Our Facilitators

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 a former President of the New England Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.

Dr. Segall has practiced Buddhism for over a quarter century. 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 under the preceptorship of Daiken Nelson Roshi with whom he continues to study. Dr. Segall studied Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Buddhist Psychology and the writings of Eihei Dogen with scholars Jan Willis, Peter Harvey, Andrew Olendzki, and Taigen Dan Leighton. In 1996 he completed a professional internship at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness, Medicine, and Society. In 2017 he completed the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care’s Foundations in Contemplative Care program.

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), and chapters in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Meditation (2022) and Springer’s Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2022). 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 topics on Buddhist philosophy, practice, ethics, history, art, and social engagement from a naturalized, eudaimonic perspective.

Dr. Segall’s work focuses on integrating Asian and Western approaches to human flourishing.

 

Former philosophy professor Reverend Meredith Hotetsu Garmon ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 2004. He began Buddhist practice in 2001 with Vipassana teacher John Orr. From 2002-2003 he studied Zen with Harvey Sodiaho Hilbert (Matsuoka lineage) and Sidney Musai Walter (White Plum Asanga). From 2004-2014, he studied with Rubin Habito (Sambo Kyodan lineage) and received jukai in 2007. He has attended sesshins in Dallas, Tucson, Austin, Toronto, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Japan and kenshukai (Sambo Kyodan’s koan review seminars for teachers) in Holland and San Francisco. From 2006-2013, he led the Dancing Crane Zen Center in Gainesville, FL. From 2014-2022 he practiced in the Boundless Way Zen tradition as a student of David Rynick. During that time he organized and led the Boundless Way Zen of Westchester Sitting Group. He currently describes himself as a “Zen pilgrim” without formal affiliation with a teacher or lineage. His Koan Index is a unique and invaluable resource for English-speaking Zen students around the world.