This is a list of the blogs on ProfessorEd.com about Zen Dharma Recovery and using meditation to help heal mental health symptoms. Click on the name and it will take you to the blog.

This is an account of how I first learned the meditation and Zen Dharma would be helpful for anxiety and the techniques I developed for meditation and anxiety. I have had different anxiety disorders over the years. Panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and social phobias being the three most prominent.

First Attempt Transforming Anxiety, A Meditation Gateway to Zen Dharma Recovery

A version of First Attempt Transforming Anxiety is at Zen Peace Maker Seniors Dharma Talks

This video talks about the use of meditation and Zen Dharma for a whole range of mental symptoms, Meditation and anxiety, meditation and voice hearing. Meditation and anger. Meditation and depression.

Zen Dharma Recovery Mental Health Video

This is an audio presentation of various techniques of silent body oriented meditation helpful with anxiety, voice hearing, depression. I am preparing a research paper on the successful successful outcomes of the use of this guided meditation with people diagnosed with “serious mental illnesses.”

Mental Health Zen Dharma Recovery Guided Meditations Audio

An important Zen Dharma understanding of the relationship of false self notions and mental symptoms like anxiety. And a suggested meditation to deal with false self notions and symptoms like anxiety, depression and so on.

Objectifying Self

Discussion of equanimity in the face of pleasure or pain and meditation for mental symptoms like anxiety, depression, voice hearing. Equanimity or balance is a Zen Dharma teaching.

Universe Contracts,Expands

This is a description of meditation using a breath technique very helpful in coping with anxiety. The Zen Dharma of not-knowing is discussed.

Zen Not Knowing Ujaya Breath Meditation Anxiety Recovery

Ujaya breath can be used as a method of letting go of mental boxes for any “symptom” or extreme mind body state. This letting go of mental boxes is Zen not-knowing or thinking non-thinking as Dogen puts it. For the bipolar thought patterns of mental boxes with which it can be used see Bipolar Mental Health Recovery Patterns>

External link to my good friend Will Hall’s excellent radio show Madness Radio. This is an interview with Ed Daigu Knight, PhD, CPRP. He discusses his use of Zen Dharma to recover from schizophrenia.

Buddhist Meditation and Schizophrenia

A discussion of applying Zen Dharma Recovery to Schizophrenia mental health recovery can be found at Zen Dharma Schizophrenia Mental Health Recovery, Hearing Voices Coping
I am a religious and spiritual practitioner and Steward. My principle practice is Zen Dharma. I give presentations and write here as a member of the Staten Island Zen Community where I am a senior student of Sensei and Zen Priest Ken Tetsuji Byalin. SIZC is a member sangha of The Zen PeaceMakers Sangha.

This page is devotional service as a Zen Dharma practice maintained for free by Daigu. If you wish to support this work please buy books and other stuff from Daigu’s Amazon.com bookstores ( Amazon Dharma Recovery Pro Bono Support Bookstore ) He also has a a few but growing number of his own art and comic material available at his Zazzle store Shop Supporting Pro Bono Work.

Daigu does pro bono work other than this page. He for example advises on scientific recovery research and teaches staff recovery at the John W LaVelle Preparatory Charter School on Staten Island. He must travel from Colorado to do this.This school founded and run by his teacher Ken Tetsuji Byalin is a college prep school and NOT a treatment school. Sensei Byalin’s principle Zen Dharma devotional service is running the prep school. He is a reformed PhD clinical social worker as he occasionally says. 40% of its students come from special education and now instead of a dead end they have a chance at going to college. Better than 80% will recovery who are psychiatrically labeled kids and if they are not prepared they will not be self supporting. They will be recovered and unskilled.

What is Zen?Click
Zen and Zen Dharma has a long history going back going back to Mahakasyapa. On Mahakasyapa When Buddha held up a rose Mahakasyapa smiled. Buddha responded, “I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvana, the true form of the formless, the subtle dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahākāśyapa.” Buddha said this to no one else. The Zen Dharma was entrusted to Mahakasyapa and a chain of teachers and disciples reaching down to in my case my teacher Ken Tetsuji Byalin.
In Sanskrit the word is dhyana meaning in general concentration. On Dhyana Or better perhaps powerful or strong concentration. The meditator becomes “one” with the “object” of meditation or concentration. Take a green vase. Becoming one simply means that the ideas “here is an object” “Green vase” “vase” ‘green” and the sense of otherness are let go of.
The Chinese did not pronounce dhyana as did the Indians so the word became “chan” and the Japanese did not pronounce the word “chan” the way the Chinese did so it became “zen”. One needs to be very careful how one uses this. One does not in a simple minded way become “one” with depression thoughts like “this will last forever” . One does not become one with mania energy. One does not become one with a “voice” in one’s mind ear. One must guard against these things. But that is not do difficult as we shall see over the next few months in future posts. One needs practice Zen Dharma with care. In western psychology this is called flow. “Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” Wiki on Flow Psychology

What is Dharma?

The word has several meanings. Generally it means phenomenon. In a narrow sense it means the ethics or life style and meditation techniques the Buddha taught to free himself and us from suffering. So Zen Dharma is the use of strong concentration of being “one” with what one is paying attention to. Or perhaps non-separation. Dhamma or Dharma in Buddhism has two primary meanings:
the teachings of the Buddha which lead to enlightenment (The Universal law of nature)
the constituent factors of the experienced world (The characteristic of elements).”
See What is Zen Dharma? How Related to Mental Health Recovery

Ed Daigu Knight PhD, CPRP speaks from the experience of DOING this work. He is currently involved in a research project on mindful approaches to mental “symptoms” like anxiety, mania, “voices”, depression with Alex Young MD, a psychiatrist at UCLA on an NIMH grant and with Mary Jane Alexander,PhD at Nathan Kline Institute also on an NIMH grant. NONE OF THIS IS TREATMENT ADVICE. I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR LICENSED CLINICIAN. IF YOU WANT treatment CONSULT A DOCTOR.

Zen Dharma heals.

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