I've been posting some stuff from a book I'm working on. Here's more:
Years ago I sat as a student in an eight-week MBSR class. There was a woman sitting next to me who was disturbed about the class. During the second class she spoke up. She said she was an executive at a high stress firm, and she liked the pace. Type A-plus, she wanted to move fast and was afraid meditation would make her lose a step. She didn’t want to be all calm and laid back and warm feeling. She wanted to clear her head and be creative. She wondered if she shouldn’t be in the class. The teacher missed a tremendous teaching moment. Meditation could help her realize who she was, not change her into a person she didn’t want to be. The beauty of the practice is that it offers almost exactly what anyone wants to get out of it. For crying out loud, this same MBSR program trained military snipers. But the teacher told her she was wrong. She should be all calm and laid back and hippie-like. She would be so much happier. The woman left at break and never came back.
I swore then that if I ever taught it would be for people like her.
Much of what presents as mindfulness meditation these days is loosely based on Buddhist practices and comes with a progressive world view attached. That’s not OK for everybody. A typical secular mindfulness retreat will tangentially touch on some ideas from Buddhist sutras like the four noble truths. Briefly, these are 1) suffering is universal, 2) suffering is caused by an attachment to greed, hatred and delusion, 3) There is a way to end suffering, and 4) the way is the noble eightfold path. Three of the planks in the path are mindfulness, effort and concentration. And that is pretty much what you get from many mindfulness gurus. That allows you to go inside of yourself and work on your own wellness. Complete view, resolve, speech, conduct and livelihood, the other five planks in the eightfold path, are pretty conservative values and look outward to our interactions with other people. They don’t quite fit the self-focus of 21stcentury secular mindfulness. Mindfulness retreats often become Asian cultural appropriation carnivals complete with a little bit of yoga thrown in, vegetarian food and rice in a bowl, and the inevitable reading of something by the Sufi poet Rumi. They’re not for everybody.
Absent is the rich history of contemplation in the western tradition, but I think it’s worth considering. Pick and choose Buddhism, presented with the limited knowledge of so many mindfulness adherents, can seem world negating, even nihilistic. Insistence on radical acceptance borders on blaming the victim in cases of abuse and trauma. With everyone hell-bent on stress relief and self-improvement little attention is often paid to the evil that lurks within us and positions itself against our mental health. Whether that evil is a thought construct or the devil himself, it’s very real to a lot of very damaged people and needs to be recognized. Instead, oversimplified, the meditation instructions to just let thoughts go diminishes the impact that these thoughts can have on us when our mind is unhinged.
Judeo-Christian meditation practices approach this pull toward darkness head on. When I recited the Divine Office the focus of attention was the Psalms. I didn’t have to dig too deep to find the anger and self-hate that mental illness had deposited within me. It was all over the Psalms. A prayer that asks God to crush the skulls of our enemies’ children ( ) leaves little room for positive spin. But contemplating these verses helped. CS Lewis positions the Psalms as representative. The enemies we seek to smite are all within, and by exposing them we can move beyond and away from their influence and their negative control of our character, and the character of our thoughts and emotions. The Buddha went through similar exercises in his battles with the demon Mara, representative of all the demonic urges a person can hold inside. The Psalms and the sutras about Mara become poetic metaphors of our triumph over our worst impulses. This can help when dealing with the negative that floods us during the most desperate depressions and psychotic manias we face. Freudian critics will say that you can’t pray mental illness away. But that’s not the point of establishing archetypes to represent an internal struggle, and to meditate on them. Since meditation reveals so many of our thoughts as transitory and inaccurate, verses that speak of the struggle against these inaccuracies can help us see misleading thoughts for what they are. Defeatist and false.
If you can’t pray mental illness away, I say you can’t think it away either. Because it’s not about thinking. Gurus will speak of emptying the mind, and such a radical simplification of Zen will help you eliminate the unnecessary, but I’m willing to bet that reason is real and ideas matter. It’s when your reason is broken that mental illness results. How do you think fighting a broken reason with more reason will go?
Thinking did not get you into this mess. You may think it did, and the thoughts you have up to and during an episode will convince you that your thought yourself sick. But you didn’t.
Some stress event collided with a genetic propensity to a mental illness in your DNA. Physical or emotional trauma or a grinding weight of dysfunction led you down a path to a place full of moods seemingly impossible to control by yourself. Whatever it was, some catalyst made your brain chemistry so haywire that you ended up with a mental illness. The role of brain chemistry is why medicines so often work in treatment. Remember, you did not think yourself sick. Meditation will convince you that so many of your thought are just plain wrong. Especially the ones that blame yourself through your thoughts for your illness.
Since thinking did not make you sick, thinking will not make you better, either. Many therapists will tell you that through their efforts you can magically change your thought patterns and get better. Now I have nothing against therapy. Proper therapy, such as therapy that helps you dig through the refuse in your mind and find where you hid the incorrect assumptions about yourself, and then strike a match illuminating these errors, is necessary for healing. That why psychotherapy works so well with meditation. They both reach for the same finish. You just have to be careful of therapies that promise to change your cognition, or your expectations, or lead you to merely think positive thoughts. What you need is knowledge about your poor self-image, knowledge about how you think and how that contributes to your prognosis. This must be internally generated. This knowledge can come through meditation, which enables you to notice and pay attention to the thoughts you’re having and watch as most thoughts reveal themselves to be largely erroneous about you and your situation. Contemplation on these thoughts will convince you that you don’t have to change them, you just have to realize and expose them, just as you would a poorly formed argument against a position you know something about.
