Grand Narratives (II)

Since its emergence in mainstream culture, ‘mindfulness’ has come to denote many things: a mental quality, a meditative practice, a stress-relieving tool, a clinical intervention, an uplifting way of doing something, to name but a few. 

‘Being mindful’ is now a popular phrase that straddles a spectrum of meanings, from the frivolity of eating one piece of chocolate at a time to the potentially life-transforming experience of sitting an intensive meditation retreat. 

The Profound and the Profane

The concept of mindfulness is flexible and adaptable. Hence, even at the clinical end of the spectrum, in programmes like MBCT and MBSR, where mindfulness is sometimes called an ‘intervention’ (i.e. a way to prevent or alter something), you always find poetry recitation forming part of essential course content. 

Poetry is a medium that lends itself to the provocation of perplexity and wonder. It seeks, even demands, no end meaning. Yet here you find it rubbing shoulders with the sterile language of ‘symptom management’ that characterises evidence-based mental health protocols. 

Mindfulness seems to have developed an ingenious ability for bridging the divide between the soulful and the scientific while still leaving room for nibbling that singular chocolate. Cap doffed.

Part of this versatility can be explained by the fact that mindfulness is still establishing itself in western culture. Like many fancy foreign imports, it will need time to move through its fad/fashion/fetishised stages before discovering where it truly fits. This is a process, one that every practitioner contributes to. A decade from now, mindfulness will be closer to finding its place as much through your efforts as anyone else’s. 

Reflecting upon how you ‘situate’ mindfulness in your life is a worthwhile exercise. If this is a new idea and you don’t know where to start, below are two different analogies, both from the western tradition, that might serve as useful reference points. 

Ornamental Health

The first is from the late 18th Century when, inspired by the ideals of Romanticism, grottos were popular places for affluent members of society to spend time in for the purposes of contemplation. This fashion for meditating in natural surroundings subsequently gave rise to the phenomenon of the ornamental hermit, also known as a garden hermit.

A garden hermit was a man hired by a landowner to inhabit a purpose-built grotto or folly and play the part of a resident contemplative. The deal was that the man had to live permanently on-site while dressing and acting the part. Often this entailed growing a beard, not cutting fingernails and toenails, and speaking to no-one. Occasionally, the hermit might be obligated to break his silence and entertain dinner guests, for example, to offer them the best sagely counsel he could muster. In return for his labour, the hermit received a stipend, free room and board, generous amounts of downtime and an excuse not to wash. 

The hermit was a kind of live-action, one-man theatre which everyone – dinner guests included – knew wasn’t fully real. They went along with the show because it was a respectable way for a wealthy person to outsource their spirituality. Here lay the value of the pretence: it gave the landowner a license to flaunt their romantic sentiment and appear to be more ‘contemplative’ than they were. The fashion for garden hermits died out. Their lasting legacy is they are the forerunner for garden gnomes.

Gnome Truths

Garden hermits might seem silly now, a cheesy combo of fashion and façade, but they were an attempt to connect with the majesty and wisdom of nature. At the time, everybody involved followed the charade and imbued it with meaning. They were not unique in this regard. Humans of every era are prone to naïve and superficial interest in life’s profundities, never mind our perennial tendency to privatise and fetishise the spiritual. 

I appreciate the honest insincerity, as it were, of garden hermits. They are a reminder of how easy it is to reduce interfacing with the sublime to something materialistic and literal. When an existential enquiry becomes a ‘thing’, the arcane appears as a sketch. Any authentic encounter with the mysteries of life stands little chance if it is laced with a homogenized formula concocted from other people’s views and opinions.

I find it useful, if uncomfortable, to consider how my mindfulness practice might, at times, resemble a garden hermitage – something I separate off from the rest of my life, mix up with ideas I don’t truly understand, make into a ‘thing’ and project romantic ideals onto. At some point, I will get wise to what is going on. I will uncover my own insincerity and reconnect with something deeper and richer than ‘mindful me’. Then, the show is over and the real practice can resume.

Rock and Roll

A second analogy for situating mindfulness in one’s life comes courtesy of philosopher and writer Albert Camus’ famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus compares the absurdity of human existence to the situation of Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology who is condemned for eternity to pushing a large boulder up a mountain, only for the boulder to roll down every time he gets to the top. 

Just as Sisyphus is obliged to repeat his meaningless task over and over again, so we humans search relentlessly for meaning where there is none, says Camus, thus rendering our lives absurd. Yet his conclusion is oddly life-affirming and far from nihilistic. Regardless of your own philosophical viewpoint, there are layers within this text that are hugely relevant to mindfulness practice.

