during daydreaming and mind-wandering. Young and Sanguinetti theorize that the ultrasound energy mutes activity in the PCC in much the same way meditation tames the “monkey mind.”

For Young, this maps perfectly onto the Buddhist paradigm.

“The basic model that we’re using is that the ‘okayness’ is already there,” he says. “There’s a primordial face that everyone has before anything is born. It’s always there. The basic Buddhist model could be interpreted as, ‘All you have to do is stop doing something to be OK.’ So as you’re going into equanimity, you’re letting go of grasping. You actually stop holding on and interfering with the natural flow of the senses.”

Young, who in 1970 ordained as a monk in a Shingon Buddhist monastery while a graduate student in Japan, emphasizes that the technology he and Sanguinetti are developing is intended to help people overcome obstacles to meditation and move more quickly along the path to awakening. 

“We’re not replacing enlightenment,” he says. “We’re not replacing getting over the self and we’re not replacing refining the self. And we’re not negating the need for bodhisattva-type service. We’re not asking anybody to believe that: we’re only asking them to believe that concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity are trainable and relevant to human happiness at all levels.”

While the technology could make meditation more accessible for novices, “we’re not saying we’re going to make it easy and quick,” he says. “What we mean by that is no watering down of the really good stuff in terms of the dimensions that we might call liberation on the one hand and character development on the other.”

Ultrasound’s apparent effect on consciousness sits squarely within a Buddhist framework, Young contends. “We’re thinking that equanimity is the centerpiece, rather than concentration or even clarity. Because it’s core Buddhism, it’s the Four Noble Truths, it’s the letting go of the push and pull on the flow of the senses. We call it equanimity: the Buddha called it ‘letting go of craving and aversion.’ That’s the kleshas.”

Experienced meditators report significant effects after undergoing the ultrasound sessions, Sanguinetti says. 

“Some people said, ‘This is like a week of retreat, and my baseline equanimity and baseline concentration is enhanced to what it would be like after five days on retreat.’ We got really excited, but with the understanding that these long-term meditators had a lot of prior experience, and this all could have been interacting with the placebo effect in some ways that’s hard to disentangle.”

The study was paused due to the pandemic, but it has since resumed, this time including less-experienced meditators—and those with zero experience. “We’re targeting those brain networks, first asking the basic question: Can we modulate the network we’re interested in?” Sanguinetti says. “It seems like we can. We’ve got these beautiful network changes in the default mode network.”

Adds Young, “We get these equanimity-related reports from the participants without prompting. They don’t know that we’re looking into anything related to meditation—we’re just some mad scientists that want to put energy into their brain. They on their own report some very meditation-like things.”

The pair started out by experimenting on themselves. “I have a principle in the lab that I won’t do anything on anybody else in terms of brain stimulation, unless I do it on myself,” Sanguinetti says.

He later put the procedure to the test during a 15-week online meditation retreat. “Four weeks in, I started four weeks of ultrasound,” he says. “The general effect was, within the first week, an extreme quieting of both inner and external space. The inner space became much stiller than I was able to accomplish just by sitting for 45 minutes every day. With the PCC ultrasound, it was within the first five minutes.”

Young helped Sanguinetti contextualize some of what unfolded as his conscious mind became very still. “My attention could sort of hone in very quickly on things that were occurring and I could see the way emotion was connected to visual thought,” Sanguinetti says. “But I’d never seen the unconscious mind get still.”

Equanimity was significantly elevated, he says. “I felt like I had this superpower where, if I stabilized my attention and focused—if I just increased my concentration a little bit—that I could blast into equanimity. That started occurring when I was off the pillow, when I was walking in the world, when I was giving talks. Those levels of equanimity were just present.”

Young, whose lifelong love of mathematics and science informs his style of Buddhist teaching, has an expansive vision for the future of app-driven meditation instruction, which he expects will help students realize his “Periodic Table of Happiness Elements,” a grid of twenty factors leading to greater fulfillment and less suffering.

