BG 173: Zen, Vipassana, and Psychotherapy

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Episode Description:

This week we speak to vipassana and Zen teacher, Trudy Goodman. Trudy shares how she got into both Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy, and uses her story to illustrate the powerful ways that these different methods can compliment one another. Trudy also reflects on the differences between her experience in Zen training with Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, and her practice of vipassana meditation.

This is part 1 of a two-part series. Listen to part 2, The Mindful Therapist.

Episode Links:

• Zen Master Seung Sahn
• Insight Meditation Society
• InsightLA

Transcript:

Vince: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Vince Horn, and I’m joined today in Santa Monica, California, with Trudy Goodman. Trudy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with the geeks today.

Trudy: Yeah, it’s my joy.

Vince: And today we’re going to talk about your history as a practitioner, about psychology, meditation, but first I figured I’d sort of get the introduction out of the way. This is always the most fun part of my interviewing gig because I get to share all the spiritual accolades and titles and stuff but you actually have a really rich background and it’s very interesting. You’re a vipassana meditation teacher and you teach at Spirit Rock, which is where myself and Emily first saw you. And you also teach some at IMS and you’re in this sort of Thai Forest tradition of Ajahn Chah and some of these amazing, great Theravada masters. And then you’re also the founder and guiding teacher of a community here in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles, Insight LA, and it’s a beautiful community. A lot of things happening there, we’ve been hanging out with you there this week and it’s a beautiful place. So a lot of sweat, blood and tears I’m sure have gone into that work.

And you’re also one of the founders of the Institute of Meditation and Psychotherapy which is in Boston. I think, maybe a good place to start would just be to ask you a question about your history, both a Buddhist practitioner and then maybe we could talk a little bit about your history in the psychotherapeutic and psychology field too.

Trudy: Sure, I’ll start with just a story. A few years ago, actually many years ago, this was in the early eighties and I think it was the second ever conference on Buddhism and psychotherapy, and it took place at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery in Woodstock. And there were maybe a hundred of us or less who gathered there, all of us clinicians of one kind or another and some Buddhist teachers and the Rinpoche, Kathar Rinpoche, who was the teacher at that center. It was his job to welcome us to this conference, which I’m sure he didn’t really understand exactly what we were doing but he did his best. And so what he said to us was, “I suppose there are some unfortunate individuals who might need psychotherapy before they could practice the Dharma. And that was his welcome to us and it was a bit odd, given that this was the life work of many of the people present.

But he was being very honest and I remember listening to him and thinking, I was one of those poor unfortunate individuals who really needed psychotherapy before I could wholeheartedly practice the Dharma. And I remember wanting to practice and being drawn to spiritual life and I had had some deep spiritual openings in the course of my life not within any practice or tradition. And so I was definitely searching but I felt, well to be honest in my early twenties, I felt too crazy to just sit with myself for hours and hours, it was frightening. I laugh now but at the time, it was, it just felt scary to do that. And so I did have some therapy. That was in the early seventies and just by, what, karmic coincidence, the therapist, he was a psychoanalyst, that I was referred to from the university health services, because I was in graduate school in Cambridge at the time. He turned out to be a meditator, very unusual in those days. And after a year or so of therapy, I was able to begin meditation practice with Korean Zen master Dae Soen Sa Nim [Seung Sahn]. And it was a fortunate, again, just a kind of auspicious coincidence, that right around the time that I was ready to do that, my Dharma buddies, before we would call each other that—Larry Rosenberg and Jon Kabat-Zinn—Larry discovered Soen Sa Nim in Rhode Island, and he came back and he told us, you know there’s this guy and he came from Korea and he worked in a Laundromat and he’s in an apartment in Providence. And then that summer Soen Sa Nim came to Cambridge to study English at Harvard to take English classes, and they started the Cambridge Zen Center, and that was where I began to practice.

So that’s the beginning of my formal practice life, although I would have to go back to the powerful experiences that I had before. And I think why those were important to me looking back, besides just their inherent value in opening my mind and heart to the reality other dimensions of experience that I hadn’t seen before, is that I always knew that the teachings, from the Zen tradition, that Buddha nature pervades the whole universe. Existing right here, right now as this moment that we’re sharing together. I knew it was true, because I hadn’t had to find Buddhism to have some powerful spiritual experiences. If that makes sense? It was a source of great faith that I always knew the Dharma. In fact it’s kind of ironic that I did know that Dharma was in me, and yet, was compelled to look to teachers and wanted to find a way to have more access to that understanding, for years afterward.

