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March 19, 2005

Psychotherapy Helps Former Tibetan Monk

Daja is now a 34 year old college graduate living in Boston whose extraordinary life story is recounted in a front page story in the March 15, 2005 issue of the Wall Street Journal. His eventual psychotherapy helped him to come to terms with his feelings about his parents and to recover from a depression.

He was the son of American hippies who gave him to a Tibetan family when he was three. His mother, Feather Meston, living in India as a Buddhist nun, was the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood writer. When Daja was six, she transferred him to a Tibetan monastery. His father, Larry Greenberg, had developed chronic schizophrenia, but he knew nothing of this. Daja grew up unhappy and lonely, feeling abandoned and that he didn't belong, a target of teasing as a white boy among Asians.

At age ten, Feather took Daja to visit his rich relatives in Beverly Hills. He developed an immediate love for the West. As a teenage monk he managed to extricate himself from the monastery by a ruse, and he persuaded his mother to send him to California. He migrated to Boston, where he married a Tibetan freedom activist. He wanted a college education, and at the urging of his wife he applied to Brandeis University with no expectation of success. He had had no formal education. The interviewer was so impressed with his life story and his apparent intelligence and resourcefulness that he decided to take a chance that Daja could master college. He did, graduating summa cum lauda. Sadly, his mother declined to attend his graduation.

He became active in the Tibetan freedom movement. In 1999, he traveled to China to observe the treatment of Tibetans. He took photographs and was arrested and grilled for many hours. He believed he would spend the rest of his life in a Chinese jail, so he jumped from a third story window, shattering his body severely. But he lived. His wife and relatives persuaded an American Consul to intervene, and he was flown to a Boston hospital. He underwent years of slow painful rehabilitation. Even now he has problems standing and walking. His brave actions became widely known, and he became a Tibetan hero. He was an important symbol that led to some Chinese reforms under American pressure.

While in rehab, he became depressed and sought psychiatric help. He wanted to understand why his parents had given him away. With the help of his therapy he learned about the lives of his parents. His mother had a lonely and painful childhood with a suicidal alcoholic mother. Her father sent her away to a boarding school. Daja's anger and hurt feelings toward his mother gradually subsided, but he found it easier to forgive his father, realizing that his father's illness made it impossible for him to care for his son. He started visiting his father, and he came to love him "quite a lot."

Daja has been greatly helped by his intelligent and understanding wife, who has worked and is about to graduate Brandeis. His father's brother Albert has stood behind him, attending Daja's college graduation ceremony. He is still quite physically impaired, but he works as a part time research assistant and plans to take graduate courses.

Related link:
"Left in Nepal at 3, Daja Takes Decades To Find Out Why" Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2005 (Subscription Required)
"The amazing tale of Brandeis graduate Daja Meston," Brandeis News, March 16, 2005
1999 State Department Briefing on Daja Meston

Posted by admin at 10:51 AM