Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Pitfalls of Zen meditation practice

Contraindications for Zen meditation practice

Not everybody benefits from concentrative and/or mindfulness-oriented meditation
practices. A minimum of mental health is required to sustain the discipline of mind
training (Tart and Deikman 1991). Failures in early attachment, self-differentiation,
self and object integration, autism, and personality disorders may not be amenable
to meditation practices (Engler 1984). Attempts to see through the illusion of self
may exacerbate self-pathology in those individuals with diagnoses of serious mental
disorders. Individuals with addictions, disorganizing mental states, self-harming
tendencies, addictive disorders, or disorders that require medication, or that incite
suspicion, oppositionalism, or apathy, would do well to abstain from meditation
retreats (Fleischman 1999). Even those individuals who may be free of the more
serious mental disorders may be overwhelmed with changing states of mind, which
may be of varying degrees of intensity and may include elation, excitement, rage,
distrust, depression, and panic (Fleischman 1999). Individuals with a history of
trauma may be at risk of being flooded when experiencing meditative states (Finn
and Rubin 1999). Pathological regression, fear of sexual feelings, and fear of emotional
intimacy may also be present (Deikman 1982; Fauteux 1987; Watson 1996).
Pressured by a society that overvalues autonomy and volition, certain individuals may
feel anxious about their ability to assert, take responsibility for, and share that
individuality (Fauteux 1987).
Zen teachers may not recognize severe pathology in students who come to
meditation practice. For students coming to meditation practice with faulty ego
functioning, the enlightenment ideal may mistakenly represent ‘a purified state of
complete and invulnerable self-sufficiency from which all badness has been expelled,
the aim of all narcissistic strivings’ (Engler 1984: 37).
On the other hand, concentration and/or mindfulness meditation practices have
been included as a useful adjunct to psychotherapy, even in severe narcissistic and
borderline personality disorders (Kutz et al. 1985). Mindfulness meditation
techniques may be introduced in therapy programs for clients suffering from trauma,
depression, anxiety, and various neurotic symptoms, but not for clients suffering from
hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders, and severe withdrawal (Deatherage
1975; Urbanowski and Miller 1996).

Teachers’ and therapists’ ignorance

Western therapists with little or no knowledge of meditation practice may either
pathologize the clients’ meditation experiences and/or fail to probe deeply enough
into their clients’ relationship with their spiritual teacher (Welwood 2000; Finn and
Rubin 1999). Asian-born teachers have little knowledge or interest in psychotherapy
and, traditionally, have not encouraged their students to seek treatment for their
developmental deficiencies (Finn and Rubin 1999; Gopfert 1999). American

154 KATHERINE V.MASÍS