The Mindfulness Bandwagon

Every week or so I receive a brochure in the mail advertising some upcoming “seminar” or “training” for mental health professionals, about “mindfulness.” Usually the instructor is advertised as a “nationally known” (whatever that means) speaker. Some of these seminars and trainings and speakers may in fact be quite excellent. Some, perhaps not.

What these brochures are telling me is that there is a mindfulness bandwagon rolling at high speed through the landscape of mental health treatment. In many ways, that is good. Jon Kabat-Zinn says (in his book Coming to Our Senses): “This rising popular interest is, I believe, merely one example of the hunger for authenticity and clarity and peace within ourselves that the world is now displaying on so many fronts. This growing interest in and enthusiasm for mindfulness is a very positive emergence, potentially a hugely healing emergence in our world.”

Yet I hear from my graduate counseling students, who go out to these seminars, and to agencies in which it is claimed that “mindfulness” is part of their approach to mental health treatment, that there is not always much substance or depth behind the brochures or the claims. It could very well be that many practitioners who have gone to a day-long seminar or training believe that they have learned enough in that one day to become a teacher of mindfulness; and they return to their clinics or agencies, attempting to apply what they learned in their work with patients. It is not likely that their work can be effective under such circumstances, and disappointment and disillusionment with the whole concept of mindfulness practice in mental health treatment may ensue.

The continuation of the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote that began in the second paragraph, above, is as follows: “Yet, as mindfulness becomes more popular, inevitably first as merely a concept, it is very easy for it to become divorced from its grounding in practice and thus from its transformative potential. Because it is on its face such a good and compelling idea to become more present in one’s life and less judgmental, some professionals naturally assume that it can merely be grasped intellectually and then taught to others that way, as a concept, and that that can be done without a solid grounding in one’s own personal practice. But without the practice, no matter how clever or articulate or sensitive or therapeutic what one is offering may be, it just isn’t mindfulness, or dharma.”

Jon is saying that, in order to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) or Mindfulness-Based Wellness or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), one must do the teaching out of one’s own experience in mindfulness practice. We have to know it from the inside-out; not out of an intellectual understanding, but out of our hearts, and out of our very bones and sinews. We have to deeply understand the experience of observing our thoughts; feeling the pain in our knees; wanting to get up from the cushion, but not doing so; experiencing the doubts about the whole enterprise; and doing all of this with the intention of bringing compassion to our clearly observed experience. If we cannot draw on these experiences, and put them in our own words, then we cannot effectively teach mindfulness practice to anyone else. As Jon said to a group of us teachers and aspiring teachers: “Who can do that?” He challenged us to put that very question to ourselves.

I got up at 3am this morning. I am in the final stages of preparation for my role, as primary teacher, in Avila’s Mindfulness-Based Wellness program. I am acutely aware of the sense that, despite years of my own meditation practice, as well as formal training in Zen, and in mindfulness meditation, I do not feel adequately prepared. But, as Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli reminded us in June of this year at the Mind-Body Medicine Training, there would likely be something wrong if we did NOT approach this work with a sense of inadequacy, or, perhaps what they really said was that we should always retain a keen understanding of the size of the task. As my Zen teacher, Stan Lombardo, once said: as teachers, we are ALWAYS teaching “over our heads.”

So, I woke up at 3am, wide awake, very much aware that I want our program at Avila to be one of the highest quality and integrity, so that it invokes in our participants the compassion and curiosity about their own lives and experience that will enable them to “come to their senses,” to wake up to their lives, and to inspire others to wake up, as well. There is a great work of transformation at hand and at work in our global, or universal, consciousness, and it is the aim of our program at Avila that we participate in that work.