Is it a religious practice, or can it be secular? Is it a relaxation technique, or can it change your brain? Are there rules that you must obey, such as sitting cross-legged, wearing special clothing, or chanting? How long does it take to learn? Mindfulness is in fashion, and is increasingly used as a therapy and as a medical aid. But given the absence of academic information on it and on its best-known technique, meditation, shouldn’t we be more concerned about its possible adverse effects? Miguel Farias is a Portuguese psychologist and co-author of the book The Buddha Pill. He worries that mindfulness is just another 21st-century fad that may encourage the mental instability it claims to cure. According to Farias, the type of self-exploration that modern mindfulness promotes caters to the egotism of the Western world:
Miguel Farias (mild Portuguese accent): It’s a mistake to think that self-exploration is always a good thing. There are people with narcissistic personality traits, psychopathic personality traits who, when exploring themselves, realise that they take great pleasure by [in] oppressing others, by [in] being cruel to others. We have been, in the West, taught to believe in ourselves; in this self-contained individual, which is always in need of something. Of increasing my self-esteem, my self-value, my self-resilience. So it’s all about my journey, my needs, my healing. And I’m afraid that this is at the very heart of mindfulness as a 21st-century psychotherapy and secular meditation technique. This mindfulness has very little to do with Buddhism. On the contrary, mindfulness is so popular because it’s clearly a projection of our current beliefs.
21ST-CENTURY PEACE
Vishvapani Blomfield is a Buddhist and has been teaching mindfulness and meditation for twenty years. In his view, there is a connection between 21st-century secular mindfulness and traditional Buddhist beliefs. And mindfulness is a potent force in society today precisely because it speaks to our needs.
Vishvapani Blomfield (English accent): We don’t really talk about self-exploration within Buddhism, we do talk about self-awareness; and the Buddha said: “You can’t have too much mindfulness; you can have too much self-exploration!” It’s an idea of social change. My father looked to Freud and I inherited that sense that if we want to change the world we need to change ourselves. I found that in Buddhism. I also found other things: a sense of community and [an] evaluation of ethics. So, turning to the mindfulness movement, what really galvanises my interest is the strength of the connection that people make with it, and how things that I do recognise as Buddhist teachings and Buddhist insights make a very direct impact on people. I see people coming along with their confusion and getting something. First of all, the capacity to calm down, and secondly some insight into the world of confused thoughts and feelings. It’s not the religion of the self. It’s about becoming aware of our thoughts and our feelings. And we need ways to do that. Meditation turns out be quite a helpful tool.
PANDORA’S BOX
Farias questions whether techniques such as meditation are advisable. He compares it to taking psychedelic drugs in uncontrolled surroundings.
Miguel Farias: If we’re talking about using meditation, you’ll have to let go of some control. Now, the problem is if you don’t have the scaffolding of the religious traditions, if you don’t have the map that can help you navigate whatever experiences you’re having, you can be left in great difficulties. There’s [are] lots of people learning meditation but there’s [are] very few people who actually know how to do [it] properly. Some models of mindfulness using meditation have been designed to help people who are psychologically vulnerable! But for some, it’s terrifying, there’s a deep sense of loneliness and even psychosis associated with it. We have built this myth of the ‘super-human self’; [that] we can all become more and more resilient, we have to go through trauma because we come up [out] on the other side stronger and more resilient, and this is bullshit.
too intense
Blomfield says that mindfulness isn’t about building resilience, but about carefully approaching difficult feelings in order to let go of them. He does admit, however, that meditation is an acquired skill, not a quick fix, and the intensity of some courses concerns him.
Vishvapani Blomfield: We’ve got what’s sometimes called the Vipassana movement, or the insight meditation movement, and this is where you go on the ten-day retreat and you’re meditating for eight hours a day and it’s very, very intensive. And I’m personally quite concerned about that model – it’s very popular. I don’t think retreats need to be like that.
A SOFTER APPROACH
Blomfield goes on to describe the type of courses he runs. They combine mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy, and are specifically designed to treat chronic depression.
Vishvapani Blomfield: On mindfulness courses, we take people quite carefully through an eight-week course, generally speaking, and the course is aimed at people who’ve had multiple experiences of relapsing into depression. We teach people about… when there are difficult feelings, when there are difficult emotions, how can we relate to them? How can we experience them? We so much want to avoid difficult feelings and so many of the problems we have personally and we see in society are about the inability to manage difficult emotions. Because if we don’t do it, they won’t go away, they’ll drive our behaviour and they’ll drive our psychology in reactive, habitual, obsessive, dysfunctional ways.