Camus’ Sisyphus accepts his fate and embraces the challenge of ascending the mountain. His task offers no reward but he commits to it nonetheless. He is present to his circumstances and regards the past and future for what they are: mental projections. He is fully in his existence, conscious of his condition, all the while refusing to surrender to its apparent futility. Each time he picks up his burden, he utters a silent “yes”. It is this attitude, says Camus, that allows Sisyphus to silence the gods, touch the deathless and conclude that all is well.

Breathing Space

In stark contrast to the garden hermit, Sisyphus offers clues on how to situate mindfulness practice at the centre of one’s life. His story is one of commitment, willingness, effort, presence and, through these, contentment. There is not even a hint of experiential avoidance or disengagement on his part. There is no artifice or wishful thinking. Sisyphus dwells in the midst of it all, unblinkered, bullshit-free. He teaches, as Camus puts it, “the higher fidelity”.

For me, Sisyphus offers essential lessons in re-homing practice when it has gone the way of the garden hermitage. He smashes down my grotto walls and urges me to wake up. When I sense the imposed limits of my situation and sit with the disquiet, nothing is off limits. Only when my cage has been firmly rattled in this way do I discern real possibilities for freedom. Then life becomes poetic again, even beautiful.

Regardless of your beliefs about life or mindfulness, Camus notes something pertinent to all practitioners. Sisyphus, on his downward journey from the summit of the mountain, is relieved of his burden and conscious of his situation. He is in motion, in his flow, fully aware of each footstep. He leans into life and is open to the task at hand. He clings to neither hope nor despair. This way of being echoes the old stories about mindfulness. Camus summarises them nicely: “That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.”

The next (and last) piece in this series will offer some reflections for your own practice.

Grand Narratives (I)

If you were to consider what ‘mindfulness’ means to you, what would show up in your mind? If you were to reflect deeply on the nature and purpose of ‘practice’, what might you see? What informs your identity (assuming that you identify) as a meditator or practitioner? What are the ideas, imaginings or mythologies you have internalised about mindfulness? Such enquiries disclose crucial information about how your practice will unfold.

Modern formulations of mindfulness tend to revolve around the deliberate cultivation of open-hearted awareness in order to facilitate less reactivity to what is happening in the moment. Traditional formulations are more nuanced (read more on that here and here). What all formulations have in common is they are embedded in assumptions and narratives about the nature of reality and identity and, by association, ideas about how to live well. 

Mindfulness practice, in this regard, is a starting point from which you make a journey into existential territory. Where you go, with what aim in mind, is largely down to you. Somewhere in the mix will be ideas, views and perspectives you have internalised. A key task of practice is to become more acutely aware of how you are being guided, consciously and unconsciously, by these. 

Raw Materials

To do this work, you need to take into account the era in which you live. Bear in mind that mindfulness in the West is still in its infanthood, unsure of its place in the larger scheme of things and not yet fully known to itself. How it develops and what it grows into remain to be seen. This is exciting and offers great potential. But it can also impart a kind of youthful confusion to practitioners seeking clear waymarks for their journey.

In the meantime, what elements from the primal matter of modern mindfulness might we isolate and inspect to assist us with our enquiries? Obviously, there is the Buddhist influence. Buddhism, however, is notoriously hard to pin down. It encompasses a vast swathe of traditions, beliefs and practices. On top of that, not unlike mindfulness, it is still in the early stages of rooting itself – in this case, in a strangely individualized, materialist culture it had little knowledge of only a handful of decades ago. For these reasons, Buddhism can be difficult to make sense of.

What we could usefully identify, however, are the main ways in which Buddhism and, through it, mindfulness have melded with pre-existing ideas and tendencies in western culture. Four stand out: science, psychotherapy, romanticism and religion (particularly the theistic, Judeo-Christian variety). If you were to look deeply into your own psychology, might you find traces of one or more of these quietly shaping and steering beliefs about your practice?

Hidden in Plain Sight

I would suggest that certain western assumptions and cultural biases can also be gleaned from the nature and content of contemporary mindfulness training programmes. While courses vary, as do different teachers’ ‘takes’ on practice, patterns are evident (partly thanks to the western scientific tendency to publish copious amounts of research-generated data in the search for measurable truths). Examples include:

• An implicit belief in the individualistic nature of practice (i.e. each of us are separate, self-directing psycho-physical ‘units’).
• Framing human suffering as a problem that can be fixed or eradicated. 
• Elevating the importance of disengaging and stepping back from thoughts in order to better regulate emotions. 
• Emphasising formal meditation as a means to cultivating tranquil states over other possibilities (e.g. insight or ethical sensibility). 
• Viewing the shift from the conceptual to the perceptual as an end in itself (i.e. mindfulness practice leads to no specified knowledge or discoveries).
• A tendency to reify the ‘present moment’ and an enchantment with experiences of ‘being’.
  
