Mindfulness Locked Down (II)

When life has been thrown into flux and confusion by the coronavirus pandemic, mindfulness practice pares down to skilful interventions on yours or another’s behalf to meet basic needs. At such times, the fragility of life is starkly revealed while our animal instinct to run for the hills is thwarted by a lockdown. It can feel overwhelming. Taking care of the seconds and minutes is enough. Otherwise, as Albert Camus notes in The Plague (1947), “stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”

In less critical moments, might we lift our heads to take a broader view of events, inner and outer, and consider how best to respond to the plight of the world? When things pause, as large parts of human society have, they are easier to focus on. This is the gateway to mindfulness writ large. Remember that ‘practice’ is not a purely personal endeavour nor mere strategic navigation of changing conditions for self-serving ends. It is about more than just you (if this is unclear, start here).

Enlightening Times

Crises scratch the surface of human existence and reveal what otherwise might be difficult to see.
This pandemic is no exception in affording a clearer-than-usual glimpse into the world we inhabit. It is interconnected in every which way we look at it.

These days we are obliged to confront our dependence on each other for survival, from the food we eat to the healthcare we need. We are less inclined to devalue the people who put their own safety on the line to provide life-sustaining services for others – not just frontline health workers but cleaners, care workers, shop workers and many others. Through acts of kindness and consideration, we discover a solidarity with our neighbours that turns out to have been there, untapped, the whole time. Priorities tend to shift when we discern who and what is essential.

Joining the Dots

Our non-separation from animals and nature is glaring. This coronavirus was likely transmitted from animals as a result of human encroachment into areas of the eco-system we used to leave be. Such invasions not only expose human vulnerabilities but can be catastrophic for other species. Now is a good time to remember that we too are animals.

Observe how this unprecedented human pause impacts our environment. The natural world – at the mercy of human exploitation and greed for so long – finds a rare chance to reclaim some territory. Meanwhile, pollution levels plummet and rivers teem with new life. What do fresher air, bluer skies, clearer waters and thriving fellow creatures have to tell us about how our species treats that which it depends on?

Remember This Moment

Mindfulness writ large is unflinching in its gaze and compassionate in impulse. Practice is inherently relational. Nothing need fall outside its remit. Now is the time, if you have the resources, to open up to the momentous change happening around you and to prepare to take your heartfulness into the world (once you’re allowed out again, that is).

This is an essential dimension of practice. To assist you, it might be useful to recollect that life is no more fragile or any less certain than it ever was. What’s changed is that our collective propensity for denial has been smashed by the wrecking ball of reality. We have always lived in a world interpenetrated by sickness and death. We never were in control. But the scale of suffering is eternally up for grabs and this is where your mindfulness and compassion are so needed.

There is nothing like a virus to remind us that we breathe the same air, that borders are insubstantial, and that something as simple as washing one’s hands can be an act of community service. There is nothing like a pandemic to illustrate how our lives are intertwined, not-so-solid and prone to extermination. On the planetary level, the worst that could happen now is we fail to read the signs or listen to the alarm bells and go back to sleep.

Click here for Part 3.

Mindfulness Locked Down (I)

The realisation may already have dawned on you: mindfulness prepares you for the times in which you live. Pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown, upheaval or no upheaval, ‘practice’ means embracing the conditions of the moment with a warm heart, looking them straight in the eye and responding with as much skill and care as you can muster.

For able-bodied practitioners, a lockdown offers a legion of opportunities. A rich and longstanding tradition of prison meditation programmes attests to it. Even in the midst of disagreeable change, disruption to habits, removal of presumed comforts, escalating social panic and the freshly exposed human proximity to death, we can draw upon our compassion and intelligence to be open and awake to it all.

Start Here

This might not be easy, so where to begin? As always, start where you are. Remember, there are no hierarchies on the path of mindfulness. Prior attainments or perfect conditions are wholly unnecessary. A blissful moment in meditation has no more value than any other moment. A lockdown has no less going for it than what you might consider to be ‘normal life’. When awareness is well established, the mind’s tendency to inflate the significance of particular experiences is diminished. In its place, equanimity can flourish.

In this way, mindfulness practice is grounding. It is a natural antidote to the mental wobbling, catastrophising and forgetfulness humans are prone to when anxious. We wise up more quickly to our tendency to fixate on bad news, defend against emotional upset and impulsively stockpile goods out of fear. We let go more readily of rigid views about the future and our primitive struggles with uncertainty.

