Judyth O. Weaver, PhD in Reichian Psychology, spent her 20’s as an aspiring dancer, student of Japanese culture, and trainee at a rigorous, traditional Zen monastery (for men) in Kobe, Japan.  In later years, she became a multi-faceted teacher and counselor, incorporating extensive training in diverse areas.  She is certified in Reichian therapy, Somatic Experiencing, massage, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and Pre- and Perinatal Therapy.  She also teaches T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Rosen Method, and Sensory Awareness.  Dr. Weaver is the Creator and Founding Chair of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute’s Somatic Psychology Program.  She maintains a position on the core faculty at SBGI and teaches in the Somatics Masters Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies as well as at private and academic facilities throughout the world.

AS: On your website – www.judythweaver.com – you describe your many months’ training at a Zen monastery in Japan and your experience there at approaching and attaining ‘Mu’.  Could you give us your most concise, Zen explanation of ‘Mu’ and explore how you encourage your somatic psychology students to experience it?

Dr. Weaver: (Laughs.)  Well, for me, “mu” is a negative, it’s “no,” it’s “nothing.”  And there’s a common Zen phrase that says, “mu ichi mutzu” which means “I have nothing” or “Everything I have is nothing.”  And so it means emptiness, openness, non-attachment and all of that is incredibly important in any kind of interpersonal work because if one wants to be a therapist, a counselor, a helper for anyone on any level, one has to be open-minded, open-hearted, and not attached. 

There’s this wonderful thing: the four edicts.  1) Show up – how to live a good life,
2) Pay attention, 3) Tell the truth, and, 4) Don’t be attached to the outcome.

And it’s that “Don’t be attached to the outcome” that is so important.  If you have an intention for your client, or you want them to accomplish something or go someplace, you know, it’s going to be a disaster!  You are not going to help anybody, including yourself.  That is where “being ‘Mu’” is very important for anyone who wants to work with other people.

For instance, in Sensory Awareness, we do not call it “teaching.”  I am not “a teacher” of Sensory Awareness.  What I do is lead people.  In fact, the definition of the word educate means to draw out or to pull out from another person.

In a meditation session, as well as a therapy session, I’m here with you – this is who I am, I can be myself, I can hold presence, I can keep myself clear and open so that you can be who you are.

AS: As you started to talk about how it pertained to the therapist, I thought of how a therapist is being a mirror of what is already present and wants to be discovered.

Dr. Weaver: That is the process of going within and answering that unanswerable question to your Master – the koan.  He’s your mirror.  He/she – whoever it is – is a mirror.  So it’s very much the same thing.

AS: How do you apply the energetic awareness of T’ai Chi Ch’uan to your own experience of teaching psychology?

Dr. Weaver: So many people have said, “How do you do so many things?”  I am always startled because I think they are all the same thing.  The essence of T’ai Chi that I have learned is the essence of sitting in meditation, of sitting with a client, of sitting with a student.  It is meeting that person where they need to be met – and everyone is different – and moving with that person as they need to be moved with, and being still with that person as it is appropriate to be still.

AS: Would you give us thumbnail sketches of your various approaches to psychology?

Dr. Weaver: Sensory Awareness, or as I prefer to say ‘all kinds of awareness’, is the basis of our being alive.  Awareness delineates how we are going to choose to be alive in that moment.  If I choose to be more or less aware of whatever it is, then that’s how I proceed to exist. 

Reichian-based Therapy or Somatic Therapy are the therapies that include the body – the energetics as well as the mind.  Awareness, feeling, movement, patterns  - all of these things are a part of somatic psychotherapy.  Somatic Psychotherapy is engaging the whole person in a somatic process.

The Pre- and Perinatal therapies are a subset of that.  I needed to go deeper and deeper into my work, and further back.  Clients would go back far enough that they knew they were experiencing things in the womb.  So, going deeper in somatic psychology led me to pre- and perinatal therapy. 

Rosen Method is not a psychotherapeutic practice, yet it is therapeutic.  Rosen Method is another way of meeting and touching people both physically and non-physically.  There is more of a focus on working with the physical body, although it is more than the physical body because you cannot be aware of where the physical and the psychic body begin. 

