THE DOCTOR FOR THE SPIRIT
Through meditation andpsychotherapy, Jack Kornfield '67works to fuse America's heart andmind.
ASA VOLUNTEER WORKER IN SOUTHEAST Asia in the late 1960s, Jack Korn field did more than serve in a foreign country. He became a part of it, joining a Thai monastery while he was still employed by the U.S. government. "He went overnight from living a normal life as a Peace Corps volunteer to subjecting himself to the incredible discipline of monastic life," says Fred Branfman, a political consultant who was a volunteer with Kornfield. "It was astonishing."
Twenty years later, Kornfield more often dons a tweed jacket than the saffron robes of the Thai Buddhist tradition. But the conventional clothes belie an unconventional life as an international Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist who offers hundreds of students and clients a unique blend of Western and Eastern perspectives on spirituality, psychology, and education. "He is one of the leaders, really one of the first to draw attention to the school of thought that shows that 'spiritual' development cannot be substituted for personal growth," according to Jack Engler, who is the clinical director of the Schiff Psychiatric Day Treatment Center of Cambridge Hospital and a supervising psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.
Kornfield's first exposure to Eastern religious philosophy and meditation was not in Thailand but at Dartmouth. He took a course from Philosophy Professor Wing Tsit Chan, author of The Source Book of Chinese Philosophy. "I remember Professor Chan used to sit cross-legged on the desk," says Kornfield. "What he taught was not just intellectual material but a way of living." The professor pointed to teachings that Kornfield had not found else-where at Dartmouth. He switched his major from premed to Asian studies.
After Dartmouth, the Peace Corps sent him on a two-year stint to Thailand to work with rural medical teams. During that time he began learning the local languages and studied at a monastery close by He eventually was ordained as a Theravadan Buddhist monk and studied in a forest monastery under Achaan Chaa, a master renowned among Buddhists. After almost six years of instruction, Kornfield returned to the United States to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology. He designed his own program first under the auspices of Antioch University in New Hampshire, incorporating training at Harvard and other universities and finally completed his work at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in California.
Though he found the Western psychological perspectives useful, he says, "I believe I actually had a much fuller and deeper education in the monastery in Thailand about the nature of the mind and body and heart and how fear operates, how delusion operates, how compulsion operates. Western psychotherapy, on a superficial level, can be used to solve problems of fear and depression, obsession and addiction. And that's very important. But most of Western psychotherapy does not necessarily take people to look at the deeper questions of human values, nor does it have the tools to train the heart in mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion that the Eastern disciplines do."
The nature of both the mind and heart has been a major theme in Kornfield's life. You can see it in the titles to some of his books Stories of the Spirit, Perils and Pitfalls of theSpiritual Path, A Still Forest Pool. He also emphasizes this theme in classrooms and meditation halls around the world, and in the dozens of tapes and videos that have been made of his talks. His teachings extend to his thriving practice as a clinical psychologist in California. He is also helping to found a major meditation center, based on the Theravadan Buddhist tradition, in northern California. It will be a sister center to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, which he helped to start in the mid-seventies and where he still serves as one of four guiding teachers.
Kornfield believes that the psychological training he has experienced in Eastern disciplines could also be applied to the educational system in the West. This is already happening on a research level, he says, noting that meditation is being studied at such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins.
Elise Miller '85 is studying for a doctorate ineducation at Harvard.
Reflecting Easturn thought, Jack Kornfield has broughtmeditation to psychotherapy.
"I becameexcited, becauseI immediatelyidealized that ifthe atmospherebehaved thisway, thenlong-rangeforecastingwasn't possible...there was alimit beyondwhich wecouldn't go."
