Barbara Joshin O’Hara, Sensei, MA., LCSW is a psychotherapist in private practice in the West Village. She is a co-founder of the Village Zendo, a meditation center in Soho,  and gives regular Dharma talks and teachings there. She completed three years of monastic training at Zen Mountain Monastery before undergoing psychoanalytic training at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Studies Center. She has also studied the Diamond Heart work with Alia Johnson, EMDR as well as AEDP. Barbara works with both individuals and couples, creative artists, members of the LBGT community, high-performing executives, and those who wish to combine a meditation practice with psychotherapy.

Her expertise and interest are in the following areas:

• Establishing a secure base from which to foster new and healing experiences
• Activating the innate, inborn disposition for self-healing
• Using crisis as an opportunity for new learning and transformation
• Facilitating the emergence of a self that wishes to expand and liberate
• Unblocking parts of the self that have become frozen
• Dismantling the false self so that a genuine vitality, authenticity and creativity can be restored
• Providing an empathic, emotionally-engaged presence to help explore challenging emotional states