The moment we catch ourselves sliding into despair or being afflicted with the contagious panic of others, we can gift ourselves the space to breathe, to feel, and to re-orientate ourselves in this moment. Life in its fullness become possible again. At other times, feeding a neighbour, caring for the sick or mourning the dead might be the focus of our practice.

Start Now

Thanks to the concern and generosity of countless good-hearted people, there is a plethora of free online resources to guide you safely through a lockdown. Their contents vary but the underlying principles align neatly with the basics of everyday mindfulness:

• maintain and develop routines that attend to basic human needs for care, exercise, social contact, creative engagement and contact with nature. Choose wisely what you feed your mind as well as your body.
• maintain and develop a healthy balance between ‘being’ and ‘doing’. This necessitates limiting the number of activities you undertake, completing them fully, and remembering to pause before you commence new ones.
• reduce or avoid poor coping strategies, i.e. the ones that provide only short-term relief from psychological discomfort and tend to inspire dependency or excessive use in the longer term. 
• spend time listening inwardly. Let your body and heart tell you what matters, what is of value and where meaning is to be found, especially in turbulent times.
• pay attention to the ordinary and humble details of existence (or at least endeavour not to discount them). Washing your hands can be a meditation as well as physically life-preserving. Chewing a piece of food can be an act of kindness to one’s body rather than a mere stepping stone to the next morsel. Walking from one room to another can be a conscious act that enables you to arrive, inwardly and outwardly, into a totally fresh space.
  

Stay Safe

As the old saying goes: when we take care of the present, the future takes care of itself. The mental quality of mindfulness is, by nature, protective (more about this here). Just as we might socially distance from others out of care, we can do something comparable with our minds when they get sucked into vortices of worry, catastrophising and doom-mongering.

 When we are able to hold in awareness, with intimacy and without aversion, the latest horror story our minds have concocted, all the while allowing the energy of associated feelings to express itself, we are doing something powerful and profoundly liberating: being with things as they are.

Negative thoughts lose their toxic charge when we offer them friendly respect and give them space. Psychologically speaking, this is a kind of social distancing. It is a lot less painful than the attrition warfare we are prone to waging with our unruly minds. It also frees us up to act wisely and kindly.

Wise action and creative engagement with all forms of life are necessary expressions of mindfulness practice. Even in a lockdown, might we consider that the most ordinary activities, carried out with attention and intention, have effects beyond their apparent significance? When we tap deeply into our presence in the world, might the world in turn become more present to us? Here lies the innate interconnection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ that abides regardless of whether or not we venture beyond our front doors.

Click here for Part 2

Vintage Roots

As modern conceptualisations of mindfulness evolve and expand and, occasionally, stretch to the point of near meaninglessness (mindful mushroom-picking, anyone?), revisiting first principles is a journey worth taking.

Early Buddhist psychology, from which major elements of contemporary theory and practice derive, offers a range of concise definitions and colourful similes to illuminate precisely what the mental quality of mindfulness is and what it does.

Here is a short summary of just one of the numerous categorisations of sati (the term for mindfulness in the Pali Canon). This list relates to the key characteristics of sati’s activity:

Monitoring: Mindfulness is understood to monitor, supervise and steer other mental qualities. It is described as a ‘watchful charioteer’. This simile highlights sati’s qualities of steering and supervision of other mental faculties together with its vigilant nature, which can note specific objects on a journey (inner or outer) whilst simultaneously maintaining a balanced and broad awareness that serves the smooth and successful passage of the journey as a whole. 

Integrating: Mindfulness is a regulative, organising activity in meditation, which notes any lacks and deficiencies, brings in appropriate qualities and suitably applies them.

Stabilising: Mindfulness exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction, as described in the ‘simile of the post’, which likens six animals to the six sense organs of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. These sense organs can be restrained by the ‘strong post’ of sati, which exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction through its ability to tether the senses and ‘keep them near’. In this way, mindfulness remains aloof and impartial, but also connected to what is happening at the sense doors.

Protecting: Mindfulness guards the mind by helping to prevent the arising of unwholesome states through its clear view of a situation, as highlighted in the simile of the gatekeeper. Such a protective role comes about through sati’s ability to exert a controlling influence on thoughts and intentions.

Applying ‘detached’ observation: Mindfulness is a calm and non-reactive type of attention, which ‘stands back’ to observe phenomena, rather than interfere with them. It helps one experience all feelings with a detached outlook. This offers a more objective stance towards one’s experience. It is sometimes referred to as ‘bare attention’, a key aspect of sati in that it both encourages sense-restraint and allows one to see things as they have come to be, unadulterated by habitual reactions and projections.

