Learning notes from Module 2 - Information abstract from the course notes

One of the most intriguing consequences of this process of constructing Mindfulness as a scientific variable is that its characteristics are determined by their utility in treatment protocols and not by their conceptual coherence with bodies of spiritual or philosophical texts.  In other words, the Science of Mindfulness cannot begin with the assumption that Sati and construct Mindfulness are identical – the scientist (qua scientist) cannot (or should not) have faith in this coincidence

One of these great difficulties is with studying Mindfulness as a condition or activity of other people (rather than of yourself).  This is because it is very difficult to observe it.  That is, it’s not immediately obvious when someone is being mindful.  For instance, am I being mindful right now? 

the Science of Mindfulness cannot escape the need to rely on the age-old technique of asking people about their experiences of Mindfulness.  This reliance on self-reports generates all kinds of concerns about the reliability of the results in this field: 

• Assuming that Mindfulness is something real that can be measured, do self-reports really measure Mindfulness?  

• Can the same Mindfulness scales (and questions) be used to assess the experiences of experienced and novice meditators?  

• Is all self-endorsement necessarily biased?  

• Can we even assume that the questioner and the questioned share a common understanding of what Mindfulness actually feels like

In general, the problem of dis-ease that Mindfulness seems to confront is not this kind of adaptive response, which is actually a marker of mental health.  Instead, Mindfulness Interventions tend to be targeted at mal-adaptive anxiety and stress.  That is, stress and anxiety responses that are inappropriate, unnecessary, or debilitating, and hence constitute a form of disorder.  

Some of the markers of this kind of anxiety disorder include hypervigilance for (or over-sensitivity to) signs of threat in our environment, which narrows our attentional resources and our openness to experiences and choices in the world, leaving us entangled and enmeshed in a net of stressful possibilities – we no longer even see the more positive clues present in our environment or in our self.  Some people refer to this as a vicious cycle, and it is often accompanied by physical symptoms (either chronic or acute) such as constriction, tension, heart palpitations, shortness of breath and so on.

On the face of it, this Buddhist-inspired defence actually seems to reinforce the notion that Mindfulness Interventions should be envisioned as treatments for mal-adaptive responses rather than opiates to blunt normal, adaptive responses.  That is, the Buddha doesn’t claim to be able to inoculate all people against all suffering, only to help them alleviate unnecessary suffering by changing the quality of attention that they bring to it.  There is a kind of ‘zerolevel’ of suffering with which everyone must deal, even the healthy.  Indeed, any technique or technology that could eradicate suffering altogether would simultaneously end (or perhaps transc-end) the human condition itself.  For Buddhists, this is the territory of Awakening, Enlightenment, Nirvana and so on

In fact, one of the critical tasks for the participant in MBSR is the cultivation of what Jon Kabat-Zinn has called the 7 Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness practice: non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.  

For instance, almost all of us (even me and you) will have had the experience of making their way home from work or school or the shops lost in concerns about whether someone had insulted us over lunch, what we’re going to do about food in the evening, or how we’re going to find time to do all our homework before the deadline.  And then, when we get home, we can’t remember anything at all about the route we took, we didn’t see the dazzlingly beautiful sunset, and we didn’t notice the three friends who tried to talk to us when we failed to notice them on the street etc.  There’s a very real sense in which we were not present during our walk home. This kind of experience always reminds me of the wonderful little parable that David Foster Wallace once told about the meaning of a liberal education: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning boys.  How’s the water?’  And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ 

The point is about cultivating our awareness of where we have placed our attention, and cultivating the discipline to place it where we want it to be; sometimes we’re missing something essential (like water for those fish).  Just as we saw in MBSR, awareness, attention, and discipline are core to MBCT.  One of the basic insights of MBCT is that our attention is often drawn away from where we are without us being aware of this, and that (particularly for people prone to depression) what draws our attention is rumination on problems, regrets, and memories of the past or fears and anxieties about the future.  Hence, instead of enjoying the water around us or the glorious sunset on our walk

home (which is really there in front of us), we spend that walk involuntarily plunged into an internal darkness of our own making.  Instead of enjoying a delightful evening walk, we are thoroughly miserable and stressed the whole time and exhausted when we get home. 

This provokes a basic question: would the quality of your life be better if more of it were spent present in what you were doing and where you were, and less of it were spent entangled in a cycle of worry, anxiety, and stress about things that were not there?  If the answer to this question is yes, which probably it is, MBCT aims to provide you with the resources to be more aware of when your auto-pilot kicks in and with the discipline to make more skilful choices about when you choose to engage it and where you choose to put your attention. 

