Polly Young-Eisendrath

Polly Young-Eisendrath (born 1947) is a psychologist, feminist, author, teacher, speaker, Jungian analyst, Zen Buddhist, and the founder of Enlightening Conversations: Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Meeting in Person. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, TED-X, and is the recipient of the Otto Weininger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Psychoanalysis. Polly Young-Eisendrath is the originator of Dialogue Therapy -- designed to help couples and others transform chronic conflict into greater closeness and development. In 1983, Polly and her late husband, Ed Epstein, designed Dialogue Therapy as a new form of couples therapy that combined psychoanalysis, Jungian theory, psychodrama, and gender theory. Polly published two books on Dialogue Therapy (1984 and 1993), detailing its theory and methods for clinicians and the general public. She has now re-visioned and updated Dialogue Therapy to include the unique combination of psychodrama, Object Relations, and Mindfulness. In 2018, Shambhala Publications will release "True Love Ways: Relationship as Psycho-Spiritual Development" that offers her vision of personal love as a spiritual path and draws on her experience of 30 years as a Dialogue Therapist and Jungian psychoanalyst. Polly maintains a clinical practice of Jungian psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Vermont, U.S.A.

Raised as a Catholic, Polly Young-Eisendrath was born and grew up in Akron, Ohio, where she graduated first in her class from Akron East High School. As a teenager, Young-Eisendrath worked as a long distance telephone operator.

Young-Eisendrath attended Ohio University where she met, among other scholars, Huston Smith. Smith's work in comparative religions had a profound and transformative influence on her, leading her to search for a religion that was not fundamentally ritualistic or dogmatic, but experiential and connected with daily life.

Young-Eisendrath began Zen training in 1970 at Rochester Zen Center with Philip Kapleau Roshi when she became a student of Shinzen Young in 1998. She is currently a Mindfulness and Dharma teacher in the tradition of Shinzen Young, and practices both Soto Zen and Vipassana, and has also practiced Phowa with his Eminence Ayang Rinpoche and with Anyen Rinpoche. She directs Waysmeet Sangha, a friendship-based Buddhist sangha, which she hosts in Vermont.

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