“We want to marry [the ultrasound stimulation] to interactive apps that incorporate really effective AI, then use humans as the safety net underneath the apps,” he says. “We want to bring that on and couple it in one device, where the interactive training with the app and the neuromodulation come together. You might be able to buy it from Amazon, but that would be a good thing, if it delivers the goods and does relatively little harm.”

For some, the prospect of a powerful new brain stimulation technology might conjure up nightmarish scenarios. What if someone amped up the dose and caused brain injury? What if an employer (or the government) forced people to undergo ultrasound treatments?

The risks are real, Young acknowledges. 

“This is scary shit—really serious,” he says. “But if people like us aren’t the first to market with this, it’s going to be someone’s skunk lab with some very limited agenda for someone who cares about power. We’ve thought it through. That’s why people like me and Jay have a moral responsibility to do this research, because we do it in the open and we have a happiness grid that says these are the better angels, and this is what we’re working toward with this technology.”

However scary the project may be, it’s clear that for Young, it is a dream come true.

“It’s like I’m eight years old, and I get every day to speed dial a senior, cutting-edge research scientist doing something important in the world that few people can even understand,” he says. “Why are they even letting me in the room here? This is so much fun for a little kid.”

The post Equanimity On Demand: Can Brain Stimulation Technology Mimic the Effects of Meditation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Every novice meditator who has ever been instructed to sit and follow the breath knows all too well the maddening elusiveness of our respiratory cycle. We find the breath to be a most intimate yet ephemeral companion—closer than close, touched for a moment and then lost amid a swirl of thought and sensation.

The breath is ever-present, the very essence of life, and it is an ongoing exchange between inside and outside, self and other. So it is not surprising that references to the breath abound in diverse spiritual traditions around the world. For Buddhists, the Pali Canon’s Anapanasati Sutta—sometimes translated as the “Breath-Mindfulness Discourse”—is a foundational meditation instruction.

With Breath Taking, an exhibit of drawings, installations, photographs, sculpture, and video on display at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe until September 5, 2021, a diverse group of visual artists explore some innovative methods for rendering breath palpable and making the intangible tangible. Each of their contributions invites us to reconsider our own relationship with this most fundamental activity.

The photo images presented in Just Breathe are disarmingly simple. Artist Linda Alterwitz asked a dozen participants to lie on the ground with cameras on their chests pointed at the night sky, set for 30-second exposures. The movement of each person’s breathing creates a unique pattern: in some of the prints the tracks of the stars are discernible, while in others an abstract pattern of light emerges. Despite the differences, each is a faithful record of the individual’s experience.  

New York artist Stuart Allen’s still and video images of iridescent soap bubbles floating against a sun-drenched sky are both mesmerizingly beautiful and thought-provoking. We know that each fragile orb represents a captive human breath that will return to the atmosphere when the bubble bursts, but in this brief interval everything is perfect, just as it is. Nearby, Allen has also mounted an installation of 35 box kites—weightless white cubes suspended in midair that gently respond to invisible air currents.

In a fine example of process art, Alison Keogh captures the rhythm of her own exhalations with finely brushed sumi ink on paper, generating densely intricate wavelike patterns. The close connection between breath and brushwork may call to mind the enso—the iconic circle brushed on rice paper by a Zen master as a manifestation of an awakened mind.

With Breath 2, draped silk wall hangings dyed in the pale blues and pinks of the evening sky are so finely woven that they undulate slightly in the air displaced by each passerby. They are the handiwork of Albuquerque artist Marietta Patricia Leis, who envisions air as “a common denominator that unites and equalizes us.”

Cynthia Greig’s Breath Scan Portraits portray another sort of interaction between air and the environment. She invites people to exhale onto the glass of a flatbed scanner, which captures the appearance of the condensed water vapor before it evaporates. Each black-and-white print renders a distinctive ghostlike shape, visual proof that no two breaths are alike.

For all the meditative tranquility evoked by these works, some elements of the exhibit directly address the twin pandemics that transfixed and transformed our world in the past 18 months. 

The SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus that causes COVID-19, is most terrifying for its relentless assault on the lungs, scarring the tissue so severely that victims are left gasping for air or cast into a medically induced coma while connected to a ventilator. Equally terrifying is the metastasizing wave of police violence in the United States, in which enforcers of the law have repeatedly been caught literally squeezing the life out of their fellow citizens.

These ominous events can be referenced with deceptive ordinariness. Biologist David Goodsell’s watercolor portraits of the coronavirus represent the spike protein-studded microbe in stunning detail—as if enlarged two million times. There is a strange beauty to the deadly pathogen, depicted with a near-psychedelic intricacy that would look at home on a Grateful Dead poster.

Chimayo, New Mexico photographer Don J. Usner opts for a stark black-and-white documentary approach, capturing his mostly Hispanic mask-wearing neighbors in various outdoor settings around Northern New Mexico. Each image is an astonishing reminder of how quickly pandemic protections became a routine part of daily life.

A photo print from the museum’s permanent collection made by Will Wilson depicts three overlapping views of a Diné (Navajo) man wearing a breathing apparatus as he offers cornmeal as part of his morning prayers at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The hazmat reference, juxtaposed with the breathtaking natural setting, evokes the central role of harmony in Navajo spirituality, even in the midst of a disharmonious world.

More unsettling are two works from Jill O’Bryan, who devised a method for making a mark on paper to coincide with each inhalation and exhalation while contemplating the asphyxiation of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. In one, she applied “holy dirt” taken from El Santuario de Chimayó (a Roman Catholic church in Chimayó and a famous pilgrimage site) to rice paper for eight minutes and 46 seconds—the agonizing interval in which an officer knelt on Floyd’s neck. The other, using graphite for a similar duration, yields a pair of glowering blackened shapes.

Taken as a whole, Breath Taking asks us to recollect and reconsider a primal experience that most of us take for granted. And in its own way it serves as a powerful meditation on presence, absence, and all that lies between.

The post Inside <i>Breath Taking</i>, a New Exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Let’s try an experiment.

Point at something across the room—perhaps a table or a chair—and pause to really notice what you’re pointing at. Then point at the floor in front of your feet and take that in. Next, point at your belly. Finally, point your finger toward your face. What do you see? Is it what you’re pointing at?

For many, this exercise is a revelation. Our head, presumed to be the locus of thought, memory, and sensation, is missing. Instead, it appears as though we are wearing the world on our shoulders. In this vivid centerlessness, the boundary between “inside” and “outside” may dissolve—along with the usual sense of self-as-experiencer.

The pointing experiment, childlike in its simplicity, is a hallmark of the Headless Way, a method devised by the British philosopher Douglas Harding (1909–2007) to help acquaint people with their true nature. Harding was not a Buddhist, but he was convinced that his insight resembled the sudden awakenings described by Tang dynasty Zen masters, a connection he explored in his most popular book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961).

Harding wrote and lectured tirelessly, teaching workshops well into his nineties. Since his death in 2007, Harding’s legacy has been carried on by Richard Lang, a Cambridge-educated psychotherapist who has led the Headless Way workshops around the world, including several with American Buddhist sanghas. Harding’s empirical and avowedly nonhierarchical approach has also been touted by Buddhist-adjacent thinkers such as Ken Wilber, Sam Harris, Thomas Metzinger, and Susan Blackmore.

The pointing exercise and Harding’s other experiments call to mind Zen instructions to “take the backward step,” “see one’s original face,” or “trace back the radiance.” At the same time, these exercises seem to stand in stark contrast to traditional Buddhist teachings that say the breakthrough to enlightenment requires many years (or many lifetimes) of arduous practice under the tutelage of a recognized teacher. One does not need special training to learn Harding’s techniques. They are easy to perform and available for free on the Headless Way website (headless.org), where people are encouraged to try it for themselves.

Given that low barrier to entry, committed Buddhist practitioners might wonder whether the Headless Way is too good to be true—and whether it offers authentic insights.

In Lang’s view, it’s all rather straightforward.

“When I do workshops, I start with the experience, right from the beginning, because then we’re equals,” Lang says, speaking via Zoom from his home in London. “Can you see your head? No. Can you see the world instead? Yes. You’ve got it.