  

This is a partial list – one, no doubt, informed by some of my own biases and assumptions. I am not suggesting any of the above are right or wrong, good or bad. What they point to, however, are some of the ways in which western scientific, materialist, allopathic-medical, psychological and romanticist beliefs have merged with much older ideas about mindfulness. 

Might reflecting on these allow us humble practitioners, finding our own way, greater glimpses of how such assumptions harmonise or collide with our own preconceived views and opinions and, in so doing, shape our experience? Better to be aware than not, right?

In the next post, I will suggest two very different analogies for how we might situate mindfulness practice in our lives. 

The Inner Gatekeeper

Modern and ancient perspectives on mindfulness broadly agree on its function as a protective mental quality.

This humble mental quality allows us to have a ‘clear view’ of the moment-to-moment flow of events in order to be ‘on guard’ for potentially negative and injurious psychological states. It is important here to distinguish between protectiveness and defensiveness, which is a ‘not wanting to know’. The quality of mindfulness always inclines towards ‘wanting to know’.

Mindfulness as a protective factor was first outlined in the ancient Buddhist simile of the gatekeeper:

“Imagine a fortress, at a frontier, which has a wise and experienced gatekeeper. The function of this gatekeeper is to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does. This is for the protection of those within and to ward off those without.

“In the same way, someone who is mindful is alert and able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago. With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, such a one maintains what is helpful and benevolent, abandons what is unhealthy, and looks after oneself well.”

You can find a translation of the original discourse, which includes this simile, here.

Here, ‘being mindful’ connotes ‘taking care’. This is also the word’s most common English rendering despite its recent and gradual shift in meaning towards something more akin to ‘awareness’.

Staying Well

Not by coincidence, protective care-taking is the rationale for modern mindfulness-based psychotherapies, which predominantly aim to prevent the relapse of mental distress.

Take one example: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). This is a well-established, evidence-based treatment for depressive relapse first developed in the 1990s. Here, the researchers were seeking a ‘final solution’ to the repetitive nature of depression.

They found that, for people who had been depressed in the past, a small change in mood led to a large change in negative thinking, which could easily trigger a downward spiral into further depression.

They then discovered that this could be prevented if people were able to recognise their thought patterns relatively early on, so that they were able to ‘stand back’ and get some perspective on their experience.

It was the combination of these two discoveries that led them to adopt a fully-fledged mindfulness-based programme, which they would later name MBCT.

Such a programme, in effect, allows you to deliberately access and empower your internalised gatekeeper, cool-headed and wise, who quietly monitors your interactions with the world to enhance your sense of ease and to diminish your potential for suffering.

As a result, life smoothes out and becomes an easier ride.

The M-Word

‘Mindfulness’ is a term rich in meaning. Specifically, it can refer to a mental quality, a psychological process or a set of meditative practices. More broadly, it can refer to a cultivation of the mind, an ethical orientation to life or an enquiry into the nature of phenomena.

One possible thread connecting different contemporary usages of the term is: the experience of a sustained, deliberate awareness of the presenting moment – what is actually happening now – that is imbued with an attitude of tenderness and acceptance.

Note there are two elements here. Deliberate awareness of the here-and-now suggests an alert and receptive attention – one that is stable, undistracted and clearly knowing. A tender, accepting attitude implies qualities of patience, non-discrimination and impartiality.

Combined in a dynamic harmony, these two elements foster a presence of mind that is as intimate as it is equanimous, and which is welcoming to whatever is arising, abiding and passing away in the presenting moment. Orientating oneself to ‘given experience’ in this way is to enter fully into the aliveness of the ever-changing now.

The Spaces Between Words

Recently I was listening to a talk about mindfulness by the veteran meditation teacher Christina Feldman. What really struck me was her remarking that she tends to come up with a new working definition for mindfulness every year.

This from a teacher of over 40 years duration –
one who has mentored the most senior mindfulness trainers from the psychology and psychotherapy professions. Her comment says something about how the kind of learning and understanding that comes through practice is never complete and is ever-evolving.

Another implication is that ‘mindfulness’ cannot adequately be confined to, or defined by, a set of words. We can never acquire a fully satisfactory conceptual understanding of it. Indeed, if and when we do pin down what we think we know what mindfulness is – perhaps into a neat and tidy phrase or two – then we run the risk of our practice ossifying.

Of course, there is no shortage of definitions of mindfulness to be found in knowledge sources, both ancient and modern. But mindfulness itself, as a quality of mind, cannot adequately be confined to, or defined by, language.

If you hanker for an exact definition, believing that you will then know the experience of mindfulness, then you’re in good company. It is the nature of the human mind to seek a definitive ‘take’ on something - anything, in fact. Just keep reading this blog for evidence of that!

