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. 

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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.

Since its founding in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa University—previously The Naropa Institute—has been a beacon for Buddhist studies in the United States, attracting students and teachers from around the world. Now it’s aiming to become one of the leaders in the growing effort to train psychedelic therapists.

On March 14, Naropa launched its new Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies program, a 200-hour training program that will unfold over the course of ten months in both an online and retreat-based setting. The course is being offered to “advanced professionals working in relevant therapeutic areas, including mental health counseling, psychiatry, chaplaincy and social work,” according to Naropa’s website. It’s a “non-degree Certificate,” which means it will provide foundational training without actually licensing participants to begin working with patients in a clinical setting. 

Blending Buddhism, contemplative practices, Western psychotherapy, and an emphasis on ethics, inclusivity, and “Right Use of Power” (a guide to the ethical use of personal and professional power), the new program from Naropa appears to be well situated for the task at hand. In fact, many within the Naropa community have long been urging the university to become more involved in the burgeoning psychedelic space. “A lot of my colleagues and a lot of students have really been pushing Naropa to consider ways of doing more training in this area,” says Dr. Sara Lewis, co-director of the Naropa Center for Psychedelic Studies (NCPS), which will be spearheading the training program. “A huge number of our students are coming to train at Naropa. . . specifically because they want to do psychedelic-assisted therapy. So it was sort of natural, given Naropa’s history and mission and the things that we tend to be up to. . . that we would move into this training.”

The new training program is a collaboration with the San Jose, California-based  Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, more commonly known as MAPS. In addition to being widely regarded as a leading organization in the modern psychedelic movement, MAPS also specializes in the training of psychedelic therapists. It’s also one of the leading funders of clinical trials involving psychedelics; and as it happens, in Boulder, not far from the Naropa campus, the organization is working on a phase III clinical trial (the final step before FDA approval) with 3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA) for the treatment of PTSD. The collaboration between MAPS and Naropa, says Dr. Jamie Beachy, another co-director at NCPS, “makes for a really beautiful partnership between people that are doing research in the field in a very relevant way and the training program.”

MDMA, thanks in large part to MAPS, could receive FDA approval for certain therapies as soon as next year. For that reason, Naropa’s new training program will focus largely on MDMA-assisted therapy, using the MAPS training model as its foundation. Fully half (100 hours) of the program will be focused on MDMA-assisted therapy, including a segment in which trainees will watch video footage from MDMA-assisted therapy sessions. Other, shorter segments of the program will be focused on psilocybin and ketamine. (Ketamine is an FDA-approved anesthetic; in 2019, the FDA approved a version of ketamine called esketamine for treatment-resistant depression.) But Beachy says there’s also an ethical reason for the program’s emphasis on MDMA-assisted therapy: “MDMA so clearly demonstrates potential for people with severe PTSD, [and] in the program we’re committed to offering training that has. . . potential to relieve human suffering. Really, that’s the guiding ethos for the program, [and] these therapies are demonstrating this incredible potential to relieve suffering.”

This isn’t the first time that MAPS and Naropa have collaborated. The two organizations also teamed up in 2020 to launch a course in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, led by Marcela Ot’alora and Bruce Poulter, two therapists with long histories of working with psychedelics who are leading the MAPS phase III trial currently taking place in Boulder.

The new program arrives during a high point for the modern psychedelic movement. Over the past thirty-some years, a growing body of research has proven that some psychedelics—administered in the appropriate settings—can produce profound and enduring relief from a wide variety of debilitating conditions, including addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and the severe anxiety that can accompany a terminal diagnosis. Clinical trials have advanced rapidly, often with stunning results. One oft-cited 2016 study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example, found that “psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety” for patients with life-threatening cancer.  The Hopkins researchers also note that after six months “these changes were sustained, with about 80 percent of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety.”

Oregon decriminalized psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms) in 2020, and states like Texas and Pennsylvania are already well along the path to making some psychedelic-assisted therapies available to some citizens. Psychedelic advocates don’t need rose-colored glasses to feel optimistic about the future.

And yet, the shadow of the past looms large. Most of the professionals working in this space today are keenly aware of the fact that our society has, to some extent, been down this road before. The first wave of psychedelic enthusiasm washed over our culture beginning in the mid-twentieth century after the synthesis and widespread distribution of “classic psychedelics” like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. That promising early era of research eventually fell under the shadow of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which in turn led to full-scale moral panic and the prohibition of psychedelics. The field, promising though it may have looked at the outset, entered into a kind of “Dark Ages.” While enthusiasm right now is generally high, so too is a sense of caution. The modern psychedelic community is like a team of mountaineers trying to reach the peak of a mountain atop a sheet of unstable snow; one misstep—in the form of a highly publicized bad trip, say, or a new-age Timothy Leary—and the whole, fragile edifice could come avalanching down. 

The training of psychedelic guides has become a key step toward ensuring that such a calamity never happens again. It isn’t easy to see successful outcomes as a  psychedelic therapist. Psychedelics are notoriously mercurial—their effects can be mapped out and predicted to some degree, but at the end of the day there’s no telling exactly what’s going to happen over the course of a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, even after rigorous scientific controls have been applied. “I’ve done this work for over 20 years,” says Ot’alora, “and I’ll still be in a session with a participant where I’ll think, ‘Oh my gosh, I have never been in this position before, how do I hold this space? How do I keep this person safe?’ It’s always going to be something different, [because] everybody’s different.” So in some sense, the skillset of the psychedelic therapist must be as dynamic as the drug itself. She must be patient, empathetic, focused, and grounded. She must be willing and able to sit beside someone, often for many hours on end, as the patient vividly relives traumatic moments. She must also check her ego if and when her subject emerges from the psychedelic journey reporting a mystical-type experience. It can be easy to start mistaking one’s role as a therapist for the effects of the drug itself. 

In a very real sense, psychedelic therapists are the gatekeepers to the profoundly transformative experiences that the drugs themselves can occasion; they serve as intermediaries between the scientists in the labs and the people who are seeking care. Proper training for therapists is arguably one of the best defenses against the onset of a second Dark Age for the psychedelic community. 

The new training program from Naropa will apply “an explicitly feminist, anti-oppression, and social justice lens.” One of the goals of this approach, says Beachy, is to train therapists who have “deeply considered power dynamics and the risk involved with. . . the non-ordinary state experience [which] creates a lot of vulnerability in the therapeutic relationship.” Beachy and her colleagues have also designed the program with a reverential nod to the ancient roots of psychedelic healing rituals; they intend to honor “matrilineal traditions,” and they aim to focus “on indigenous rights and reciprocity, to really weave the conversation throughout the program with people who have thought deeply about this and [who] represent those communities.”

Mindfulness and contemplative training will also appear at various points throughout the ten-month program. “Naropa will weave contemplative practice throughout our training sessions in small and large groups, and trainees will complete a compassion meditation training led by Naropa’s Center for Contemplative Education (CACE),” says Dr. Beachy. “Contemplation is built into the core curriculum.” Introspection, according to Ot’alora, should be a key component in any therapist’s training: “You need to do your own work,” she says. “The way to not be afraid of someone’s suffering is to not be afraid of your own.”

As it looks toward the future, Naropa aims to become a force that will harmoniously connect the demands of the modern psychedelic industry with ancient wisdom. “With FDA approval in sight for some of these medicines… what’s happening is there are a lot of entrepreneurial interests [that] are creating trainings and programs and medicalizing substances and plant medicines. There’s a lot of interest in investment and capitalizing on this cultural emergence, or reemergence,” says Beachy. “Naropa, among other institutions, [has] a commitment to ethics, Right Use of Power, and relieving human suffering—and doing that in a way that’s equitable, rather than motivated by profit only. We feel that there’s a need for the kind of guidance we can provide in the world; guidance that’s rooted in mindfulness, and rooted in deep conversations about ethics and equity.”

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Read more on Buddhism and psychedelics here.

