Are you interested in joining the Two Year Online Buddhist Psychology Training Programme
Yes
What Buddhist sangha, if any, do you belong to? If none, write "none".
Jodo Shinhu Otani ha
Are you a
Student, Meditation practitioner, Academic teacher
Your history with Buddhism/Psychology & interest in this network:
I was ordained in the Jōdo Shinshū tradition (tokudo, 2013) and have practised and taught within it since. I lead a virtual sangha of around fifty-five members, and I am currently a student in the Certificate in Shin Buddhism at the Institute of Buddhist Studies.
My research is in Yogācāra, which I read as a transcendental phenomenology of experience rather than a metaphysical idealism. That reading is what brings me to Buddhist psychology. The Yogācāra account of the ālaya-vijñāna, of the seeds and habits that quietly shape how a world shows up for someone, strikes me as a description of the same territory a therapist works in, arrived at by a different route and with a soteriological aim: āśraya-parāvṛtti, the turning of the very basis of experience. I am a member of UKABS and IABS, and I am founding Instituto Neurodharma in Madrid, a lay academic association for the study of Yogācāra, Madhyamaka and Abhidharma.
On the practice side, I work with Focusing in the Gendlin lineage, and I have been developing a method I call ANTARĀ that holds Focusing and Yogācāra together: the felt sense as a way into how experience is being constructed, moment by moment. I also write on contemporary mind, including the extended mind thesis and what artificial intelligence does to our assumptions about where a mind begins and ends, in Lion's Roar and Buddhistdoor Global.
What I am looking for in this network is company in that work: people who take both the doctrinal precision and the clinical reality seriously, and who can tell me where a phenomenological reading of Yogācāra helps in the room and where it does not.