“The more you accept that people have got it—which they have—the easier it is for them to get it. [Getting it] is the easiest thing in the world. Living from it is more challenging.”

Lang has been seeing his no-head since he was a teenager. In 1970 he and his brother attended the London Buddhist Society’s summer school, where they met Harding and were introduced to his experiments. Before long, Lang was sharing the Headless Way with others. “I somehow felt I’d been born to do this,” he says. Later, Lang spent four years living at a Theravada practice center in Cambridgeshire, where he led ten-day meditation retreats. But this, too, became an exploration of the headlessness: “In a way it was an opportunity for me to be still and quiet with the Headless Way.”

Harding, who by his own account was painfully shy as a young man, was raised in a strict Christian sect called the Exclusive Brethren, an experience that left him with a healthy skepticism of spiritual authority. He left the group as a young adult and embarked on a career as an architect, but all along he was deeply preoccupied with the question of identity. “Douglas was asking the question ‘Who am I?’ ” Lang says. Then he came across an arresting self-portrait sketched by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach that depicts the side of Mach’s nose, his torso, legs and the room in which he was sitting. “When he saw it, he said, ‘Oh, OK, that’s from my point of view,’ ” Lang says. “He knew he had struck gold.”

The headless experience is the point at which we are zero distance from ourselves.

Harding had a scientific turn of mind and sought an empirical basis for reconciling what he had experienced with the startling insights of 20th-century physics. He eventually worked out a schema that said our identity depends on the distance from which we are regarded. Viewed from outer space, we are infinitesimal. Up close, we loom large. And at the subatomic level, we’re mostly empty space. The headless experience is the point at which we are zero distance from ourselves—and where something interesting happens. The customary view of self-as-object has gone missing, and all that’s left is the world. Inside becomes outside, and outside becomes inside, the nondual perspective described by the Zen ancestors. But at the time Harding knew nothing about Zen.

“He came across this independently of any tradition: ‘What I am depends on the range of the view,’ ” Lang says. Harding had his insight while working in India in the 1940s, and he labored for ten years to express his realization in the massive work The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, first published in Great Britain in 1952 by Faber and Faber, with a foreword by C. S. Lewis. In the late 1950s, Harding encountered Zen through the writings of D. T. Suzuki and became acquainted with the teachings of Huang-Po and other Chinese Zen ancestors. “He had not really shared the Headless experience with anyone, and so when he came across Suzuki, which led him to people like Huang-Po, he felt he had at last found friends,” Lang says.

Harding’s piqued interest in Zen led him to eventually meet Christmas Humphreys, founder of the London Buddhist Society, who agreed to publish On Having No Head. Harding went on to teach at the society’s summer school until 1975, when his relationship with the institution came to an abrupt end during one of their gatherings.

“Christmas Humphreys was kind of a slow, long, gradual-path guy,” Lang explains. “Humphreys rather pointedly said to the audience, ‘There are some people here who think you can get it straightaway. You can’t—you can’t get it in this lifetime, you can’t even get it in the next lifetime.’ Well, that was the end for Douglas.”

As Harding’s writings gained a wider audience, Western Buddhist teachers were intrigued by what he had to say. One was Roshi Philip Kapleau, the American author of The Three Pillars of Zen, who had trained in Japanese monasteries for 13 years before founding the Rochester Zen Center in New York. Kapleau was an admirer of Harding’s and visited his home, telling a friend, “ ‘Douglas’s house is the spiritual center of England. What’s going on here is great,’ ” Lang says.

Harding went on to pay several visits to Rochester, Lang says. Things went awry on a second visit, however, when Kapleau encouraged his students to subject Harding to some rough-and-ready Zen testing. “A monk came on the stage and pulled his nose, and Douglas said, ‘Look, I didn’t come here to be tested. I’m a friend. I came to share something.’ It was a clash of an old tradition and a man who wasn’t in the tradition.”

