Dear Sandy -

Thanks, although I wouldn't go anywhere near there, especially as I MAY HAVE STUPIDLY ALIENATED PERSONS OF FAITH. Please check out Shinzen’s YouTube based Welcome to New Viewers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvk99BRxlPw My words were ill-chosen at best.

That said, your reference to the program at the Cleveland Clinic is well taken, although I just have a sense that program may owe more to Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR than they may acknowledge. Check out the MBSR home page at http://www.umassmed.edu/Content.aspx?id=41252 as well as Jon's homepage at http://www.mindfulnesscds.com/index.html with particular reference to his most recent book Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness.

There are some subtle yet significant differences between MBSR and Shinzen's approach, although both teach Vipassana (Mindfulness) Meditation, a technique which has at its heart, however practiced, with the careful noting of experience. There are however, two clear (at least in my mind) distinctions between the their approaches.

First, Jon is working almost exclusively out of the oldest and more conservative of the two principal branches of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, which gave rise to Vipassana (Mindfulness) Meditation - and in the U.S. is most closely associated with the Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA and Spirit Rock in Marin Co. CA - while Shinzen, although a Vipassana teacher in his own right who has studied directly under the Burmese master U Ba Khin (1899 - 1971) and others, began his training in the second and later branch of Buddhism, Mahayana, where he was first ordained as a monk a Japanese school that is a close counterpart of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, then spending another three years (I think) training in Japan, but in (Rinzai) Zen, another Mahayana school, before travelling to Burma to study Vipassana.

As such, Shinzen has been able to incorporate the emphasis on the discernment of internal visual images of the Vajrayana School along with the Vipassana emphasis of noting all things in the somatic world of the body - including sensations in the body of clearly emotional origin - along with what is typically associated with the principal activities of the mind: verbal thought. And to all of this he adds a Zen perspective of directly experiencing the complete lack of separation between one's subjective experience and the outside "objective world" as well as the understanding that the cessation of an experience is equally significant as it's arising. Although that is a concept that runs in one way or another throughout Buddhism, that nothing (be it noun or verb) exists/arises except in relation to something else. (I knew there was more to John Dunne's "No Man is an Island" when I read it in high school, it just took 35 years or so to get there.)

And having taken a couple of MBSR classes and studies with Shinzen for a number of years, the biggest difference in practice is that Shinzen has significantly reformulated traditional meditation techniques, with quite specific and incredibly efficient methods of noting experience. All with the goal of developing concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity. The latter being defined by its negation: aversion (resistance) to the unpleasant and craving the pleasant.

As chronic pain patients, we can build tremendous equanimity, but to do so generally requires maintaining our concentration on the clarity of the pain experience, so that we become first of all merely observers of it, as opposed to its captives. Big difference.

For any and all who are interested, I can refer you to the following additional sites:

1. Shinzen's homepage http://www.shinzen.org/ including the recorded “Dharma Talks” (perhaps starting with Breath Meditation, The Core Practice and Equanimity. As well as one item in particular under “Articles,” A Pain-Processing Algorithm which can be directly linked to at http://www.shinzen.org/shinsub3/artP...gAlgorithm.pdf

2. Shinzen’s program of monthly telephone retreats, where each month there is at least on class for pure beginners, the BASIC MINDFULNESS Home Practice Program at http://www.basicmindfulness.org/ and

3. On Shinzen’s YouTube channel, his wonderful presentation of the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, a.k.a. the Ten Bulls (famous in Japanese Zen) at the talk he gave on the last night of the 2008 – 2009 Year End Retreat, which I was lucky enough to see in person. http://video.google.com/videosearch?...d=0CCMQqwQwCA#

Mike