Cohort Conversations: Amanda Coggin, Buddhist Chaplain

Q&A with Amanda Coggin

Amanda Coggin offers mindfulness, trauma-responsive, whole person care as a pediatric and adult chaplain at UCSF. She began spiritual work with meditation in the Buddhist Vipassana tradition while living and working in Southeast Asia in 2000. Buddhist death and dying work followed as a hospice caregiver and volunteer coordinator at Zen Hospice Project from 2011-2014. After four units of clinical pastoral education at UCSF in 2016-2017, she continued training at UCSF’s Interprofessional Continuing Education in Palliative Care for Practicing Clinicians in 2018. At Zen Caregiving Project she currently facilitates open death conversations at UCSF and supports patients, their caregivers, children, babies, doctors, nurses, CNAs, chaplain residents, medical students, residents, and fellows, who are committed to meet the collective suffering of humans in community with equanimity and heart.

BCSP

Why are you drawn to psychedelic facilitation? What was your personal and professional journey to pursuing the program?

Amanda Coggin

I had dabbled with psychedelics in my early adulthood, and had given up “intoxicants” to take the Buddhist precepts and deepen my meditation practice over these past 25 years. I had developed a relationship to being in expanded states with self and with others through my meditation practice, through supporting students while on silent retreat, and by bringing presence to the dying and their loved ones. This began by training and working as a hospice caregiver with Zen Hospice Project (now Zen Caregiving Project), where I still facilitate courses in end-of-life care and mindful caregiving, and it continued when I trained in clinical pastoral education (CPE), a hospital chaplains’ medical residency year at UCSF, where I work today in adult and pediatric chaplaincy. 

In this culture, historically, dying can often be thought of as an individualized, isolating, fear-laden endeavor, yet I had learned in my travels while living in Southeast Asia and by training in that Buddhist hospice house that all of these expanded states (dying, meditation, and psychedelic experiences) were enriched when shared and processed while in sangha (community). A rich, connecting, and spiritually healing opportunity arises for us as humans if we open up and seek out what’s possible in these states in this lifetime, not to mention the communing with nature that also arises to meet us in these spaces. 

After a death by suicide of my partner in 2007, I began my path of healing towards this work. I came to appreciate the Venn diagram between how intergenerational trauma creates mental disease yet can be healed within generations, how expanded states can create conditions for healing, how adverse events from expanded states need to be tended to and held in community, how healing systemic and family legacies can transform societies, and how dying can lead us to understanding, forgiveness, and awe. All of these areas could have plant medicine in the center. My “call” to be of service towards self, others and the planet’s collective healing, to educate and do the spiritual weight-lifting required, put me exactly where I needed to be. The clinical research reflected what Indigenous traditions had always known, which propelled me to get reacquainted with plant medicine. Now our culture is in preparation, joining the listening, and hopefully will integrate the teachings and its learnings.

BCSP

What was your experience with psychedelic work before entering the BCSP program?

Amanda Coggin

I honestly knew nothing about its Indigenous use, which is not a surprise based on my origin story: a lost child, from a loving and deeply felt, yet dysfunctional, family system, that spawned from a legacy of colonizing European-Americans, whose own trauma history was deeply unknown to them until I came into being. I often joke that I came into this world emerging from my mother with a notepad and pencil behind my ear, scrutinizing and taking notes on the adults who didn’t really model adulting. From a very early age, I wanted to understand the nature of their suffering, so I spent the next 50 years finding that out. Psychedelics in my early twenties were a major part of that trajectory, and I imagine they were the doorway into my later spiritual practices and call to service.

BCSP

What drew you to the BCSP Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate Program over others?

Amanda Coggin

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a chaplain colleague sat socially distanced from me in my backyard in Berkeley, and told me how she had participated in a study helping patients use psychedelics as a staff chaplain at UCSF. She and I had trained as hospice caregivers and then worked as chaplains at UCSF together. She planted the seed about this program and how BCSP’s program would choose to put spirituality at its center, which is similar to what we have learned happens in plant medicine. It’s a spiritual experience that is enhanced collectively. 

In healthcare, as chaplains, we are often trying to remind our medical colleagues of who we are and what we can bring to the team. Not all sickness is purely physical, and we are advocating for our roles as spiritual healers. Tending to the spirit, meaning-making, needs, fears, and curiosities that can emerge through illness requires presence, patience, silence, and spiritual tending. Palliative care, which I also trained in at UCSF, does a good job acknowledging that whole-person care takes an interdisciplinary team. BCSP mirrors that experience and values it by admitting a wide array of healers who are trained to work together, learn from one another, and respect each other’s point of view, positionality, and breadth of understanding and knowledge, as well as how they will share it with the collective.

BCSP

What are you finding most meaningful about your experiences in the program?

Amanda Coggin

I’m an “in-person” kind of human. I deeply cherish building and supporting communities. It’s definitely in response to how I wish I had grown up: in a village, helping one another. It’s why I moved to Asia and lived there and felt so at home there. The community is in your business, wants to know you, and wants to support you. BCSP has created a beautiful community of teachers and learners, and I plan to lean on them and hopefully carry this spiritual work alongside them. That’s my hope and my intention.

BCSP

What are you learning from other students in your cohort?

Amanda Coggin

I’m learning that our stories are our power. We are stronger together than as individuals. Healing is exponential when processed together, shared, and then brought back into the world as service. It doesn’t really matter what role we work in, it’s what we do with sharing our knowledge that matters. Systems only change when people come together to change them. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and what you have learned in your lifetime benefits me and others, and hopefully what I’ve learned will benefit you and others, so let’s join together and offer that to the world. It surely needs it right now.

BCSP

What advice do you have for incoming students as they prepare for the program?

Amanda Coggin

I stand by the precepts I took in Buddhist hospice work at (then) Zen Hospice Project. They’ve carried me and many other caregivers through life and through this work. To practice in this work, cultivate these precepts, developed by Frank Osteseski, a co-founder of Zen Hospice Project: 

Don’t Wait

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience

Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things

Cultivate Don’t Know Mind

And I would also say to consider this intention for yourself: What are the lessons this work wants to teach me? How can this work work me? Will I allow it to? What from this work have I learned that I can join with others to expand out into the world to benefit all beings?

This interview was edited for length and clarity.