Western Psychology, Eastern Spirituality with Jeffrey Rubin (#390)

Summary

---

Religion on the Mind with Dan Koch

Episode #390 – "Western Psychology, Eastern Spirituality" with Dr. Jeffrey Rubin
Released: March 30, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, licensed therapist Dan Koch sits down with Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin—clinical psychologist, researcher, and developer of meditative psychotherapy—to unpack the rich, complex intersection of Western psychology and Eastern spirituality. Their dialogue traverses personal spiritual upbringing, the synthesis (and mis-synthesis) of East and West, the pitfalls of spiritual bypassing, existential psychology, and the lived realities and scandals in modern Buddhist and psychoanalytic communities. Throughout, Rubin argues for a dynamic, dialogical, and mutually critical approach to integrating traditions, encouraging listeners to live from radical honesty, self-trust, and creative intimacy.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal Religious Background and Openness

• Jewish Heritage & Its Influence
  • Dr. Rubin recounts his upbringing in a secular Jewish home with atheist parents and how the absence of religious pressure allowed him to remain spiritually open:

    "All my friends that were Christian, Catholic and Jewish got turned off really early to religion because of the way it was being practiced then.... I did not get turned off because I didn't have it stuffed down my throat.... when I was on my search... I had a real opening because I wasn't turned off, which I consider a weird advantage." (04:12)

  • Core Jewish values shaping his thinking include: ethics in daily life, benevolence, love of learning, and the centrality of dialogue.

2. Origins of East-West Integration

• Mystical Basketball Experience as Catalyst
  • Rubin describes a transcendent moment during a high school basketball game, an entry point to "mushin no mind" (no-mindedness):

    "A portal had opened to a different state of consciousness and a different way of being. And from then on it burned out a lot of my typical male conditioning.... I knew there was another world. There is another world, comma, and it is in this one." (08:14, quoting poet Paul Élouard)

• Parallel Study Paths
  • Rubin pursued psychology and Eastern practice in parallel, noting he saw both paths as holding wisdom, despite cultural suspicion and separation:

    "Therapists thought this Eastern stuff is pathological. Practitioners of Eastern stuff thought this Western stuff was inferior. I just kept studying both at the same time. And then things gradually coalesced." (12:37-13:01)

  • Important guidance from mentor Joel Kramer:

    "Don't force the synthesis before it organically emerges." (12:55)

3. The True Spirit of Integration

• Critique of Shallow Synthesis
  • Rubin aligns with Dan on the importance of genuinely inhabiting both traditions deeply, not simply overlaying techniques:

    "A lot of the people doing the integration, frankly, I don't feel their western side is that deep... It often is techniquey and then integrated with meditation, which is techniquey. And then it stays surface. And so it's really both." (27:43)

  • Western psychotherapy brings developmental psychology and the tools for working with trauma—elements often missing in Buddhist traditions.

4. Higher States of Consciousness: Skepticism & Critique

• Against Spiritual Hierarchies
  • Discussing "higher consciousness," Rubin warns against linear, hierarchical models (spiral dynamics, "Zen masters"):

    "You don't master a path that never ends. It's a path you keep walking." (20:53) "It makes them feel secret shame when they don't live up to it and creates devaluation of other people. So… it’s tricky and it’s to be watched out for, really." (21:10)

• Multiplicity of Development
  • Anna Freud’s idea of multiple “developmental lines”: people may be advanced in some areas and not others.

5. Reframing Meditation

• Beyond Calming, Toward Honest Presence
  • Rubin challenges the popular notion that meditation is just for calming down:

    "Meditation is not getting rid of anything. It's about being present with what is, but in a very different way, with a spirit of self friendship." (24:11)

  • Meditation often heightens awareness of discomfort and distress, which is an opportunity for gentle encounter, not for judging or suppressing.

6. Spiritual Bypassing and Scandals

• Critical Analysis of Buddhist Communities
  • Rubin discusses scandals in Buddhist communities (money, sex, substance misuse), noting limitations in Buddhist systems to address issues of character and continuity:

    "One of the ways you could look at scandals is its character. Psychoanalysis defines character... as a stable organization with a slow rate to change.... Unless someone transforms their character... they're going to keep acting out or living in ways that are not skillful, that are not wise." (44:27)

  • Contrasts psychoanalytic “working through” with Buddhist impermanence: without attention to character, change remains superficial.

7. Developmental Psychology: East Needs West

• Buddhism Lacks a Developmental Model
  • Rubin credits Western developmental psychology as non-negotiable and necessary for understanding and ethical maturation:

    "Buddhism does not have a developmental psychology that's powerful, doesn't have a theory of development." (34:43)

  • Both agree that developmental stages are foundational and vital for both spiritual and therapeutic growth (36:00-37:02).

8. Meditative Psychotherapy: A Three-Stage Model

• 1. Heightened Listening (from East and West)
  • Quieting and focusing the mind through meditation or contemplative prayer, to listen to rather than for:

    "Listening to, not listening for. So it becomes really crucial... to really embody it." (15:40)

• 2. Meaning-Making (Western Bread and Butter)
  • Decoding and understanding experiences, rather than just experiencing them (as in meditation).
• 3. Liberated Intimacy
  • Cultivating empathy, self-reflectiveness, creativity, and playfulness in the therapeutic relationship.
  • Illustrated through stories (e.g., empathizing with a client’s desire to feel alive even if it’s self-destructive, playfully improvising with a child client).

    "Be like water flowing depending on the exigencies of the situation. Not by the book, but you flow with the situation and you respond ... You're a jazz improviser, not a customs official." (59:30)

9. Existential Crises: Spiritual and Psychological Approaches

• For clients in existential disruption ("life after religious change"), Rubin’s method is to:
  • Educate in radical honesty (not bypassing pain)
  • Teach self-trust and efficacy through repeated embodied experience (acting, then seeing the results)
  • Encourage both therapist and client to cultivate openness, returning to presence when flooded by anxiety or distress (62:48)
  • Orient toward hope, even while facing the "hell" of despair or systemic failure (65:30)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On integrating East and West:

  "We need a dialogue that's mutually respectful, aware of differences, vulnerable, willing to learn from each other—to be surprised." (32:24)

• On spiritual bypassing:

  "Meditation is not getting rid of anything. It's being with it differently. And that's a different ballgame when that happens." (24:12)

• On the dangers of spiritual hierarchy:

  "You don't master a path that never ends... It makes them feel secret shame when they don't live up to it and creates devaluation of other people." (20:53, 21:13)

• On radical honesty:

  "Looking at it like, okay, I'm gonna stop avoiding, I'm gonna stop turning away, I'm gonna stop papering over. I'm gonna attend radically to what's going on and be totally honest with myself about it... it's fucking powerful, man." — Dan Koch (64:06)

• On hope and despair:

  "Things are worse than we believe, and there's more hope than we know. I really believe both of those things. So face the despair, go into hell with Dante... and also be open to the light and where hope lives." (65:38)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:40 – Dr. Rubin on Jewish heritage and its impact on his intellectual and ethical orientation
• 08:00 – Mystical basketball experience and its existential implications
• 12:40 – Keeping Eastern and Western practices in parallel
• 15:38 – Meditation and the art of listening "to, not for"
• 19:07 – Discussion of "higher consciousness" and the pitfalls of spiritual hierarchy
• 22:45 – Challenging the meditation/calmness cliché; embracing discomfort in meditation
• 34:19 – The lack of developmental psychology in Buddhism; what West brings East
• 42:43 – Reexamining the Four Noble Truths; suffering and joy (East-meets-Existential)
• 44:30 – Explaining spiritual bypassing, character, and why Buddhist impermanence can be misused
• 51:18 – Introduction of the "Meditative Therapy" three-phase model
• 62:40 – Navigating existential overwhelm in everyday life, using meditative principles
• 65:30 – Rubin’s closing thoughts on hope, despair, and radical honesty

---

Closing Thoughts

This episode is vital listening for those interested in genuine, lived integration of psychological and spiritual paths—not just technique or surface-level "synthesis," but a deeper, ongoing, dialogical process. Dr. Rubin’s insistence on self-trust, embodied ethics, openness to dialogue, and radical honesty provides a potent vision for healing and growth at the crossroads of East and West. Both clinicians and seekers will find wisdom here in meeting suffering and joy head-on and cultivating hope amid real-world complexity.

---

Links from the Episode:

• Dr. Jeffrey Rubin’s Website
• Dr. Jeffrey Rubin’s Amazon Author Page
• For comments or questions, email: [e-mail]

---

Transcript

[Venmo Advertiser]

Score more with the college branded Venmo Debit card and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash. Got paid back with the Venmo Debit card, you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up [e-mail] collegecard the Venmo Mastercard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA Select Schools available Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo me stashterms max $100 cash back per month. 5am I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change and head to work. Meetings Workshops One more Celsius. No slowing down. Working late but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate [e-mail]

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

so

[Dr. Dan Koch]

good so good so good.

[Nordstrom Rack Advertiser]

New spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores. Now get ready to save big with up to 60% off rag and bone, Marc Jacobs, Free people and more.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Cause there's always something new.

[Nordstrom Rack Advertiser]

Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack

[Lowe's Advertiser]

Spring Fest means more sun, more fun and more free at Lowe's. Keep your yard in line with an additional free EGO fixed 56 volt battery when you buy a select Ego mower trimmer or blower. Plus keep landscaping fresh with stay green 1 cubic foot garden soil 5 bags for $10. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's, valid through 4 a while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Welcome back everybody to Relig on the Mind, the podcast that is still lacking a standardized introduction, but it's about psychology and religion and spirituality. And I'm your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. Today I am joined by Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin. Jeffrey, you are a clinical psychologist and researcher probably best known for developing what you call meditative psychotherapy, which is kind of the primary focus of our conversation today because it sits at the intersection of a ton of stuff that I'm really into and like to cover on the show, including Mindfulness East Meeting West Spiritual Bypassing, which has its own sort of uniquely Protestant flavor, existential psychology, which is becoming more and more central to my client treatment. And so really there's just a lot here to talk about. I'm very excited to be chatting today and thank you for joining me.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Thank you for having me, Dan. Look forward to speaking with you.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

We will do our best to mediate our own east versus West. Me a little California punk rocker, and you a New York psychoanalyst or whatever here, but that's fine. Let's start here. So Ruben, commonly a Jewish last name, right? Are you like, is there, is that a part of your story such that listeners of this show who are interested in religion, you know, beyond Christianity, like, does. Does any sort of Jewish upbringing kind of play a role in the development of this work long term? Anything that might be interesting for us,

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

not overtly, but a younger, brilliant person I work with years ago said, Reuben, you're so Jewish in your thinking.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

What did they mean?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

It's a way of being. I think ethics in everyday life is one part. It being benevolent is another part of it. Embodying your ethics, related to the first point, just really embodying what you're talking about. Love of learning, interest in dialogue. You don't study Talmud alone. I mean, you can, but it's in conversation, it's in dialogue. And the idea is that it's in the mutuality, it's in the collaboration that something meaningful comes out, whether it's truth, whether it's refined understanding of ethics, whether it's better behavior, but it's in. It's in dialogue. So I think all that is part of who I am. My folks were atheists. I was an agnostic growing up. I wasn't bar mitzvahed. I didn't have the usual training, which had a weird benefit, which was that all my friends that were Christian, Catholic and Jewish got turned off really early to religion because of the way it was being practice then. This is the New York area in a particular time period, the 60s and the 70s, I did not get turned off because I didn't have it stuff down my throat. So then when I was on my search and starting, I guess in my teens, I read wildly and widely read, you know, Heschel and I read Aryeh Kaplan on Jewish meditation. I read all sorts of stuff. I had a dream once about Rabbi Schneerson. And so I had an openness. I read Daniel Matt's book on Jewish mysticism, Elie Wiesel. I just had a real opening because I wasn't turned off, which I consider a weird advantage.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, it's sort of an inversion of the average listener of this show and my own experience. Although on the whole, I am still grateful for my moderate evangelical upbringing. And I recognize there are a lot of listeners who are not, on balance, grateful for their upbringings, especially. Especially individuals who end up queer or women who feel a real strong call to ministry. There are some categories where you're unlikely maybe to have that or less likely to have that sort of overall gratitude. So I do have that overall gratitude. But I also recognize even within that, the well was poisoned against all kinds of things as sort of part of the. Part of the recipe of that upbringing. And maybe that's a nice way to talk about east and west, because I think basically an Eastern worldview was something that the well was poisoned beforehand. You know, before I ever read, like, I did have a Christian school, like when I was like a junior, a senior in high school, a guy who's now my friend Mark Mitchell was my AP English teacher, and he recommended that I read Shisaku Endo's book Silence. The Scorsese film was made from that book. And it's really struggling with East West. Endo's a Japanese Catholic and, you know, finds all these incompatibilities, he thinks. And so, you know, eventually I found my way to starting to think through those things. But obviously that was like a shock that a Christian teacher would recommend a book that had anything sort of like that to say. So for you, though, you said you read widely starting as a teenager. Is that when your interest in sort of, oh, can I put east and west together Began in a sort of a primordial form? Did it come later? What's the story there?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

It came when I was 18. I loved basketball and I wanted to be a professional basketball player till I was 18. But I had an experience, a kind of mystical experience. When I was 18. I was very competitive. I hit a basket with 10 seconds ago and we were up by one. And we're elated, the team, my teammates are elated. And then they hit a basket with five seconds to go and they're completely deflated. And I some. A strange calm descends upon me. I walk over to my coach, who's also my brilliant senior English teacher, and I tell him, tell them not to panic and just get me the ball. For those that know a little bit about basketball, we rolled the ball in so the clock didn't start counting down from five seconds until I touched the ball at mid court. It would be like my back was faced to you. Now the ball was thrown in over there. I catch it and I turn and I start dribbling up the court. The gym was a kind of monastery. Silent. It was like a Buddhist retreat. I didn't hear the thumping of sneakers. I didn't hear the breathing. I didn't hear the cheerleaders yelling. And I had no hope, no desire, no fear. And I sensed that the five seconds were up. I jumped in the air, I released the ball. And as I released the ball, my guy was going to me was six, two. His hands covered my face. So I just released it for a second. Then my hands are the. His hands are covering my face. And then I kind of lazily look up. I'm still in this place. In Japanese they call it mushin no mindedness. In Suzuki, Zen mind beginners. I'm sorry, Zen in Japanese culture talks about mushin no mindedness. And I look up at the scoreboard and it says, Woodmere 51 feels than 50. And the place erupts. But interestingly, I didn't care. I mean, I did care. My best friend said, my oldest friend said, you punch the air like you had defeated death. But then when I went in the locker room, I really didn't care. And I lingered and I stalled and everyone quickly showered and got on the bus. Because I wanted to grok. I want probably a California word from the 60s. I wanted to. I wanted.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Thanks to Jordan, thanks to Robert Heinlein for that one and thanks to Elon Musk for fucking it up for everybody.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Hi, Holly.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

If people don't know, by the way, the Grok AI is named after this term, grok, which is to like fully comprehend in this 60s, extreme, extremely sexual 60s sci fi novel by Robert Heinlein. What is it? Stranger in a Strange Land.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Michael Valentine Smith comes down and he's a fair witness. He listens to everything objectively and he's completely clear headed. So anyway, I'm stalling in the locker room, deeply engaged in two questions. What the heck happened? And how do I get back there? Because a portal had opened to a different state of consciousness and a different way of being. And from then on it burned out a lot of my typical male conditioning. Dan, you know, winning is everything. All the slogans I had imbibed as an athlete of that time, Vince Lombardi, Winning isn't, you know, the only thing. It's everything. All of that stuff I had imbibed and I knew there was another world. There's a surrealistic poet, Paul Elleward, poet and artist. And he says there is another world, comma, and it is in this one. So it wasn't about transcendence, a little bit like Judaism. It was about this worldly wisdom, not something outside of this world. And so I went off to college and I read wild wildly and widely in the humanities, art history, history, philosophy, religion. I majored in English literature. And I really wanted to answer those two questions. What had happened and how do I replicated. How do I get there? Again, I didn't answer the question. So four years didn't at college, didn't answer it. But the year after, I saw a little magazine in a health food store, I think in Brooklyn, New York, and it was about a Buddhist retreat. And I went and did it that Christmas 1977 or 78, and I was hooked.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

A whole world.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

I talk about this in the book Meditative Therapy that just came out. A whole world opened up and I was doing psychological training at the same time and went to graduate school and training to be a therapist. And so I had these parallel tracks. This was a lot different than it is now. There were these parallel tracks and people really kept them separate and really didn't want to cross boundaries or talk about it because one assumed that the other was psychopathological or deluded. And so I just happened to believe in both. And I kept studying both. And I had a wonderful medit, Wonderful mentor who unfortunately died. Joel Kramer. He was a great yogi in Bolinas, and some call him the sort of grandfather of American yoga. He was the yogi in residence at esalen Institute in 68 to 70. And Joel said to me, quote, don't force the synthesis before it organically emerges. And that's what I did. I just had a kind of purity of heart. I just kept studying both and I didn't care about what was going on around me. Therapists thought this Eastern stuff is pathological. Practitioners of Eastern stuff thought this Western stuff was inferior. I just kept studying both at the same time. And then things gradually coalesced. When I was in analytic training, I wrote a paper, 1982, I guess it was published in 85, called Meditation and Psychoanalytic Listening. And I said that Freud identified the ideal state of mind for therapists to listen. Evenly hovering or evenly suspended. Attention. You're alert, you're focused, you're poised, you're open. But he didn't know how to operationalize it, he didn't know how to train it. And I realized that's exactly what Buddhist meditation trains. The exact state of mind Freud pointed to, but didn't know how to train So I thought if therapists meditate, they would listen in a fundamentally deeper and better way.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, so much wonderful stuff in there to respond to. The first. Is that. And maybe this is. I can do this quickly. Maybe clinicians will find this most engaging more than the average person. But I noticed that your journey has been pretty decently mirrored in the overall journey of especially what we call second wave cognitive therapies. Right. So especially acceptance commitment therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. Act or act and dbt. And like, your idea that I should hold both of these things together and not synthesize them is literally the middle path approach in dbt. DBT does involve mindfulness. And in fact, DBT specifically apes. You know, Marshall Linehan, what's her last name. Yeah. Takes the beginner's mind concept from Zen and just literally says, yep, that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about a kind of radical openness to the world as we find it, free of as many of our preconceptions as possible. And just to put a little. Draw a little causation there for non clinicians, the reason that that matters, the reason that especially for dbt, which is developed for people with borderline personality disorder initially, so people who have a really hard time with the depth of emotional distress and experience that they go through, which is of a higher order of magnitude than the average person, that to be able to sort of get rid of previous conceptions that may have calcified that might be, you know, really kind of predetermining how you're going to interpret things in your life, to sort of let go of that and come with. A beginner's mind can be so powerful because it can allow certain aspects of your experience of the world to sort of speak to you and reach you in a way that you might be defensively keeping them at bay without realizing it. That's the first of three things I wrote down during. Your answer was just like, oh, wow. Your journey kind of maps pretty well onto the discipline as a whole.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

An important point when we get to pinning down meditative therapy, that the first stage of it, to me is a different way of listening. Listening to, not listening for. So it becomes really crucial, becomes crucial for me when I teach to really listen, not just to talk about it, but to really embody it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So here's one that we don't necessarily need to linger on, but I'm curious if you'll have something to say. You know, higher form of consciousness. Higher forms of consciousness. This lingo gets Thrown around a lot. It gets thrown around in multiple disciplines and areas. I find that there are sort of two categorical ways of talking about it. And I'm really into one and my flags fly up immediately with the other. The way that I am into it and feel like it's wonderful is when a higher form of consciousness is used in the moment to moment way. Like. Like when you're describing the experience at the basketball game. Very self serving story, Jeffrey, I gotta say. Just gotta give you a little bit of shit for that. The hero over here. No, but like you, you were describing that for a moment.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

What? Why do you say hero? We won. It wasn't me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You hit the final. You were the Steph Curry of that

