Mindfulness in Context

Mindfulness out of context is half a practice.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Mindfulness is noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensations and allowing them to pass by, without judgment.
• Without its foundation in the practice of meditation, mindfulness loses all gravity.
• Buddhist meditation and, by association, mindfulness, are not intended to make us happy.

Mindfulness has become quite the rage of late, particularly within the helping and healing professions. Since it was introduced in the West by Jon Kabbat-Zin almost 30 years ago as a means for managing stress and anxiety, mindfulness has become a go-to modality for anything from acute traumatic stress to depression.

Mindfulness, or shamatha, is a subdiscipline of meditation. It is, in part, an exercise in nonattachment. In the Buddhist wisdom teachings, attachment—or grasping and clinging—is described as the source of all suffering; the first of the Four Noble Truths. Liberation from suffering is attained through releasing our attachment(s). Mindfulness is the practice of noticing present thoughts, feelings, and sensations and allowing them to pass by, without judgment. This creates for us a state of naked awareness, which is the essence of nonattachment.

A Rigorous Act

Mindfulness is, however, not a passive exercise. It is a rigorous act of self-examination and spiritual exploration leading to liberation from the burden of both the internal and external experiences weighing us down and, by association, making us miserable.

As with many Eastern practices co-opted by the West, similar to yoga and martial arts, mindfulness has become painfully diluted, moving further and further away from its Buddhist roots. That’s a problem, because, without its foundation in the practice of meditation, mindfulness loses all gravity, becoming a virtually empty exercise—what many critics have come to call McMindfulness.

This is because mindfulness is not simply paying attention and feeling good as a result, as many of its mainstream McMindfulness proponents portray. In proper context, mindfulness is a specific quality of attention linked to the essence of our thoughts, words, and actions. It is one thread in an entire fabric that informs, and is informed by, a specific way of being in the world.

Not Always a Positive Experience

That brings up another quite salient point: Mindfulness is not always a positive experience. Mainstream advocates of McMindfulness focus primarily on the positive benefits of the practice. What they fail to remark upon is Buddhist meditation, and, by association, mindfulness, is not intended to make us happy. Rather, it is to radically shift both our sense of self and our perception of the world.

Plot twist: Awakening to self-awareness is a destructive process. That deconstruction is in service of scrubbing off the red dust of the world and delving into our essence. In the best of all possible worlds, to quote Voltaire, this can lead to self-realization; while, at its worst, it can lead to increased anxiety, depression, and even dissociation.

Although not a religion per se, Buddhism is a spiritual practice focused on attaining a higher state of consciousness through developing self-awareness, empathy, and compassion; this is referred to in the wisdom teachings as maitri, or loving-kindness. Wait. What? Self-awareness? Empathy? Compassion? That’s right, folks: emotional intelligence. Keep in mind, Dan Goleman’s seminal monograph, Emotional Intelligence, is grounded in neuroscience, but he, himself, is a dyed-in-wool Buddhist, with that proclivity informing much of his work as a psychologist.

Buddhism, as outlined by commentators like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Lama Thubten Yeshe, Jack Kornfield, Taisen Deshimaru Roshi, and even the Dalai Lama, first and foremost, is a psychology. Even Gautama Buddha himself said, “Mind is everything.”

“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” –Buddha

Extracting a subdiscipline from this whole cloth psychology, and portraying it as a psychosocial panacea, is, at best, a slippery slope. You can’t pull a single brick from a wall and say it’s still a wall. It’s not: It’s a single brick. Conversely, no one thing works for everyone, and no amount of romanticizing is going to change that. Even Buddha himself reportedly said he taught many different techniques because not everything works for everyone, and his followers should take what worked for them as individuals, leaving the rest.

Recognizing that mindfulness has been separated from its roots does not wholly deny its effectiveness as a tool for shifting our state of mind, or even its potential benefits in terms of mental health. It suggests, rather, that, out of context, it may not—and quite possibly cannot—be everything portrayed. Just a little something of which to be mindful.

© 2024 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved.