Buddhist mindfulness practices are being used in settings from healthcare to corporate stress management and military training. This is the secular Mindfulness Movement. But can what else can mainstream society learn from Buddhism, and what does a Buddhist context add to the view of mindfulness itself? (1 of 2 posts)
A few months ago I wrote several posts exploring whether Buddhism and the secular mindfulness movement are Friends or Foes; and What Buddhists Can Learn From the Mindfulness Movement. My main point was that Buddhists should celebrate and embrace the use of mindfulness in secular settings, but I am also keenly aware that much is lost in the transition. I want to explore this further not by focusing on the demerits of secular mindfulness but by asking what else Buddhism has to offer.
It is striking how little this question is asked in the rush to mindfulness. The Buddhist roots of mindfulness are acknowledged, but Buddhism itself is placed in the category ‘religion’ and therefore considered alien to secular settings. I think that’s a false dichotomy, and the mindfulness movement itself shows how a Buddhist teaching can be applied outside a Buddhist context because the insight underpinning it is universal.
Some other aspects of Buddhism are being explored, especially under the influence of Buddhists who are also psychologists or mindfulness trainers. The most prominent example is the development of compassion and loving kindness in mindfulness courses, prompted especially by academics Paul Gilbert and Kristin Neff. Like mindfulness, the benefits of compassion are also being explored by neuroscientists, often working alongside Buddhists, notably at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Vidyamala’s Breathworks course and Paramabandhu’s Kindness Based Therapy (KBT) are both mindfulness courses developed by members of the Triratna Buddhist Order, drawing on their experience of practising mettabhavana (loving kindness practice).
The ‘secular compassion movement’ is younger and much smaller than the mindfulness movement – and, unlike mindfulness, the practice of developing compassion has prominent non-Buddhist antecedents. But it demonstrates a principle that I think can be taken much further: many aspects of Buddhist practice can be mined by secular society, just as mindfulness is being.
Most straightforwardly, some practitioners of mindfulness meditation are likely to want to explore other approaches to meditation including concentrative (dhyana/jhana) and insight-based practice as well as compassion practices. Indeed, the Insight Meditation Movement (IMM) – the network of centres including The Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock and Gaia House – is already the hub of largely secular Buddhist meditation movement. The IMM strips Buddhist practice down to what it considers key elements that are practiced intensively but largely outside the broader Buddhist context. These start with mindfulness – and it was a relatively small step for Jon Kabat Zinn to go from his IMM-style mindfulness practice to the development of MBSR. Beyond mere mindfulness lie insight practices as the Gaia House website explains:
‘In common with mindfulness training, insight meditation retreats teach skills that help us respond more effectively to difficult emotions and painful feelings. But such retreats go further. … This path seeks not simply to equip us with better skills to cope with suffering but, more radically, to develop the understanding that will uproot the basic misperceptions which underlie all our sense of discontent, and disconnection from others.’
What other elements of Buddhist practice might be taken up in this way? Buddhist psychology is already being taught at Bangor University’s Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice; and one can imagine Buddhist ethics attracting attention as a way of making explicit what is involved in the wise choices that MBSR and MBCT already explore.
I understand why some other Buddhists have reservations about these developments, but I am happy to see Buddhism being mined in this way: this is how its insights and values can effect society on the widest scale. However, the price of entering the mainstream is that these aspects of Buddhism are inevitably soaked in mainstream values: muted, co-opted, commercialised and in that sense distorted. I think Buddhists should accept that this will happen and not mind too much, but we can also have an influence. For me, the most important contribution Buddhists can make us in adhering to and actually practising a much more expansive and far-reaching vision of mindfulness, meditation an life itself.
See the next post in this series
Vish, thanks for another great post. I must say that loving kindness meditation has been an integral part of all of the mindfulness-based programs I’ve experienced, and was taught to me by my first MBSR teacher. Also, the statement that “mere mindfulness” as taught in MBSR is only about helping us better cope with suffering is an oversimplification. MBSR focuses on helping us see deeply into the lived texture of our experience and embrace it fully in order to touch the dynamic, spacious and interconnected nature of our being. In short, the dialog between mindfulness and Buddhism you call for is already well underway and appears to have been so since these practices were first developed.
Hi Mark,
Yes indeed. Mindfulness is never ‘mere’ mindfulness and the genius of MBSR is that it finds a way to communicate a seed that can grow into genuine Dharmic insight in an entirely secular context. However, the context makes a difference, as I’ll be to arguing in future posts.