Minding My Own Busyness

Recently, I found myself in a restaurant with three other mindfulness teachers, shovelling Pad Thai down my throat at great speed and with considerable mess. We were discussing meditation between partially digested mouthfuls while repeatedly checking the time.

We were on a short lunch break during a mindfulness conference and, time- and food-wise, had bitten off more than we could chew. Rushing back to the conference, splattered in noodle sauce, still attempting to conclude discussions, I had the vaguest glimmer of knowledge that I wasn’t so much ‘walking my walk’ as stumbling around in a state of mindlessness.

Sure enough, two hours later, during a talk on the importance of a teacher’s embodiment of mindfulness, I discovered myself – partially slouched in a plastic chair, partially propped up against the conference room wall to ease my indigestion – firing off non-urgent emails on my phone.

This was a ‘good’ moment. It reminded me that mindfulness is not about where I go, what I do, who I hang out with, or what labels I attach to ‘me’. It is simpler than all of those.

Simple as in: being sensitive to the cause and effect of actions. Simple as in: being aware of the relationship between stress and response. Simple as in: taking care of body and mind. Simple as in: getting clear about one’s priorities in the here-and-now.

Action Plans

I once received a useful teaching from a car mechanic on how to handle the human tendency for doing too much. He knew his propensity for taking on more jobs than he could handle and further overloading himself by not taking proper holidays. So he would staple together certain pages of his work diary to indicate when he would take breaks from work. Crucially, he would always stick to his plan. Skilful intention, resolution, kindness and care, all manifested with the click of a stapler. Nice work.

Something I’ve been practising myself for a while is to pause when I find myself facing an unconsidered task or situation, and to inwardly pose three questions: Do I need to take this on? Do I want to take this on? What is my intention here? Momentarily stopping and checking in with myself often clarifies how best to proceed.

Of course, I can just as easily forget to do this. These are the times when I find myself biting off more than I can chew, blundering about like a nitwit, and washing off noodle stains afterwards.

Taking the Mick Out of Mindfulness

The commodification of mindfulness as a ‘feel good’ therapy prescribed for personal gain now has a name: McMindfulness. Such a package assumes its rightful place in the burgeoning catalogue of problem-focused, goal-orientated therapies designed to soothe overloaded human minds.

McMindfulness is a fitting product for an ethically unencumbered marketplace trading on human desire and aversion, but it lacks authenticity for this very reason. It also relegates mindfulness to a bland technique dedicated to attaining ‘presence’ and so neglects the practice’s broader purpose of ‘holding in mind’, seeing clearly and remembering what is of value.

When a practice for cultivating awareness becomes blind to itself – and, by extension, its interdependent nature – the awareness that results is partial and sterile.

Dead Calm

Elevating the ‘present moment’ into some kind of special state, or goal, is an easy trap to fall into. Mindfulness practice may be a worthy antidote to getting unhelpfully lost in the past and future, but it can just as easily lead to getting uselessly stuck in the here and now. Chasing the calmness of ‘being present’ is usually the cause of this.

Conversely, skilful practice is about letting go of any insistence to be present and giving up on acquiring calmness. This is a delicate balance and easy to miss – all the more so if we forget to reflect on what we are doing, practice-wise, and why we are doing it. Wise reflection is essential to mindfulness. When we abandon this and lose our spirit of enquiry, something in our practice dies.

Walking the Tightrope

The obstacles are many on the path of mindfulness, but they teach us so much. I have learned the hard way over the years that practice is like walking a tightrope – skill and effort are required and it is possible to lose balance at any moment. I go chasing contentment, only to wind up disappointed. I go chasing ‘enlightenment’, only to remain ignorant. Guess what happens when I try to be ‘a great meditator’!

The good news is that when I give up on chasing, balance restores itself and the practice glides. Such moments bring a refreshing humility – I am engaging with something bigger than and beyond ‘me’. Practice ceases to be a private affair. Mainlined into the flux of existence, I may even, for a fleeting moment, glimpse my non-separation from this world of beings and the ever-changing mystery and wonder of it all.

From: Mindfulness for Unravelling Anxiety, 2016.

No More Heroes

As I noted a few years ago, when assessing the growth of mindfulness in society at large, anything that becomes fashionable is susceptible to dilution and corruption. Uprooted from its ethical foundations, mindfulness can, in theory, be utilized for any number of human endeavours, from assassination and burglary to wine-tasting and golf. But when you divorce mindfulness from empathy, compassion and awareness of causality, what results is little more than a highly attentive, egocentric state of mind that is dissociated from the world around (Mindfulness for Unravelling Anxiety, pp109-110).

