In concrete terms, the Mindfulness movement suggests that change is to be accomplished at the level of the individual – social change will be the natural, incremental result of individuals reaching more authentic and healthy understandings of their relationship with the way they feel and think about their (possibly materially unchanging) place in society
A good question at this point, then, if so much is allowed to remain as it is (at least materially), is whether we’re really talking about a Revolution at all. Indeed, for John Kabat-Zinn this revolution actually seems more like an evolution: he suggests a loosely teleological vision of human history in which the development of the mindful society is a natural outcome (or perhaps the culmination) of the development of democratic societies: ‘in a society founded on democratic principles and a love of freedom, sooner or later meditative practices, what are sometimes called the consciousness disciplines, are bound to come to the fore … It is part of the ongoing evolutionary process on this planet’ (Coming to Our Senses 553), which develops towards maximal individual self-understanding and freedom.
The rationale behind this evolutionary vision seems to be that modern citizens have their authentic freedom compromised by being too attached to discriminatory thinking and rumination: they spend too much of their time ‘lost in thought,’ ruminating about the past and the future, worrying, dreaming, riddled with anxieties about things that are not happening (and might never happen), depressed and stressed and unhappy.
Hence, the modern individual spends more of her life entrapped in her own abstractions than she does actually experiencing the world around her. In short, people today have learned thought patterns that actually disconnect them from the world and the people around them – we are self-alienated by our own cognitive patterns. In other words, the Mindfulness Revolution seeks to pathologize and politicize certain patterns of thought, suggesting that liberating ourselves from these schema will also emancipate our communities.
Of course, it is not the case that the Mindfulness Movement demonizes all thought, only certain types of thought that involve the thinker in cycles of rumination. It’s not about our selftransformation into mindless Zombies … Indeed, as we’ve seen in this course, Mindfulness Training generally takes the form of therapeutic interventions designed to transform our thought processes from toxic into more healthy patterns (not to prevent them altogether).
While the idea that particular styles of thinking can be pathologized (made to seem like an illness) with political significance evokes the controversial anti-psychiatry movement, one of the particular characteristics of the Mindfulness Movement is that it does not target an ostensibly deviant minority of individuals for ‘correction’ by authority but instead asserts that it is the majority in society that is somehow muddle-headed and ‘sick.’
The hegemonic (mainstream) discourse is actually the source of toxicity rather than the basis for rectification. In this case, the political relations implied by the political-therapeutic model are not the personalised power-relations of the centre and periphery of society (or even between state and society) as suggested by the anti-psychiatrists, but rather the disjunction is between the material conditions of capitalism and the psychic conditions of humanity in general: with a few invaluable exceptions, we are all muddle-headed about how to live in capitalism in a healthy manner. We are maladapted to our own civilization.
there are two political possibilities:
the first is that mindfulness enables a form of genuinely healthy authenticity that emancipates people from the suffering foisted upon them by the inequalities of capitalism (even while leaving the structures and institutions of capitalism materially untouched);
the second is that mindfulness functions as a form of secular religion within capitalism – a contemporary opiate for the people, if you like – serving as a new form of ideological domination that encourages (and actually enables) people to endure the alienating conditions of capitalism without calling for material revolution, redistribution, or institutional change.
‘Meditators sometimes report that fear of liberation holds them back in their practice; as they proceed into unchartered territory, fear of the unknown becomes an obstacle to surrender. But this is not really fear of enlightenment. It is rather fear of ideas about enlightenment … The mind might invent many different images of the experience of liberation. Sometimes our ego creates images of its own death that frighten us’ (5, emphasis added).
In various ways, much of the literature about the connections between the cultivation of Mindfulness and the practice of the martial arts rely on more generic connections between Mindfulness and the practice of skilled actions more widely. To some extent, the cultivation of Mindfulness through martial arts emerges as a species of the practice of what we have called (and experienced as) Mindful Movement.
That is, Mindfulness in the martial arts, like Mindfulness in yoga or qi-gong (or simply while stretching, walking, or climbing a mountain), involves bringing our attention into the particular sensations of the present moment as our bodies work to perform specific actions. A punch, a kick, a lock, or a throw is just as legitimate as a site of attention, awareness, and discipline as a yoga pose or a deliberate step.
