What's Wrong with Mindfulness (And What Isn't)

Zen Perspectives

Barry Magid, Robert Rosenbaum, Barry Magid, Robert Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781614293071
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhismus

Mindfulness seems to be everywhere—but are we sure that's a good thing? Teachers Sallie Jiko Tisdale, Gil Fronsdal, Norman Fischer, and more explain how removing mindfulness from Buddhism may set a dangerous precedent. Mindfulness is in fashion. Oprah loves it, Google teaches it to employees—it has become widespread as a cure-all for stress, health problems and psychological difficulties, interpersonal trouble, and existential anxiety. However, when its proponents try to make it more accessible by severing it from its Buddhist roots, they run the risk of leeching mindfulness of its transformative power. Taught outside of its ethical and spiritual context it becomes a mere means to an end, rather than a way of life. Mindfulness is in danger of being co-opted into the spiritual equivalent of fast food: "McMindfulness." Instead of being better people, we just become better employees, better consumers. The Zen teachers gathered here ask a bold question: Is universal mindfulness really a good thing? Ranging from thoughtful critiques to personal accounts of integrating mindfulness into daily life, each chapter offers insights to ground mindfulness in a deeper understanding of both where it comes from, and where it might be headed. Withcontributions from Marc Poirer, Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum, Barry Magid, Hozan Alan Senauke, Sallie Jiko Tisdale, Gil Fronsdal, Max Erdstein, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Janet Jiryu Abels, Grace Schireson, Sojun Mel Weitsman, and Robert Sharf.

PART I

CRITICAL CONCERNS

1. MISCHIEF IN THE MARKETPLACE FOR MINDFULNESS

Marc R. Poirier

As we desire the natural order of our minds to be free from clinging, we must be aware of our greed.

— From the traditional Zen meal chant, as interpreted at Ordinary Mind Zendo

These days there is a wide-open market for mindfulness training, of that there can be no doubt. And a market is made up of consumers, not practitioners in any traditional sense.

Generally speaking, consumers are driven by desire and aversion. Those who buy a good or service can be expected to inform themselves before making a purchase (to a certain extent, at least — information is costly); to compare products; to buy one and, if dissatisfied, then switch to another or look for substitutes that will achieve the same goals by other means; and to seek out the best price for value. When something stops being useful, you stop buying it. These are normal, value-maximizing behaviors.

From the supplier side, whatever label or design will enhance the value or marketability of a product or service is fair game. The goal is to sell product. There is much leeway about how one can brand a product. And what the consumer ultimately does with a product is not the producer’s responsibility. The supplier sells, but he or she does not have an obligation to provide follow-up guidance or counsel. The consumer’s desire guides all. Once you take meditation off the cushion — out of its original religious context — and bring it as “mindfulness” into the marketplace, it appears that just about anything can be labeled and linked to mindfulness one way or another.

This commodification of mindfulness and meditation is increasingly prevalent and problematic for a variety of reasons. It obscures the importance of at least three key aspects of traditional Buddhist training: (1) a sustained commitment to practice over time; (2) the usefulness of a community of practice in stabilizing and expanding individual practice; and (3) the importance of guidance from a learned and trusted teacher or elder with whom the student develops a long-term disciple relationship. These three elements are essential for those who wish to explore more deeply what mindfulness and meditation can offer as a way of life.

People will always flit in and out of meditation and mindfulness training. When sampling becomes the norm, however, and when supposedly skilled teachers offer nothing more than a few weeks of occasional practice undertaken in order to obtain a short-term anodyne, there is mischief afoot in the marketplace for mindfulness. In this chapter, I explore some characteristics of this mischief, first from the teacher side and then from the confused student side. I also comment on the pros and cons of relying on the rhetoric of science to validate and market mindfulness. Finally, I discuss the core issue: greed’s central function in the marketplace and the importance of being aware of greed in a sustained Zen meditation practice.