One of the most characteristic practices of MBCT is the brief, ‘3minute (or 3-step) breathing space,’ which can be deployed at moments of stress or difficulty during the day to help centre practitioners in the here and now, and thus support their ability to make these skilful choices.  If you’re participating in the meditation labs for this course, you will become familiar with this simple technique; you’ll be doing it a lot

The enquiry process in MBCT should provide a space for the embodied compassion and acceptance of the instructor to facilitate the discovery of experiential, first-person knowledge by the participants; it should not be a directive, didactic, or changeoriented exchange in which the instructor tells people how their experiences should feel.

1. Recognising that our everyday experiences are made up of numerous experiential components;

2. Recognising that we can change the emotional force of an experience by controlling where we place our attention; 

3. Recognising the beneficial possibilities of a de-centred, metacognitive standpoint from which to act.  

We’ll look at each in turn. So, the first of these principles concerns the nature of experience itself.  That is, in our everyday lives we tend to encounter experiences as though their full complexity and multidimensionality are basic to them.  In particular, we accept as self-evident that all our experiences involve a unity of sensations, emotional tones, thoughts and so on.  So, when someone we know passes us on the street without acknowledging our presence, this experience seems to mean an inextricable combination of weight and gasping, guilt and worry, puzzling for reasons and planning follow-up actions. 

Hence, Mindfulness Interventions invite us to entertain a place of ‘bare’ or ‘direct’ or ‘pure experience’ that lies somewhere prior to that complex constellation of thoughts, emotions, and sensations.  This conceit – that there is a pure form of experience that can be felt by any of us at any time, and that this pure experience is importantly unsullied by our preconceptions and preconditioned judgments – is vital to Mindfulness in general.  This type of experience is what we usually mean when we use phrases like ‘beginners mind,’ ‘open’ or ‘non-judgemental awareness,’ or when we say things like ‘pure experience has no meaning at all.’ 

 the insight that the felt emotional quality of an experience is not a feature of the experience itself but instead is a kind of arousal that that emerges from our response to it.  The idea that our emotional arousal (whether positive, negative, or neutral) emerges from our interaction with experiences rather than being contained in the experiences themselves, opens a space for us to make some skilful choices about how we might regulate our emotional condition by deliberately bringing our attention to specific sensations and experiences.  While we’re walking home, how would it be to rest our attention on the sensation of the sun on our skin here and now, rather than on our anger about an insult or offense that took place last week? In concrete terms, both MBSR and MBCT make use of the process of inviting our attention onto or into our breath, as the site of an experience that is usually arousal-neutral.  We might also think of making use of particular postures, places, or even scents in this way.  Hence, Mindfulness Interventions train us in the capacity to regulate our emotional state through correctly intentioned and disciplined regulation of our attention.  Mindfulness Training enables us to become increasingly skilful in the recognition of rumination, wandering, and negative (or even positive) emotional arousal associated with specific experiences, and then to make a deliberate choice to place our attention elsewhere (such as on our breath) and hence create a greater sense of calm, ease, well-being.  One of the important consequences of this principle is that it works to change the emotional quality of an experience without requiring us to avoid the experience itself and without taking us away from the experience itself.  That is, Mindfulness is not aversive but open.  We should be able to continue to perform any activities typical of our daily lives, and also take more pleasure in experiences are made up of clusters of components; the emotional force of experience changes depending on where we place our attention; a metacognitive standpoint enables skillful choices.

activities that once caused us stress, anxiety, or pain.  Indeed, we remain (or return to being) firmly embedded in the present moment.  In other words, this principle works towards the establishment of a more spacious and permissive locus of being. And this idea of spaciousness leads into the third principle, which we might consider as the cultivation of a metacognitive standpoint, or a stance of meta-awareness.  All that is meant by this rather intimidating phrase is that Mindfulness Interventions train us to take a step back from our experiences into a wider space in which we can be more aware of the way we encounter, process, and experience those experiences.  In this wider space, we have more room to consider and decide where we would like to place our attention.  The more expansive view gives us more information and keeps us open to other (positive) clues in the environment that we might otherwise miss if we remained stuck in a narrower site. 

Conversely, for some this decentred sense of self can actually become a source of pleasure (or even intoxication) in its own right.  The feeling of observing ourselves from without can sometimes be accompanied by a sense of euphoria and freedom.  These kinds of experiences during secular Mindfulness Interventions often lead participants to make inquiries about more spiritual, philosophical, or existential issues.