From early exposure to New Age gurus seeking transcendence to pioneering meditation in therapy, the author shares her journey. She explores the evolution of understanding meditation—especially its intersection with trauma—and argues for a radical shift: facing our wounds with compassion, not escaping them.
In the mid-1960s, my aunt, a dynamic young journalist in New York City, was sent on assignment to cover the first Swami who opened an ashram in the heart of Manhattan. She was enchanted by the warmth and joy that Swami Satchitananda exuded. Growing up in Boston, she had never seen anything like this. On her next visit home, she was exuberant as she described to her mother and sister (my mother), the billowing incense, the dancing, the radiant people and the infectious charisma of this guru. My aunt was an ambitious, tough, hard-edged reporter—what happened?
My flinty New England family was dismissive and laughed at this new passion (she was known for her passions), but I was intrigued. In elementary school, this seemed a lot more interesting than anything happening in suburban Boston, or the uptight temple where we went to worship.
Thus began my education in the spirituality of New Age America. My aunt was drawn to new, sparkling ideas, so with every visit to New York there was always a new guru to check out, each more enlightened and more brilliant than the next. My childhood was spent with visits to listen to Krishnamurti, Ram Das, the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Khan, ancient Tibetan Lamas, such as Kalu Rinpoche, the Zen master Philip Kapleau, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
With many of these teachers, the focus was on transcending the world and entering exalted states of bliss. Meditation was to climb these mountain tops. One popular teacher called it the "spiritual Olympics." It seemed that the goal was to live in an altered state, away from the concerns of the world.
Throughout high school and college my interest deepened and I spent my free time attending lectures and retreats. As teenagers do, I watched these teachers, and the centers that had formed around them with a critical eye, finely attuned to hypocrisy. I was surprised by the number of scandals, and the plethora of misbehavior. But I remained curious about these centers where I spent so much time. Why did students run out of meditation classes sobbing? What was happening here? I continued on to graduate school thinking that there would be a job market for teachers of comparative religion, only to find that these academic jobs didn't exist. I made a pivot to the field of Psychology; I'd been in therapy since college and it seemed like a compassionate way to make a living.
After years of course work, we began our actual training. My clinical internship was at a neighborhood mental health center in Cambridge. My first patient was an angry sullen teen, who gave me a hard, cold stare when I said "hello." Things rapidly got worse. Whatever I said was stupid, idiotic and worthy of a dramatic eye roll. My fears that I wouldn't be good at this were confirmed. Long silence. "This isn't working. Can we try something else?" I suggested. I'd been thinking about what helped me when I was an angry, sullen teen. I knew this world.
I taught her some muscle relaxation and a simple body scan. Something shifted. She liked this. She began to talk, telling me about her angry mother and alcoholic father. I knew these techniques worked for me, why not try them with clients, I wondered.
I told my advisor that I wanted to discussion bringing meditation into therapy. She looked at me aghast. This was 1981. There was virtually no research on meditation and no precedent for bringing it into therapy.
She was horrified, to put it mildly. "Susan," she said, lowering her bifocals and giving me a hard cold state and said in her most demeaning Harvard accent. "You can do what you want behind closed doors, but I will not supervise you on it."
I was totally shamed and humiliated. I felt like a had violated a serious taboo, as if I had said I wanted to have sex with my patient.
I stayed very silent about this interest. The meditation teacher Jack Kornfield has quipped that during this time, we were teaching meditation without adult supervision.
Luckily, I found other colleagues who were interested in meditation, and we talked quietly. Together we founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. We started having conferences and writing books. A lot of them. And based on solid research.
Fast forward 45 years. It now turns out that 81% of therapists practice mindfulness, up from 42% ten years ago.
In 1991, a friend invited me to a group for therapists led by Dr. Judith Herman. Her gold-standard book, Trauma and Recovery would be published in 1992. Trauma was not a household word then, and people didn't talk about it. But things changed very quickly. Not only did trauma enter the literature; it entered our collective psyches. Soon we saw it everywhere. As I became trained, I began to put things together. Of course it is hard to sit still when memories of abuse arose, such as in silent meditation or the quiet of savasana in yoga class.
And things shifted again. Over the years I became a consultant to meditation centers. At a number of places, students now need to sign a medical release to go on long retreats, and teachers worry about unintentionally triggering students into breakdowns. The press started to talk about meditation being dangerous. Were we causing harm? How do we understand this, and what do we do?
A recent retreat by Zen teacher Henry Shukman at Upaya Center helped me rethink this. When he was a teenager in England, Henry had a sudden experience of awakening while watching a sunset. He returned home to his dysfunctional family and had a breakdown, entering therapy to make sense of his complex family history. What if, he postulated, the task of meditation is to face our trauma, to turn toward it and not to transcend it but to work with the wounds and heal them through compassion and understanding. What if the "breakdowns" are necessary breakthroughs? Of course, when we sit on silent retreats years of accumulated trauma rise to the surface.
What if the goal isn't to escape the difficulties of being human but to reach out to others to help comfort and diminish our collective suffering? To fully accept being human and not to bypass our fears and anxieties. The renowned teacher Pema Chodron puts it elegantly, "You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and turn it into compassion." Pema acknowledges that spiritual awakening has been described as a journey to the top of a mountain. But the problem with this metaphor is that we leave the others behind—our homeless brother, our schizophrenic sister. Their suffering is not relieved by our personal escape. Pema turns the journey upside down, "The journey goes down, not up."
The goal is not the mountain top. The more we can understand our lives, our traumas, our families and the forces that drive us, the more we can break free and reach out and support everyone.