Mindfulness, though, is best understood through direct experience. So when you notice your mind is on the hunt for conceptual understanding, that is a mindful moment. Everything else is just filler.

Reality Check

In our over-stimulated, highly spun and monetised world, it can be hard to know what’s for real. Whatever ‘mindfulness’ is supposed to be about, it’s not stimulation, spin and money. So how do we sort the wheat from the chaff?

Stress, busyness and distraction are unlikely to aid one’s efforts to seek out what’s nourishing and discard the husks. But mindfulness, if it prizes anything, prizes wise discernment and the importance of knowing for oneself. So try we must.

Paths have a tendency to get overgrown, to get clogged up with detritus and to lose their markings. Inner paths are no different. Knowing when your path is blocked is wisdom in action.

To skilfully engage with struggles and obstacles that you encounter is to learn something important – that they are friendly forces in disguise, indeed opportunities for learning and growth. Trusting this comes with practice.

No Obstructions

For me, the penny really dropped when an experienced meditation teacher told me that 95% of meditation practice is working with the so-called ‘hindrances’ of sensual desire, ill will, restlessness, dullness and drowsiness, and sceptical doubt. Up to that point, I’d thought it was just me.

Since then, I have come to appreciate that the human birthright is to encounter powerful psychological forces that disturb and obscure inner clarity. Encountering these forces is an indication that there is some form of mental grasping at work.

But it is also a sign that the mind is bringing to light an unskilful habit, which softens and releases through awareness, so such moments are an occasion to rejoice. Really!

‘First They Ignore You’

Until recently, it was barely conceivable that mindfulness would find any substantial role in western healthcare. In 2007, when I first started running MBCT courses, it was a niche endeavour.

In my city, which normally prides itself on being ‘ahead of the curve’, the only course providers were two small centres and a lone psychologist in the local NHS.

Within the psychotherapy world at the time, we professionals were considered rather dubious, strange even, to be advocating silent meditation practices for psychological wellbeing. Therapy is, after all, usually about talking – lots of talking.

But there we were, shamelessly encouraging clients and patients to quieten down and watch what shows up. As the old saying goes: “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

‘Then They Laugh At You’

Ten years later, it’s all change. The popularisation of mindfulness is a phenomenon. My city is now awash with mindfulness courses, instructors and practitioners. The lone psychologist may have retired but she left behind enough seeds for the local NHS to sprout its own mindfulness centre. The UK’s ‘mindfulness mega-trend’ continues its breathless pace. Here and beyond, the m-word is used for selling everything from colouring books and scented candles to being cool and looking good.

We have come so far that mindfulness is now the subject of parody, as exemplified by the hilarious Ladybird Book of Mindfulness and Modern Toss’s Mindlessness Colouring Book – much-needed splashes of comedy in a genre of few laughs. For me, these are reminders of how much has changed in 10 years. They’re also a useful prompt for not taking myself too seriously.

Seeking A Way

For over 20 years I have endeavoured to cultivate what might loosely be called a mindfulness-based life. I have practised with many different meditation teachers from all over the world, joined and set up sitting groups, lived and worked in retreat centres, conducted Masters-level research on mindfulness, participated on and facilitated numerous courses, workshops and social outreach projects.

It has been a rich and fascinating journey so far. For sure, there are the inevitable fruits of practice, but I have probably learned more from my many wrong-turns and missteps. I have made every mistake going on this path – apart from the ones I haven’t had a chance to yet.

I am grateful to the guidance of teachers and wise practitioners I have encountered along the way. When I’m in a hole, they remind me to stop digging.

Sweeping The Path

This blog is about mindfulness. It has been inspired by the many and varied queries, doubts and confusions – not to mention insights and revelations – that crop up with dependable regularity for practitioners on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) courses.

Like my books, it is intended to be part toolkit and part roadmap for one’s journey on the path of mindfulness.

Establishing and sustaining a practice takes effort and patience. It does not necessarily bring instant rewards. The importance of reflecting on what we are doing, why, and how, cannot be overstated. Hence a blog for offering ideas, stories, exercises and a heap of received wisdom for your reflection.

I hope it encourages you onward – or, at the very least, not to give up!

‘Reflection’ is a big part of mindfulness practice (though sometimes sadly overlooked). It implies consideration and contemplation. In a nutshell, taking the time to chew things over in order to discern potential value, and maybe to try something out for oneself.

Personal effort and personal agency are central to this path. So, from the outset, it would be pertinent to say: don’t take my word for it.

The contemplative traditions from which mindfulness practices have evolved urge us to find our own way, and to trust in the authority of our own experience. In that spirit, if you find something of use here, please hold onto it. Similarly, if something turns out to be of little help, best cast it aside.