4. Do or Do Not. There Is No Why (Until Later).

The previous blog explored some of the immediate historical context of modern mindfulness. It looked at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s stated intention of bringing Buddhist ideology into mainstream medicine without using Buddhist terminology. 

“...Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was developed as one of a possibly infinite number of skillful means for bringing the dharma into mainstream settings. It has never been about MBSR for its own sake. It has always been about the M. And the M is a very big M...”

At the start, he went out of his way to hide this, knowing that any  religious or spiritual associations would hinder his project, but in recent years he has spoken openly of his previously hidden rationale. His article Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and The Trouble with Maps (Contemporary Buddhism, May 2011) helps to explain this shift in policy.

As we have seen, Kabat-Zinn “...bent over backward...” to avoid MBSR being seen as “...Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’.” He began to rethink this policy in the early 1990’s when Thich Nhat Hanh offered an endorsement for the book Full Catastrophe Living. Although the statement “...showed that he had grasped the essence of the book and the line it was trying to walk,” Kabat-Zinn says “I did think twice about it”:

“It precipitated something of a crisis in me for a time, because not only was Thich Nhat Hanh definitely a Buddhist authority, his brief endorsement used the very foreign word dharma not once, but four times. Yet what he said spoke deeply and directly to the original vision and intention of MBSR. I wondered: ‘Is this the right time for this? Would it be skillful to stretch the envelope at this point? Or would it in the end cause more harm than good?’”

In the end, Thich Nhat Hanh’s endorsement was used as the foreword to the book. Why the change? Kabat-Zinn realised that there had been a shift in the attitudes of Western culture and medicine.

“Perhaps by 1990 there was no longer such a strong distinction between the so-called New Age and the mainstream world. So many different so-called counter-cultural strands had penetrated the dominant culture by then it was hard to make any binary distinctions about what was mainstream and what was fringe.”

Media presentation of yoga and meditation had helped to normalise Eastern practices in the Western mind. Having cleared the first few hurdles with regards acceptance by health professionals, there was sufficient momentum and interest in MBSR to begin explaining its origins without undermining the whole project.

“Perhaps it was important to be more explicit about why it might be valuable to bring a universal dharma perspective and means of cultivating it into the mainstream world”.

If you have ever spent time living or working in a Buddhist culture you will notice something distinctly ‘Eastern’ about Kabat-Zion’s strategy here. In Western cultures, influenced over millennia by the philosophical questions and methods of Ancient Greece, and the propositional-doctrinal emphasis of Christianity, we typically like to start with ‘understanding’ and then move on to ‘doing’. Before we begin anything we want to know the ‘whys and wherefores’. We start with the idea.

In simplistic terms, Eastern religious thought can often be seen to proceed in the opposite direction. You ‘do’ what your tribe or your family have always done because it works. It is not necessary to understand why - explanations can come later, if necessary. For example, if you travel in Tibetan areas of Central Asia, you will see various religious symbols painted on to houses. Inquire what these symbols mean and, quite often, the inhabitants will answer “I don’t know, ask a monk”. They start with the activity. Intellectual understanding is secondary and even optional.

Kabat-Zinn’s strategy involves getting people to start doing mindfulness. You have to do it first. Only after you have experienced the benefits of the activity, and become open to its possibilities, will the ideas that underpin mindfulness be explained. Within the Buddhist framework which he employs this is not considered unethically deceitful; it is a ‘skillful means’ necessary to advancing the perceived greater end, namely, bringing the dharma to bear on lived experience in a transformative way.

“It is my hope that people attracted to this field will come to appreciate the profound transformative potential of the dharma in its universal and skillful applications through their own meditation training and practice. Mindfulness can only be understood from the  inside out. It is not one more cognitive-behavioural technique to be deployed in a behavioural change paradigm, but a way of being and a way of seeing that has

profound implications for understanding the nature of our minds and bodies and for living life as if it really mattered... Without this living foundation, none of what really matters is available to us in ways that are maximally healing, transformative compassionate and wise. Of course, ultimately there is no inside and outside, only one seamless whole, awake and aware.”