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How has Buddhism used me in my role as a therapist? How have I used Buddhism? As I think about this year’s worth of work, I can see one thing very clearly. Let me put it in a nutshell: I introduce my patients to a meditative sensibility by the way in which I relate to them. Maybe this should have been obvious from the start! But in examining my method, I can see that while I am different with every patient, I am myself with all of them. I learned from meditation how to let myself be, and this is the quality that guides me. I do not model this sensibility by resting calmly in a meditative state while my patients free-associate. I engage actively. But I am very quiet inside when I am working; all of my concentration, all of my attention, goes to the person I am with. And I want to know everything, from the television shows they are watching to the food they are eating to their most dreadful thoughts and reflections. I believe in the power of awareness to heal. I want my patients to see how and when and where their egos, or superegos, are getting the best of them, because I know that if and when they can see this clearly, something in them will release. And their best chance of seeing it comes when my mind is quiet. Somehow, my inner silence resonates in them and feeds their awareness. Each person is like a koan I cannot solve with my rational mind. I have to give myself over completely, while staying very much myself, to let their koan and my response to it become one thing. When this one thing fills the interpersonal field, the hidden kindness in life, present in each of us, gets revealed.

I want my patients to see how their egos are getting the best of them. And their best chance of seeing it comes when my mind is quiet.

D.W. Winnicott, in his final major paper, came to a similar understanding about his therapeutic technique. He was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making interpretations. . . . It appalls me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance.

The Zen of therapy rests on just this kind of attitude. People come with all kinds of strange sorrows. They want to understand their experiences and learn from them. They want to make sense of what happened to make them what they are. And while that is interesting to me, too, I know that learning from experience is not all that it is cracked up to be. There is more to a person than who they think they are. Sometimes therapy has to act like the unmoving shadow of the rose-apple tree, creating circumstances conducive for unlearning, creativity, and joy.

Learning by unlearning. How often have I disoriented people to the systems and explanations they have created for themselves? Disorienting systems is something both Buddhism and therapy can agree on. Things that feel fixed, set, permanent, and unchanging, like one’s self-righteous anger, are never as real as they seem. Problems are not hard and fast, selves are not static and motionless, even memory is nothing we can be certain about. The Zen of therapy wants to get things moving again. It wants to open things up, make people less sure of themselves, and in the process release some of the energy that has become stuck in the mud. Rational explanations have their place, but irrational breakthroughs, like those that come out of koan practice, are invigorating because they alert us to capacities we do not know we have.

As this year of sessions has confirmed for me, when enough trust is built up in the therapeutic relationship, there is a chance to release, and be released from, a self-preoccupation that is no longer serving a reasonable purpose. The path I have outlined eventually leads to the realization that simple kindness is the fuel of the peace of mind we all crave. When the mind object drops away, even for an instant, all kinds of latent interpersonal possibilities emerge—for connection, empathy, insight, joy, and, dare we say, love. How to make this happen remains the trickiest of questions. There is no formula to follow, no script that can be written that will ensure success. But this project has affirmed for me that therapy does indeed have the potential to catalyze such openings. Therapy can bring out the hidden intimacy that gives meaning to life. I have chronicled these sessions to explore what such openings look like when they occur and to describe what brings them forth. What risks I have sometimes taken with my patients! How brave and vulnerable they have been in response!

From The Zen of Therapy by Mark Epstein, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2022 by Mark Epstein.

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Read an interview with Mark Epstein and Tricycle’s editor-in-chief James Shaheen about The Zen of Therapy, the role of no-self in therapy, and the polarity between doing and being.

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Mark Epstein, MD, has been exploring the territory where Buddhism and psychotherapy meet for several decades. His many books on the convergence have helped define what amounts to a subgenre in both fields. Epstein’s investigation of Buddhism predates his work in psychotherapy, so the dharma has always influenced how he views his interactions with his patients. It was reassuring to him, he says, that he could bring the Buddhist way of listening—simply being with his patients, what he calls simple kindness—into the psychotherapeutic way of listening, and start to use them interchangeably. This interplay is a major theme of his new book The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life (Penguin Press, 2022), in which he reflects on a year’s worth of therapy sessions. In this conversation with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, Epstein discusses the role of no-self in therapy and the polarity between doing and being, a concept that he attributes to both Donald Winnicott, a major influence on his work, and Buddhist thought.

Your latest book, The Zen of Therapy, is a departure from your other writings about Buddhism and psychotherapy. This time, you talk about your own process. The question that people are always asking me—and that I’m always trying to avoid—is “How do you bring your Buddhist experience into psychotherapy? Do you teach your patients to meditate? Are you asking them to be mindful? Do you sit quietly with them?” And I always answer, “No, I’m just being a therapist.” But I’m trying to be myself. So somehow, if Buddhism has influenced me, it should be coming through.

I’ve written a lot about translating Buddhist thought into the psychological language of the West, but this time I decided to pay attention to the details of the individual psychotherapy sessions and try to write down, as literally as possible, what happened in sessions where my Buddhist inclinations contributed to the therapy, even in a small way.

Over the course of a year, I accumulated notes from around 50 of these sessions with different patients. It was kind of a mosaic picture of a year of therapy, which happened to end just before the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t read over any of the cases until the year was up, and then I showed it to my editor. I really trust her. She said the through line was really me, not the random selection of patients. She told me to go through each one and write a reflection so that readers could see what was going on in my head while I was being the therapist. I liked that, so that’s what I set out to do.

You write about how the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had to stop interpreting for his patients because he was interfering with the patients’ own process. Can you say how to be with a patient without interpreting everything they say or do? Winnicott says something like, “I realized that I was interpreting mostly to impress myself, but the patient could experience that interpretation as a kind of intrusion.” Things finally started to open up for me as a therapist when I stopped interpreting so much and just let myself be there. That seemed very Buddhist to me. The concept in psychoanalysis about how and when to interpret centers around tact, which is another version of the Buddhist notion of right speech. We all can see what’s wrong with the people we’re close to, but how often is it helpful to tell them what’s wrong with them? Tact is very important in our relationships, including the psychotherapeutic one.

I set up this polarity in the book between doing and being, an idea that comes from Winnicott but is also a Buddhist idea. This is not to devalue doing but to say that doing isn’t everything. There’s this other quality to life that has to do with being that’s also an interpersonal experience. When I’m able to simply be myself with my patients, that quality of attention or awareness or empathy—in the book, I call it simple kindness—is transmissible. Sometimes it can be absorbed by the patient, who might need that quality in their experience.

You quote Gary Snyder, who years ago wrote in Tricycle that “within a traditional Buddhist framework of ethical values and psychological insight, the mind essentially reveals itself.” What is happening when the quality of being allows the patient that space for the mind to reveal itself? I love that about the mind revealing itself. While I was deeply inspired by my Buddhist explorations, which did happen way before I even began my training to become a psychiatrist, that way of working is part of the psychoanalytic tradition, even going back to Freud. In psychoanalysis, the patient is lying on the couch without looking at the therapist, so that the analyst is simply listening and the patient is listening to themself, to their own mind (or unconscious, as Freud talked about it). That was one of the parallels that I saw originally when I started my training. The analytic attitude and the method of free association or evenly suspended, free-floating attention was remarkably similar to the mindful attention we learn about in Buddhism. It was very reassuring to me that I could bring the Buddhist way of listening into the psychotherapeutic way of listening and start to use them interchangeably.

“Things finally started to open up for me as a therapist when I stopped interpreting so much and just let myself be there. That seemed very Buddhist to me.”