So, in the Rinzai Zen tradition you have an initial koan that is probably the most earth-changing or life-changing experience.  And there are several different koans that are chosen by the teacher based on the temperament of the student.  And then, after you – the student – solve that koan, you’re given another koan, then another koan, then another. 
My experience of each therapy was that they were all just different aspects of the same question or koan.  It’s like those crystal balls that have different facets.  So you look at it from this side, and then this side, and then this side.

And my life and my practice has been that!  Rosen Method is one of those ways and T’ai Chi is another of those ways where, as I said before, the initial practice, the form is a solo meditation.  You do it by yourself.  You do it regularly, you do it every day.  It gives you a great basis and a lot to work with.  And then you have the interactive process of taking that individual practice and what you know of yourself energetically, physically, and mentally to work in relationship with another person. 

I have clients who have used some of the T’ai Chi exercises in couples’ therapy.  So, it’s another way, more energetic, more physical, but really no less mental.  It’s definitely a body-mind integrative practice.

AS: Right! 

Dr. Weaver: Years ago, I asked another disciple, heir of my Zen Master why all of his students study T’ai Chi as much as possible?  And he said, “My monks are so good, they’re so strong.  When they sit, they really, really meditate!  When they work, they really, really work!  But some of them, in getting up from the cushion, some of them lose it!” 

AS: (Laughs.)

Dr. Weaver: It’s the between places that T’ai Chi addresses!

When I first met my Zen Master – and he wasn’t my Master then – he asked me what I had done in the U.S. and I told him I’d been a dancer.  And he looked at me and smiled.  And he said, “Ah!  Now you will learn the highest form of dance!  Movement-less dance!

AS: (Laughs.)  Ah!!!

Dr. Weaver: And he was so right on!  Sitting still – if it’s possible to sit still – I learned more about movement than I had moving, dancing.  It was a wonderful lesson for me.

AS: In your current approach, do you find that you blend these therapies together broadly, or do you lean more strongly toward utilizing methods that feel most appropriate within each moment?

Dr. Weaver: In my current approach, I don’t use any methods, except when someone comes to me for a T’ai Chi lesson or something like that.  In my current approach, somebody comes to me and I do whatever is appropriate.  And I don’t think of, “This comes from this, this is from that.”  It is again that sitting and being open to allow whatever needs  response to be responded to and happen. 

AS: In discussing your leadership of sensory awareness classes in different countries, you wrote, “Our work goes underneath the vagaries of cultural experience and reaches down to the foundational essence of human nature.”  Could you describe the positive essence that you have experienced and how you evoke it with your work when the so-called shadow is active?

Dr. Weaver: Wow! The essence that I meet is the goodness that is there everywhere.  The goodness, the innocence, the interest, the desire to explore, the openness in making contact – that’s what I meet.  I wait!  And I accept.  I allow the person to do what they need to do because whatever that is, there is a reason for it.  Whatever it is, they need to do it, so I need to accept and also honestly reflect back because I don not accept just garbage.  The person has chosen to come to the therapist or the meditation teacher or whomever for whatever, and they think, “O.k., you must know something that I don’t.  You’re the leader, or maybe you’re a couple of steps ahead of me  and so I can learn from you.”  There’s usually some of that.  And even with a baby, I’m bigger!  (Both laugh.)  And basically, it’s holding presence.

So to the goodness in the person that I meet, I have to present my goodness so that they can meet it!  And there’s our meeting place, of essence.  I was going to say human essence, but it can happen between dogs too.  And it does a lot!  So, it’s the essence of the meeting beings, in there.  There we can be and progress as we need to.

You know that Rumi poem – “Somewhere there’s a field – I’ll meet you there”?

AS: How do you experience Western Somatic Psychology as distinct, or diverging, from Eastern direct experience philosophies or practices?