Harding also befriended Ajahn Sumedho, the American-born Theravada Buddhist monk who established the Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in South East England, and some of his students. And John Toler, an American Rinzai Zen priest living in Japan, also sought Harding out after hearing about headlessness and went to visit him at his home in Nacton, Suffolk. “John was generous and he had no doubt: ‘You see this and it’s self-evident,’” Lang says.

Harding “had a great debt, in a way, to Buddhist friends and to those old Buddhist teachers,” Lang says, “but he did make a progression, and after two or three years he realized that the Headless Way was not Zen—it was its own thing. He had to work that out, because it was so close to Zen. And yet he just had to say, ‘Well, this is something new, and it stands on its own, and it doesn’t need to be under another umbrella.’ ” The two paths shared a family resemblance, it seemed, but they were distinct.

Harding “had a great debt to Buddhist friends and teachers.”

In 1996, Lang cofounded the nonprofit Shollond Trust to carry on Harding’s work. Through Lang’s online and in-person workshops and annual gatherings in the UK, US, and Australia, Harding’s ideas have gained a wider audience in recent years. And influential figures like Sam Harris, who interviewed Lang for his popular Making Sense with Sam Harris podcast and asked him to develop content for his Waking Up app, have brought even greater attention to Lang and Harding.

The Headless Way also caught the attention of Robert Beatty, a former Theravada monk who leads the Portland Insight Meditation Community. “Three or four years ago he emailed me out of the blue and said he loved the Headless Way,” Lang recounts. “There are some unusual characters who are deep in their tradition and yet find the Headless Way and go, ‘That’s great. Let’s bring that in.’ The truth comes before the tradition.”

Around the same time, Hwalson Sunim, founder and abbot of the Detroit Zen Center, encountered Harding’s writings while searching for ways to better translate Zen for students in the West. Myungju Sunim, the center’s vice abbot, said Hwalson realized that Harding “had an experience of awakening without being connected to a lineage, and the language that he expressed it with was uniquely Western.”

Myungju recalls one of Lang’s workshops that he gave in Detroit in April 2019. The atmosphere was light, even playful, as Lang led a group of around 40 people through assorted exercises, like having two partners peer into opposite ends of a paper tube. “You’re looking at another person’s face, and it’s very intimate,” she says. “It’s a little scary. And while you’re in this tube, feeling like you’re ridiculously 5 years old and someone is saying, ‘Now, you’ve traded faces. You actually don’t have a face.’ … [That experience] allowed for an intimacy at the Zen center that was very beautiful.”

She adds, “It’s the practice of true seeing, and it’s very unfettered. But I think Richard and Douglas would be the first ones to say, ‘This is just a starting point.’ ”

The headless way would seem to share with Zen the aim of eliciting a direct realization of a world-without-self—but it more or less stops there. Zen, arising within a monastic Buddhist tradition, prescriptively addresses ethical and metaphysical questions and requires a teacher to authenticate a student’s insights. Traditional Zen practice is a rigorous body-mind discipline, famously presented as a life-and-death matter demanding unrelenting spiritual exertion. As the 18th-century Rinzai Zen teacher Hakuin Ekaku memorably put it, “Should you desire the great tranquility, prepare to sweat white beads.”

Headlessness, by contrast, is resolutely nonhierarchical—Lang refers to fellow practitioners as “friends,” not “students”—and assumes that those who experience headlessness can interpret it for themselves. It offers a straightforward and relatively undramatic method for appreciating what has always been the case: that we never directly perceive our heads—or a separate self. Remembering to see it takes effort, but it can be transformative.

The deeper implications of that seeing elude many people who try Harding’s experiments, Lang acknowledges, and some simply shrug and move on. “My approach is just to keep affirming that the person has gotten the experience and that their response is totally valid,” he says.