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

warriors team coming through me wasn't me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Oh, okay. You're. You're okay. You. A little self emptying here. Okay, good. All right, well, that's nice. That's some nice Eastern style humility there. So you described sort of momentarily getting into this higher state of consciousness and then kind of wanting to go back and being really interested and intrigued by it and sort of desperate to figure out what was going on there. That is the way I find it really compelling to talk about higher states of consciousness. Briefly, I'll connect this to liberal Protestantism. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher, sort of the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology. This is basically what he described. He called it Christ consciousness. And he said this is the thing that Christians ought to be aiming for. It is a sort of moment by moment purity of heart, but almost purity of mind, heart, intention. He likens it to the best moments of a pastor giving a sermon where occasionally he experienced just pure goodwill toward his congregation, hoping that God was sort of speaking directly through him to them, you know, egoless kind of a thing. All that is wonderful. But sometimes people talk about higher forms of consciousness as if they have graduated and they are upperclassmen and other people are underclassmen and are still existing. And I think spiral dynamics is unfortunately a lot of times implicated in this because there's no way for people. I don't. I'm not gonna describe all of Ken Wilber's integral thought and spiral dynamics here to keep it quick. But you know, there's these different modes of being in the world. And although it explicitly says these are not better or worse, they fucking are better or worse. And everybody who talks about it knows it. And that's a little collective delusion, I think, of people who say, I'm not saying I'm Better than my family members who are still in this old evolutionary form of conflict resolution. Yes, you are. You are saying you're better acknowledge it. So that I don't know if you have something to say there about the sort of the two ways, or maybe there's more of that. Higher consciousness can be used. I'm curious if you have a different take on that or if you share my intuitions there.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Now, in Psychotherapy and Buddhism, I critique some of that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Your book, Psychotherapy and Buddhism, you're referencing a book you're an author of eight books, by the way. We're going to have a link to your Amazon page in the show. Notes for people who want to dive deeper. Go ahead.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, I talk about that in Psychotherapy and Buddhism. It often was a linear kind of male stage model. And one of the problems is I just don't think human beings work that way.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Anna Freud alerted me to this with the idea of developmental lines. So when you're in it, when we're in a building, we're on one floor. We're not on three floors at once. But that's not the way identity works. Someone could have a refined relationship to their emotions and be clueless about their body. They could be tuned into their body and be clueless about their interpersonal relationships. We have these different developmental lines. So the idea of this unified being. There are several problems with that old model. One is this unified idea of consciousness, but we don't work that way. And the second is, as my friend Joel Kramer, who unfortunately died, said. He said the idea of a Zen master to him, in a way, is a little silly. You don't master a path that never ends. It's a path you keep walking. A large part of my practice now, I'm still very interested in meditation, yoga, all that. But in recent years, it's expanded to a lot of Chinese internal practices, Qigong, martial arts. And it's an ongoing lifelong process of refinement and opening. It's not arrival at a specific point. So I don't think it works that way, number one. Number two, I think it starts to play tricks on the mind because people start to identify and this is what you were getting at. They have an identity connected to that. And then weirdly, it alienates them from themselves. It makes them feel secret shame when they don't live up to it and creates devaluation of other people. So for all sorts of reasons, I think it's to be. It's tricky and it's to be watched out for, really.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay. So let's get into. Let's talk about meditation. Right. So obviously meditation is sort of the beginning, the practice that led you down this road of sort of integrating these two sort of multiple books eventually coalescing in meditative psychotherapy this specific practice. But I think that like you have an interesting way, as I understand it, of thinking about meditation when we typically in either therapeutic or psychological context, I think the typical understanding is that meditation is about calmness. So if they were to put that into clinical terms, which people aren't doing unless they are a clinician, but they would say it's about reducing momentary distress, reducing anxiety as we experience it in the moment, you know, symptom reduction ultimately. Now people who spent more time meditating might not think that, right. This is maybe a lay understanding, but like. Or a phrase that like from my 90s and aughts upbringing, like being Zen about things which I think is maybe even having a little Gen Z comeback as a term like oh, I'm call, he's calm, he goes with the flow, he's Zen. That that's really what meditation sort of is linked to disabuse us of that, of that notion.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

When I teach meditation, and that's one of the hats I wear, I got Zen teacher training when I teach it, I say it's what happens is more and more when I lecture in public, I'll actually start with meditation, not start with a lecture. And sometimes it's pretty not what people are expecting. So we'll meditate at the beginning and then we'll get into the talk because I think they'll be in a different level of receptivity. They'll leave some of their daily life that happened right before the meeting. They'll leave it behind, they'll be more optimally receptive, et cetera, et cetera.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Which is the same principle as doing a difficult therapy session where you know you're going to be getting into some heavy. You, you start with some centering, you make sure that both parties are feeling kind of ready to face this. It's like it's kind of common sensical honestly.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

