Student Profiles

Johnnie Featherston, MA Contemplative Psychotherapy '09

What the MA Contemplative Psychotherapy Program offers in tandem—a combination of Western and Eastern approaches to the mind—Johnnie Featherston discovered separately.

The son of an Episcopal priest in Indiana, Featherston grew up in a spiritually charged atmosphere that stoked his curiosity about other world religions, particularly those in the East. He encountered Buddhism in college and, after graduation, worked a variety of jobs related to social justice and environmental work.

It wasn’t, however, until he experienced being a psychotherapy client that he “realized how important psychology is to bringing peace and healing to the myriad ways in which we suffer. I really saw how transformative and healing it could be,” he says, “to work with people on a more intimate, immediate and basic level.

“I was drawn to the contemplative program because of its integration of Western and Buddhist psychological traditions. I felt that the two, taken together, could provide a more holistic and beneficial approach to working with people. I also believe the training in Buddhist psychology to be an irreplaceable foundation in learning how to work with my own mind and better prepare myself to be of service to others.”

Particularly fond of the six-part Buddhist Psychology series of classes—which cover everything from “innate sanity” and addictive behaviors to clinical ethics and the bodhisattva ideal of altruism— Featherston credits them as departmental “cornerstones that lay out a practical and stable groundwork for psychotherapy practice.”

Ultimately planning to open a wellness center that “utilizes contemplative psychotherapy and contemplative practices to help others heal and experience their basic goodness,” Featherston looks forward to entering the counseling field. “I have become,” he says, “more confident, available and skillful when working with clients because I’m less trapped by my habitual ways of being in the world.”