Myungju thinks that headlessness may be best suited for those who already have a serious meditation practice and a context within which to appreciate the experience. “The one weakness, if there is one, is if it tries to stand on its own as a lineage without a context for community and practice,” she says. “The greatest pitfall might be thinking, ‘I don’t need a teacher, I don’t need a community, I don’t need a practice—my practice is to just sit here and point at my head.’ ”

Despite the differing approaches, Headlessness could help guide dedicated practitioners toward an initial awakening. But what comes next is a different matter. In the end, perhaps the best perspective comes from the Buddha himself, whose admonition to his monks in the Cunda Sutta (SN 47.13) placed matters squarely in their hands: “Be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the dhamma as your island, the dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.”

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For years, members of the Hyde Park Zen Group have gathered each Wednesday to spread out their cushions around the altar in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, a cavernous space modeled after a medieval cathedral with soaring vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and a 200-foot bell tower.

They sit together for half an hour, with a dharma talk following. It’s a treasured interval of tranquility for students, faculty, and staff at the University of Chicago, a school so notorious for its academic rigor that it is often referred to as “the place where fun comes to die.”

“I’m a big-time monkey mind guy,” says Alex Peltz, a student in the master of divinity program who joined the Zen group as an undergrad and now helps lead it. “Here at UChicago I have a lot of thinking to do, which can get me into trouble,” he explains. “To have 30 minutes a week where I don’t have to think at all—it’s a very important tool.”

For students like Peltz, campus Buddhist organizations offer a refuge from the pressures and insecurities of college life and, for some, open the door for a deeper exploration of life’s meaning. Most of these student groups are nonsectarian in spirit, although they often have a close relationship with a local sangha.

“You can almost feel the relief in their bodies as they sit there: ‘Oh, it’s safe to be here, I can be vulnerable,’” says Brian Taylor, a senior member at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, a Soto Zen temple on Chicago’s North Side, who coordinates the campus group. “They don’t have preconceptions. They have a kind of beginner’s mind that’s refreshing. They don’t show off their knowledge of Buddhism—they really ask questions.”

In April, the sitting group moved its zazen [sitting meditation] sessions online in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, as did the Ancient Dragon Zen Gate sangha, where a “virtual zendo” began offering daily meditation sessions and a dharma talk on Sundays.

Students are often drawn to Buddhist practice because they sense its potential to alleviate the distress they’re experiencing, says JoAnn Cooke, the Buddhist chaplain at Syracuse University in central New York State.

“Students are basically very lonely and disconnected from each other,” Cooke says. “There’s just so much to do and so much to take on as a college student. The drama of their world is this competitive, weird, unknowing way of relating to people.”

The university’s Buddhist Meditation Association history stretches back more than 40 years, when members helped found the Zen Center of Syracuse, where Cooke is a senior student. The group rapidly adapted when the Syracuse campus closed because of the COVID outbreak, Cooke says. “We have two student-led meditations via Zoom on Mondays and Fridays,” she says. “They are going pretty well. We have been getting six to eight people on Mondays, not so many on Fridays.”

In New York City, the Columbia University Buddhist Association (CUBA) hosts weekly 30-minute meditation sessions, followed by presentations by teachers from various dharma traditions, says Reverend Doyeon Park, a Won Buddhist kyomunim [teacher] who has served as Buddhist chaplain since 2011.

“At Columbia they are very smart kids,” Park remarks. “At the same time, they are genuinely searching for their own purpose or meaning.” She regularly meets with students to answer their questions about Buddhism, and says the group serves primarily as a general introduction to the dharma. “If I see the student has an interest in a particular Buddhist tradition, I recommend a particular teacher or center for their own needs,” she adds.

CUBA vice president Kavin Chada says the group is competing with campus groups that attract participants by advertising mindfulness as a way to alleviate stress.

“My generation, in general, is very reluctant to hear about anything that sounds like religion,” Chada says. “We even talked about changing the name of the group. If you speak about mindfulness, people are very open to hearing about that. But I find if you want to go a little bit more deeply, usually people’s interest peters out. I think with the label of Buddhism it can be just scary.”

When the Columbia campus closed in March with COVID concerns, CUBA moved to hour-long online meditation sessions. “The main idea for us was to reposition ourselves to be a support system for the community at large,” Chada says. “It is an opportunity for everyone to come together rather than a source of significant insight in terms of meditation practice, which is what we usually try to provide.”