And so what off then I'll have people and I'll often have people write down how they're feeling before and especially if they're therapist write down how they feel beforehand we do a little practice and then write down how they feel after the meditation practice. It's actually yogic breathing and inevitably there's a real important difference. And they're often whatever, whether 25 or 85, they're people that have had life experience and have been around the block and yet they're, they're struck by how unaware, how aware they became of how unaware they had been. Which is a very important learning and meditation. Right. Very important insight. Okay, so then I'll, I'll have about seven people say, how do you feel? How do you feel? How do you feel? And it's all positive. And then either there'll be someone who has a neck, well, but my anxiety is worse, well, but my lower back hurts more. Or if I don't have that, I'll say, does any. Did anyone in the group have a very different experience? And inevitably one person will raise their hand and I say, may I get personal and ask you about it? Yes. And then what will come out is that whatever was present when they walked into the meditation is heightened. I'm not going to say worse, but heightened. And I'll say, can I ask you another personal question? Yes, you can ask me. And I say, how do you hold that? And often people don't know what I mean by that. How do you react to that? And often there's a deer in the head, like lights, look. And I'll say, did you judge it? And often, yes. And I'll say, you see, to me, meditation is not getting rid of anything. It's about being present with what is, but in a very different way, with a spirit of self friendship. So if you have anxiety or if you have fear or trepidation or lower back pain or a headache, meditation to me is not getting rid of it, it's being with it differently. And that's a different ballgame when that happens.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I love that I'm going to one place in particular. So a lot of my, basically my main focus in therapeutic work and also in the coaching work that I do is life after religious change. That is really kind of my bread and butter. And one of the biggest sort of concrete issues for people who have undergone religious change, especially from a more conservative sort of more all encompassing, certainty based form of religion, is learning to trust oneself, to adjudicate, to make choices, to be one's own ultimate authority. Right. These are obvious in existential circles. These are sort of obviously things that we have to do. But a lot of religious tradition, a lot of religious traditions sort of make a very straightforward point that no, you are not your own authority, God is your authority. Here's how you access God's authority. Usually it's mediated through these particular leaders and the scripture and whatever the way you're describing meditation reminds me of what I will often have to say, which is like, well, we will talk about how we know things. And I'm a cognitive existential therapist, so I do a lot of cognitive stuff and we talk about evidence and all that stuff. But I also say ultimately you're gonna grow in your trusting of yourself to do this by doing it. Like you're just gonna prove it to yourself. And, and then you'll also see that you've already been doing this. Like you did have a choice to not walk into that church and you kept walking to that church. Not if you're a kid with your parents, but, you know, whatever. We let clients know that they are already taking some control of their lives and that, you know, the solution or a beneficial thing would be to continue taking more and growing in that confidence. And that's what I thought of. The way you describe meditation is there is a. There's a real self efficacy, self trust, a kind of doing the thing over and over again to prove the thing to yourself element to it. I wonder if you could speak to that.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, you know, earlier when you said that I got to where I got through meditation, I didn't want to interrupt you. It's meditation and it's psychoanalysis. It's both. And where I may be different than a lot of people is the western side has really influenced me more. A lot of the people doing the integration, frankly, I don't feel their western side is that deep. And it's not that evolved really. The depths of it, the depths of working with the deepest kind of trauma, the depths of doing it over decades. It often is techniquey and then integrated with meditation, which is techniquey. And then it stays surface. It stays surface. And so it's really both. But the psychoanalysis also cultivated the self trust because it's done well, or any psychotherapy done well. It's about knowing what you feel and it's about greater self trust and it's about working through self mistrust so that you have refined capacity to rely on yourself. So it's really both traditions, both. You can think of them as kind of two, two streams flowing into body of water. Both of them have helped me with that quality with other people and with myself.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You know, it makes me think of William James, the philosopher and psychologist who, you know, delineated his, his big, his two big categories in the varieties of religious experience, which I talk about a little bit ad nauseam, are sick soul religion and healthy minded religion. And when I hear his description of healthy minded religion in my time and place, you know, 21st century America. I, I do think of this kind of like very la. Sort of Buddhism light, kind of like it's all there. Just tap into it, you know, and Freud and Martin Luther and a lot of the Christian and Jewish thinkers in tradition line up much more on the sick soul side. They're like, we start by recognizing the profound evil in the world. You know, we start by recognizing this evil, unavoidable suffering that we have. And obviously the Buddha also took individual suffering very seriously. I'm not trying to denigrate Buddhism itself, but the way that it can be done here, like when you're saying a lot of east west synthesizers in name are actually not synthesizing the west part of it very well. And I just think that kind of maps on to that sick soul versus healthy minded distinction. Like they're, they're just doing healthy minded maybe. Or does that feel like it connects for you?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, totally. One of the ways I realized this was that I had, you know, there weren't that many anthologies out at that time when I was first writing about this. And every one of them, I'm not, I don't want to mention names, putting anyone down, but every one of them was really about how the east helps the West. It was not really reciprocal. And so in psychotherapy and Buddhism, I jokingly talk about P&B. Two people in a relationship of whatever sort doesn't matter P and B. You don't have real intimacy if B is above P or if P is below B. And it's psychoanalysis and Buddhism was P, P and B. You have to. We need a close encounter of a new kind. I realized this years ago. There's not really. And I had a student of mine who's growing in prestige in these areas of integrating Buddhism and therapy and wrote me an email a few years ago student of mine some years ago when I taught at Union Theological Seminary course on psychoanalysis and Eastern thought. And she said there's nothing new under the sun to say. And I wrote back I couldn't. This isn't meditative therapy. I talk about this in the introduction. I could not possibly disagree with you more. We've only scratched the surface. And we've only scratched the surface because the dialogue is often not that emotionally intimate and it's often not that emotionally intimate because either we don't really know both traditions viscerally, as my grandmother would say in the kishkas in the guts. We don't know them both viscerally. We're studying them. We know about them. We have an acquaintanceship with them, but we don't know them really know them. That's number one. And number two, we this iconic book in the 70s, I think FitzJo Capra Dow of Physics. One of the questions I had about the book is he said, if you push the Eastern mystics all the way, they come out at the same side as the Western scientists pushed out to the edge. The interesting thing is the opposite. The interesting thing is not how is Buddha like Heisenberg or Einstein. The interesting thing is how they're different. There's a wonderful line that I love. Kent is one of the only trusted figures in King Lear. And Kent says, I'll teach you difference. I'll teach you differences. The interesting thing is the difference between Buddha and Freud, not the similarity. Because if it's a similarity, you're just seeking superficial parallels. But how they're different and challenge each other is not really revealed. The other interesting thing is there's still scandals. I wrote about this in 1998 and it's still not, I think, talked about deeply enough. There's still multiple scandals in Buddhist communities involving teachers stealing money from the community, substance abuse, exploiting non consenting, often female students. What is this about? Well, Western psychoanalysis, for example, could illuminate some of that. I have a chapter on that. Dancing with Desire in Meditative Therapy. Shining a psychoanalytic light on scandals in Buddhism. We could go in the other direction. We could talk about how Buddhism and meditation can enlighten therapy. Absolutely. But we often don't talk about how analysis or psychotherapy could enlighten Buddhists. And we need a dialogue that's mutually respectful, aware of differences, vulnerable, willing to learn from each other. Is surprised. There's a big conference at Harvard in 1994 that I was a part of. Healing the Suffering Self, a dialogue among psychoanalysts and Buddhists. And I listened and it was the same thing. It was just never the twain really was meeting. They'd have a famous analyst presenting and a famous Buddhist and the twain never met. There was never really great cross pollinating dialogue.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Can you give us an example of something you have read or heard or come across that does kind of do that hard work of, of letting each tradition speak to the other? I totally understand what you're saying in the abstract and I'm pretty sure I agree. But it might be helpful to get an example or an example that you think misses the mark would be interesting too.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Very, very, very little. I try to do it in all my work. And a Man who died that I thought was doing very interesting work, Jack Engler, I think, tried to do it too. He knew Pali and he knew Sanskrit and he was a Buddhist teacher and he'd gotten some psychoanalytic training, so he was looking at both. One of the interesting things is Buddhism does not have a developmental psychology that's powerful, doesn't have a theory of development.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And that to me is like, this is important for me personally and it is important for every one of my religious change clients. Right. Epistemology shows up. It always shows up. How do I know what I know and how do I know that I know it? And what counts as evidence and what counts as confidence? And you know, in what ways was I, have I been encouraged to think I could have certainty that is actually impossible? And in what ways can I have more assurance where I was maybe told there's no way of having any sense of, you know, it's like kind of getting that recalibrated, right?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Where do I need to let go of certainty so I can be graced by surprise?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Exactly, exactly. So that's been really important. And there are a few. Like, as I try to sort of navigate rethinking what I was getting given in my faith tradition, there are certain sort of non explicitly faith related, like more scientific items that I find myself using them sort of as anchors because I think they're pretty, just non negotiable. And so they help me kind of figure out, all right, there's a solid footing. So things like the universe is 14 billion years old, it's not 6,000 years old. Like that's like non negotiable. And certain things will flow from that. So that's, that's helpful for me. And I would put developmental psychology now we might not know. Like, like I don't think we have complete knowledge of human development from a psychosocial developmental perspective. But the, the broad outlines of the difference between a 13 year old and a 53 year old, I think are about at that level of the universe is 14 billion years old. Like we have to take this shit seriously. We just know that people at different developmental stages are gonna respond to the same stimuli, patterns, situations, whatever, in really different ways. And that, that is appropriate. You know, I have a five year old and a two year old, so this is inescapable for me right now. I'm constantly thinking, okay, what does he, he's five, what does he understand and what does the two year old understand and what do I and his mom understand? So like, you know, all that stuff that I do think that's a great example of, like if there is none of that in. In Eastern thought. Okay, let's get to work. Because that seems like something that we have genuinely to offer here.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, exactly. And it's true in reverse. It's true in reverse. One of the things I say in psychotherapy and Buddhism is that Buddhism is psycho. Let's start with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is four sided and Buddhism is nearsighted. There's a chapter called Beyond Self Psychoanalytic and Buddhist visions of the Self. Because what I realized as I was struggling because. And this is where someone like Wilbur at first was really helpful because his model purported. The early model in no boundaries, for example, this. The spectrum of light, you know, that were. That all these different traditions exist on different spectrums. And from schizophrenia to enlightenment. At first it was reassuring because it places stuff in categories and you can study this rich array of things from psychosis to enlightenment and have a grid to sort of put it in. But then when I realized the Anna Freud thing, it became more complicated that we're on these different levels at once. So we're not in this unified stage. Okay, but so meditation has enormous amount to give to analysis, for example, because it refines moment to moment alertness in a very different way. So western analysis is like a group of people holding a camera with a wonderful lens and their hands are shaking, but they're all in a row. One of the chapters is on this is called Deepening Listening the marriage of Buddha and Freud. So imagine a group of analysts and they're next to each other and they're all shaking a little bit. You might not notice the shaking if they were all. If they're all shaking. But the vision they're going to get through the camera is going to be blurry because they're shaking. So meditation could calm the mind. The observer is then coming from a different perspective and then the vision you

