BG 174: The Mindful Therapist

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Episode Description:

This week we speak to vipassana meditation teacher, and psychotherapist Trudy Goodman. Trudy completes the story of her early Zen days, and also describes how she transitioned into becoming a vipassana teacher. She also shares some of her training in psychology, wherein she studied with the famous child developmentalist, Jean Piaget in France. She was eventually led her to work with children diagnosed with extreme developmental disorders, and with adults as well. Trudy shares how her practice of meditation was crucial in supporting people in their own therapeutic process, and how the key for all therapists who want to practice some sort of mindful therapy is to really practice and become familiar with their own mind.

This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Zen, Vipassana, & Psychotherapy.

Episode Links:

• Jean Piaget
• InsightLA

Transcript:

Trudy: I studied Zen and vipassana, but I spent more years training in Zen, because I, from Soen Sa Nim, I practiced with Kobun Chino Roshi in the Soto Zen tradition, until he went into a kind of early retirement, which I think it was a depression, too. And then I met the teacher who became my heart teacher, and with whom I practiced until she died. From the time I met her until she died, I never practiced vipassana again, or with any other teacher. And Maurine Stuart Roshi moved into the Cambridge Buddhist Association, which is about ten minutes from where I lived, walking. And so, it was so easy to go sit with her. And I really just fell in love with her, just loved, loved, loved her. She had raised three kids. She knew about being a mom. She had been a concert pianist. She loved music. She used to say, “If I can’t get them in a Zendo, I’ll get them at the piano.” So, she taught piano lessons and she was a deeply enlightened Zen teacher.

So, I practiced with Maurine for eleven years. And I also married a Zen teacher, George Bowman. And then when Maurine died, I practiced with George for a while, and we taught together. And I began to feel that I needed some, well in therapy world, we would call it “supervision”, for my teaching, that I wanted to check in with somebody besides my husband. So I would go a few times a year and meet with Sharon [Salzberg] and Joseph [Goldstein], and just share with them my questions about teaching the Dharma. And, oh, I have some wonderful notes from those meetings. They were wonderful! And then I began to sit with them—long retreats in the fall at IMS. And kind of segued back into vipassana practice.

And a whole chapter that, is beyond the scope of this interview is, that I had to leave my marriage. And I left Zen practice at that time. It was just too heartbreaking for me. All the rituals and chants, and all the things that I had loved, really became sadness in a certain way, for a period of time. And I remember, I was very sad, and I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I was talking to Joseph after a long retreat. And I said, “Joseph…”, I had left my marriage, I had left my Sangha, I had left my professional community, my friends of almost thirty years, my whole known world, and left my husband there. And I said, “Joseph, I have left everything! I don’t have anywhere I belong! I don’t fit in anywhere!” Tears, tears coming down and, and Joseph just looked at me and said, “Well, I think you fit in just fine, right here.” And I will always be grateful to him for that. I thought, “Oh, oh, maybe I could fit in here!” And I did. So, that was the beginning of the transition to being a vipassana teacher.

In my psychotherapy practice after I ended my analysis, I guess I had also been to graduate school and studied Developmental Psychology. And that was the bridge for me, when my daughter was born I became deeply interested in how her mind was unfolding, and beginning to see and understand things little by little. I remember the first time I hid something that she could see me place a towel over it. And the first time she lifted up the towel. It’s called “object constancy”, that she was able to realize that it hadn’t disappeared, that it was there under the towel. Watching her little mind have these insights and realizations, I just loved it! So, I actually went and studied Developmental Psychology with Jean Piaget who was the greatest of our day. And enrolled in his Institut des Sciences de l’Éducation, which fortunately I was bilingual, so I could study in French. But I was really dismayed to discover that his work with children—he said it—he said, “Well, I only interviewed children because I couldn’t interview early people!” Of course, he said “early man.” And he believed that the development of children recapitulated the development of intelligence over the evolution of human beings. But he had no intrinsic interest in children themselves. And so I was studying all these things that actually held no intrinsic interest for me. And so, I wound up leaving that program, and coming back to Cambridge to study Developmental Psychology. And I was quite focused on cognitive development, actually, this kind of clarity of cognitive development. And it wasn’t until my own therapy and beginning my own meditation practice, that I became interested in the emotional lives of others.