Back in Chicago, Howard Ruan, who uses the pronouns they/them, was already an Ancient Dragon Zen Gate regular when they enrolled in the University of Chicago Divinity School and started sitting with the Hyde Park group. Their Buddhist practice, they say, “has become profoundly more subtle and mysterious over time. It has become a structured time to just not be doing anything and paying attention to what happens.”

Attendees at the Rockefeller Chapel gatherings—including residents living near campus—take turns delivering dharma talks, according to Sara Lytle, a UChicago Divinity School graduate training to be a chaplain. “They tend to be on a range of subjects,” she says. “I did my dharma talk on the Therigatha, a collection of poems by early Buddhist women.”

Now in clinical pastoral training at Northwestern University, Lytle has fond memories of sitting with the Hyde Park group and stays in touch with members.

“It was definitely a really important part of my time at UChicago,” she says. “It was really nice to sit there.”

Correction (08/10/20): An earlier version of this story referred to Howard Ruan with the pronouns he/him. Ruan uses they/them pronouns.

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Rebecca Williams-Karnesky credits her practice at Portland’s Dharma Rain Zen Center with helping her survive a demanding MD/PhD program at Oregon Health & Science University. Later, stressed-out colleagues in the University of New Mexico’s surgical residency program remarked on her calm, steady demeanor despite all-night shifts and 80-hour workweeks. They asked her what her secret was, which got her thinking about how she could teach mindfulness to others. Williams-Karnesky won support from administrators in part because they thought mindfulness might help with physician burnout. She now teaches a mindfulness course for third-year medical students, who learn breathing practices and metta (lovingkindness) meditation.

***

How did daily practice at a Zen center affect your experience in medical school? It helped me clarify my reasons for going into medicine. When I started, there was a larger component of ego driving me. Much of it felt like expectation or desire to please others. Practicing with a teacher and having her reflect those things back to me allowed me to understand those drivers and set them down. In zazen you see the transitory nature of things, and if you sit with something long enough it will go away. That helps when you’re in the midst of a difficult situation with a patient.

Third-year med students typically rotate through clinical settings, but for now they’re learning in a virtual environment. How have you adapted to teaching mindfulness during the COVID-19 pandemic? Students usually experience stress when they enter a clinical setting for the first time, but the biggest challenge they’re facing right now is just the uncertainty and anxiety about what’s going on. The mindfulness classes can serve as an immediate stress-relief tool. I’ve actually restructured the course a little bit and increased the amount of interactivity, asking students to spend more time actually practicing these techniques. While I’m teaching them the same tools I did before, the sources of their anxiety are looking really different right now. Luckily, I have a student who is really interested in mindfulness who is helping me with the course. She has the perspective of being a current med student who can check in with classmates and is acutely aware of the present challenges.

What benefits does mindfulness hold for medical students and other health care providers? One is the ability to be present with patients, with colleagues, with yourself, and to recognize suffering in yourself or others. Cultivating that ability to be still in the midst of something that’s very chaotic—I think that’s huge. In the trauma bay, if you can be there with a patient and calmly tell them what’s going to happen next, they’ll respond to that even if they are acutely injured.

How do you present this to students? I tell them: if we approach the practice of medicine mindfully, we can redesign the system in a way that will help prevent burnout. But more than that, the focus on cultivating compassion and joy of practice are for your personal relationships and well-being. That doesn’t get talked about in medical school, but it has practical application to your life, to your career—it’s a skill that you can learn and improve upon. I also provide them with examples, like answering a pager. When your pager goes off it creates a Pavlovian response: you’re tense, angry, afraid. Mindfulness allows you to create some space, and then you can pick up the phone, do some cognitive reframing, take a deep breath and say, “Hey, how can I help you?”

What sort of response have you received? Over the past couple of years, 96 percent of students think the course should continue to be offered, 94 percent think it should be mandatory, and 74 percent say they’ve used a mindfulness activity outside of class. There’s usually one person who asks, “Why are we doing this?” And there are always a few people who say, “I’ve been wanting this—this fills a need.” Sometimes a student will look inattentive or skeptical, but afterward they’ll come up and say, “Hey, can we chat a little bit more about this? I’m interested in how I can incorporate this in my life.”