[Dr. Dan Koch]

get is different just to make clear that analogy. So the idea there might be. Westerners in some ways have built better cameras, but Easterners in a lot of ways have taught camera people to chill the fuck out and sit still so that they can take the picture. And so there are things to be learned about. Hey, you teach me how to get. Stay still. And here, let me show you what we figured out with our camera.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yes, yes. For example, I have a story and I have these two books that just came out. Psychotherapy case studies exploring the prison, escaping the prison you didn't know you ran and Meditative therapy So the cases. Sometimes it gets confusing to me because I have Zenish and meditation stories in both. It's not just in the meditative therapy. One is very case oriented, the psychotherapy case studies, and the other one is case oriented, but also more theory, meditative therapy. So there's a story about a woman who says, I don't want to go to Tibet. I mean, I want to go to Tibet. And then she says to me, is that a Freudian slip? And I just look at her and we both smile. And then she says, well, I want to go to Tibet. I want to learn Tibetan Buddhism. But also, I'm not sure all the motivation's kosher because my boyfriend really wants me to do it, and some of it's coming from him. So I imagined her with a Buddhist teacher. That teacher would not tend to say, what do you make of I don't want to go? I mean, I want to go. It would seem like a perceptual glitch, as if I'm walking and I trip a little bit, and it's not meaningful. It's just that I trip that these things happen to me. It was potentially meaningful. Not definitely meaningful, but potentially. In other words, you can't look in an area if you don't have the category. The east doesn't have the category of slips of the tongue the way Freud did. So each system is going to be able to see certain things and not based on the questions they ask, the categories they have, et cetera. And people act like they're Watts. The word we used to use was Watts. Lines to God, Watts, lines, the truth. They were subjectively created systems that arose out of the consciousness of particular individuals. And Buddha was never self analyzed, and Buddha was never analyzed, and Freud was never analyzed. They both did self analysis. But as the older analysts used to joke, the problem with self analysis is countertransference. In other words, as they say in the yoga sutras, we can't see what we can't. The eye can't see itself. I can't see what I can't see. I need the mirror of you to see it. The mirror, as Krishnamurti might say, the mirror of dialogue, to be able to see it. I have a line that's somewhere here from Bruce Lee. And it's about real mastery is in relationships. It's not just solitary meditation, because some of your conditioning only comes up in relationships.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, it's kind of a nice bridge into something that I wanted to ask you. Coming back to the question of meditation. So again, sort of Coming from a generic Western understanding of this. And this was even sort of my understanding for a long time. I took a class on Buddhism in undergrad. I was a philosophy major. I don't have real studying, but I knew a bit more than your average person. I know the four noble truths of Buddhism, or I probably could recognize them in a multiple choice test. And. And the idea that, like, you know, attachment brings suffering and life is suffering because life inevitably includes these attachments, which then we feel entitled to certain things attached to certain things. And the idea with meditation is to reduce our attachment and maybe this is just the sort of Western mindset filling in and therefore to reduce our suffering. Right, That's. That's kind of how I understood it for decades.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Have you ever really thought about the first or second noble truth?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, so you have to remind. I don't remember the order. You have to remind me.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Everywhere there's dukkha. Dukkha is a polling word and a Sanskrit word. You know, it's arm out of join, a wheel out of socket.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

This is life is suffering. Right? That's number one.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Satisfactory suffering, incompletion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A great, great, great, great, great, great yoga teacher. I studied with TKV Desiccara, who unfortunately is no longer with us. When I asked him about this, he said it also means bad duka, bad place or bad space, which is interesting. And then I said to him, so is there a good space in Sanskrit? Pali sukha, It's a propitious or a good or open space. Okay, so that's another way it's understood. This is not the way Buddhists often talk about it. But in terms of a scholar of Sanskrit and the languages in the yoga tradition, it was a broader definition. Okay, so it would be more accurate to say, in my opinion, everywhere there's suffering and joy, not everywhere. See, right away, to me, that's already a very particular worldview.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, so you're saying. So first of all, you translated from life is suffering to everywhere there is suffering. That's the little grammatical thing. And then you're saying, well, really a more truthful statement. So like noble truth 1A is everywhere there is suffering and joy. There's sort of two sides of the coin. Now you're sounding like very existential here, Jeffrey.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

I mean, who said I was?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, I know, I know you are. I know. I'm just saying, now you're getting straight into the like, yeah, it's a package deal. We get both sides. That's a given. You know, kind of A thing?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah. See, daoism knows this. To have high, to have low. You. So originally when Buddhism came from 5th century BC when it came to China, there was native Daoism there as well as other traditions, maybe shamanism, Daoism. But somehow this dropped out of Buddhism, this awareness. You can't have one side and it runs into a problem and it influences the scandals. Because what is one of the key ideas in Buddhism? Ceaseless change. But for a daoist, you wouldn't have ceaseless change without ongoing continuity. Right. And so one of the ways you could look at scandals is its character. And psychoanalysis defines character, or one analyst described character as it's a stable organization with a slow rate to change. Once you have that idea, then unless someone transforms their character. Sophocles said this and Heraclitus said this character is destiny. One's going to keep acting out or living in ways that are not skillful, that are not wise, you see. But if everything changes and I'm a teacher and I've been involved in a scandal, well, the next moment there'll be something else. Yes. And you will continue to look at women or look at money or look at substances in a similar way until you don't. Until you work with that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, so now we're at spiritual bypassing. Right. And sort of the different ways that spiritual bypassing can show up in different traditions. So in Christianity it's rare. I guess the, the closest thing you'd have in Christianity would be. And Jeffrey, you, you probably saw this on my website because I know you looked into things a little bit like spiritual abuse is my, is my research area. Right. So included in my dissertation and