You explore the Buddhist teaching on no-self in relationship to psychoanalytic theories of self. In particular, you ask, “if inklings of no-self are not necessarily signs and symptoms of developmental deficits but also windows into underlying truth, how are we to proceed?” When I was growing up, I was always worried that my self wasn’t “self” enough. Where was I? I was preoccupied with that question. I couldn’t help comparing myself with the people around me, who look like they have bigger, better, and more real selves than I do. You could call it anxiety or insecurity. But this self that we’re brought up in the Western world to think should exist, it doesn’t really exist in the way we imagined it, which is what the Dalai Lama always says: It’s not that there’s no self, because that’s ridiculous. You’re you, and I’m me. But the self doesn’t exist in the way we imagined it does. Winnicott always said that most people can’t really get out of their childhoods without creating a “false self” or “caretaker self” that tries to take care of either the intrusive or the abandoning environment of family life.

All of those ideas were swirling around when I was writing this book: What if the self doesn’t have to be what we think it should be? What if we were correct in wondering about it even from a very young age but had to push all that away in order to function? And then Buddhism or therapy comes along and says, relax about all that and just see what’s there. Try to find it as it really exists, not as you think it should.

You quote your friend and former therapist Michael Vincent Miller as saying that Buddhism and psychotherapy “both aim for the restoration of innocence after experience.” Can you say something about what that means? When he said that to me, I didn’t even know what it meant, but I knew it felt profound. Especially in the psychotherapy world, we’re led to believe that experience is everything—that we’re supposed to learn from experience, and that’s what life is about. But then I think of the koan: what was your face before you were born?

When Ram Dass first found out that I had become a psychiatrist, he said, teasing me a little bit, “Mark, are you a Buddhist psychiatrist now?” I said, “I guess so.” And he said, “Do you see the patients as already free?” I think I do see them as already free. It’s the idea that there’s a hidden kindness in life or that buddhanature is inherent to who we are.

Experience layers us, and we do learn from it, but we also have to defend ourselves against experience and the ways we start to develop ideas about identity and who we are, who the other person is, and so on. Our original innocence gets covered up and lost. When we talk about the feeling in meditation of coming home or being at peace about ourselves, there’s some reconnection with that innocence. I think that’s what Michael was getting at.

I’ve often had difficulty reconciling a psychological orientation and Buddhist practice, but you seem to hold both in balance. For instance, you talk about the oceanic feeling and Freud’s take on that, which you don’t dismiss, while understanding its value from a Buddhist perspective. I don’t know how much your readers know about what Freud meant by the oceanic feeling. He had a long correspondence with a French poet named Romain Rolland, who was a student of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and told Freud a lot about what happened to him in meditation. Freud wrote that Rolland’s meditation experiences reminded him of a young child at the breast and that they were seeking a restoration of the limitless narcissism of the infant. I think that that’s partially true.

On meditation retreats, if we’re lucky enough, we have these blissful experiences. That’s one of the things that we keep coming back for. If you really look at what they are, how addictive they can be, and how people get trapped in seeking them, those retreat experiences do have a lot of that blissful feeling of the infant at the breast, the restoration of limitless narcissism. That’s part of their power. I always see that as part of the concentration practices, the samadhi practices. They give you that holding environment for the mind that has an infinite quality. But it’s not solely the experience of the infant at the breast; it’s also the experience of the mother holding the infant. Once we start to use the accumulated samadhi to investigate the nature of mind, we become much more like John Cage, who’s hearing everything and allowing everything in the way a mother hears and holds a baby. It’s the maternal quality or the parental quality that is also oceanic. Trying to figure out how to talk about that was interesting and fun for me.

You just mentioned John Cage, whose ideas appear throughout your book. You’re working with the art of therapy, and in a certain way you’re performing an art that is similar to Cage’s; it’s a spontaneous, unblocked opening. That’s the improvisational nature of therapy. That’s one of the things that the process requires. That might just be the way that I work, but I think it’s proven to be an important capacity to bring to the encounter. It takes a kind of trust, too—to trust my own mind without trying too hard to find the right interpretation but rather to use what comes up in a judicious way to engage, provoke, and support a patient.

I imagine early in your career as a Harvard Medical School–trained psychiatrist you thought you needed to know answers and to give your patients answers. In any event, you seem to have come to this place where it’s ok if you don’t know. The thing about becoming a psychiatrist via the medical route is that they don’t really teach you anything about being a therapist. They teach you about diseases, and then one day, you’re the psychiatrist. It’s not like with a surgeon where you can assist and watch how to do it. You have to go with the patient into the room and be the therapist with hardly any education on how to do it.

For me, that was good because I had to figure it out for myself. I already had the Buddhist training, so the best I could do was to try to deploy for the patient what I had learned for my own mind. That set me on this path that we’re talking about now. I’ve had good therapy teachers since, but they were all supportive of not-knowing as the foundation of the relationship.

That really comes through in the book. It really comes through how much I don’t know. [Laughs.]

No, no. [Laughs.] That you’re comfortable when you don’t know, and you can relax into that. It’s exciting to me. It’s a mutual discovery. That’s what therapy is all about.

♦

Adapted from an interview with Mark Epstein by Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, for the Tricycle Talks podcast.

The post The Zen of Therapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In January 2020, the journal Mindfulness devoted a special section to “second-generation mindfulness-based interventions” (SG-MBIs), signaling a notable shift in the development of contemporary mindfulness practices. Though many psychotherapists still enthusiastically believe that mindfulness can be tremendously therapeutic, in recent years harsh criticisms of long-standing programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction have started to dominate the conversation—particularly the widely promoted charge that they contribute to a superficial “McMindfulness” that offers relaxation but ignores the true causes of distress. The debate has become so contentious that the religious studies scholar Ann Gleig named it “mindfulness wars” in her 2019 book American Dharma.

Second-generation MBIs have arisen out of these clashes and are portrayed by their developers, like the British research psychologists William Van Gordon and Edo Shonin, as possible solutions to common criticisms. For example, Van Gordon and Shonin argue that unlike earlier forms, SG-MBIs are taught embedded within Buddhist ethical systems and exclusively by qualified, experienced teachers. If such practitioners now accept that a new generation of mindfulness practices is necessary to correct the failings of the old, then perhaps one side of the rhetorical “war” has already won. But what has been won, exactly?

Today, psychotherapists often feel trapped in a catch-22, convinced by many aspects of the McMindfulness critique yet also believing that mindfulness practices are powerful methods for healing suffering people. Critique is helpful for raising consciousness, but what should psychotherapists do with their new awareness? Should they stop using mindfulness practices altogether? And has the prominence of the McMindfulness critique been entirely positive, or are there ways that it can do more harm than good? The way clinicians answer these questions will have real consequences for the suffering people who come to see them for care.

Imagine you are one of those therapists, a social worker, perhaps, in your local VA hospital, providing counseling to veterans who have survived wars that are far from rhetorical. You’ve used therapeutic mindfulness practices since the 1990s, yet now, sitting across from this veteran, you feel conflicted. Your heart contracts as you listen to their harrowing stories of trauma and loss, as they tell you of sleepless nights and panic attack–filled days. Both research studies and your own experience tells you that mindfulness practices must be used with caution for some people struggling with trauma, but you also know that for many they can be absolutely transformative. What gives you pause today, however, is the rising chorus of concern about mindfulness that you’ve heard among your colleagues, other members of the meditation group you attend regularly, and even on Twitter. You became a social worker to help people, and furthermore, identifying as a committed Buddhist, you see it as part of your dharma path to reduce suffering wherever you can. At the same time, now you fear there could be ways you are actually inadvertently contributing to that suffering. You’ve often seen people struggle with avoidance. Could mindfulness be used to further it? Perhaps mindfulness could make us de-stressed to the point of numbed out, turning a blind (or non-judging) eye to the very problems that veterans face every day—homelessness, racism, feeling tossed aside and uncared for by society.

