Balancing the Psychological with the Spiritual

The Big Mind practice has two roots. It has an Asian Buddhist root, mostly Zen, but to some extent Tantric Buddhism, coming through my teacher, Maezumi Roshi, and also through some other great teachers like the 16th Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and other great masters that I got to meet along the way, who have guided and assisted me in this path I’ve been on now a little over thirty-seven years. It also has a Western, psychotherapeutic root, coming through Hal and Sidra Stone in the Voice Dialogue work, from others like Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, and many other great Western therapists. Let me say a little bit about the synthesis of these two. I spent from about December of 1983 to about June of 1984 studying the Voice Dialogue work, mostly with Hal Stone, not so much with Sidra his wife, and what I discovered was that this Western psychotherapeutic approach complemented, supported, and blended beautifully with the Zen training we’d been doing for years. What I saw was that Zen training, particularly as we were practicing it in the West, was basically the Japanese model, which was a male monastic model, brought to the West for not just monks, but laypeople as well and somehow it didn’t work so well for meeting all of our needs. So, many of us in going through this Zen training over the years under my Zen Master, Maezumi Roshi found that we needed to do something to complement it, or support it, through other practices. Voice Dialogue was one of them, along with EST, Gestalt Therapy, Jungian Psychotherapy and many others that we found beneficial during that time. What I have noticed by merging Voice Dialogue and Zen is that the Big Mind work is more psychologically healthy for us westerners, because it deals with a lot of issues that do not often get dealt with in traditional Zen practice. A lot of these issues are around emotions, trauma, and all kinds of decisions that have gone on in early life that now affect us in our later years and can go on affecting us until we die if they’re not dealt with. A great Zen Master by the name of Master Rinzai, or Lin-Chi in Chinese, said many hundreds of years ago, ‘I basically do only two things: I untie knots and I remove barriers.’ I feel that’s exactly what the Big Mind work is all about. We get kinks in our hose, we get knots in our plumbing, and we have voices that are universally disowned or that are universal shadows that can be kinked or knotted. The Big Mind work releases these knots and allows the energy to flow. It also removes barriers like the things that have happened in our childhood or growing up, where we’ve made a certain decision, and that decision becomes a barrier to going further, deeper, and clarifying more in our Zen practice. So in my mind this work is really psychologically and spiritually healthy. It’s really an integrated practice. Genpo Roshi founded the Kanzeon Sangha, an international Zen community in 1984, with groups and centers throughout Europe and the U.S., and is abbot of Big Mind Western Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he founded in 1993. He discovered the Big Mind process in 1999. His newest book is Big Mind Big Heart: Finding Your Way. More at: www.bigmind.org