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

the

[Dr. Dan Koch]

main article that the scale is published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. I talk a little bit there. I expanded in the dissertation about forms of spiritual abuse that have been documented in the peer reviewed literature in other religions. So Zen Buddhist centers has gotten the most ink and investigation in the United States anyway, in Canada and stuff. But it can exist anywhere. Anywhere there are power dynamics and authority and all this kind of a thing. Yeah, because the building blocks are there. But so you get a kind of a version of this with Christian ministers who have had a scandal, a falling away, and then there's sort of a short period of time goes by, they quote, unquote, engage in, listen to wise counsel, they do a few things that get wrapped up in sort of scriptural language and then they're put back on their pedestal. But they're not really leaning into the impermanence of every moment, the sort of constant change. I think that it shows to illustrate how they're actually different psychologically. The claim that's being made in the Christian context is, yes, this man had a flaw in his character, but otherwise he's turned towards God. We've solved the problem. You know, we've gotten in there, we've removed the cancer and patched him up, and now his character is intact. So it wouldn't be a ignoring of character. It would be a. No, no, no, we, we know he's good. He's still got that good Christ character y' all came to know and love. And he's fit to teach you where you're saying in some Eastern, you know, religious context and stuff like that, you could, you could bypass the real work that needs to be done by reference to the constant changeability of things like, well, he's not going to be the same guy he was last week because everything is impermanence. And so there's sort of like different ways of using concepts to bypass what really has to happen here to solve it.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, and actually Judaism has an interesting way of looking at this, which is the idea of repent. Repentance as I understand it. I'm not a scholar of Judaism, but as I understand it, it's feeling remorse for what I did did to you, it's explaining why I did to you what I did to you. And it's showing you in a similar situation that I am operating differently. And you need those three ingredients. You need to actually embody it in action. So we travel over similar land and I'm different, and I'm different than I was before. And so sometimes a great dream researcher, Monty Ulman, that I studied with said, there are two parts of us that don't lie. The rest of our being can lie. Dreams and the body. So the problem with words and you know, is self deception and lack of self awareness. And we can, I'm sorry, and it can mean nothing or it can be very sincere. It depends on one's intention and one's level of awareness.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Let's get directly into the existential psychology stuff. So one of the areas where I really see that in what I understand of your work, you are assuming that sort of the type of existential disruption that is generally a predicate for this kind of existential therapy, or at least in an ideal sort of scenario, series of events, is people have some experience that puts them into more direct and immediate and destabilizing contact with something like their death, their lack of certainty this comes up a lot because of religious change, especially out of Christianity or within different forms of Christianity, because there's so much knowledge and propositional, doctrinal content in Christianity. So it could be a loss of certainty or very strong confidence. People sort of waking up to, you know, as Yalam would put it, like, the terrible weight of their individual freedom and choices. You know, the way that morality, like, what might have been a pretty pure and consistent, internally consistent fabric of morality in which they were raised. Like, let's say they were raised evangelical in the United States, and now they've been watching what's been going on in Minneapolis and they see all the old evangelicals in their life, like, on the quote, unquote, like, pretty sure they're on the wrong side of this, you know, so this kind of existential crisis, disorientation, whatever, like, this is really, really common in my work. I'd love to give you the remaining time to sort of say, okay, so how does your use of meditation. Because this is a different thing than I do regularly. How does that sort of meet that existential moment? I want to hear more about that.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

To understand what I'm going to say, I have to just briefly summarize. Meditative therapy. It has three elements. One is a different way of listening, and that involves quieting and focusing the mind with any kind of awareness. Discipline. It could be Western prayer. It's not just east. We often think it's east. But it's any genuine, sincere discipline that quiets and focuses the mind.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, for me, my most common version of that has been centering prayer, which is a Christian form. But it's very meditative.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It could be centering prayer. So we quiet and focus the mind. What meditation lacks is it's not focused on meaning. It's focusing on experiencing what you're undergoing, but not decoding or translating the meaning. Now, to be clear, sometimes that happens automatically. In the mystic literature, they call it gnosis. It's kind of a direct knowing of the universe. In Zen, it's called prajna wisdom. The immediate, like an epiphany. The immediate knowing of something that's true.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You might call it grokking.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

You might call it groggy. That's right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You wouldn't anymore. But you used to maybe call it groggy.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

That's why I loved it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Speaking of poisoned. Well, okay, go on.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