Exit incorrect assumptions about the world you’re in and your place in it, enter wisdom.
Observing how you process information and form thoughts is key to building your skill at identifying erroneous thoughts during meditation and seeing through to the truth of any situation, even if that truth is that everything you thought about how mental illness is going to destroy you is wrong. Just investigate how your mind works.
An effective exercise to study how your mind works is Lectio Divina, or divine reading. Monks in Medieval Europe would read a very short piece of scripture over and over until a fragment jumped out at them. They’d repeat that fragment several times and then go silent and listen to what God, or their subconscious, said to them about it. This silent observation of the thoughts generated is much like the meditation we’ve investigated already. It’s just set in the context of a script designed to generate a certain kind of thought or realization. The monk would open himself up to whatever God, or his mind, presented him relative to what he read, and he would contemplate that until another message came along. His effort would be to tie everything back to the line of scripture to reveal something he hadn’t before realized about it.
An interesting shift takes place here. We’ve discussed how meditation can reveal that thoughts are incorrect and how much of what’s in your mind that qualifies you as mentally ill doesn’t stand up to investigation or light. Now we make a switch. The next step is to realize what thoughts, feeling and emotions are real. What is your reality, what is really happening to you right now? This shift is necessary to help you predict oncoming episodes. A practice such as Lectio Divina, with it’s laser focus on a specific phrase from a meaningful script, can help make this adjustment in what we put into and seek to get out of meditation: Knowledge.
You don’t need a spiritual text to practice Lectio Divina, although it’s very nice. I often used Chinese or Japanese poetry, or Dante or Milton. Something with veracity would always catch me and take me deep within. Try it with something you’ve read that’s important to you and see where the lines between contemplation and meditation begin to blur. While engrossed in the reading consider how you feel in your body and your emotional state. Pull your thoughts back on topic when they veer off into some unrelated diatribe. At its best, Lectio Divina is another form of meditation that helps us focus our thoughts on something tangible like the reading (or the feelings in our body, or the sounds around us, or a mantra). Those thoughts will coalesce toward either profundity or nonsense. The profound is ephemeral, though, so I’m betting on nonsense. We always seem to end up there. When something insightful does present itself, grab it, and write it down in the margin of what you’re reading.
Western meditation techniques like the Divine Office and Lectio Divina get short shrift by many because they always come back to God (the meditation industry is missing a huge number of people who think this is a good thing). A rich trove of mysticism and contemplation lies fallow while herds drive into watered-down commercialized Buddhist practices. (FOOTNOTE – In no way am I critical of Buddhism. Buddhism holds a vast canon of learned and contradictory insight into the cosmos and human behavior, as does the monotheistic tradition of the west. My criticism is reserved for meditation’s salespeople in the west who cherry pick ideas from the Buddhist canon to support their message. This is a method familiar, too, to many Christian-based messengers of wellness. In combing the Zen and Catholic traditions for effective therapies for mental illness, I am surely guilty of the same crimes of intentions and results) In the west, contemplation has often been the point. To many in the mindfulness set it is to be avoided for pure experience. But, with mental illness, pure experience and reality don’t always line up. Anyone who has ever hallucinated realizes this. Some contemplation is required to see the difference between truth and the errors of the mind. The strength of the Zen method I practice is that it leads the meditator to question everything, not with the doubt of a cynic, but with the inquiry of a true, curious observer. Observational meditation such as this can reveal a lot, especially as you continue to question what appears before you. Christian mystics achieved the same thing on their path to monism, but I don’t have the time or the faith to be a mystic. Zen practice will do just fine.
In using meditation to combat mental illness, at some point you’re going to have to make a judgment call on your state of mind. Reductionism can push aimlessly through moods that need definition. The experience of meditation will offer up reams of information to investigate as thoughts parade by like floats on the Fourth of July, one after another, each allowed to move on as a new one appears.
My Zen teachers tell me that in the end I will realize that there is no definable self. I don’t want to realize that. I’m trying to make this self I’m currently convinced is real, better. I’m willing to settle for the fact that my transitory self has a disease and I’d like to practice meditation to help me manage it. I have a family I’d like to help support, and like a Bodhisattva in the Mahayana tradition of which Zen is born, I’ll gladly pass on my own enlightenment until everybody else gets theirs. I just want to avoid another manic episode.
So forgive me if I mash up meditation techniques from different cultures to achieve a method of managing mental illness. As I said before, whether you seek a good night’s sleep or to slip the bounds of samsara, the basic method of sitting and fiercely focusing on something is the same. That’s the beauty of it.
I don’t want to lose the pure beauty of practice. I think the commercialization of mindfulness risks that. The practice is too simple to be co-opted by the profit motive, and the stakes of living with mental illness are too high to be taken in by hucksterism. In always looking out and considering our place in the world as our meditation sessions extend into our daily lives, I think we can beat mental illness. There is no room for selfishness in what I propose. I’ve already lived through one me generation. Years ago I got wrapped up in an ultimately disappointing new age period that rejected traditional forms of wisdom for hocus pocus. Now all that is back. I don’t want to join the ascendant fads that have seized the meditation world. I’m set to lay out a method of meditation that can help predict and stave off the worst episodes of affective disorders. Then we can be selfless and bring others along with us.
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