Dr. Weaver: Well, that is so neat because Western therapy came from the mind and went into the body.  In the East there has not been any therapy until recently.  There were practices that came from the body and then moved up into more of the intellectual sphere.  When I went to study dance in Asia, I was not taught, I was told to follow.  At the end of the first week, they said, “O.k., next week you’re going to learn another dance.”  I said, “What do you mean, learn another dance?  I have not learned this one yet!  I don’t know this one!”  They said, “Don’t worry about it!”  So, it was follow.  And in T’ai Chi, traditionally the teacher does the movements and you follow.  And eventually – which for the Asians meant, “If not in this lifetime, next lifetime!” – you will get it in you!  If I taught it that way in the West, Westerners would not want to stay.  Westerners want to grapple with their minds.  There is the form, practice and explanation.  When I learned T’ai Chi, I didn’t learn the names of the moves.  There were not any books in English back in the ‘60’s when I started.  Now there are a gazillion books and everybody wants to learn the names because it helps them.  And I go, “Huh?  How is this name of the movement going to help you do it better?”  But it does because there are mental relations that Western people make because that’s our common way of working.

Of course, now Asia is following the West.  I started teaching Sensory Awareness in Japan in 1985.  I gave a workshop at the Transpersonal Association Conference in Japan.  One of the participants was just so impressed and thought this was so wonderful.  He said, “Where does this come from?”  I looked at him and I said, “From your own culture!”  But he couldn’t get it.  He had to really know and go to a Western style workshop.  Alan Watts called Sensory Awareness when he met Charlotte Selver  living Zen.  And it is so strange that more and more Japanese are coming to the work because they don’t find it in their culture.  It is harder to find it in their culture now because their culture has gone up into their heads.  As people go up into their heads, they go further away from their bodies.

AS: Having founded the Somatic Psychology Program at SBGI, what advice can you offer our current and prospective students?

Dr. Weaver: I think the field of somatic psychotherapy is incredibly important and essential if we are going to be a healthy society or world, an essential connection combination.  And the students who become teachers and practitioners are on the leading edge.  It’s becoming more and more accepted, but I still hear people saying, “Somatics?  What’s that?” 

My advice, my wish, is that we all continue to do our own integrative practices which will help us become more whole.  The best teaching is modeling and if people are inclined and can, they will follow.  I think it is so essential that we continue with great sensitivity and integrity.  Doing our work will help others come to do their work!

AS: What is most intriguing or pleasing to you in your personal work right now?

Dr. Weaver: Well, two things come to mind.  One is that in ten days, I am going to Africa, and this is a continent that I’ve never been to.  I am going to be working with people from another culture whom I have not worked with.  I am really excited because it is so Western, and I am so Asian.  I know that I am going to work with mainly children.  They know how to move, they know how to sing, they know how to dance…what am I going to do with them?  The modality that I think – and heaven only knows what’s going to happen –is graphic art.  For instance, part of what I’m going to do is to take about 15-20 teenage students to the Serengeti.  They live near there, yet have never seen it.  This is part of the program Global Resource Alliance.  What I am going to do is first work with them with art, then take them to the Serengeti, and then work with them with some more art to see if their experience with the animals causes any changes in them.  We will see it in the art.  That’s exciting!

And the other is that as I offer my Sensory Awareness classes, both in Japan and here, the focus has come to be: How can we be so sensitive and still support our sensitivity in a world with cell phones, machines, and all this stuff?  I have brought living with technology into the sensing experience.  How does using your cell phone affect your breathing, for instance?  How does sitting at your computer all day affect your nervous system?  I can tell you that it affects you a lot!

I am expanding my work both in pre- and perinatal psychology and in Sensory Awareness by offering the study group in Sensory Awareness through emails in which I will give focuses to work on by themselves for a six month period and then we will meet.  I’m using technology to make contact and interaction at a distance – and then, coming close.  I am enlarging my expanse to encompass these more primitive, simple, sensitive areas as well as include the technology that is affecting us in so many ways.  We need to be able to put all of this in the right perspective so that we can be healthy and vital.

AS: And human!

Dr. Weaver: And the other thing is that I’m expanding my pre- and perinatal experience of teaching.  In September I will be starting my own basic training of the pre- and perinatal work, which will go over a couple of years.  I am challenging myself to integrate the technical and scientific with the movement and sensitivity.

It is interesting.  I am almost seventy years old and I’m doing a lot of expanding and integrating.  I am not saying, “Oh, I have to deal with all these lousy machines and technology!”  Rather, I am asking the question, “How can I deal with all these machines and technology and stay healthy?  It’s quite a challenge!

AS: Thank you Judyth!