And I began to work at a school that I actually co-founded. It’s called the Community Day School now. It was at Mass Mental, which is a Harvard teaching hospital for severely—we called them emotionally disturbed—disregulated children who had diagnoses of autistic and psychotic, and some of the most abused and traumatized children as well. Children on the whole spectrum of developmental disorders and also some of most neglected and abused children in the greater Boston area. And through working with those children I developed the fearlessness to be able to work with adults in extreme states, because they were so little they weren’t scary to me even though what they were dealing with in their lives and their minds was quite often terrifying, but they were little. And through learning to understand and accompany them as best I could, and work with their families, and we really worked through some really extreme situations. Unbeknownst to me then, I was actually training to understand and work with adults who carry all their phases of child within, who actually would have been too frightening for me to work with right away because I was a shy person, not interpersonally in relationships and friendships, but in my work life. And certainly I never ever aspired to be a teacher or any kind of public person, and it was through being able to see the child in the adults that I was able to find the courage to work with adults in often extreme states of unbearable affect too.

Vince: And did you find also that your ongoing meditation practice also supported that transition to working with adults?

Trudy: Yes, it did, it did. My meditation practice taught me how to be present with experiences of intense affect within my own being and of course with the children that I worked with, and it gave me a very powerful seat where I could sit and be present with the affective states of adults and bring that same quality of just unmovable presence that we learn through hours and hours and hours on a cushion, that I could bring that into the therapy room. And I also learned to bring the ability to hold those experiences in a much bigger frame of mind and to be very silent inside while I was listening and that is something that is communicated, it’s transmitted to people. And so they would feel themselves in a kind of field of listening that would, I think, help them bear witness to their own experience, that in a sense I was lending them my stability from meditation to use as they would explore the frightening parts of their own lives and psyches. And I felt as a meditator that this was something I could really offer to people and that whether they knew it or not, they would feel it. And I remember Kobun, my teacher Kobun, came to visit—I think it was for when George and I got married—and he was sitting with me in my therapy room and he said to me, “Why do you think people like you?”, sort of like—Why do they like you anyway? Why do you think people like you and come to you?”, which I hadn’t said anything about, but he was a very intuitive, psychic type of person. He said it’s because you sit, it’s because of the Dharma. And it was great because maybe I was expecting with my ego to hear something wonderful about myself, some way that I was really special that people liked so much. And he was just like it’s because you sit. That’s all.

But it was true, too. And I didn’t teach people to meditate, but I brought them into my own experience of sitting in that way. And it was so interesting too because I felt that the meditation helped me know, almost unerringly, intuitively, what was me and what was not me, because I knew myself so well.

And I remember sometimes I would be sitting and I would suddenly have intense anxiety in my body, and I wasn’t anxious about anything. It wasn’t anything of my own. And I would know, oh, this is someone who is not experiencing their own anxiety because it’s just too threatening. And so it’s here between us.

Vince: And I know you’ve been teaching a lot of psychotherapists—and there are plenty of them here in Southern California, I understand—at Insight LA, teaching them meditation and mindfulness. Is there something that you could share with the people out there that maybe are therapists, or they’re working in that capacity, or they just are working with their own minds, helping, supporting other people? Something you could say about maybe what’s helpful with mindfulness, or meditation, or awareness in bringing that to, like, a therapeutic context or their other things?

Trudy: Thank you, that’s a great question, Vince. You’re good at what you do. I spent years actually teaching clinicians in a variety of settings at professional symposia, conferences, and continuing education programs including here at UCLA and at Harvard and so forth.

