It began with a grandmother’s dying wish. Mimi, a four-foot-nine Jewish immigrant from Brooklyn, spent her final days surrounded by Zen students who showed up with open hearts. They sang to her, they gave her pedicures, they ate sandwiches by her bedside. In that space of ordinary love, she realized something she had never fully understood: that love means embracing all of someone, even the parts that frighten you. She suggested that her grandson Koshin—whose Zen path had always puzzled her—and his husband Chodo, also a Zen teacher, create a center that would teach people how to care for others. And they did. The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care was born from her vision.
Today, that growing organization on Manhattan’s 23rd Street trains doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals across the globe. What began as a modest community has grown into something far-reaching: 150 doctors have now completed its year-long Contemplative Medicine Fellowship, with participants joining from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and across the United States. Each year the cohort grows, from 20 to 40 to 60, and the impact keeps spreading. As Koshin put it during my recent visit, “If we support them, then they can support themselves, their relationships and their patients equally. The ripple effect is kind of amazing.”
The need is undeniable. According to two peer reviewed studies published in EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing, physician burnout reached crisis levels during the pandemic, with 62.8 per cent of physicians reporting symptoms in 2021. The consequences includeincreased medical errors, reduced quality of care, and physicians leaving the profession altogether—with the Association of American Medical Colleges projecting a shortage of up to 139,000 doctors by 2033.
The Zen Center’s Contemplative Medicine Fellowship offers a different way forward. Over 12 months, it trains doctors and advanced practitioners in contemplative practices like Zen meditation and ethics, generous listening, narrative medicine, and compassion practices. The results are striking. In the 2021–22 cohort, emotional exhaustion dropped by 6.5 points, depersonalization by 2.2 points, and personal accomplishment increased by 2.7 points—all statistically significant. By the end of the program, participants’ burnout levels had returned to the national average from significantly elevated baselines. The 2023–24 cohort showed even more dramatic results: emotional exhaustion dropped by ten points, depersonalization by three.
The researchers acknowledge that this is still a new and developing field. The studies are limited by small sample sizes and self-selected participants, yet they describe the findings as promising and call for further research into abbreviated contemplative training models. It’s exciting to watch these developments unfold, and to see Buddhist teachings recognized as a meaningful part of the solution.
As one of the studies noted, contemplative medicine addresses what has been called “physician as human”—embracing vulnerability and growth, cultivating compassion and community, and finding meaning in the midst of difficult work. “Contemplative medicine,” the study authors wrote, “aims to restore clinical and personal capacity via an evidence-based contemplative pedagogy that trains clinicians to cultivate attentional stability, compassion, work-life integration, community, and values-aligned action amidst suffering.”
Participants spoke of feeling more connected to their colleagues and more aligned with the healing values that initially drew them to medicine. Beyond the numbers, something harder to quantify emerged: a renewed capacity to cultivate presence, both in the face of suffering and in the mundane. As Koshin writes in Untangled (2022), one doctor who went through the training had become so caught up in her professional identity that she had stopped looking her patients in the eye. “I’ve been almost like Rip Van Winkle,” she said. “I have been asleep for a long time.”
Another participant learned to sit in front of the dryer and watch her family’s clothes spinning around—finding beauty in the ordinary, discovering that presence is not reserved for meditation cushions but is available everywhere.
This is the work of waking up.
And this is the work that Koshin and Chodo have been building for nearly two decades. The center is now so popular that it’s moving to a larger space—still in Manhattan, but bigger, to accommodate the growing community. “We’re excited to move,” Koshin said during my visit, “but we’ll miss this space because it has served us so well. We are committed to bringing the culture of a loving sanctuary to our new home—a few blocks away.”
“Grandma Mimi, I miss you so,” Koshin writes in his book Wholehearted (2019). “You continue to accompany me each day and encourage me to keep widening out the circles of compassion and love.” Those circles have widened far beyond one woman’s deathbed, far beyond one Zen center on 23rd Street. They now reach doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants in hospitals across the world, touching patients they will never meet,rippling outward in ways that no one could have predicted. Mimi’s dying wish has become a living practice, a fellowship, a Zen community of care that spans continents.
This is what happens when we meet suffering with presence rather than avoidance. When we remember that we are all in this together—patients, clinicians, carepartners, grandmothers, Zen teachers, strangers on the street. When we widen out the circles of compassion and love, just as one grandmother asked her grandson to do, just as he is now teaching others to do.
Nina Müller is a Mindfulness Teacher who offers online mindfulness coaching sessions. If you would like to find out more, please visit The Mindful Practice to book a complimentary consultation.
References
Ellison, Koshin Paley. 2019. Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications.
Ellison, Koshin Paley. 2022. Untangled: Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion. New York: Balance/Grand Central Publishing.
See more
New York Zen Center
Contemplative Medicine: A practical approach to “Well-being 2.0” in medicine
Compassion, connection, and capacity: Outcomes of a yearling contemplative medicine fellowship
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