Edward Mitchell Podvoll was a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and co-founder and first medical director of the Windhorse Project, an alternative Buddhist-based approach to the treatment of psychosis and other extreme mental states. Dr. Podvoll was the director of the Contemplative Psychotherapy Graduate Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a department he directed for twelve years.

Podvoll’s most comprehensive work was originally published as The Seduction of Madness (HarperCollins, 1990); it was republished under the new title, Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Psychosis (Shambhala Publications, 2003).

Early Life

Edward Podvoll was born March 25, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Maxwell Podvoll and Gertrude Brickman. His sister, Myra, became a lawyer.

Podvoll’s father was a physician who kept his medical office on the first floor of the family’s residence. In Recovering Sanity (2003), Podvoll writes tenderly of a time when his father, seemingly without discussion, began a practice to help young Edward who was deeply struggling with his focus on homework. Samuel would come upstairs during breaks in his schedule, open his own medical books, and read quietly next to his son, who was trying in vain to study his own school books. Without words or comments, forced to face his own distraction with his focused father by his side, Podvoll writes, “very gradually, I learned to hold my seat—just as he did—and I became a proper student” (p. 349). He speaks of this moment as a first experience of what he would later call “basic attendance.”

He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and then Milford School in Connecticut before graduating from Bowdoin College in 1957. He then studied for his MD at the New York University College of Medicine and was an intern and medical resident at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Following that, Podvoll became a graduate student in psychiatry at Stanford University.

Career

Podvoll headed back to the east coast, working as a research associate in Bethesda, Maryland, for the National Institute of Mental Health Laboratory of Neurobiology. After becoming an MD in 1961, he began a six-year employment as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at Chestnut Lodge, a hospital in Rockville, Maryland, known for its alternative methods of psychiatric care. Here Dr. Podvoll worked with Otto Will and Harold Searles, both important figures in this new psychoanalytic movement to apply intensive psychotherapy to the care of people with severe mental illness. Dr. Searles was Podvoll’s training analyst and primary mentor. During his years at Chestnut Lodge, Podvoll acted as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, supervisor and consultant in casework, and director of admissions. During this time, he was also a psychotherapy supervisor at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, and taught psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

He then moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to work as director of education at Austen Riggs Center from 1974–1977, an alternative psychiatric hospital specializing in long-term psychiatric care.

In 1977, Podvoll moved to Boulder where he worked as a psychiatrist in the University of Colorado’s Student Health Services. He also became involved with the emerging Shambhala Buddhism community in Boulder. Like many psychologists, therapists, and seekers at the time, he was drawn to the spiritual teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s translation of Tibetan Buddhism into western language and concepts. This path led to Podvoll’s involvement at the Naropa University (founded in 1974) and his eventual role as the Director of the Master’s in Contemplative Psychotherapy, which he held for over a decade until 1989.

The Windhorse Project as we know it now was founded in 1981 by Podvoll and his colleagues, based on their studies at Naropa University and the insights they gained in their group supervision together. They founded the first Windhorse treatment center as a non-profit called “Maitri Psychological Services” with Dr. Podvoll as the Medical Director. For six years, the group created home and community-based clinical teams for individuals experiencing extreme states like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but for whom traditional hospital treatment had not provided relief. The Windhorse approach as an integrated approach to mental health care has developed from those inspired beginnings. This first Maitri community was closed in 1987. Podvoll devoted the next three years to writing The Seduction of Madness while teaching at Naropa University.

Retreat

After completing The Seduction of Madness in 1990, Podvoll increasingly focused on furthering his meditation practice and to face the internal work that he felt this endeavor demanded of him. He decided to leave the comforts of Boulder-life and search for further direction on his path of meditation. Along with his wife Candace, he traveled to India, first living in an ashram in southern India to continue his practice of hatha yoga. Over the next three months, his devotion to his Buddhist teachers and their lineage intensified such that he then left the ashram and traveled to New Delhi to find lineage teachers who could give him direction. Then a remarkable series of meetings suddenly unfolded that quickly opened the way for him to enter a meditation retreat in Le Bost, France under the guidance of Lama Gendun Rinpoche (1918–1997). He would remain in retreat for the next twelve years under the name given to him by Lama Gendun: “Lama Sampa Mingyur,” meaning “Immovable Intention for Enlightenment.”

This was an unusual retreat known as “life retreat”; Podvoll committed to stay in the strict confines of a small group retreat of men for the rest of his life. He sold his possessions and said goodbye to his colleagues, family, and wife. But when, in 1997 Lama Gendun died, he left instructions, unbeknownst to the retreatants, that three of them, including Lama Mingyur, should take a break or leave completely after twelve years of retreat. Having given up the world, they were now told to return to it. Mingyur faced endless uncertainty during the length of time between finding out he would be leaving retreat and actually walking out of it gates. He was uncertain about where to live and how to support himself. What he a monk? A mendicant? A teacher? He was also uncertain whether to go by his retreat name, Mingyur, or to return to his earlier name: Edward, or Ed, as his friends called him. This question of name was a muse for the deeper uncertainty he felt as to what do with this “rebirth.” He referred to himself as “Lazarus,” the Biblical figure who was restored to life from death.

Return and Death

In 2002, Lama Mingyur left retreat, eager to return to all that he had missed. But this new chapter would also be his last. He knew he was sick and upon medical examination in France after leaving retreat, the first medical care he had received in over a decade, he was diagnosed with cancer.

Edward returned to Boulder, Colorado, for treatment and to reconnect with his Windhorse friends and colleagues. During his last year of life, a Windhorse team was created to care for him, employing the very model he had helped create. He found this ironic and was fascinated and touched to experience Windhorse team care as a client.

As Podvoll approached his own death it suddenly occurred to him that he could share one final teaching gesture for those around him—a radical lesson in impermanence—a traditional cremation ceremony in which the corpse is consumed by fire under an open sky.

He died in his home in Boulder, Colorado, on December 10, 2003 at 11:30 a.m. surrounded by loved ones. According to his wishes, a cremation ceremony, traditional for a Tibetan Buddhist monk, was held at Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. Those in attendance practiced and sat with him as his corpse was burned on an open funeral pyre.

After the ceremony, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” ran a segment reporting on the event. “The day of the event was windy and cold. The crowd gathered on a meadow,” reported Ted Rose. “A truck pulled up and six pallbearers reached inside. They emerged with a body wrapped in a white shroud … He looked less like a corpse and more like a newborn baby.” Even in his death, Podvoll valued the learning process of those around him and was ceaselessly generous in his dedication to that.

He was survived by his daughter, Stacey Winters, and his sister, Myra.

Dr. Podvoll kept meticulous files and recordings of much of his life’s work. The Windhorse Legacy Project is committed to publishing this rich legacy and to keeping his discoveries alive and relevant.