American Zen Hospital Chaplaincy: The Practice of Mindful Spiritual Care

This dissertation examines the origins of American Zen hospital chaplaincy in the US through an ethnographic study of Upaya Institute and Zen Center (UZC). I explore how the founder of UZC, Joan Halifax, ecologizes, medicalizes, and neurobiologizes mindfulness in American Zen spiritual care via a close engagement with her writings. I connect Halifax's teachings with the work of her students in incorporating mindfulness into spiritual caregiving as a moral practice in clinical settings. I pay especially close attention to how the cultivation of empathy and compassion through spiritual practices creates a richly textured mode of embodiment in spiritual caregiving that clinical chaplains trained in mindfulness at UZC translate into biomedical institutions.