Dear Friends,
I am enjoying going through the proofs of the above on these long hot summer days. SCM-Canterbury are doing a wonderful job. Below is some of the first chapter for your interest. We hope to have it launched in the autumn.
best wishes
Peter
'We
seem to be in the midst of a mindfulness storm.
Until very recently comparatively
few people, apart from a few dedicated practitioners, had heard of this form of
meditation. Yet today there seem very few areas of healthcare, psychological
intervention, education or even business and commerce that have not in some way
been touched by what has been termed ‘the mindfulness revolution’. Why this
should be so is anyone’s guess but the trend, especially in the older Western
democracies, for formal religious belonging to be replaced by looser forms of
spiritual expression, as traced by sociologists of religion such as Linda
Woodhead and Paul Heelas, seems by now well documented and well entrenched (see
inter alia Heelas and Woodhead 2004;
Bullivant 2013). That this is related to the coming era of ‘mindfulness’ is no
doubt linked.
When the molecular biologist
Jon Kabat-Zinn first developed his mindfulness courses at the University of
Massachusetts in the late 1970s he was not so concerned with the metaphysical
implications of what were originally Buddhist meditation practices as their
clinical and medical efficacy. This novel notion of giving mindfulness
meditation a sound clinical and experimental basis is what proved the essential
catalyst for the subsequent explosion of mindfulness (See Boyce 2011, pp. xii‒xiii).
Thirty years later the clinical evidence for the efficacy of these methods in
treating illnesses as diverse as depression, cancer and eating disorders is
overwhelming (even though latterly there is the inevitable counter-movement
expressing the ‘dangers’ inherent in mindfulness). This, alongside courses such
as Kabat-Zinn’s own Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) ‒ the
eight week forerunner for many of the later mindfulness courses - and the
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) developed at Oxford by Professor
Mark Williams and colleagues, have contributed to the success of mindfulness as
we know it today.
Kabat-Zinn
himself defines mindfulness as ‘paying attention in a particular way: on
purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally’ (Kabat-Zinn 1994, p. 4).
This ‘bare’ definition is supplemented by many practitioners with wider values
drawing upon something closer to traditional Buddhist notions of mindfulness.
Thus Chozen Bays (2011) suggests that it is ‘deliberately paying attention,
being fully aware of what is happening both inside yourself – in your body,
heart and mind – and outside yourself in the environment... it is awareness
without judgement or criticism’ (Boyce 2011, p. 3). She goes further to state
that ‘when we are mindful, we are not comparing or judging. We are simply
witnessing the many sensations, thoughts and emotions that come up as we engage
in the ordinary activities of daily life.’ We could continue multiplying these
varying definitions yet, following Mace, what becomes clear when we analyse
these contemporary understandings of mindfulness is that there seem to be two
directions in current usage (see Mace 2008). First, the desire, as Mace himself
puts it, to concentrate on the ‘bare attention’ - to observe, Buddha-like, the
passing show of sensations, thoughts and emotion with no sticky entanglement.
As neuro-biologists and scientists have become interested in the subject this ‘pure
bare mindfulness’ (difficult as it is to isolate) has become the main source of
their study. On the other hand, writers such as Chozen Bays above or Shapiro
(2006) link the practice with wider connotations of ‘heartfulness’, compassion
and the general teleological development of character.
Esoteric though
these debates may sound I think they go right to the heart of the subject we
shall be considering in the present volume: ‘How far, if at all, can
mindfulness be accommodated into an established religious practice such as
Christianity?’ And I think the answer will be (in typical philosophical
fashion) – ‘it depends what sort of mindfulness you are talking about’. Let me
explain further.
Mace makes the
point that Kabat-Zinn’s original 1990s formulation of the basic notion of
mindfulness as commonly used today has ‘something of the spirit of the US
Founding Fathers’ in that he wanted ‘to make mindfulness available without any
requirement to accept or reject particular religious beliefs’ (Mace 2008, p.
59). And there can be no doubt that this agnostic method assuming no adherence
to any particular religious belief system (as expounded by Kabat-Zinn et al) has clearly filled a hole in the
collective psyche that was left when the box ‘no religion’ was ticked in
numerous surveys, censuses and questionnaires (see Bullivant 2013).
The sceptical
outlook of the Buddha himself – he always advised his followers not to trust
his teachings but to test them and scrape them (like a goldsmith) to see if
they were counterfeit – adds to their ability to fit into the prevailing zeitgeist of sceptical humanism within
which we find ourselves. As Mace puts it, ‘part of the genius of Buddhism has
been to link aspects of spiritual attainment with psychological changes that
can be expressed in cognitive terms. This has made it appealing to people in
the West who are respectful of reason, and who believe in human potential, but
distrust deist religions’ (Mace 2008, p. 161).
So faced with the
question, ‘How far, if at all, can mindfulness be accommodated into an
established religious practice such as Christianity?’ as well as asking
ourselves what concept of mindfulness we are applying we also need to ask
ourselves a more fundamental question – what concept of religion are we
applying to ourselves? Indeed, a similar question might arise for any
practitioner of mindfulness whether they considered themselves a Muslim, Jew or
Sikh as they came to terms with the implications of the practice for their own
religion.'