This quote raises a number of fascinating questions about the relationship of mindfulness to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), the widespread sense of meaninglessness in which people are looking for ways to ‘live life as though it matters’, and the pantheism or monism articulated in the last sentence. But I am still trying to outline the historical context in which mindfulness has become widely accepted. This is not just important in understanding what modern mindfulness is. It will also help to illuminate the broader spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary western world and the intersection of spirituality and medicine - with much wider general application.

The take home point from this blog is that in Kabat-Zinn’s account, the acceptance of MBSR did not just involve changes to Eastern mindfulness, it also involved changes in Western culture and medicine.  He strategically obscured the underlying worldview until mindfulness practice had gained acceptance by a medical community which had also changed in becoming more open to alternative health care approaches. Can we explain these changes?

3. Mindfulness: It’s a Magical World...

The previous blog quoted Candy Gunther Brown’s claim that the recruitment of mindfulness into the medical mainstream followed a similar model to the attempted recruitment of Transcendental Meditation (TM): “translation into Western language and settings, popular recognition, adoption within scientific research in powerful institutions, and the use of sophisticated marketing public relations techniques”. ‘Mindfulness’ was the word chosen to represent a form of meditation in early English translations of Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts. It gained credibility through the advocacy of Western Buddhist converts with academic credentials in science and psychology. The medical breakthrough is credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. Further popularising occurred through the support of high-profile peace activists, celebrities, and media.

In contrast to mindfulness, the medical promotion of TM failed. TM was not presented as a simple stress-reduction technique but retained its explicit connections to Hindu religion and supernaturalism. In tracing the East-West translation process, it is necessary to recognise that in Buddhist religious contexts mindfulness also has a definite ‘supernatural’  orientation. The key points on this I take from Jeff Wilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of Waterloo, in his book Mindful America - The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In traditional Buddhism, meditation is not a normal part of life for lay-people. It is a pursuit for monastics, those who have reached an advanced stage through multiple reincarnations, and for whom Enlightenment may be within reach. Meditation is carried out under instruction in religious community and balanced with philosophical study and real world ethics. ‘Mindfulness’ is but one form of meditation among many and it is associated with

“…the highest concentrative trance meditative states; supernatural

powers of hearing and sight; recollection of thousands of past lives…

mind reading, the ability to multiply one’s body; invisibility; the ability to 

pass through walls, dive into the earth and walk on water; 

supernatural flight…etc”. (Wilson, 106).

Strange or supernatural experiences were not unknown to the earliest advocates of medical mindfulness. In a PhD thesis exploring the psychological impacts of intensive mindfulness meditation and mindfulness retreats, which was submitted in 1977, Jack Kornfield reported that mindfulness can result in disturbing emotional experiences including “nightmares, anger, pain, mood swings, fear, paranoia, hatred, uncontrollable body movements, hallucinations, and psychological tension”. Wilson comments 

“Another class of effects erased from current scientific discussions

 of mindfulness is psychic phenomena. Significant numbers of mindfulness

practitioners on retreat reported manifestations of telepathy,

precognition, or out-of-body experiences”. (Wilson, 82-83).

Kornfield’s research also reported positive effects including reductions of stress and anxiety and suggested the application of mindfulness for pain reduction, before Kabat-Zinn presented MBSR to the world. Wilson notes that whilst this dissertation is “...thoroughly psychological...” it is “...also thoroughly Buddhist... Though Buddhism is framed as psychology, it is also overtly and indelibly religious in his presentation” (Wilson, 82-83).

Elsewhere, Kornfield has acknowledged that in South East Asia, monks who are meditation masters are “revered for their qualities of mind, their purity and saintliness, and in many cases the powers they are believed to possess”. However, Wilson says that Kornfield follows Asian tradition by deliberately avoiding discussion of “powers” developed through meditation. He:

“…acknowledges that powers are common among Asian meditators,

and that this accounts for a significant portion of their popularity, but

refuses to discuss them with his English-reading American audience”.

It is unnecessary for Asian mindfulness teachers to talk about these ‘magical’ phenomena because “they live in cultures that already expect meditation teachers to manifest such powers”. This is widely recognised by mindfulness teachers with experience of practice in Asia. Teachers and students trained exclusively in the West are, says Wilson, “often completely unaware that mindfulness is embedded in magical contexts in Asia” (Wilson 107).  