So I began practice in the Korean-Zen tradition with Dae Soen Sa Nim. I was simultaneously in therapy, which was not something that we admitted openly in those days. Especially in those circles. In the circles of meditators it was kind of frowned upon. Our Asian teachers, as I mentioned with Kathar Rinpoche, our Asian teachers didn’t understand what psychotherapy was. And they thought that it was a way to lose yourself, in your emotions, and just strengthen the conditioned self. And they did not see it as a path of freedom.

So after, I think it was a couple years of Zen practice, and being in this…well, it turned into psychoanalysis. In 1976, I gave a talk at the Cambridge Zen Center—the first talk that I gave on my own. Part of our practice with Soen Sa Nim was that we had to speak to the group about our practice. And he would sit next to us and then answer questions, but we had to give a little… like a 15 minute Dharma talk. But this one, I was on my own, and the title of the talk was “Zen and Psychoanalysis”. But it was a subjective talk from the practitioner and the analysand, the one who is in these experiences. So really I date my intensive study of these two subjects—psychology and meditation, particularly Buddhist meditation—to that time of 1976.

And it’s remained a passion for the rest of my life. So I remember after that talk, after practicing Zen for a couple of years, John, my friend John Kabat-Zinn said, “You know, I found these people and they can really sit, they sit like a rock, they sit for a whole hour, and they’re sitting Vipassana.” So we decided to go to a retreat. Now remember, I was also at that time, I was a mom, I was working. But I worked in a school so I had the school vacation times. And there was a Vipassana retreat that was during the spring break. And it just happened my parents were in the country and were willing to do childcare. So off we went to Great Barrington, to a Vipassana retreat. Johnny, Larry and I. Ram Dass was at that retreat, and Jack was teaching that retreat. I think it was maybe the second retreat that he had taught in this country. It was shortly before they found the property that became IMS.

And during that retreat, I really learned a lot. A lot of explicit teachings—what the Buddha taught. Which we had in Zen, but they were encoded in a different way. And so, I was fascinated. And also we were taught a way to access a deeper samadhi than I had known at the Zen Center. And it was interesting because I also fell in love with the Vipassana practice. I went and spoke to my Zen teacher, and I remember saying to him, “You know, I want to do retreats with them when I can, and what do you think?” And he said, “Oh, sure, go, do that, but it’s going to make you more worser afterwards. Those retreats, yes, you’ll go very deep. You’ll have lots of Samadhi and then you’ll be more worser when you come out.”

And that made me laugh, at the time, not because of his pidgin-English, but just the whole idea. But he was right. When I would emerge from those retreats, I really felt that I had no skin, and I was so open that everything was an impingement. Even my little daughter was an impingement on my silence and sensitivity. And so I feel grateful that I had the Zen practice in addition to the vipassana practice because in those days none of the vipassana teachers had kids. They weren’t married. They were young, and the context for practice was deep retreat, deep intensive, silent retreat. The shortest one you could do was two weeks, then. And, of course, I couldn’t go do the three months because of being a mom. But I really feel grateful that I had the earthiness and the emphasis on the daily life of the Zen and particularly the tradition that I was practicing in. Because Soen Sa Nim placed enormous emphasis on service and selflessness and the group and not trying to seek any sort of special state and certainly not to maintain a special state. He wanted us to maintain a mind that was open, and he used to say, “Don’t know mind.” That was his expression. It’s become everyone’s expression now, which is beautiful. But he used to tell us, his meditation instruction was, “Only keep don’t know.” And then you would be just taken into the non-thinking world of receptivity and clarity.

