Zen Therapy

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Typical of this new breed of teacher-therapist is Tara Brach, an insight meditation teacher and psychotherapist in the Washington, D.C., area. 'Brach takes a position that many consider to be the cutting edge of a new American Buddhism,' writes Simpkinson, 'namely, that emotional healing is . . . part of the spiritual path. It’s neither the underside of the path nor the shadow side, nor must it come before spiritual work.'

Therapist and author John Welwood implies much the same in Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path to Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Shambhala, 2000). While meditation and therapy may cultivate awareness in different ways, they are not incompatible, he maintains. What’s more, advanced Buddhist insights can help suffering therapy clients who are far from having 'resol-ved' their 'issues.'

How Buddhism and psychotherapy can complement each other is relatively easy to show. But what about the grittier issue of Buddhist teachers wearing therapist hats? Some teachers and therapists are wary of any situation that combines two roles with such a high potential for transference—the client or student becoming fixated on the teacher/therapist and replicating family patterns and pain with that authority figure as the focus. These critics warn that the impact may be too much for any one person, no matter how gifted, to handle. 'There’s conflict of interest at a very deep level,' Robert Aitken told Simpkinson. 'Nobody really understands what transference is. . . . It’s different for every student and must not be monkeyed with. I don’t think any of us know how to handle transference in these two dimensions. It’s like riding two horses at once.'

In true Buddhist fashion, many of the two-horse riders hold that this very problem is an opportunity. As Simpkinson puts it, it provides a 'double-strength ‘messy’ compost with which to fertilize growth.' For them, the issue is not to create rules that keep therapy and practice safe in the abstract, but to rely on the teacher’s wisdom and the student/client’s frankly expressed sense of what feels right for him or her to maintain a complementarity between the safety that therapy needs and the fearless facing of life-as-it-is that Buddhism demands.

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