As both a practicing psychotherapist and a religious studies scholar who researches the history and development of how therapists have approached Buddhist traditions, I have heard clinicians increasingly describe this kind of situation. The debates, if not “wars,” surrounding mindfulness in the United States have roots that date as far back as the 1940s and 1950s, when such figures as the humanistic psychoanalyst Erich Fromm were already warning against treating Buddhist practices as clinical “techniques’’ extracted from a larger Buddhist path. However, as William Van Gordon wrote last year for Psychology Today online, “it seems unusual at the moment for even a week to go by without a media report surfacing somewhere relating to the superficial or negative side of modern mindfulness techniques.” The pervasiveness of criticism has brought with it what Gleig has called “the emergence of the mindfulness critic,” a sort of new “public and professional identity” who promotes such criticism. These professional critics have participated in the so-called mindfulness backlash for so long now that a series of publications periodically surfaces to catalog the wide variety of mindfulness critiques one regularly reads today.

Perhaps most prominent among them, however, is the McMindfulness critique. To summarize it, as explained by writers like Zen teacher, ecodharma activist, and scholar David Loy and Mindfulness and Its Discontents author David Forbes: ancient mindfulness practices have been culturally appropriated by profiteers in a global capitalist system and McDonald-ized, routinized into something superficial. Reduced to little more than a marketable commodity and promoted as a panacea for nearly every ill, mindfulness has become as recognizable as “the golden arches” in our cultural consciousness—and as lacking in true substance, true nutritional value. Moreover, these now-inauthentic mindfulness practices are being employed in corporate trainings by companies like Google to improve worker satisfaction and performance. As a result, McMindfulness has actually become a tool of global capitalism. And the public is persuaded that their struggles are an individual problem in need of “self-help” rather than a consequence of the systemic injustice many experience on a daily basis.

Perhaps professional mindfulness critics are guilty of the very ills they accuse others of as they establish McMindfulness franchises.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to point out that some clinicians feel defensive in the face of the McMindfulness critique. The psychologist and author Lynette Monteiro, for example, told me that mindfulness practitioners initially felt attacked when first hearing of McMindfulness. Again, we may be able to empathize, as professional mindfulness critics often seem to “question the character of” practitioners (in Monteiro’s words) and speak about them in a “derogatory” way.

In response, some seem to want to turn the tables on those who promulgate the McMindfulness critique. Van Gordon highlighted in his Psychology Today post “one of the key problems [second-generation mindfulness techniques] seek to address—McMindfulness.” But he also issues a warning about the critique itself. He and Shonin call it “extreme” in an editorial they contributed to the January 2020 issue of Mindfulness, arguing that “despite no doubt having intentions of seeking to raise awareness of the inadequacies of some current approaches to mindfulness practice . . . [it] could easily become misguided due to seeking to establish and propagate its own legitimacy. In the event such a ‘McMindfulness ego’ were to emerge, it would only serve to foster additional superficiality and confusion.” Whether or not we are witnessing the emergence of a “McMindfulness ego,” it seems undeniable that, even as contemporary mindfulness practices are criticized for being co-opted within a consumeristic society, the McMindfulness critique is now its own global brand representing a cottage industry of books, podcasts, videos, and online classes, a wholly owned subsidiary of the larger mindfulness economy. Perhaps professional mindfulness critics are guilty of the very ills they accuse others of as they establish McMindfulness franchises pursuing a certain kind of celebrity or “social capital” along with financial capital.

As the McMindfulness critique has gained greater and greater prominence, commentators from various fields have entered to refute its basic claims. For instance, the philosopher Rick Repetti’s retort in a recent essay to the criticism that “mindfulness is all about self-help[;] it does nothing to change an unjust world” is that this sentiment is analogous to arguing that “a shortcoming of sports [is] that they do not try to change an unjust world into a just one . . . [or that] it is a shortcoming of psychotherapy that it fails to try to change an unjust world into a just one.” If mindfulness-based psychotherapists were to adopt the perspective of Repetti and others, they might argue that anything other than symptom reduction, easing the psychological pain of those who come to see them for care, is out of their “scope of practice.”

But psychotherapists have not dismissed the McMindfulness critique; they have actually been at the forefront of grappling with the questions it raises. In fact, it is interesting that Repetti chose psychotherapy as a counterexample in his above analogy. In reality, since the very invention of talk therapy, clinicians have debated whether psychotherapy should, indeed, seek to do more than only cure psychological illnesses and instead, as Repetti says, contribute to “chang[ing] an unjust world into a just one.” From contemporaries of Sigmund Freud himself like Alfred Adler to Erich Fromm to today’s feminist psychologists, there have always been therapists who have advocated for an understanding of the person as deeply interconnected within a larger society that can often be the primary source of their suffering. Some therapists actually consider Buddhist traditions to be the ultimate antidote to psychotherapies they see as overly focused on the isolated individual. They hold up Buddhist teachings on mutual co-arising and the interrelatedness of all human beings within their environments as a crucial corrective that should revise existing psychological theories (despite the fact that this is actually a relatively new modern[ist] understanding of Buddhist doctrine).

Though he is rarely credited, it was the mindfulness practitioner and psychologist Miles Neale who (in 2011) coined the term “McMindfulness.” His rhetorical flourish has gone on to itself be “culturally appropriated” time and again in the years since. But Neale told me that he felt somewhat alone in the 1990s when he first became concerned that therapeutic mindfulness practices could be misused to further not only materialistic but also nihilist elements in US culture. On the contrary, however, nearly all of the psychotherapists (mindfulness practitioners or otherwise) I have interviewed for my research have been concerned about some of the same issues now encapsulated under the banner of “McMindfulness,” such as how Buddhist practices have been incorporated into fee-for-service health care systems.

The pain of a person struggling with addiction or depression—the toll it takes on their mind, body, and heart—is not theoretical. Does this real-world pain get lost in conversation about the McMindfulness critique? A number of cultural commenters have questioned whether—even if we grant that the use of mindfulness practices could have the risks expressed by the McMindfulness critique—we should really, as Doug Smith suggests in an article for the Secular Buddhist Association, “throw the Buddha out with the bathwater.” Psychologist Lynette Monteiro told me that in her view especially the “initial stage of the McMindfulness movement was very diminishing of people’s suffering.” Practitioners were concerned, she said, that “by highlighting the criticisms of McMindfulness, we can withhold treatment that can be helpful.”

And the need for this treatment can sometimes be extremely urgent. There are those who struggle with urges to self-harm, to cut or burn themselves. Those therapists who believe that mindfulness practices can assist people to become nonreactive to those cravings might indeed believe it deeply unethical to deny them. Perhaps addressing these immediate needs should supersede any other consideration. We might recall an oft-evoked metaphor of an army medic in the midst of an unjust war. That medic may be gravely concerned with the evils of the battle they witness, but they will nonetheless still jump into action when confronted with a soldier writhing before them in anguish. A recent article on the McMindfulness critique in The Guardian used just this metaphor, citing the ethicist Jeff McMahan as saying “We do not condemn a doctor who treats the victims of a war for failing to devote his efforts instead to eliminating the root causes of war.”

Importantly, psychotherapists, dating back to at least Erich Fromm’s time, have not felt satisfied by this argument. For medics who mend soldiers only to have them sent back onto the battlefield in advance of an unjust cause may wonder whether they have ultimately only contributed to more suffering. A therapist who helps to reduce someone’s anxiety without addressing its societal roots might unintentionally prevent those roots from fully coming to light.

Some psychotherapists have thus remained conflicted about their use of mindfulness practices—Neale, for instance, told me, “I see both the value and the critique at the same time”—and seek ways to resolve their dilemma. Some express optimism in the transformative power of mindfulness practices, arguing that even in corporate settings they will lead to liberation from greed, hatred, and delusion. Psychologists like Monteiro, meanwhile, believe that the use of mindfulness practices can undergo a positive “evolution.” Therapists, she says, should heed the “warning signals” of the McMindfulness critique, which should be “skillfully used to be protective of our clients, of people who suffer who come to us, so it’s not . . . ‘Oh, just go and sit and meditate and you’ll be fine. Oh, just breathe and it will all go away.’” But she also believes that mindfulness practices can be used in an ethical way to help transform society by, for example, recontextualizing their instruction within the eightfold path.

