I write about and teach meditation with a very specific aim: to help people manage mental illness. It works. Still I make no other vast claims about the practice. I avoid calling what I do mindfulness because mindfulness speaks to a whole slew of now contradictory goals attributed to the same simple practice I recommend. My practice is born of that undertaken by the desert fathers and ancient Zen masters, and still practiced today by spiritual seekers across the world. It’s also practiced by people like me, who use it for a very specific purpose instead of mystical experience or enlightenment. It’s also practiced by the purveyors of secular mindfulness, who I think overpromise results for too little effort.
Mediation is hard work, and while often pleasant, it sometimes yields difficult experiences. It can relieve stress, or it can lead one to exaggerate stress. It’s all about one’s relationship with their thoughts and the feelings in their body. I shiver when I hear secular mindfulness gurus promise all happy, happy. They seem to ignore the long history of struggle by meditation’s masters. This tendency toward navigating struggle is what makes meditation so applicable to treating mental illness. But we first must acknowledge that much of what happens while meditating is a struggle. That’s how we learn.
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. It could help her retain the best of herself and safely encounter what she was dissatisfied with. 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 thoughts that flood 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. Mental illness is as much a disorder of the body as it is of the mind. 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? Therapies and practices that extoll the benefits of thinking happy thoughts and present that as curative are suspect. Meditation presents you with only what is right before you and what you think about it. And how your body feels when you encounter it. It doesn’t demand you change anything. It just asks you to notice before you try to adapt. Through meditation you can know what it means to be alive as you are right now; how you live and how life feels. Fr Richard Rohr said it best when he said, “we don’t think ourselves into new ways of being, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
People in the secular mindfulness world often define mindfulness as non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. But judging, while it can be defeating when it is in error, is necessary for survival. We judge what to eat and whether or not to walk down a dark alley. We judge ourselves and others, too, and that needs to be ferreted out and dealt with and judged either true or false. I guess you can practice non-judgment while you’re meditating. That seems healthy enough. But is that the definition of mindfulness? This definition of mindfulness perpetuates the poor idea that mindfulness is something we do, often at set times within the bounds of a learned practice, then we get up and do something else. To be completely non-judgmental is to be open to injury and abuse, as well as to set oneself up to make poor decisions, or to put off decisions altogether until it’s too late. When I’m meditating I’m often judging whether or not the feelings, thoughts and emotions I encounter are pointing to a coming episode of mania or depression or not. I don’t want to miss that because of a questionable definition of mindfulness.
Buddhist teacher John Peacock defines mindfulness in a way I relate to and understand much better. He says mindfulness is the realization of where we are, and where we don’t have to be. That will help us live with proper guidance, and we can practice that every waking minute.
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 in much of the mindfulness movement. 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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