Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy

Rating:
Summary: ...from an ordinary reader
Review: Although the title of this text implies that this is a work best suited to professionals, I was delighted to find just the opposite. This is a book clearly presents some of the most basic aspects of Zen meditation written from a personal and inspiring perspective. It makes it possible for even the beginner to understand the rewards and challenges of just sitting meditation.
As a previous reviewer said ..."this is not just an intellectual polemic. Using a combination of honest examples from his own life, the wisdom of the Zen koan, and not least of all, humor, he repeatedly returns to how these issues inform our everyday life as we live it."
In addition this work includes a nicely written index making it possible to revisit those areas that made you think on your first read.

Rating:
Summary: A truly important contribution
Review: Magid uses classical koans, clinical material, and the thinking of cutting-edge psychoanalysts like Stolorow, Eigen, and others to lucidly explore the commonalities and divergences of Zen practice and the psychotherapeutic enterprise.

In particular, I found his thoughtful examination of self at once
evocative and refreshingly straightforward. His examination of the issues of boundaries in both clinical and zen teacher-student relationships is intelligent and realistic. And his comments on transference and its relationship to a Buddhist conception of ego are of particular interest.

In psychoanalytic circles lately there has been a growing interest in Zen and Buddhist psychology. I believe that Zen students and mental health professionals alike will be in Magid's debt for a long time to come.

Rating:
Summary: Zen couch, Zen cushion.
Review: Real meditation practice takes place "out at the edge of the darkness," Barry Magid writes in his not-so-ordinary book, ORDINARY MIND. "That's where we have to work. What is that edge? It's the boundary of where we feel comfortable, where the difficulties start. And that boundary is always clearly marked by anxiety or anger or fear: whatever we don't want to face. That's where we need to sit" (p. 74). Magid is no stranger to the cushion. Not only is he a psychoanalyst who has been practicing Zen meditation for the past twenty-five years (p. 1), he is also the founding teacher of New York City's Ordinary Mind Zendo (p. 4). In his book, Magid demonstrates how therapy and meditation practice can work together "like one foot forwarded and the other behind in walking" (p. 5). "What we do in Zen practice," he writes, "what we do in therapy, is watch how we go about facing--and even more important, avoid facing--our life as it is" (p. 160).

While Magid's observations may not be "groundbreaking" (John Welwood, for instance, has covered the same territory in books such as TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF AWAKENING), they are indeed fascinating. Therapy and meditation practice share some common ground. Both create long-term relationships with a therapist or a teacher, respectively. Both create "a setting for the eliciting and working through of intense fantasies and affects." Both train us "to stay with, tolerate, and explore thoughts and feelings normally felt to be too painful or frightening to endure" (p. 103). "Through both psychoanalysis and Zen practice we strive to come back to ourselves," Magid says, "to re-own what has been split off, and to embrace what we have warded off. Then we are who we are; each moment is what it is" (p. 166).

Based on my own experience with Zen and shamatha-vipashyana (mindfulness-awareness) meditation styles, I found that Magid's observations are frequently reminiscent of the late Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa's teachings. For instance, Magid's observation "that we lead lives so confined and constricted that we can hardly begin to imagine what true freedom is like" (p. 41) echoes Trungpa's MYTH OF FREEDOM. Perhaps Magid would agree that, just as psychoanalysis may be integrated with Zen meditation, it could also be integrated with other schools of meditation including shamatha-vipashyana Buddhist practice.

Magid's excellent book will appeal to the reader interested in uncovering the painful and hidden material of his or her life through therapy, meditation, or both so as to alleviate suffering, and to live a more meaningful life "as it is."

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: A Seamless Presentation
Review: What I found most interesting, and also most valuable, about Barry Magid"s work is his ability to bring together the insights of his psychotherapy practice to the clarity of his role as a zen teacher into one seamless presentation. In fact, the major theme of Ordinary Mind, that there is no sharp boundary between psychology and spirituality, is so well made that the reader will surely have to question any prior assumptions about what psychology is and what spiritual practice is. I particularly liked Magid's thoroughness in clarifying the normally fuzzy thinking that occupies the borderland between psychology and religion.
But this is not just an intellectual polemic. Using a combination of honest examples from his own life, the wisdom of the Zen koan, and not least of all, humor, he repeatedly returns to how these issues inform our everyday life as we live it. Time and again he brings us back to the essential point that must be addressd in any approach to living a less self-centered life, whether the approach be that of psychology or spirituality. And that point is that the real satisfaction that all of us are looking for must come from the increasing ability to move away from our false pictures of what life is and what spirituality is, and instead move toward a direct experiencing of our life as it is.