The situation is far more complex than a simplistic dualism of “good” and “bad” usages of mindfulness practices.

All of this can be lost in the sweep of the McMindfulness critique. In its narrative, the main actors are massive global social forces (like “capitalism” and “neo-liberalism”) that encounter Buddhism through mindfulness and threaten to consume both of them whole. But the people participating in the mindfulness movement are professionals struggling with a set of highly complicated issues. The psychotherapists I have met are not unreflective profiteers driven purely by greed or well-intentioned unwitting dupes naively furthering the aims of corporate interests. Many have expressed their own concerns about the trajectory of contemporary mindfulness practices for decades and have thoughtfully attempted to weigh out multiple and sometimes competing motivations. New developments like second-generation mindfulness practices are a continuation of an ongoing process that generations of psychotherapists and other mindfulness practitioners have taken part in.

Of course, there are surely significant flaws to be found in efforts like second-generation MBIs. It is far from clear, for example, whether they truly represent a new approach to teaching mindfulness practices or merely a new way of talking about them. But when we imagine ourselves in the position of practicing therapists today, what is clear is that the situation is far more complex than a simplistic dualism of “good” and “bad” usages of mindfulness practices. Corporate interests can undoubtedly have a stake in the promotion of the latest mindfulness apps for smartphones, but contemporary mindfulness practices have not only been used at corporate retreats; they were also found at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Practitioners do not only see mindfulness as doomed to foster a social amnesia of the social and historical causes of suffering; some marginalized communities have even taken them up for healing from the intergenerational trauma of racial violence.

If we are to move forward from a second generation of mindfulness practices to a third and beyond, we would do well to adopt the humility of a more nuanced and balanced perspective on the place of contemporary mindfulness practices in society.

The post The McMindfulness Wars appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The mindfulness boom keeps on booming. As the pandemic continues to change our way of life, people are turning to meditation and mindfulness practices to help them cope with the stress, anxiety, and isolation that social distancing causes. The Washington Post recently reported on a marked spike in meditation app usage—a trend that may only increase as the impact of COVID-19 is felt more acutely around the world. 

For practicing psychotherapists, this may not come as a huge surprise. Scholars have noted that the immense popularity of mainstream mindfulness is due in large part to their successful entrenchment in health care and, especially, psychotherapy. Contemporary therapeutic mindfulness practices are an established feature of the mental health field—studies assessing the clinical effectiveness of mindfulness practices number in the many thousands, and have even become the foundation of entire treatment modalities (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive therapy). And though it continues to be referred to as a “new fad,” the use of mindfulness practices in psychotherapy is actually decades old.

But many mental health care professionals disagree with the ways mindfulness can be used in psychotherapy. In fact, a robust debate surrounds so-called mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), dating at least as far back as the 1990s. Many psychotherapists seem to view the very popularity of mindfulness practices as a sign of their superficiality. For them, the practices’ appeal comes at the cost of their co-option within a global capitalism that appropriates rich cultural traditions and then markets them for unwholesome ends in corporate and military sectors. Other therapists harbor resentments that MBIs seem like a juggernaut, eclipsing the other ways that psychotherapists have approached Buddhist traditions. 

If we look farther back into history, we see that the current state of mindfulness was far from inevitable. I explored this history at length in my book Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion, and found that when psychotherapists began taking an interest in Buddhist teachings and practices (not too long after the invention of talk therapy as a discipline), they investigated Buddhist thought as a whole and never seriously considered using actual practices in their clinical work. 

For well over a century now, clinicians have approached Buddhist teachings and practices in surprisingly diverse ways that go far beyond mindfulness. Early talk therapists, most famously Carl Jung, pored over some of the first Buddhist texts to be translated into German or English, believing they held important insights into human psychology. Some colleagues pathologized Buddhist meditative states as based in a narcissistic wish for return to a state of maternal union. Jung, however, advanced a highly romantic interpretation of Buddhist practices as inward-facing means for achieving a self-actualization that required, as he wrote, a “penetration into the ground layers of consciousness.” Early therapists like Jung attended to Buddhist cosmographies and, moreover, to topics like rebirth and nirvana, which they understood to mean escape from the cycle of rebirth. They assumed such concepts were not metaphysical but psychological realities, metaphors that described vital truths about being human.

Psychologists and psychotherapists at the turn of the 20th century thus played a major role in introducing the newly named world religion “Buddhism” to communities in Europe and the United States as a uniquely psychological religion. Jung himself provided introductions to seminal texts such as W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s influential edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When preparing his Introduction to Zen Buddhism for publication in German (and subsequently English), the modern Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese scholar often referred to as the person who brought Zen Buddhism to the West, wrote Jung requesting he contribute a foreword.  

Psychotherapists’ intensive theoretical dialogue with Buddhist thought in general, and Suzuki in particular, continued in the decades that followed. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the US was experiencing a “Zen boom,” in some ways as influential as our present-day mindfulness mania. Growing numbers of psychoanalytic therapists like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm became convinced Zen philosophy could inform therapy. Horney, for example, suggested that Zen teachings offered models for an ideal therapeutic presence she named “wholeheartedness” (a posture some have described as a proto-“mindfulness” at a time when virtually no one was using the term). 

The highwater mark may have been the 1957 meeting Fromm arranged between Suzuki and nearly fifty psychoanalysts at the University of Mexico. The edited volume produced from the gathering’s conversations, Zen and Psychoanalysis, represents therapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions during this period: intellectual explorations comparing Buddhist and psychoanalytic metapsychologies surrounding, for example, conceptions of the self. Analysts were fascinated by the notion of satori [sudden enlightenment] experiences and wondered if Buddhists were describing phenomena akin to the moments of transformative insight and self-realization awakened by psychotherapy. 

Nonetheless, most psychoanalysts imagined Buddhist practice to be a parallel path to talk therapy and did not actively incorporate Buddhist elements into actual sessions. Yet through the 1970s, communities of humanistic and, a bit later, transpersonal psychotherapists, began to mix together practices from a number of different sources, including Buddhist traditions. Zen meditation practices started to be viewed as viable therapeutic interventions that could be placed alongside yoga poses, Taoist philosophy, and Gestalt therapy’s emphasis on the present moment.  Scientists like Herbert Benson conducted empirical research on techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM), helping legitimize them to major medical institutions. These therapists laid the groundwork for taking seriously the healing potential of practices associated with Asian religious traditions. 

The development of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) is often seen as arising directly from this trajectory. This is somewhat ironic because the humanistic and transpersonal therapists who paved the way for the incorporation of mindfulness were often highly opposed to what they referred to as the “medical model,” with its emphasis on empiricism and symptom- reduction. 

Fromm was actually a vocal critic of psychotherapy that merely “adjusted” people or helped people cope with suffering he believed was often generated by societal injustice. He had warned his fellow analysts that Suzuki’s Zen, as Fromm wrote in his 1960 collection Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, “is not a ‘technique’ which can be isolated from the premise of Buddhist thinking, of the behavior and ethical values” of Buddhist traditions. Interestingly, late in his life, he learned a style of meditation from the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera (née Siegmund Feniger) that would today likely be recognized as a mindfulness practice. Fromm came to believe that it was this meditation that, like an authentic psychotherapy, would allow sufferers to cull away conscious and unconscious barriers to self-liberation from the psychic structures that left one vulnerable to submission to politico-economic oppressors.

Contrary to Fromm’s vision, mindfulness practices were initially viewed positively by cognitive behavioral therapists in the 1990s precisely because they believed they could be translated into secular techniques for those who would otherwise be averse to the religious. Even as these clinical techniques became more prevalent, psychotherapists continued to seriously engage with Buddhist philosophy, and many sought to integrate Buddhist and psychotherapeutic frames.

