Eva Muller says she learned how to be a
therapist as a child, sitting on her mother’s knee and
listening as her mother related memories of the Holocaust,
including being separated from her husband and forced to give birth
to her son amid the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen death camp. As her mother’s stories of pain flowed
out, Muller says, she became an expert “empathy-giver,”
an attribute that led to a career of helping others work out their
problems. Muller’s parents and older brother all
survived the war and were reunited in Zurich, Switzerland, where
Muller was born. In 1954, they came to the United States, landing
in New York City. In 1968, Muller was among the last graduates
of Hunter College in the Bronx, earning honors in psychology.
Hearing of her desire to become a therapist, her teachers directed
her to get into a doctoral program, and she wound up earning a
Ph.D. in clinical and school psychology from Indiana State
University. “I worked with children until I had my own and I
had to tell other parents they needed to be consistent when I was
struggling with that myself,” she says with a chuckle. In 1987, when she turned 40, Muller read a
book that changed her life: Stephen Levine’s Meetings at the Edge,
a collection of meditations on death. “It let me see there
were options to deal with pain,” she says. “It could be
turned into a deep spiritual experience.” Muller had watched
as the traumatic past had pushed her mother away from God and
spirituality and had concluded that part of her mother’s
constant pain stemmed from her spiritual alienation.
Around the same time, Muller attended her
first meditation retreat, at Vipassana Meditation Center in
Shelburne Falls, Mass. “I had three children and decided that
whatever training I participated in, it would be the very
best.” She went to a 10-day retreat conducted in silence.
Muller was introduced to sitting meditation, breath work, body
scans, and controlled introspection. “On the fourth day of
sitting, I had a breakthrough. I had the overwhelming sensation of
‘I can tolerate any body sensation, but I’ll not sit
with it.’ ” She describes this experience as similar to
the feelings expressed by that survivors of horrendous abuse, but, she says, “my parents
didn’t raise a hand to me; I knew I had experienced no childhood
trauma.” Then came another insight: “The reason I was so
terrified to be in my own body was because of the experience my mother
had been through. I’ve been blessed with doing healing my mother
was never able to do.” Continuing to explore meditative practices,
Muller was led to the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn after seeing it
highlighted on Bill Moyers’ PBS series Healing and the Mind.
Zinn’s Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of
Massachusetts, founded in 1979, has been replicated in hospitals
and institutions around the nation and is lauded for its clinical
results in individuals dealing with stress and illness. More than
500 research studies on the effectiveness of the mindfulness
techniques have been conducted at 200-plus institutions. One of the
most impressive findings concerns lasting benefits: Four years
after completing the Zinn Stress Reduction course, 93 percent of
the participants still used mindfulness-based stress-reduction
techniques regularly.
Muller’s stress-reduction clinic is
modeled on Zinn’s work. The goal is for participants to learn
effective stress-relief and pain management skills through a
36-hour structured group experience conducted over the course of
eight weeks. The program is not a quick fix; it requires a
commitment to a daily practice of the gentle yet rigorous
mindfulness techniques. The reward is less pain, less stress, more
self-control, and more joy in living. Muller says that the program has helped her
control her weight and stop smoking and that over the past 10 years
she’s seen such participants as a mother of five who wanted
to expand her ability to appreciate the moments of her life to a
man coping with colon cancer.
For more information, contact Eva Muller at
Professional Counseling Offices, 1124 S. Fifth St. (217-744-3525).
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2006.