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Roshi Alfred Jitsudo Ancheta, a native New Mexican who became one of America’s first Hispanic Zen teachers, died at his home in Albuquerque’s North Valley on Saturday, May 9, following a long illness. He was 76.

Ancheta was one of 12 dharma successors of Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi. He went on to form the White Plum Asanga following Maezumi’s passing in 1995. He was also a dharma successor of Tetsugen Bernie Glassman in the Zen Peacemaker Order.

Ancheta paired his devotion to Zen practice with a deep commitment to promoting peace, social justice, and interfaith understanding. In his later years he also became a skilled woodblock printmaker, blending Buddhist, Catholic and traditional New Mexican motifs in his work.

Ancheta was born in Embudo, New Mexico, a village along the banks of the Rio Grande on the road to Taos. He spent his early years there before the family moved to Long Beach, California, but he returned to the area each summer to stay with his maternal grandparents.

Ancheta’s heritage was an important touchstone in his teaching and art practice. Family lore had it that Ancheta’s mother was descended from Juan de Oñate, who led the earliest Spanish settlement in the region in 1598. His father hailed from Silver City, in the southwestern part of the state. According to the family history, an ancestor had come to the territory from Mexico in 1856. 

Ancheta’s path to Buddhism was a circuitous one. He enlisted in the Army in the 1960s, serving as a medic during a tour of duty in Europe. Later he studied at Long Beach Junior College and California State University, Fullerton, where he first learned about Buddhism in a religion course.

“It intrigued me,” he recalled years later. “What I was trying to do was understand myself: ‘Who am I? What is the meaning of all this?’”A friend eventually steered him to Maezumi’s Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), telling him, “There’s a real Zen teacher there.”

Maezumi, a Japanese Soto Zen monk who had come to the US to serve at Zenshuji Temple, the US Soto Zen headquarters, founded ZCLA in 1967. It would become the training ground for many influential American-born Zen teachers, including Glassman (Maezumi’s first dharma successor), John Daido Loori, Charlotte Joko Beck, Jan Chozen Bays, and Genpo Dennis Merzel, a schoolmate of Ancheta’s.

Ancheta’s first encounter with Maezumi, whose dharma name, Taizan, means “Great Mountain,” was memorable: “When I first saw him, I just got this wave of, ‘This is a mountain.’ It just stopped me in my tracks.”

Ancheta soon became a student at ZCLA, but in 1972, he moved to rural British Columbia with the dream of creating an off-the-grid Zen community, commuting to L.A. for 10 years to practice with his teacher. He took formal vows as a monk when he returned to California in 1982.

Maezumi soon dispatched him to a remote site high in the San Jacinto Mountains, where, as the resident monk, he helped in the construction of Zen Mountain Center (now Yokoji-Zen Mountain Center), ZCLA’s rural retreat. He came to serve as administrator and vice abbot, while reaching out to work with the homeless, at-risk youth, and HIV/AIDS patients and their caregivers. He received dharma transmission from Maezumi Roshi in 1994, with authorization to teach.

In 1995 Ancheta and some students bought a two-story Victorian-era house in downtown Albuquerque that would become home to Hidden Mountain Zen Center. In his teaching career he recognized seven dharma successors in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.

Thanks to his active interest in promoting interfaith connections, Ancheta served on the board of the Center for Action and Contemplation, an organization founded by Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest. He also taught meditation at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe, led homeless retreats and took part in two Zen Peacemakers interfaith retreats at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. He was a co-founder of the Center for the Promotion of Peace in Albuquerque.

In later years, Ancheta devotedly supported the work of his wife, Diana Stetson, a noted artist and calligrapher, and launched an art practice of his own, creating acclaimed woodblock prints that found their way into art collections.

He is survived by Stetson, his wife of 25 years; his daughter, Serena Grace Ancheta Frisina; and stepson Ezra Elm Buller.

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