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.