Western mindfulness teachers acknowledge that mindfulness has religious, Buddhist origins, without ever going into detail regarding what those origins entailed. They rely heavily on the claim that Jon Kabat-Zinn secularised mindfulness by removing it from this religious Buddhist context, thus making it ‘accessible to people of all faiths and none’. So what exactly did Kabat-Zinn do? Trained as a microbiologist, Kabat-Zinn’s first encounter with Buddhism was at MIT in 1966. He began meditating every day and received further training when he accepted the role of Director at the Cambridge Zen Centre, becoming a student of Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn. Kabat-Zinn struggled with a sense of disjunction between his day-job as a biology lecturer and his meditation teaching and practice.

In his own words:

“In 1976, I went to work at the almost brand-new University of Massachusetts

Medical School. All the while, my koan about what I was really supposed to be

 doing with my life in terms of right livelihood was unfolding in the background.”

(A ‘koan’ is a kind of paradoxical riddle used in some forms of Buddhism to move one’s thinking away from ignorance and towards enlightenment).

“On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS)

in Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room 

one afternoon about Day 10 of the retreat, I had a ‘vision’ that lasted maybe

 10 seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was 

rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable

 connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought

 stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully

 explain and don’t feel the need to.

I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the longterm

 implications of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be

 implemented in one test environment—namely that it would spark new fields

 of scientific and clinical investigation, and would spread to hospitals and medical

 centres and clinics across the country and around the world, and provide right

 livelihood for thousands of practitioners. Because it was so weird, I hardly ever

 mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better

 sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I

 decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could. Pretty much everything 

I saw in that 10 seconds has come to pass…” 

He explains how he proceeded in this karmic assignment.

“…From the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to”

avoid “the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ 

‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’.” 

This was difficult because:

“…the entire curriculum is based on relatively… intensive training

and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga

pretty much defined one element of the ‘New Age’.”  

He remained fully committed to teaching the Buddhist ‘dharma’ which aims:

“...to elucidate the nature of suffering and its root causes, as well 

as provide a practical liberation from suffering”. 

However, in the public sphere: 

“this is to be undertaken, of course, 

without ever mentioning the word ‘dharma’”. 

(J. Kabat-Zinn, "Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps," Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1 2011): 282, 287-288).

2. Meditation as Medicine

Lets start with some recent historical context. In the late 1960’s, with celebrity support from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi attracted numerous followers of his Transcendental Meditation (TM) teachings. Drawing extensively on Hindu philosophy, mantras, and cosmology, TM made outlandish promises of supernatural powers to fee-paying meditation students. The initial enthusiasm of celebrities and others proved short lived and the Maharishi returned to India, a self-confessed failure. Nevertheless, from the 1980’s UK supporters argued that TM could be used for relaxation and stress relief and should therefore be available on the National Health Service (NHS). TM’s overt religious associations are one of the reasons why access to this as a public service has been denied.

Observers of popular mindfulness have noted clear parallels. The promotion of mindfulness in Western society closely followed that of TM: “translation into Western language and settings, popular recognition, adoption within scientific research in powerful institutions, and the use of sophisticated marketing public relations techniques”.1 The translation process started in the 19th Century, when Western orientalists began converting Buddhist writings into English. The Pali word for meditation in these texts was sati, with the equivalent, smṛti, in Sanskrit texts. The word ‘mindful’ was chosen to translate sati/smṛti into English.

From the 1970’s onward, a number of Western academics who had converted to Buddhism  made efforts to adapt their understanding of sati meditation in order to apply it to the concerns of Western secular, rather than Eastern Buddhist society. The high-profile peace activism of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, and the professional qualifications of Buddhist scientists and psychologists like Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Daniel Goleman gave mindfulness an intellectual credibility. The major breakthrough into mainstream medicine is credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn, an ordained Buddhist monk and associate of Thich Nhat Hahn, who presented meditation to secular health clinics in the late 1970’s as the ‘Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction’ (MBSR) programme.

These names, associated with the origins and key developments of Western mindfulness, represent the weighty core of the mindfulness ‘movement’ the spokes-persons who appear repeatedly as lecturers, authors, and researchers, the subjects of magazine articles and interviews, or the celebrity writers of forewords and back-cover endorsements. Thich Nhat Hanh has alone written over one hundred books on mindfulness. 

