Our Facilitator
Seth Zuihō Segall, Ph.D. is a Zen Buddhist priest ordained in the White Plum and Zen Peacemaker lineages. He is a retired clinical psychologist who served for three decades as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He also taught on the faculties of Southeast Missouri State University, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and SUNY-Purchase. He is a former Director of Psychology at Waterbury Hospital and former President of the New England Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
Dr. Segall has been a practicing Buddhist for nearly three decades. He began by attending retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, the IMS Forest Refuge, the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and the Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry. Since 2010, he has practiced in the White Plum Zen lineage receiving shukke tokudo (clerical ordination) in 2016 and shusho hossen in 2024 under the preceptorship of Daiken Nelson Roshi with whom he continues to study. He completed a professional internship at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness, Medicine, and Society in 1996 and the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care Foundations in Contemplative Care program in 2017.
Dr. Segall’s publications include The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism (Equinox, 2023), Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings (SUNY Press, 2003), Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), Living Zen: A Practical Guide to a Balanced Existence (Rockridge, 2020), chapters in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Meditation (2022) and Springer’s Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2022) and the encyclopedia entry on Buddhism and Western Psychology for the St. Andrew’s University Encyclopaedia of Theology. He is the science writer for the Mindfulness Research Monthly, a contributing editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, a review editor for The Humanistic Psychologist, and a guest teacher at the New York Insight Meditation Center. Dr. Segall’s blog, The Existential Buddhist, covers Buddhist topics from a naturalistic, pragmatic, and eudaimonic perspective.