A terminological note. I thought at first that it might be helpful to put blame on the widespread use of “mindfulness” these days in every possible context. But some skillful teachers use the word “mindfulness” to translate or expound in English what I view as credible Westernized interpretations of traditional Buddhist teachings: Joseph Goldstein, Bhante Gunaratana, and Bhikkhu Bodhi all offer a canonical perspective on mindfulness. At the same time, some current teachers of “meditation” offer it in ways quite foreign to the Zen practice I teach, as a technique to achieve a goal. So I will tend to talk about the two together; “meditation” as a more focused and ritualized practice of attention, and “mindfulness” as an extension of that attention into everyday life. The key question is whether mindfulness and meditation are deployed to explore and investigate and participate
and behold — or instead to help an imagined separate self achieve gain and avert loss.

MISCHIEF IN THE TEACHING OF MINDFULNESS AND MEDITATION

Approaching practice as a goal-oriented technique has troubling consequences. Although a teacher might present specific practices as tools in the service of the relief of suffering or as a skillful means to engage students at the level of their most immediate concerns, when this advertisement for meditation is presented without even an occasional acknowledgment of the practices’ links to wider, deeper, more transformative experiences and to the availability of accumulated wisdom in various traditions, the instructor does a disservice to the student, patient, or client. The wider road will not always be cut off, of course. In our information-rich culture, those who seek for more have many opportunities to find it, and Buddhist centers are no longer scarce. Still, I do not view offering meditation or mindfulness solely as a technique to a specific gain to be skillful.

The typical reply is that the practice will take care of itself. Just get folks to sit for a bit. At some point, presumably, the beginning student will find dissatisfaction inevitable, and he or she will back away from a results-based conception of what practice is about and begin to engage in an ongoing, wide-ranging inquiry with less thought of gain. But in my view, discovery of the profundities of practice is less likely to happen when the teacher articulates practice only in terms of short-term gain. Instead, the disappointed beginner will simply flit away, deciding to shop elsewhere.

A related issue concerns the background and length of practice experience of those who hold themselves out to be teachers of an instrumental view of mindfulness training. I have encountered a number of well-meaning professionals who have read about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for lawyers and other professionals, in popular journals, books, or clinical reports. They may have dipped into an online course or a few weeks of practice. With just about no experience of what can happen in the course of a sustained practice, these folks then set out to provide workshops for others. They may find support from well-meaning institutions such as universities and bar associations, which also may have only a cursory and goal-oriented approach to mindfulness. Such instructors and institutions view mindfulness and meditation as easy-to-convey techniques, to be taught in a few days or weeks, often for a fee. Their lack of experience may seem to them of little concern, because they understand the techniques to be simple mechanisms with predictable results, as established by scientific studies.

All in all, I view this development as harmful. Many beginning practitioners will be guided to the shallow end of the pool. Worse, some of them may experience insights or rushes of psychological turmoil that an inexperienced instructor may be ill-equipped to address or perhaps even to recognize. Well-constructed training programs that provide ongoing support can address some of the issues of a new teacher’s inexperience. But those who offer to teach practices that they themselves have acquired in an off-handed way may well not seek out the appropriate training to help them support their students — especially if they view what they are doing as a business, not a professional commitment.

This incorporation of instruction in mindfulness and meditation in institutional contexts such as corporations and law firms is very concerning. Such projects purport to be about the well-being and happiness of workers but are skewed in a direction of increasing productivity and marketable creativity. Google’s Search Inside Yourself project is an example. Starting in its title, it purports to promise “success, happiness (and world peace).” Google has just completed its first training of a group of independent trainers. They will use Google’s brand and corporate cachet to market mindfulness training to major businesses. A graduate of Google’s Search Inside Yourself program “considers it as sort of an organizational WD-40, a necessary lubricant between driven, ambitious employees and Google’s demanding corporate culture.”¹

One recent New York Times article assessed Google’s approach (approvingly, I might add) as teaching employees “to recognize and accept inner thoughts and feelings rather than ignore or repress them,” which is “in the company’s interest because it frees up employees’ otherwise embattled brain space to intuit end users’ desires and create products to satisfy them.”² I object. This paradigm is especially insidious, as neither the sponsor nor the instructor is interested in the student exploring the free play of awareness. The instructor and the corporate sponsor have a stake in avoiding valorizing the experience of unsatisfactoriness. It is contrary to the employer’s goal of achieving more productive workers and to the instructors’ pitch to those workers that practice will make them happy and successful.