Orbiting at increasing distances from this centre of gravity, are people whose interest level varies from strongly committed to mildly sympathetic, and a spectrum of claimed applications ranging from the mystical, magical, and momentous to the marginal and mundane. There is money to be made in novelty with ‘Mindful Mints’, ‘Mindful Mayo’ and ‘Mindful Equestrianism’ among the more trivial offerings. In 2017 a documentary movie about Thich Nhat Hanh was narrated by none less than Benedict Cumberbatch, star of several blockbuster movies and the hit UK TV series ‘Sherlock’.  Other celebrity names associated with mindfulness are actresses Goldie Hawn and Angelina Jolie, and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. Since 2007, employees at Google have had access to an in-house mindfulness programme, made more widely available in Chade-Meng Tan’s 2012 book, “Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected path to Achieving Profits, Happiness (and World Peace)”. 

MBSR is now available in different forms at countless health institutions in the USA. Mindfulness is recommended by the UK National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health Care Excellence (NICE) as a means of treating some forms of depression.  Approximately 400 academic papers were published on mindfulness in 2011, increasing every year since 1996 when there were just 7.  Prominent US Higher Education institutions including Stanford, UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego have centres which focus specifically on mindfulness related research. This must amount to millions of US dollars in research funding worldwide. The US army has invested in Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training to improve soldier’s resilience to conflict and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  In the UK, the ‘Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group’ was formed in order to run mindfulness programmes for politicians within Parliament. In 2015 they published “Mindful Nation UK” which recommends the application of mindfulness to a range of policy issues in healthcare, education, the workplace, and criminal justice systems.

One of the reasons MBSR succeeded where TM failed is that proponents dissociated mindfulness  from its religious origins and re-associated it with science. That claimed translocation is something that needs to be examined closely.

1 C.G. Brown, The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 223.

1. Everyone does it.

Celebrities do it. Horse riders do it. CEO’s do it. Politicians do it. Soldiers do it. Convicts do it. For the last few years it’s been pretty much every where - in schools, prisons, GP surgeries, magazines, and books. In February 2014, it even made the front cover of Time magazine. I am talking about ‘mindfulness’.

Mindfulness interests me, as a Christian, on several levels. It first came to my attention as a practical question when Church members started to ask questions: “My children are being taught this in school... it is being encouraged on my management course... my GP recommends it... is this compatible with our Christian faith?” It is not possible to answer that question without understanding what mindfulness is and, in researching that, a range of other issues emerge. For example:

• It is widely recognised that mindfulness has Buddhist roots but its current relationship to Buddhism is a matter of ongoing debate - not least among practicing Buddhists. If it is not Buddhist then what is it?

• Mindfulness advocates assert that it is a spiritual practice which is “compatible” with “accessible to people of all faiths and none”. Where did that claim originate? How was the assessment made? Is it accurate?

• Because acceptance of mindfulness in public institutions rests on the claim of universal faith-compatibility this assertion has a political dimension. Reframing the previous question - someone, somewhere, is claiming the authority to assess the relationship of mindfulness to every religious and non-religious worldview. Quite a remarkable claim! Who is making that claim? And what do they expect to gain by making it?

• Counsellors who offer mindfulness therapies have found that Christian clients are not just concerned about mindfulness’ Buddhist links. They are also concerned that it may have connections with the occult. Are these fears reasonable?

• Some professing Christians advocate using mindfulness as a source of theological knowledge. What sort of theology does this produce?

• Mindfulness is promoted as a way to reduce suffering. Christianity has its own clear teaching on this topic. Not least, Christians worship a suffering Saviour, a God-man who was rejected, opposed, and crucified in a  clear-cut miscarriage of justice. Perhaps the most important question Christians can ask is whether our ‘suffering Saviour’ was also a ‘Mindful Messiah’.

Before trying to answer some of these big questions we need to do some groundwork. I will start by trying to put mindfulness into historical context. It did not just appear, fully-formed, in a vacuum. As we shall see, up until a few decades ago, when the idea of ‘meditation as medicine’ was proposed, it was dismissed. 150 years ago, only a tiny minority of Westerners would have had any interest in Buddhist meditation techniques. 350 hundred years ago Buddhism was more or less unknown in the West. What has changed? I think that is the best place to begin.