Enlightenment Therapy – John Waide Ph. D.

Enlightment Therapy – A Discussion 
Written by John Waide Ph.D. 

​26 April 2009

Today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine includes “Enlightenment Therapy”, an article by Chip Brown “The vessel you took to escape your childhood became your prison cell.” describing the life and therapy of a Zen monk (Louis Nordstrom) with his psychoanalyst, Jeffery Rubin. It is a thoughtful consideration of the life of a man whose dedication to his Zen spiritual practice was both liberating and confining. Part of what is interesting about it is the way that reclaiming his life didn’t require renouncing Zen.

I wonder whether this may be a relatively common path for many who seek deeply devout spiritual or religious solutions to their problems and, in so doing, find much that is good but are still unable to feel complete enough, good enough.  (It is difficult even to talk about such matters because various spiritual and religious traditions use distinct terms (or assign different meanings to the same tems) and we cannot be sure that these terms are interchangeable — though they might seem roughly equivalent to outsiders of a particular tradition.)  Part of what is touching in the account of Nordstrom’s crisis is the feeling of failure as a Zen teacher — the feeling that he had failed.  I suspect that we could find such agonies in many devout people of a variety of religious faiths.  And I suspect that a respectful, nuanced therapy or psychoanalysis may be just what is needed for such a devout person to reclaim a sense of self in relation to the divine.