So the most important thing is to practice. And this is something that I feel can get so easily lost in the current craze for mindfulness, which is a wonderful thing. When we started the Institute it was the first of its kind in the world to look at the interface of meditation and psychotherapy. And that wasn’t even that long ago, maybe 12 years ago. Maybe 13 at the most. And there’s been an explosion of research, and interest, and practice in the field, which is wonderful. It’s like beyond our wildest dreams wonderful.

At the same time, because of the tendency of the mind to look outward and to forget that actually with our mind we create the world to a large extent, that the world isn’t out there existing as we perceive it exactly. Because of that tendency, mindfulness can become reified, thing-ified, and reduced to a set of techniques that you could learn and then share with your clients, or apply to yourself. And what’s really transformative and profoundly healing is the willingness over and over again to be present with experience, with one’s own experience, and, yes, sitting with others, with the experience of others.

But there’s a way that we track experience in therapy which is very much focused on the content of experience. And the therapist tracks that content in her own mind as she’s working and making connections and so forth. And there’s another dimension, another way of being with where the mind goes naturally that isn’t about content. It’s about the process and how experience is born and passes away, the arising and passing away of experience and how one experience is replaced by another one.

There’s so much Dharmic truth that is revealed by watching the mind that way. So the most important thing, I feel, is to meditate and to really give oneself wholeheartedly and sincerely to doing that. And I know it’s challenging to find the time and space and dedication and support. But, it’s so worth it. One thing I share with therapists always is my own experience in those early days, I was teaching meditation and sitting retreats. In the early days I was teaching mostly with my then husband. So, we each had a therapy practice and we would work with people during the week and then we would do maybe a three day sesshin or four day sesshin. And then we’d come back to work. I mean we obviously taught longer retreats, too. But what was amazing to me was even in a weekend retreat, maybe it was just Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And maybe I was teaching, so that I wasn’t even completely inside my own meditation. I was thinking of the people I was teaching and reflecting on what I would say and so forth.

But I also practiced when I taught. I sat every sitting with people, too, so I was practicing. And then I would come back to work on Monday and see my therapy clients and, invariably, everybody would have some kind of opening in their therapy. And this happened so many times that it wasn’t a coincidence. And I would reflect, “Why? Why is this happening?” Is it just some inner space that is created in me that allows people to step forward into new dimensions of their own psyche? I don’t really have an answer. So much is mysterious in terms of what happens. And I think that, too, is one of the things that I would like to convey to therapists, especially in these days of evidence based everything, is that there is a mystery to all of this, a profoundly unknown dimension that we begin to know but not in the way we know other things.

We begin to know it because we can begin to touch to the mysteriousness and vastness and unfathomable nature of what this is, this life we’re living that we’re involved in here together. And that is something that I don’t know a therapy, even the transpersonal therapies do not take us beyond what the self knows and perceives. And so to find that, this is our birthright to know this. We are drawn to this.

It’s sort of like when you have a baby and then, later on, parents, you know, they want to make love again and they want to reconnect as people and not just parents of this infant. And it’s as though every time they’d start, the baby wakes up. And that’s not a coincidence either. It’s as though the baby knows, “Oh, they’re going back to where I came from, to the source world.” And the baby wants to be part of that [laughs]. So, we’re like this too. You know, we have these whiffs and intuitions and glimpses of this sublime process of the universe, birthing and everything kind of birthing and mating and coming into being, and we want to be part of this.

And the teaching, the early, early Buddhist teaching, there’s this beautiful phrase, the pavasara citta—I love this. And it’s the mind that is—clear, pure; they say, “undefiled”. It’s a very Victorian word, “undefiled”. But the mind that is free of the things that preoccupy and torment us, and that is our birthright to know this and to be able to not know or to know, whichever way we look at it. But to be aware and deeply, deeply grateful for our awareness of this dimension of our being.