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.