I have somewhat fewer qualms about the widespread adoption of mindfulness practices in healthcare and medical school contexts. This very important development is due in large part to decades of effort by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, based at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. A core ethical expectation of healing, or at least doing no harm, pervades the health care professions, keeping the interests of institutions, mindfulness instructors, and patients more or less aligned. So Kabat-Zinn’s very successful secularization of Buddhist practices is protected from the worst effects of commodification, to some extent, by a preexisting professional ethos in the health care fields; they also have developed a certification process for their instructors.

There is no similar secular ethical constraint that pervades the worlds of business and law. Maximizing productivity or wealth is about as close as one can come, and that’s not a good foundation for undertaking practice.³ Sooner or later, conflicts of interest are likely to arise when the consultant on mindfulness or meditation, who works for or is hired by the employer, works with employees as they discover roots of unhappiness in their work situation. Is the instructor’s allegiance to the employer or to the employee? Without a much clearer ethical code for secular instruction, I expect that serious harm will be done from time to time by instructors whose own financial interest is aligned with keeping executives in large corporations happy with results. In business contexts, the notion that mindfulness will produce happier, more productive employees is simply at odds with exploring some of the roots of life’s unsatisfactoriness.

Contemplative practices are also being systematically introduced into educational contexts.⁴ The circumstances and uses are quite varied. I don’t take a strong position on the use of these techniques to encourage youth to notice more deeply and to explore their intuitions. That’s legitimate education. One must wonder again here whether extended practice might present situations beyond the skill of an inexperienced instructor. No doubt, as some studies show, introducing mindfulness training in middle schools and high schools can reduce violence. But will the instructor be equipped for other consequences of young students engaging in mindfulness practice?

At the college level, young adults may well be looking for practices that will develop a sustained inquiry such as Zen practice. Hopefully these settings will provide resources for those moved to go further.

In professional contexts, such as the law school setting with which I am familiar, mindfulness training is typically being offered as stress-reduction and balance, in order to offset the acknowledged deleterious psychological effects of law school and the practice of law.⁵ As I’ve said throughout this chapter, that approach is unfortunate.

Some law professors do tie the value of skills developed through meditation and mindfulness techniques to lawyering competencies, especially in the areas of mediation and negotiation; Clark Freshman, for instance, argues that mindfulness training enables one to detect lying.⁶ But others argue that emotional intelligence, not contemplative practice, develops these competencies.⁷ Sometimes mindfulness is studied formally in law school, as part of a course on emotional intelligence, or in order to appreciate the role it may play in the successful practice of law. It is still all very instrumental, very take-it-or-leave-it. Only occasionally do voices in legal education go further, gesturing toward the authenticity and groundedness that a contemplative practice can offer the lawyer;⁸ describing meditation as a source of long-term satisfaction;⁹ or emphasizing the importance to the practice of law of teaching students to access a further spiritual and ethical dimension through contemplative practice.¹⁰

MISCHIEF FROM THE STUDENT’S SIDE

Beginning students almost always seek out instruction in a meditation or mindfulness practice because of personal pain or loss, the sense something is lacking, or a need to fix some aspect of their life. Occasionally, they wish to become enlightened. Consequently, impatience with unsatisfactory results, flightiness, and misunderstanding of how deep change in one’s life occurs are common aspects of a beginner’s practice. An encouragement to stay put and stick with it are essential to a skillful introduction to practice, helping it to ripen over time.

In my own life, after reading Philip Kapleau’s exhortations about sustained practice in The Three Pillars of Zen, I sought out a local Zen center and, after one evening’s experience, wrote out on a scrap of paper a commitment to practice Zen for ten years, after which it would be permissible to move on. That piece of paper stayed posted on my bedroom mirror for a decade. This was a little extreme, I admit, and I did not know what I was getting into, in more than one sense. Still, my own slogans for teaching law students and professionals who are too busy to sit captures some of this need to emphasize commitment: Show up, slow down, step back, settle in.

Workshop mentality and commodificatio...