It’s true that Buddhist influence is strong in some MBSR trainers, but they are often (though by no means always) Buddhists as well. Then again, I meet psychologists who teach MBSR or MBCT as a mere technique, with no sense that they need to practice it themselves, and I think the decontextualisation of mindfulness in MBSR sets the scene for this – even though people like Jon Kabat Zinn deplore it.
The place of loving kindness is a very live issue in MBSR circles. It isn’t part of the original course and I believe that JKZ and Santorelli are currently clamping down on variations. But many trainers, myself included, find that it adds another, important dimension to he course.
I don’t doubt that there are such professionals — I can only say I’ve never encountered such. The eight or so MBSR teachers I know are all very much involved in practice themselves. The major text on mindfulness pedagogy , “Teaching Mindfulness” (McCowen et al) stresses the importance of personal practice, and in fact suggests that effective teaching can only grow as part of one’s own practice. It also advises mindfulness teachers to study Buddhism, and even maps the teaching intentions of MBSR onto the Four Noble Truths. So while there may be aberrations I think the roots of mindfulness in Buddhist teaching are strong.
HI Mark,
I agree that’s true of the MBSR trainers I know, but in the UK MBCT is offered as part of the National Health service’s provision for avoiding depression relapse. I do meet clinical psychologists who think they can teach mindfulness as a technique, just as they would offer CBT. I meet HR people who think something similar.
Hi Vishvapani,
I’m glad that you are generally encouraging of this wider use of Buddhist techniques, but I find some of your assumptions contradictory here. On the one hand, you say that it is a false dichotomy to treat Buddhism as ‘religion’ and alien to secular settings, because “the insight underpinning it is universal”. I have much sympathy with that point. On the other hand, though, you say “However, the price of entering the mainstream is that these aspects of Buddhism are inevitably soaked in mainstream values: muted, co-opted, commercialised and in that sense distorted.”
If the underpinning insights are genuinely universal, then there is nothing inevitable about the loss of these insights when they are used outside a conventionally Buddhist setting. You might want to complain about specific uses of mindfulness-based approaches being “muted, co-opted or commercialised”, but if you think that this is because they are “secular” then you seem to be reinforcing the very false dichotomy you are criticising. You can’t have it both ways. Either Buddhism is special because it is “religious”, and “secular” uses of it will then inevitably lose something important, or Buddhism is just a vehicle that has helped to convey universal insights, in which case those insights are open to all, and nothing will necessarily be lost by applying those insights in a completely different way in a different context.
Hi Robert,
I understand your point, but I don’t agree that there’s a contradiction. It’s common to note that when you take something from one context and place it in another you change it — because the context is important. For example, we often hear debates about the merits of private versus socialised healthcare: it’s the same treatment but the different context is what prompts the debate.
In the case of mindfulness etc one context is that the Dharma offers a coherent view of life when its basic teachings are taken together. Another concerns the engagement of the teachers: there’s a big difference between teaching mindfulness as an aspect of one’s own practice and as an aspect of one’s profession. It’s not an insuperable divide, but I think Buddhists have a role to play here.
Hi Vishvapani,
I agree with both your points about context: firstly that the insights of the Buddha form a cluster that need to be understood and practised together, and secondly that doing something professionally if you assume that there is no element of personal practice in it is very different from a full practice. What I don’t understand is why you are identifying this point with the religious/ secular divide. It’s quite possible for someone to try to practise the Buddha’s insights outside the traditional contexts of Buddhism and yet be seeing those insights as an interdependent cluster (e.g. as necessarily including morality, meditation and wisdom). It also certainly doesn’t follow from a ‘secular’ context that people will teach mindfulness as a technique without practising it themselves.
It strikes me that you probably have good points to make about mindfulness teaching which is separated from ethics and wisdom, or from the personal practice of the teacher, but there is no need to associate this with the religious/ secular divide. There are also traditional Buddhists who teach things that they may not be practising very much themselves, or who lay emphasis on one aspect of the path too much to the exclusion of the others. These are just signs of insufficiently effective practice that doesn’t address all the conditions, whether it’s ‘religious’ practice or ‘secular’ practice.
Hi Robert
I am not intending to invoke a religious/secular dichotomy. I speak of the perils of the mainstream, by which I mean market forces etc, not of secularity per se. I agree that the issue is commitment to practice and a broader ethical commitment beyond that, not religious affiliation and that some people may have that commitment independently – and even that you amy well be such a person yourself!
Metta, Vishvapani