Where earlier comparative analyses often focused on similarities between Buddhist and psychotherapeutic ideas, in the 1980s and 1990s clinicians increasingly observed significant differences, which they often described as incommensurable—such as psychotherapy’s aim of restoring a whole healthy self and the Buddhist concept of non-self. Some sought to resolve these incompatibilities, such as in transpersonal therapist Jack Engler’s famous dictum “you have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” Others have emphasized the need to preserve a differentiation between Buddhism and psychotherapy without subsuming one within the other. Contemporary clinician Pilar Jennings draws on relational psychoanalysis to explain the importance of maintaining differentiation and healthy boundaries in all relationships, including, as she writes in her 2010 book Mixing Minds, the “relationship between Buddhism and psychoanalysis.” Nonetheless, the resulting integrative forms have at times been described as mixtures, new psycho-Buddhist schools uniquely suited to a contemporary culture in the US. 

Many decades since Jung took up the first Buddhist texts to be translated for European consumption, psychotherapists have copious (and far more accurate) resources for their investigation of Buddhist traditions. Therapists’ passion for Buddhist study has even driven some to obtain additional degrees. Well into his career as a psychiatrist, Joe Loizzo earned a PhD in Buddhist studies under the prominent Tibetologist Robert A.F. Thurman. And, perhaps most dramatically, psychotherapists in the US have doubled as founders and leaders of Buddhist communities. In her book American Dharma (2019), Buddhist studies scholar Ann Gleig observed that psychotherapeutic resources are utilized to assist practitioners in clearing psychological obstacles blocking their meditation practice.

The fact remains, however, that even those contemporary therapists who take a more thoroughly integrative approach to Buddhist traditions cannot ignore the impact that mindfulness-based psychotherapies have had on the field. Some, like Loizzo, have simply included mindfulness practices within his larger “Buddhist psychotherapy,” as he has called it. Others have become vocal critics of the mindfulness movement. Psychoanalyst and Zen teacher Barry Magid has strongly critiqued the explicit insertion of Buddhist teachings or practices into clinical sessions; Magid considers it, among other things, an“instrumentalization” of Buddhist practices within a dehumanizing “means-to-end” way of living that is directly counter to his understanding of a Buddhist path. In 2016, Magid and therapist Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum co-edited the book What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (and What Isn’t), in which several clinicians expressed their concern about the decontextualization of mindfulness from Buddhist doctrine, philosophy and ethics.

Yet as therapeutic mindfulness practices reach ever closer to ubiquity, psychotherapists continue to employ a diversity of approaches to Buddhist teachings and practices, and there are multiple perspectives among mindfulness practitioners, too. A decade and a half ago, feminist psychologist Jan Surrey was developing a “relational mindfulness” as a response, in part, to what she perceived to be overly individualistic mindfulness trainings. Her mindfulness practices were framed as essentially relational in nature, holding the capacity to awaken an awareness of one’s interconnectedness to all beings. The peer-reviewed journal Mindfulness devoted its entire first issue of 2020 to what it dubbed “second-generation mindfulness-based interventions,” which, for example, offer an answer to a deracinated mindfulness by teaching “right mindfulness” recontextualized within the larger eightfold path.

Within these perspectives, we also see continuities that extend back through the century-plus history of psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhism. Surrey carries forward a conversation surrounding what Buddhist teachings say about the nature of the self that goes back to Jung. But while some Buddhist psychotherapists (and even some mindfulness practitioners) decry a psychotherapy limited to symptom-reduction and champion recovering the salvific or soteriological aspects of Buddhist practice, they do not strive for a nirvana that is liberation from a literal cycle of rebirth. For clinicians who practice relational-cultural therapy, which focuses on the importance of relationships to well-being, the interrelatedness revealed by the concept of dependent co-arising is not a web of karmic ensnarement one seeks to escape but part of understanding an optimal state of human health and wellness. 

Over the decades, psychotherapists have variously focused on Buddhisms of the Pali canon, D.T. Suzuki’s Zen, or the Dalai Lama’s dialogues with neuroscientists. But, from the first therapists to study Buddhist doctrine to today, contemporary clinicians often begin with the assumption that concepts like rebirth or merit-making are psychological metaphors, though in the lived experience of Buddhist communities across the globe they are often anything but. Cultivating an awareness of the diversity and continuities of psychotherapists’ interactions with Buddhist traditions can hopefully bring us toward an ever more nuanced understanding of the dharma’s role in mental health care. 

The post Not Just Mindfulness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sogyal Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham . . . alas, yet another wave of scandals around issues of sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers. In this case, public outcry has been partly inspired by the #MeToo movement, but is anyone still surprised by the recurring pattern?

Western Buddhists will presumably continue to do what we’ve done in the past: as disheartened students move on from their troubled communities, those on the outside will share their dismay for a while, until something else comes along to divert their attention. Before that happens, however, I think we should take a moment to examine whether these scandals keep repeating because they are symptomatic of something deeper.

If an abusive teacher is enlightened, why did he (it’s almost always a “he”) act so badly? Some students remain in denial, offering one excuse or another: it really wasn’t that bad; everyone shares responsibility for what happened; it was done for the student’s own good. Those who accept the disturbing revelations find themselves in a dilemma: either their teacher wasn’t that enlightened after all, in which case they’ve been conned, or enlightenment isn’t what they thought, which can be even more distressing.

Of the many issues raised in the discussions of the recurring problem of abuse, it seems to me there is a key aspect that has yet to receive the attention it deserves. In addition to the power differential in the relationship between a spiritual teacher and a student, there is often a spiritual transference. Like psychological transference in psychotherapy, spiritual transference can be beneficial to the student or, as we keep seeing, it can be harmful. How the transference is handled determines which it will be.

Related: Will Sanghas Learn from the Scandals in the Buddhist World?

In psychotherapy, transference is a clinical term describing our unconscious tendency to redirect emotions and behavior felt toward someone in the past, like a parent, and project them onto someone else in the present (for example, one’s therapist or guru). It is a common way of trying to fill up our sense of lack by subordinating ourselves to someone who, we feel, is more real than we are, someone who can take care of us. Transference reveals how we remain childlike, misperceiving the world in order to compensate for a persistent, deeply rooted sense of inadequacy. As we mature, the urge to find security by subjecting ourselves to others often persists, transferred from parents to other authority figures such as teachers—including spiritual teachers.

This urge is not simply an emotional dependence but a matter of experiencing the other as one’s whole world, just as the family is for a young child. In his book The Denial of Death, the existential psychologist and cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes, “Mirabile! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.”

According to Becker, this personification of our highest yearnings and strivings explains our urge to deify others, including (especially!) spiritual teachers: “The more they have, the more rubs off on us. We participate in their immortality, and so we create immortals.” Wanting to participate in our teacher’s enlightened being, we create the teacher as a being who is superior to us.

When you are surrounded by people who think you are godlike, and treat you that way, the danger is that after a while you will begin to agree with them.

The problem is that this process is largely unconscious and uncritical, a form of wishful thinking. One becomes extremely vulnerable to the views and actions of such a teacher, whose authority can easily be abused. But there is also a more positive aspect to transference. The person we identify with can motivate us to transform our three poisons: greed into generosity, ill will into loving-kindness, and delusion of a separate self into the wisdom of our interdependence.

No matter how well it functions, however, there comes a time when the transference needs to be broken—a process that almost always involves some pain. Spiritual maturity requires us to withdraw the projection and stand on our own feet. The teacher may be wise and compassionate, but he or she is also human, with some of the same foibles and shortcomings that afflict the rest of us. Breaking the transference requires not a breakdown in the relationship but a more mature version based on mutual respect. Instead of subordinating ourselves to the buddhanature of the teacher, we realize our own buddhanature and are guided by our own inner gyroscope.