So, number one is a different way of listening. Number two, when you are listening to something and encountering it, you try to figure out what it means. You Try to understand it. That's stage two. And that Western therapy is broadly defined or wonderful at. That's their bread and butter. Their bread and butter is not quieting and focusing the mind before the session. It's not. Okay. Stage three is a different kind of relationship. I call it liberated intimacy. That's stage three. So heightened listening based on drawing from east and west, decoding or translating meaning and cultivating understanding. That's stage two of meditative therapy. And stage three is liberated intimacy, different kind of relationship. And that involves heightened empathy, self reflectiveness, creativity and playfulness. I'll try to illustrate each very quickly with a story. Okay, so the empathy. Empathy is crucial. Okay, so years ago, I treated a man labeled paranoid schizophrenic by the psychiatrist who sent him to me. We're in a session and let's say he was sitting over here, and I'm sitting here and I'm facing him, and beyond me is a window and then a street that's decently traveled. This was on Long island in New York area. And he says at the beginning of the session, I feel dead like a mannequin. And he looked inert and lifeless like a mannequin in a store. And then he said to me, for some reason, I have the fantasy of running past you, crashing into the window, going outside, crashing into a car. Okay. Now many therapists would look at that from the outside, which is not empathy. Empathy is understanding something from within the other person's frame of reference. What does it mean to them? Not I like it, I don't like it. Not they're self destructive. What does it mean to them? Because I didn't know what it meant to him. So then I started walking through that exercise internally. So he's dead like a mannequin. He wants to crash into the window. He wants to crash into a car. So I said, I wonder if crashing into the window and crashing into the car would create sensation. And sensation, even with the risk of cutting yourself or even dying, would make you feel alive. And feeling alive was preferable to feeling dead like a mannequin. He immediately brightened up and that was. Was on target. So that's what I mean by empathy. It's the steadfast. It's Dante's Divine Comedy. It's Virgil going into hell with Dante. And you see now, now to circle back, if we're doing a little bit of Western therapy and we know something and we love Eastern thought and we bring it together, that's not what I'm talking. It's not walking in the Hill with Dante. No.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And Emmy Van der. And I'm reading through her kind of clinician book about doing existential therapy. So her framing is always on my mind these days. But she would say one of the jobs. One way of saying the entire job of the existential therapist is to help a client understand their way of being in the world so that they can figure out how they want to change their way of being in the world. And that empathy is required. You cannot, you can't help them map themselves. If you're not using your training skill, you know, your sort of momentary presence in the room with your client to attend to their experience and their internal processes the best that you can access them through what you're seeing and what you're hearing from them.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Exactly, exactly. So it starts with that. Okay, the self reflectiveness is. We often have a model, like a physician patient model, that the patient comes in. They're independent of us. Whatever's wrong with them is in their body. This isn't the contemporary psychoanalytic, contemporary relational view that there's no such thing as an infant. As Winnicott said, there's only an infant with particular caregiving units. Grandparents, parents, three people, two people, one. And I joke in one of my books that there's no such thing as a patient. There's a particular person with a particular therapist who's going to manifest differently, both of them with different people. The therapist will be different with different people, and so will the client, patient and Alison, whatever. Okay. So thus part of the work is a great self reflectiveness about one's own role in the work, one's own interference with the work. If there's interference, the influence of one's own theories on what's happening, the influence of one's own being on how safe the other person feels, how much they open up. So a different level of self reflectiveness, like empathy, this can be misunderstood. Oh, yeah, I'm self reflective. But I mean a real deep, thoroughgoing ability to look at your own role in the whole process, not step outside. I guess Durkheim, I think Durkheim wrote about this in one. Heinrich Racker, an analyst, wrote about this. The well, analyst and the sick patient. It's not that. But we're in this thing together, which is very existential. We're in this being in time together. Yeah, very much.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Briefly, Van der Zen would say, if we are right in the basic philosophy that leads us to existential therapy in the first place, which is like, this is the human experience being thrown into this World with specific limitations, limited language with which to interpret our experiences. Like, if that's everybody's experience, then that is also the therapist experience in the world. And, like, we ought to be open to what we're gonna learn about ourselves and the world through our clients as well. Like, we are not. We are in process as well. And that. That it's a kind of a selling out of the entire process to just sort of treat from a perch. We are there to get our hands dirty.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. So the several ingredients of the third stage, liberated intimacy, greater empathy, self reflectiveness, and then creativity and playfulness. So years ago, a boy rushes into the session. Let's say the door was over there, and my chair was here. And there was a little indentation where I had some books, and I had my phone and wall of books. And he runs into the session ahead of me, and he sits in my chair right here. So I get in his chair over there. So I go. And he says. And he picks. Oh, he picks up the phone, my phone. And I say, what's going on? And he says, I'm calling his mother. And so I played out the sort of fantasy scenario that I thought he was setting up. I said, if he talks about me, I'll never trust him again. And he starts giggling, and he goes on and on playing this thing out. And finally when he sees that I've gotten it, he then says, okay. And he puts the phone down and he goes over there. He's about 9 or 10. And he sits in his seat and I come back to mine. So it's an ability to play with stuff. To Bruce Lee would call it be like water flowing depending on the exigencies of the situation. Not by the book, but you flow with the situation and you respond to the situation. You're a jazz improviser, not a customs official. A customs official knows ahead of time, oh, this is too large. It can't be brought into the airport. A jazz improviser is grounded in the fundamentals, but can spring from them in the moment and be creative.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You answered these questions, Questions, you know, this question with these. These three phases, like talking to clinicians, basically sort of like you're. You're. You're describing it from your perspective as the therapist. At the same time, I recognize there's tons of, like, same answer to the client. Like, a lot of it is overlap. How would you differently sort of shade your answer around how this approach deals with these existential crises from the perspective of the client? Is it really the same thing? Or are there differences of emphasis or anything like that?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Well, one of the key things in my work that I think that people have two problems. They have whatever brought them, and they have whatever way you could call their practice of self cure, the way they cope with that. And it's a whole subsystem or meta system. And so often what I'm trying to do is see what the deeper problem is, trauma, wounding, whatever it is, and then see the system that they set up to cope with that, and then see if we can find another way. And so often when they. When they sort of learn that, then they start to work with themselves differently. They learn the value of quieting down, looking clearly, like in the meditation example before, not assuming bad experiences are bad, but trying to understand what they mean. They, in a way, learn a different way of being and a different way of being with themselves and being with other people. I mean, that's one way I would look at it. The second way is something I said on a podcast during COVID a few years ago. Someone was asking me of meditation in everyday life. And I said, in meditation, you have a chosen object, whatever it is. It could be prayer, it could be a mantra, it could be your breath, your mind wanders, you catch it and you come back. So in daily life, the way to think of it is we're doing an activity. We're having this. This dialogue right now, and then something else comes up in our mind, we get pulled away, and then we come back to the primary activity. So in daily life, when people. For example, I've been interviewed recently, last week, about four times, about the mental health effects of the horrible news, which is really weighing everybody's feeling, you know, besieged.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. We are recording this on January 26, two days after the most recent citizen murder.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So one way is when we start to get ahead of ourselves, when we start to panic, when we start to get flooded, to see if we can come back to what is it we're doing, we're talking to a child, we're writing an email, we're doing Pilates, we're doing whatever it is we are, we're serving someone, we're serving food at a church. Whatever we're doing to come back to what we're doing, from our head wandering away to other things, that's the way to think about meditation in everyday life.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, and that ties back maybe this. We'll have to end it here for time. But this idea of spiritual bypassing, if you were raised or had come to engage in Some form of spiritual bypassing. So you're using something about that faith tradition, some language, some practice as a way of sort of avoiding, you know, in a lot of cases, avoiding precisely the kind of distress and sense of conflict that has now become inescapably present to you because of an existential crisis of some sort. Like it is a, it's sort of a direct action way of, you know, or it's like an opposite action, I guess, to take another idea from dbt. It's sort of like, okay, that's how I was taught to do it. I'm going to actually turn 180 degrees around and I'm going to not bypass. I'm going to look at it as clearly and honestly as I can. And I will just say that that turn, that embracing of sort of radical honesty, radical openness to reality as we find it is just practically. I don't have studies to back this up. I have my own life and my clients lives. It's fucking powerful, man. It is its own. It's like Mario hitting the flower and being able to throw fireballs. It is just like a power up. There is something about, there's a natural sense. And I'm sure there are edge cases of people for whom it does not prove to be empowering. But that really is my clinical and personal experience is that looking at it like, okay, I'm gonna stop avoiding, I'm gonna stop turning away, I'm gonna stop papering over. I'm gonna attend radically to what's going on and be totally honest with myself about it, man. Like sometimes we're off to the races at that point.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Any final thoughts for us, Jeffrey, before we wrap up? We're gonna have, we'll have a link to your, your website, drjeffreyrubin.com as well as a link to your Amazon author page so people can see your books. Anything you'd like to leave us with.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

So a few years ago I was lecturing on one of my books, the Art of Flourishing at my mother's education center in Florida. And I had my papers spread out and my mother said, you're going to give them some hope. Right? And these were people my parents age. And I said, ma, things are worse than we believe and there's more hope than we know. And I believe both of those things. They're much worse than we believe. If we were ever at any meetings with governmental officials, they're worse than we believe. I really believe that very deeply. And there's more hope than we know I also believe really deeply. So face the despair, go into hell with Dante. Be there for other people as much as you can. And also be open to the light and be open to where hope lives and see if we can nourish hope.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That was almost. That was almost spiritual wisdom there. Thank you for that, Jeffrey. Appropriate for this show. All right. Well, dude, this was a great conversation. I am so, so grateful to have met you and. And started having it. Hopefully we can. I want to hang out in person someday, so hopefully we can make

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

other

[Dr. Dan Koch]

side of the country. I live in Bellingham, Washington.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Okay. Okay.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But I am going to the 4th Annual World Conference on Existential Therapy in June, which is in Denver. It's halfway. So if you decide to go to that thing, then we can hang out, have some beers. Okay?

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Okay.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Sounds good. Thank you so much, Jeffrey. What a great conversation, man. Have a good day.

[Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin]

Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks, Sam.