The ignorance, spin and profiteering that occur in regard to mindfulness aren’t new. Nor is the rhetoric of ‘self-mastery’, ‘resilience’ and ‘personal happiness’. Perhaps what is becoming clearer as we approach the third decade of the 21st Century is the inability of the mainstream mindfulness movement to deliver on its promise of a paradigm shift in human society.

Super Size Me

More striking again is the banality of the mainstream. Hollowed out of meaning, mindfulness in the marketplace regularly trades in its depth and mystery for a generous splash of self-promotion as the quickest fix in town.

McMindfulness is everywhere and aptly named. As Ronald Purser notes in a recent article in The Guardian, just as burgers and fries at McDonald’s are the same wherever you go, there is a similar lack of variation in the content and structure of mindfulness courses around the world.

This is evidenced by the manifold programmes and curricula implemented by a self-appointed establishment of training organisations, which refuse to engage with issues of social and economic justice, environmental destruction, climate destabilisation and cultural toxicity. The movers and shakers of mainstream mindfulness have opted to play no part in the revolution they once proclaimed for our interrelated, interdependent world.

Purser outlines how these programmers have reduced themselves to promoting a product – a market-friendly palliative offering new and improved ways of handling life’s rat race whilst insisting that one remain a rat (– not a problem if you are a rat, but you’re not).

Mindless Nation

We are trapped in a “neoliberal trance”, says Purser, quoting what the education scholar Henry Giroux has called a “disimagination machine”, a process that stifles critical and radical thinking. “We are admonished to look inward, and to manage ourselves. Disimagination impels us to abandon creative ideas about new possibilities.”

On this subject, the last time I took any notice of mindfulness in the Press was also in The Guardian (see here). On this occasion, however, it was definitely business as usual: a puff piece about a meditation pod that is custom-made for office workers. The idea is that you “step in” then “float out” a few minutes later and get back to work. About as world changing as a cigarette break, then?

What grabbed my attention was not the underwhelming pod but the accidental precision with which the writer captured something of our brave new mindful world: “Meditation used to be about the quest for deep existential truths: the inner peace it fostered was a side-effect that took off, like the discovery of Post-it notes by scientists who were trying to create the world’s strongest glue.”

What a nifty way of inadvertently summarising the collision of ancient wisdom and modern world. Yes, I know, it is usually described as a ‘meeting’ or an ‘encounter’, but such words do no justice to the dismemberment and ruin that are becoming apparent.

The normal routine for rounding off articles on mindfulness is with a little flourish – something upbeat and positive that seeks to remove any need for the reader to sit with uncomfortable truths. Well, I’m not going to do that, not this time.

Hot Off The Press

Once in a while, an article about mindfulness appears in the mainstream Press that is worth reading. The standard fare about calming down / spacing out / focussing in / floating off / etc. / etc. / etc. takes a break. The smooth flow of sound bites about inner peace and the scientifically proven health benefits of meditation drops to a hush. Into the space pops an insightful and refreshing critique of what’s really going on.

This year’s contribution came courtesy of The Guardian, along with the confusing title ‘The Mindfulness Conspiracy’ (read it here). Fortunately, the spin stops at the title, most likely because the author, Ronald Purser, is no lifestyle journalist, but that rare combination of a recognised authority who is unafraid to ask searching and difficult questions of other authorities.

Even if you have only a cursory interest in mindfulness, Purser’s piece deserves a read. He documents how secular mindfulness, having found itself as a major player in the ‘mood economy’, is succumbing to a graceless slide into a swamp of greed and exploitation – the very swamp it was designed to steer practitioners away from in the first place.

Selling the Family Silver

Here lies the perennial problem of all liberation movements, whether they be ‘inner’ or ‘outer’: what starts out as a revolution becomes a surrender. In this case, the quest for a better life, a fairer world, gets hijacked, privatised and co-opted for social, economic and political control. According to Purser, the commodification of mindfulness has left it “void of a moral compass or ethical commitments, unmoored from a vision of the social good.”

In recent years, a lucrative self-help industry has found ingenious ways of packaging mindfulness and selling it as a technique for stress-reduction and “personal life-hacking optimisation.” In so doing, its practice often degrades into a form of “auto-exploitation” whereby it merely aids one’s capacity to cope with the socio-economic toxicity that precipitated one’s stress in the first place.

Who could have predicted that, only a decade ago, the so-called mindfulness revolution would wind up as the touchy-feely arm of a profiteering medico-wellbeing industry that never wastes an opportunity to pathologise stress in order to generate rationales, remedies and treatments for it?

More on this subject in the next post.