Ideally, teachers will have some intuitive understanding of transference. Even if they don’t know anything about psychotherapy, they are able to use the transference to motivate and direct the student. At its best, this includes knowing when to break it, or helping it to end in a way that minimizes the inevitable awkwardness. Again, however, the relationship does not always progress so smoothly. In particular, teachers can get caught up in what psychoanalysis calls the counter-transference. And that brings us back to the problem of teacher abuse, sexual and otherwise.

When you are surrounded by people who think you are godlike, and treat you that way, the danger is that after a while you will begin to agree with them. Of course, one would hope that spiritual teachers would not fall into that trap, but obviously some do. We might suppose that such teachers are not yet mature enough in their own practice, but some of them are recognized by their tradition as possessing the qualifications to take on the responsibilities of being a teacher. And then things get tricky.

Related: Unmasking the Guru

The power differential that encourages transference opens up possibilities that are complicated by the freedom that the Buddhist path enables. According to the Zen tradition, those who have realized their true nature are free to follow conventional morality or not, and I believe that Tibetan tantra emphasizes the same thing. This freedom arises from the recognition that social morality is a cultural construct rather than an absolute set of ethical principles. The Mahayana concept of “skillful means,” upaya kaushalya, incorporates this insight: there may be occasions when, for the good of others, it is appropriate to break even basic Buddhist precepts.

Needless to say, such freedom can be abused. Yet this insight into the ultimate “emptiness” of moral codes highlights one of the most distinctive aspects of Buddhism: its focus on understanding and alleviating dukkha, “suffering,” right here and now. Fundamentally, the Buddhist path is not about good versus evil and salvation from sin, but ignorance versus awakening and developing the wisdom that sees through delusions that lead to dukkha.

The logic of Buddhism’s ethical perspective holds that those who are genuinely awakened will not be inclined to abuse others, because awakening frees them from the bonds of self-centered views and passions and causes them to refrain from behavior, including sexual behavior, that creates dukkha. For those who have ceased to view themselves as a separate self, external guidelines such as the precepts may be helpful as rules of thumb, but in the end they should not even be necessary.

That’s the principle, anyway. The long list of abuses by many so-called enlightened masters raises questions, of course. If awakening is very rarely (if ever) a matter of all or nothing, and if it isn’t integrated in a way that actually reforms self-centered habits, the freedom of realization can encourage and rationalize taking advantage of one’s position. And although awakening tends to make one less inhibited, is that always a good thing? If, as Buddhism emphasizes, the (sense of) self is mainly composed of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and so forth, then “letting go of oneself ” can include letting go of ego-constraints that prevent some problematic patterns of behavior. Like alcohol, this letting go can also “free” us from self-consciousness—and foster the difficulties that sometimes ensue. A practitioner—whose transference may include being enamored—may not be able to think clearly about the consequences of unskillful actions, but the teacher has a responsibility, and supposedly the wisdom, to understand the implications and set appropriate boundaries.

Given the potential difficulties with spiritual transference (and countertransference) in teacher-student relationships, it is important to understand the strong and largely unconscious tendency to romanticize spiritual leaders and the spiritual path. This entails, I would say, a more modest way of thinking about awakening itself. Rather than regard it as a superior state of being that some special people have attained, we might instead speak of awakened activity, which is motivated by altruism and compassion. It’s one thing to have experiences of profound realization, but something else—and much more difficult!—to integrate those insights into how one actually lives in the world, day by day, moment by moment. As another spiritual teacher once remarked, by their fruits shall you know them.

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In her 2010 book Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, psychotherapist Pilar Jennings notes, “It is very possible to have a deep and rich spiritual life that reaps all manner of spiritual rewards while core psychological patterns and struggles remain untouched.” Without a doubt, mindfulness is a helpful tool, but nothing can replace the healing power of a relationship with a well-trained and dedicated listener.

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in spiritually based mindfulness meditation practices, and Jennings succinctly describes a phenomenon, generally known as spiritual bypass, that can happen when we try to use these techniques to solve psychological problems and end up avoiding them instead. Mindfulness meditation increases the ability to live in the present moment and may produce profound insights into the nature of reality, both invaluable tools for crafting a conscious, well-lived life. But these practices were not designed to heal an injured heart.

An American Zen teacher I know recently told me that when people come to talk to her about their anxiety or depression, she frequently suggests that that they should really be seeing a psychotherapist. Like me, she has come to believe that talk therapy, specifically psychodynamic psychotherapy, is more effective than meditation for dealing with emotional problems because it is able to undo psychological patterns and resolve the symptoms that they create.

The Danger of Spiritual Bypass

I fell in love with Buddhist philosophy as a teenager and believed that Buddhist meditation held the key to magically dissolve the anxiety that had plagued me since childhood. Since I privileged Buddhism over Western science, it never occurred to me to turn to the field of psychology for help.

As soon as I graduated from college, I moved to Japan to study with an esteemed Zen master. The discipline was strict, the floor of the meditation hall was cold, and the teacher was deeply intimidating, but I felt like I had finally arrived and was solidly on my way to transcending the vicissitudes of the mundane world. It soon became apparent, however, that I was also becoming increasingly anxious and depressed, and I started to have frightening visions during meditation that left me feeling physically shaky and disconnected from my body.

I made an appointment to see the teacher and tried to tell him about what was going on. He cut me off mid-sentence and yelled at me. “Illusions!” he shouted. “Your feelings and visions are nothing more than illusions. Forget about them, go back to your cushion, and concentrate on your meditation. Just sit!”

In other words, “Suck it up and get over it.”

And I did. I went back to my cushion and steeled myself against the feelings of the little girl inside me who was terrified and felt completely alone, the one he had just annihilated.

I continued to meditate for years under the guidance of a series of Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist teachers and became skilled at one-pointed concentration and mindfulness. And I just kept stuffing down those “illusory” feelings—until one day in my fifties when I was walking down a street in Greenwich Village and had a full-blown panic attack. I was terrified and called a Buddhist friend of mine, who happens to be a psychoanalyst, to ask her what she thought I should do.

“You need to talk to somebody,” she said.

And that’s how I ended up on the couch of an interpersonal psychoanalyst.

The Value of Talk Therapy

All my analyst required me to do was to show up and to talk. And as I began to speak, my emotional body seemed to wake up and find its voice. And, lo and behold, it had a lot to say. I kept talking and my analyst kept listening.

One day, as I was nattering on about something that happened when I was a child, my analyst observed, quietly, “You seem sad.” I started to protest, but then stopped. He had heard it. The sadness underlying my brittle cheerfulness. And then, maybe for the first time, I heard it too. And I started to cry.

This crack in my veneer led me to uncover the deep-seated emotional conflicts that had been festering in my unconscious for years. As we began to explore them, I gradually started to feel better and my life-long anxiety symptoms, such as an exaggerated startle response and chronic nausea, disappeared completely.

Therapy was able to resolve issues that meditation never had.

Over time, I realized that none of my Buddhist teachers had ever really listened to what I had to say. Even with the appearance of a relationship between a meditator and a teacher, when I was performing mindfulness meditation practices, I was basically alone. With my analyst, I was not. And that seems to have made all the difference.

The post The Couch and the Cushion: Why Mindfulness Is No Substitute for Therapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“You’re not who you think you are.”

The first time I heard Ram Dass say this, I felt something stir in me. It was the summer of 1974 and I was 20 years old. He was 43. It had never occurred to me that I was not my ego, but it seemed obvious once he said it. My obsessive thinking, according to his way of understanding things, was obscuring my soul. He had more to say on the subject, but the more theoretical he became the more my attention wandered. Nothing compared to the raw impact of that first proclamation: I was not who I thought I was. This seemed very true. Then who was I?

I am now 65 years old, and Ram Dass is almost 88. The comment he made, and the questions it provoked, have stayed with me over the past forty-odd years and guided me in my work with my patients. The ego takes refuge in the intellect, but as a famous psychoanalyst once said, “We are poor indeed if we are only sane.” Not knowing is better than pretending. As the ancient Buddhist text Dhammapada declared:

The fool who knows he is foolish is, let us say, wise.
The fool who thinks he is wise is hugely foolish.