Indeed, like some of these other bodily practices, the martial arts involve some of the same basic tensions with the idea of Mindfulness. We might entertain two of them very briefly: the first is a concern about aspiration and judgement – that is, when we’re performing specific techniques that are cultivated for specific purposes, we quite often find ourselves judging our performance in terms of those purposes.
So, rather than practicing a kick as an opportunity for Mindful action, we quite easily and naturally slip into judging the perfection and effectiveness of the kick as a kick, we berate ourselves for our lack of flexibility, strength, or precision, and then we resolve to practice harder in order to improve. This pattern of ‘discrepancybased thinking’ is exactly the kind of thinking that Mindfulness is supposed to help us to overcome. So it’s something to which we need to be alert when incorporating Mindfulness into skilled actions of various kinds, not only the martial arts
The second tension revolves around the idea of ‘auto-pilot.’ This contemplative discourse of the martial arts is often concerned with how repeated practice of the same techniques leads to a moment of sublimation of those techniques – that is, our training is a process of constant repetition designed to liberate us from having to pay attention to our actions at all. The goal is precisely to cultivate a form of auto-pilot, as a form of emancipation from our selves. When we have to think carefully about our movements and techniques (as we might in a Mindful Movement exercise) the chances are very low that such techniques will be effective; indeed, to some extent, mastering a martial art means no longer having to pay attention to what your body is doing because it does it all by itself.
This interpretation of ‘auto-pilot’ resembles the kind of thinking that Mindfulness is supposed to help us to overcome. So it’s something to which we need to be alert when incorporating Mindfulness into skilled actions of various kinds, not only the martial arts.
Between them, these two concerns contribute to an explanation for why most practitioners who seek to combine Mindfulness and the martial arts tend to prefer the ‘internal’ or ‘soft’ martial arts like Taiji quan, or allied forms like qi-gong, rather than more explosive styles like Karate or Taekwondo. Indeed, in general, martial arts that emphasis the cultivation of ‘qi’ (or ki) seem to lend themselves especially well to Mindfulness, since it is believed that the flow of qi in our bodies follows the flow of our attention. Hence, an exercise like the body-scan, for instance, might also be a means to lead qi throughout our entire bodies.
Of course, all of this overlooks one of the core defining features of the martial arts, which is this: they are not only systems of bodily movements; their focus is on the disciplined performance of violence and combat. And this basic fact provokes all kinds of ethical questions about the association between Mindfulness and the martial arts.
In fact, these questions have been long-standing features of the literature and practice of Mindfulness for centuries in East Asia in particular. In broad terms, there seem to be two interrelated concerns here: the first is that, as we’ve seen, it seems plausible that the practice and cultivation of Mindfulness enables the development of higher levels of expertise and skill in martial conduct; the second is that, as we’ve seen, the practice of Mindfulness is associated with the cultivation of forms of nonjudgement and non-attachment that might disable our capacity to make sound choices about when it is appropriate to perform violence.
With respect to Mindfulness training in schools, then, one of the early dilemmas has been about the nature of the relationship between Mindfulness and Buddhism. In particular, if it’s the case that Mindfulness is a kind of Buddhism, does that make it into a form of religious education that should not be part of a mainstream, secular education in a liberal democracy? Taking this even further, if Mindfulness is essentially Buddhist, is it even imaginable that it could have any place in a religious denominational school dedicated to other religions?
The flip side of Mindfulness in education is the way that it might support teachers. Like soldiers in our last session, teachers work in unusually stressful (and sometimes dangerous) environments, which can have seriously detrimental effects on their health as well as their well-being and performance in the work-place. Again, teachers are people too, so Mindfulness Interventions like MBSR have been shown to be quite effective in supporting and enhancing the well-being of teachers.
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?’
it is important for people who are studying and practicing Mindfulness to remember that there are no necessary or sufficient trappings. We don’t need any particular equipment or any particular spaces in order to bring our attention to the present moment on purpose and non-judgementally
In the end, then, the Mindfulness Industry is a complex and fascinating space in which many of the most interesting and important issues surrounding contemporary Mindfulness play themselves out. It is a vibrant and experimental space, full of risks and opportunities for everyone involved. If we learn nothing else from this course, we should at least learn to enter this social space Mindfully, making sure that we bring a quality of attention to it that enables us to make use of it in nourishing ways rather than to allow it to feed on us.
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