Mindfulness
In the past 40 years, mindfulness in various forms has found its way into the mainstream of medicine, health care and psychology, where it has been broadly applied and continues to be more extensively studied through clinical research and neuroscience. More recently, it has also entered the mainstream of education, business, the legal profession, government (UK), military training (USA), the criminal justice system etc. Interest in mindfulness within the mainstream or society and its institutions is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, supported by increasingly rigorous scientific research and driven in part by a longing for new models and practices that might help us individually and collectively to apprehend and solve the challenges threatening our health as societies and as a species, optimising the preconditions for happiness and wellbeing and minimising the causes and preconditions for unhappiness and suffering.
Mindfulness is a way of being in a wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly. It is cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non – judgementally and by learning to inhabit and make use of clarity, discernment, ethical understanding and awareness that arises from tapping into one’s own deep and innate interior resources for learning, growing, healing and transformation, available to use across the lifespan by virtue of being human.
It usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we are often unaware of, take for granted or discount in terms of importance. These would include our experience of the present moment, our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions and above all our tacit and constraining assumptions and our highly conditioned habits of mind and behaviour.
Mindfulness practices in various forms can be found in all the mediative wisdom traditions of humanity. In essence, mindfulness being about attention, awareness, relationality and caring, is a universal human capacity, akin to our capacity for language acquisition. While the most systematic and comprehensive articulation of mindfulness and its belated attributes stems from Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is not a catechism, an ideology, a brief system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion or a philosophy. It is best described as ‘a way of being’. There are many different ways to cultivate it wisely and effectively through practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, Medical School, Lexington Massachusetts July 2015.
Can anybody meditate?
An extract from ‘wherever you go you are there’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
I get asked this question a lot. I suspect people ask because they think that probably everybody else can meditate, but they can’t. They want to be reassured that they are not alone, that there are at least some other people they can identify with, those hapless souls were both incapable of meditating. But it isn’t so simple.
Thinking you are unable to meditate is a little like thinking you are unable to breathe, or to concentrate or relax. Pretty much everybody can breathe easily. And under the right circumstances, pretty much anybody can concentrate, anybody can relax.
People often confuse meditation with relaxation or some other special state that you have to get to or feel. When once or twice you try and you don’t get anywhere or you didn’t feel anything special, then you think you are one of those people who cant do it.
But meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still, although stillness does deepen in meditation and can be cultivated systematically. Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It’s not about getting somewhere else but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. If you don’t understand this, you will think you are constitutionally unable to meditate. But that is just more thinking, and in this case, incorrect thinking at that.
True, meditation does require energy and commitment to stick with it. But then, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “I won’t stick with it”, rather than, “I can’t do it”? Anybody can sit down and watch their breath or watch their mind. And you don’t have to be sitting. You could do it walking, standing, lying down, standing on one leg, running, or taking a bath. But to stay at it for even five minutes requires intentionality. To make it part of your life requires some discipline. So, when people say they can’t meditate, what they really is they don’t like what happens. It isn’t what they are looking for or hoping for. It doesn’t fulfill their expectations. So maybe they should try again, this time letting go of their expectations and just watching.