I feel very grateful that I got to have both of those teachings as well as the teachings of Western psychology, which helped me come to terms with my disturbing emotions and to understand the personal realm, my own personal history, the constellation of conditioning that formed my particular unique psyche, and to understand my own projections onto teachers, onto other people, onto the world. Having that learning in therapy enriched my meditation practice. I felt it helped me not bring certain projections to my teacher. Of course, one does inevitably, but it helped attenuate that. And also there was such a powerful synergy because I would sit in the Zendo and not have to do self-therapy on the cushion, because I had therapy. And in the Zendo I could really quiet down and have insights that would be almost nonverbal pictures, then they would be expressed in words. But I would see things that I could then bring back into my therapy that would really move that process along. And thanks to the meditation practice I was also able to tolerate being in the therapy in a different way.

And I remember a turning point in my therapy was when I was able to be silent in the presence of my analyst and not feel awkward, tied in knots, anxious I should say something, I need to fill up this silence. There was just a golden moment of resting together in the stillness without needing to do anything or be anything. It was so intimate. And there was no fear attached to it. There was nothing except that moment of intimacy. And I remember afterwards my therapist said, it makes me smile to remember this and I really loved him and still do, he said, “Well, that was a moment of harmony.” And I laughed and I remember thinking yes it was, and so much more. And that’s when I also began to see where therapy doesn’t go. Because that’s so much more that I had experienced was inexpressible and huge. And yes, it was a kind of harmony, but it went way beyond that. It was the falling away of everything that I felt was my personality that I had to maintain or inhabit in some way. And the experience of not just harmony but really no separation between us—that we were inhabiting the same great mind space together, and I don’t mean the no-separation of boundary-less pathological states. I mean something really open and beautiful and that until that point I hadn’t experienced in the presence of another except my meditation teachers.

So, this is my way of talking about meditation and psychology. I like to, in fact I have great joy, in finding in the flow of experiences of my life, experiences that hold the teachings and to find them in the most mundane experiences that you could so easily overlook. That way the particulars of my life become a doorway to the more universal truths of the dharma.

Psychology has refined such a nuanced observation, understanding and insight about the particulars of our human psyches. And certain existential truths that are universal, of course. And there is a realm that we call absolute or universal. It’s not separate. We can call it emptiness, there are so many names. But it’s completely interwoven. It’s one with, it’s connected to, the words don’t express the fact that it’s not separate from the particular. And the trick for us as practitioners, whether we are practitioners of psychology or meditation, is to really see and unite these experiences so that we can be present with the ordinary moments of our life, and more and more hold an understanding of those moments as being deeply significant, expressions of the truth of that moment. Not truth with a capital “T” that some reified, always true…but the truth of that moment because it’s life. It’s life in the form of you, me, this moment of experience. And then, when we really can truly know that, so many things are possible for us. We don’t have to be afraid of experience or afraid of our own minds. Of course, we like flowers, we hate weeds. We wish for happy experiences and we kind of dread scary sad ones. But as practitioners we can really be with both.

So, to take a particular story and find in it, whether it’s a psychological story or…Today, the simplest thing: I was driving my grandchildren to school. Owen is six and Ally is eight, and she’ll be nine at the end of June. We always have interesting conversations in the car. Children spend a certain amount of time in the car in Los Angeles, just like the adults. So we use those times to have interesting conversations or listen to a story. And so we’re driving to school, and we came to an intersection. I wasn’t sure because I usually drive them home from school. I thought it was a left turn, so I said, “Do I turn left here?”, and they said, “Yes, make a left.” And I made the left turn and Owen said, “You know, this time I say make a left here, but if you were in another place it would be a right.” And he was just playing with his understanding of left and right. And I said, “Owen, that is huge!” That understanding that left and right don’t exist as some thing in a place, left and right. But they are completely dependent on where we’re looking from and which way our car is going. We talked about how the oncoming cars, you know, what was left for us was right for them.

And so, that’s what I mean. Being able to take just a little moment where your grandson says “Oh”, you know, left, right, and see this is the relativity of perception. This is how we make our world. If they could keep their mind that sees and understands that; what a freedom that would be, what a freedom. So that’s my job. To underline those moments and say, “Look, this is amazing. You’re right.” And I think that’s the role of a teacher, too, is to point to our realizations that we would otherwise overlook and say, “Right there. That’s it. You have it.” And in some ways the role of a therapist, too, is to lend us their trust that we can change before we believe that it’s possible.