In the serene depths of spiritual exploration, there exists a guiding light in the form of Ekai Joel Kreisberg, the Spiritual Director of the Shining Bright Lotus Meditation Society. With over three decades dedicated to teaching healing and meditation, Ekai’s journey is a tapestry woven with threads of wisdom, compassion, and profound transformation. Having embarked on his path under the tutelage of Jn Po Denis Kelly Roshi at Hollow Bones Zen, Ekai received the name “Ekai,” symbolizing the vastness of generosity that characterizes his teachings. Ordained by Jun Po Roshi in 2018 at Dai Bosatsu, the root monastery for Hollow Bones, Ekai assumed the role of Executive Director in 2019, steering the community through turbulent waters following the loss of their founding abbot. His contributions extend beyond the spiritual sphere, with extensive publications in integrative medicine literature and authorship of the transformative book, “Coaching and Healing: Transforming the Illness Narrative.” In this exclusive Mystic Mag‘s interview, we delve into the depths of Ekai Joel Kreisberg’s insights, exploring the intersection of meditation, healing, and spiritual awakening.
How did this evolution in your career path influence your approach to healing and meditation, particularly in your work with Hollow Bones Zen and the development of the Mondo Zen Facilitator Program?
Attending the subtle dimension of healing was always a priority for the 30 plus years I practiced as a homeopathic physician. I attended my first Vipassana retreat in 1993 when I first started teaching classical homeopathy. Meditation quickly became essential to my personal practice as well as a component of my teaching homeopathy. Several of my students went on to work directly with Tinus Smits’ Inspiring Homeopathy system based on meditative provings. We would sit in a group taking a remedy such as Lac-humanum (mother’s milk) or Rhus toxicodendron (poison ivy), and with guided meditation, journey to meet the spirit of the substance, directly learning how to work with the remedies.
After training as an integral coach, I choose to focus on deepening my own experience of meditative states. That’s when I stumbled into the teaching of Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi. My first week-long sesshin with Jun Po Roshi was in 2010. I was ordained as a priest in the Hollow Bones Zen Order in 2018. I offered to develop the Mondo Zen Facilitator Program for Jun Po Roshi. I felt that my skills in healing, teaching and zazen, combined to allow me to bring a unique blend of spiritual development and healing arts. In the current group of students I’m training, I use historical Zen teachings, the trauma work of Thomas Hubl, the emotional intelligence perspective of Karla McLaren, and STAGES, a developmental psychology model created by Terri O’Fallon. Practitioners must do their own healing work as part of their ongoing development as Zen teachers.
Developing the Mondo Zen Facilitator Program seems like a significant undertaking. What inspired you to create this program, and how do you envision it contributing to the dissemination of Jun Po Roshi’s core teaching of Mondo Zen?
Jun Po Roshi’s model was to offer Mondo Zen in a weeklong sesshin, encouraging those who resonated with the teachings to come back for a second weeklong training – The Mondo Zen Teacher’s Training. Over the course of seven or eight years, about 150 people completed both offerings. With such minimal training many were never able to successfully transmit Jun Po’s koan dialogue process successfully. The Mondo Zen Facilitator Program I designed, is a six month program that requires students to engage in the koans as daily practice, to practice in our community, meeting in small groups every other week, and to offer the entire Mondo koan process to three individuals. These three full Mondo Facilitations were recorded so that the student facilitator could review and assess their own work. I found that this methodology of applying the technique, then reflecting on one’s process greatly speeds up the learning. This also allows the mentors and faculty to review student’s work and offer formative feedback that greatly benefits the student.
We then articulated six core competencies that provided clear teaching goals. This became the standard for demonstrating competency. The leadership and faculty had to go through a detailed process of articulating exactly what we expect to happen during a facilitation. This was a monumental undertaking. We trained six faculty members, four mentors, and then developed a final assessment process we called the competency panel. In the first three years, we successfully trained 31 students. Not all students have gone on to continue with Mondo Facilitation. Currently there are 18 Certified Mondo Zen Facilitators.
My belief is that Jun Po Roshi’s teachings offer a unique perspective on dealing with emotions in a Zen setting. By articulating a clear standard, and training competent practitioners, we created a more consistent cadre of facilitators who can effectively reach a broader audience.
What type of services do you offer?
Currently, I run my own Zen Center – Shining Bright Lotus Meditation Society. We include the teachings of Jun Po Roshi in a broader vision that I call Cosmopolitan Zen. Similar to my training model, we include contemporary innovations for a variety of fields such as developmental psychology, trauma recovery, all three turnings of Buddhism– Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, and ecodharma. Most important is our commitment to inclusion and diversity. Our efforts are to have our offerings make sense to a broad, diverse audience. We offer weekly practice periods, retreats and classes.
I also continue to work with individuals with homeopathy and Narrative Health Coaching. My approach to healing attracts individuals ready to invest in a meaningful path to healing.
Your book, “Coaching and Healing, Transforming the Illness Narrative,” explores the intersection of coaching and integrative medicine. Could you elaborate on how these two disciplines intersect in your practice, and how they can be integrated to support holistic healing?
About ten years into my work as a homeopath, I noticed that most if not all of the alternative/integrative practices in medicine, continued to base their perspective in the disease model – figure out what is wrong and fix it. Contemporary Biomedicine uses a research driven treatment protocol for choices regarding interventions. Alternative medicine uses more natural approaches that were handed down through the ages. I was in search of a new approach. I stumbled into the work of Anton Antonovsky, who devoted his research to salutogenesis or ‘generating health.’ This coincided with my training as an Integral Coach. Professional coaching is fundamentally a relational practice, and when combined with a salutogenic perspective in health care, it became Narrative Health Coaching. Our work invites the client to learn how to identify positive goals, develop healing resources, and to begin to work with healing narratives – “What is my story of healing?” This shifts the process away from whether the ‘symptoms’ are improving to learning and growing into the healing process. Symptoms become opportunities to listen and learn about what is being asked of you. This fits very well with Jun Po Roshi’s belief that feelings are the messages that we send ourselves. The invitation is to look inside to find what is required for awakening.
How do you see the role of meditation evolving in modern society, particularly in the context of increasing stress and mental health challenges?
Recently I read a wonderful piece by another brilliant Buddhist teacher, Lama John Makransky. He identifies the Transhistoric Buddha. What he means is that going all the way back to Sakyamuni Buddha himself, there has been this transmission of the teachings that empowers the next generation with the wisdom and skill to offer these teachings. Consistent with the Zen belief that we are all Buddhas, this transmission of wisdom is the Transhistoric Buddha. The expansion of mindfulness into contemporary society, into the workplace, into medicine and healthcare, are all part of this increasingly powerful transmission of these ancient teachings. I believe that Buddhist meditation is a simple, accessible, highly salutogenic technology for relieving suffering and increasing health and wellbeing. I would hope that as we continue to evolve more complex circumstances, we continue to recognize and invest in the effective historic practices that only require concentration, patience, effort and persistence. Likely meditative practices will continue to grow from the bottom up. Since there is no one right way, rather, a rich history of wise sages evolving the basics of the Buddha’s wisdom. Jun Po Roshi’s interpretation of Rinzai Zen attracted me. Now my community is resonating with how I evolve these teachings. I see these waves of innovation as the means for accessing healing in greater and greater numbers – for individuals and the planet.
Ekai Joel Kreisberg www.shiningbrightlotus.org