In 1997, Ram Dass suffered a crippling stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and challenged to find the words he needed to express himself. He was no longer who he had thought he was either. I visited him a year later, when I was well into my career. He greeted me with a chuckle.

“So are you a Buddhist psychiatrist now?” he teased me.

It took a long time to enunciate the entire sentence, but he did so with a twinkle in his eye. When I answered positively, he asked me another provocative question. He had trouble getting the words out, but I eventually understood what he was saying.

“Do you see them as already free?” he queried.

His question went right to the heart of what he had taught me all those years before. I did indeed try to see my patients as already free. My job was to help clear away the ego’s debris so that they could see it too.

In April 2017, twenty years after our last encounter, I visited Ram Dass for several days at his home on the grounds of an old horse farm on the north shore of the island of Maui. On this occasion, Ram Dass did not question me about anything. I was waiting for him on the patio out behind his house at sunset, having just arrived from my New York flight. He came gliding down on a little elevator from his bedroom, the back door of the house flying open as he descended, and rolled out in his wheelchair onto the terrace in time for dinner. There was a smile on his face as he registered my surprise at his unanticipated entrance. Three white cranes had just swooped into the yard. His speech was much improved from the last time I had seen him, and he greeted me warmly.

“I’m spending much more time in here now,” he told me, pointing to his chest.

He was uncomplaining. He needed help from various attendants to move from his wheelchair to a garden chair, but his mood was chipper and he was clearly an inspiration to the people who were helping him. We had some good conversations about death over the next few days.

“Death is like taking off a tight shoe,” a spiritual friend had once told him.

“Soon I will be released from Central Jail!” his own guru had exclaimed after having a heart attack shortly before he died.

I told him how I had spoken to my father about the Buddhist view of death when he was 84 years old and newly diagnosed with a silent but malignant brain tumor. My father, a physician and professor of medicine with no interest in any of my spiritual pursuits, was a scientist who did not believe in an afterlife. I had always avoided talking to him about Buddhism, but I suddenly realized I had advice I had never given. He was surprisingly receptive.

“You know the feeling of yourself deep inside that hasn’t really changed since you were a boy?” I said. “The way you have felt the same to yourself as a young man, in middle age, and even now? It’s kind of transparent: you know what it is, but it’s hard to put your finger on it. You can just relax your mind into that feeling and ride out through it. The body comes apart, but you can rest in who you have always been.”

As we were sitting at the dinner table with the members of his household after this exchange, Ram Dass pointed at me and said to the others, “He’s . . . he’s . . . the real thing.” I had been somewhat nervous about visiting for such an extended time (I was there for three days in all), not wanting to impose on him, but his comment made me relax. I was very glad to feel his approval.

The next morning we took an expedition to the ocean for a swim. It was raining, but Mondays were beach days and the weather app promised that it would be sunny on the other side of the island. The weekly swim was a tradition I had heard about before I arrived, but I could not really envision how it was going to happen. Still, things unfolded smoothly. Six of us piled into two cars, Ram Dass sitting in the front of an SUV with his friend driving him. I sat in the back and listened as the driver played a recording of Ram Dass giving a lecture sometime in the 1970s when he still had his golden tongue. I remembered how enthralled I had been by his storytelling.

“Did you write that stuff out beforehand or just improvise?” I asked him. “The narrative is so well-constructed.”

“Improvised,” he responded with a hint of pride.

“How did you learn to do that?” I asked.

“I used to listen to my father giving speeches for Jewish charities,” he answered, and we laughed and laughed.

When we got to the beach, things moved quickly. The sun was shining and the ocean beckoned. Ram Dass was transferred from the SUV to a makeshift wooden wheelbarrow, a wet suit was maneuvered onto him, and he was wrapped in a life vest. He lay in the wheelbarrow grinning as he was wheeled into the ocean. I was already there, swimming into the oncoming waves, my first taste of the warm Hawai-ian waters. I turned just in time to see him being dumped out of the wheelbarrow. I had assumed he would just rest in the wagon and let the sea wash over him, but I was in for a surprise. Floating in the water, supported by his life vest, Ram Dass was able to use his good arm and leg to paddle at will. Lying on his back, he propelled himself around, bobbing and weaving like a jovial old prizefighter. Without my being aware of it, 15 people or so had joined him in the water. I swam toward them. They were an assortment of aging Maui folks, mostly ex-hippies from the mainland by the look and sound of them, familiar types to me but no one I had ever met before. It became clear very quickly that this was a regular thing for them: they came each week around this time to join Ram Dass in the water.

We were indeed a pod of souls, liberated, for an interlude, from the confines of our egos.

I was struck by their shining countenances. When I had spoken earlier with Ram Dass about death, he had used the phrase “a pod of souls” to talk about the way friendship and love bound people together life after life. The phrase came back to me in the ocean as I looked from one person to the next. We were like a pod of souls in that sea, jostling about as the waves lapped around us. Ram Dass was very happy to be freed from the encasement of his beleaguered body. The other people were glowing too, and I was caught up in the shared enthusiasm. One man (“He’s a retired dentist,” Ram Dass whispered to me as I swam alongside him) began to call out a Hawaiian chant. I had no idea what he was saying, but the sound rang true and everyone sang a gusty response. The beauty of each of the swimmers hit me deeply. I don’t really mean they were physically beautiful—they were not especially handsome—but each one of them was stunningly lovely. I suppose it was the communal happiness that gave me that impression. I was caught up in it: the buoyancy of the sea, the lightness of our bodies, the sun’s warmth, and Ram Dass’s evident pleasure.

The next thing I knew, everyone was singing:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily . . .

The simplicity of the song made me happy. It was perfect. Soft waves were ushering us toward shore. The group was singing the verses in a round. Ram Dass was paddling himself; the rest of us were rowing alongside him. The waves were gentle as a stream. And the phrase “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily” came spinning off everyone’s tongues like one of those hoop-rolling games European children played after the war. We were indeed a pod of souls, liberated, for an interlude, from the confines of our egos.

Back on shore, Ram Dass was quickly whisked out of his wet suit. He made it clear that he was taking everyone to lunch. An empty Thai restaurant in a nearby strip mall awaited us. The proprietors had clearly seen this group—or one like it—before. They were overjoyed and set a long table for 20. I sat across from Ram Dass, and the gathering stretched out on either side. Everyone was back in his or her personality, and I began to question my earlier impressions of their beauty. There was much commotion as a waitress began taking orders for Thai iced tea. A few people did not want ice; others could not drink condensed milk; many preferred theirs without sugar, and a few asked for Splenda instead. Some people wanted hot tea while others wanted decaf. One woman asked the group to turn off their cell phones since their electromagnetic radiation worsened her arthritis. My judgmental thoughts, refreshingly absent during my watery sojourn, began to flow freely, and I was once again back to who I thought I was. I shook my head wondering how long this was going to last. With the possible exception of Ram Dass, who was more interested in his lunch than in the kvetching around him, we were all swimming in our egos now, myself included.

In the back of my mind the nursery rhyme was running on. I had been so swept up in the rowing and the stream and the delightful sound of the word “merrily” (from the Old English myriglice, meaning “pleasantly,” “melodiously”) that I don’t think I had bothered to finish the song in my head. But now I did.

“Life is but a dream.”

Ordering the iced tea had been difficult enough for the group: imagine what happened when it came to the soup. Ram Dass ate heartily, though. I was full of disapproving thoughts, but he didn’t seem perturbed by any of what was flourishing around him. Later that evening, as we were watching a repeat of Saturday Night Live, he remarked on how happy he had been in the ocean. “Yep,” he repeated several times. “Yep . . . yep, that was great!” And he nodded his head in the affirmative. Throughout my entire visit he was consistently upbeat. Despite the constraint and discomfort of his long-suffering body, I had the distinct impression that he was already free.

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