Zen Beyond Mindfulness: Using Buddhist and modern psychology for transformational practice by Jules Shuzen Harris (Shambhala Publications) presents some very intricate Buddhist psychological concepts interwoven with a Western psychological model of Mind Body Bridging.

Shuzen Harris is a Zen teacher and dharma heir of Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara and a psychotherapist trained in the MBB approach of psychotherapy. In Zen Beyond Mindfulness, he brings together an in-depth exploration of a select set of concepts from the Abhidhamma and the psycho-educational framework of MBB. The approach, ironically, flips the usual East-West weave by setting the Abhidhamma as the cognitive process with the MBB as the body-centered, experiential approach. It takes a moment to see that are the infrastructure of Shuzen Harris’ model.

With the glut of Buddhist-W.Psychology integration books, there is a risk that the essence of either or Buddhism or Western psychology becomes a makeover, not a crossover. Zen Beyond Mindfulness manages to avoid the makeover; yet, it perhaps sets up strong boundaries between the two that is not as easily bridged as one would hope. Still, the book offers an interesting start point that is rarely seen in this genre.

Suzen Harris’ teachings on the skandhas are insightful, definitively showing them as the formation of consciousness by which we connect with our inner process rather than heaps we should be diving into. Tying in the five common factors, he draws a rich picture of how we relate to the world through our ego, patterns, and desires.

Understanding the dynamic of skandhas and common factors is an important system for the beginning practitioner whose impulse in seeking out the Path is to find a way to relate to the external world. Granted, it’s often because we have a misunderstanding that by knowing how we relate to the external world, we can then control that world and by extension, control our reactivities to it. It’s the bugbear of all psychotherapies – and Buddhist practice.

Zen Beyond Mindfulness then incorporates the twelve links of dependent origination as the granular view of the creation of our cyclic patterns of suffering. Of particular note for me was his description of ignorance which moves the term away from lack to a process we can shift through observation:

Normally ignorance means a lack of knowledge, but in Buddhism, it is closer to “ignoring.” p. 51

Once we enter the six realms, I was wishing we had an interactive map that showed the interactions of the skandhas, common factors, dependent origination, and now, the six realms! However, the book is meant to be read slowly, allowing consolidation of the concepts and not as a “quick give me the answer to my woes!” For the sake of transformation, I appreciated the time Shuzen Harris took with each chapter: laying out the model, showing its connection to fundamental Buddhist teachings, tying it back to the previous models, and moving it forward.

Having laid the foundations, we are moved into the Mind Body Bridging model, which in my reading seems to be a way of using the Body Scan with written reflections that explore our assumptions and self-made rules of how the world should serve us. The I(dentity)-System was developed by physician Stanley Block and is intended to uncover that ways the identity we developed to survive developmentally have become obstacles to healthy relationships. The I-System overactivity becomes the cause of our symptoms of distress.

The latter half of Zen Beyond Mindfulness is the reflective exercises (many written) that open us to the ways we get in our way. I found it hard to link back to the Buddhist framework so carefully set up, although it is there in the chapters themselves. Experientially, it takes a bit of (non)doing. In Shuzen Harris’ own words, some of the concepts may be artificial delineations of this-that and sometimes those divisions can be misleading for readers less familiar with Buddhism’s core foundation of emptiness/sunyata.

I can certainly recommend the book for practitioners (zen or not) who want to spend some introspective time exploring their edges. However, the words “beyond mindfulness” beg the question of anything being “beyond” in the Buddhist worldview – except just plain going beyond. Svaha!