Sometimes the frequent yammering about “mindfulness” and meditation leave me feeling like I used to when a favorite underground band suddenly got noticed. The worry would be that the quality of the experience would be brutalized by the endless rounds of larger venues and the pressure to match expectations set by the record label. Not long after, a musician finds most of her time taken up by very unmusical concerns. Boredom, ennui, and an anxious rootlessness creep up like gangrene. Soon, the patient is dead.
Every philosophical and religious paradigm must eventually leave the hot house of innovators and dedicated evangelizers and meet the marketplace. The “marketplace”, the bustle and endless distraction of the world outside of the meditation hall, is a very important metaphor in Zen. There, the rubber hits the road. Compromise, worry, the needs of others, the quotidian duties that come with food, shelter, and safety can do a real number on a would-be monastic.
The rubber is now hitting the road. Mindfulness has hit the big time.
I recommend reading Judith Warner’s New York Times blog from March 5 as well as a few of the comments. These provide a remarkable document of where mindfulness is at, right now. The writer writes clearly about a practice that she has an admittedly limited grasp of, and the hundreds of comments seem to come from a wonderful diversity of experience. To my way of thinking, she suggests several important conflicts and misunderstandings about mindfulness and Buddhist practice that will continue to represent its leading edge as it enters the mainstream of American culture.
One problem some of us face is simply definitional, and this is right at the heart of TAS’s quirky relationship to the public schools. This problem would be the difference between a spiritual practice and the techniques associated with it. Our curriculum is completely secular, but we teach and use certain techniques to support our students intellectual development.
The breath is a good example. The breath is the fundamental element of meditation. It is what one first concentrates on and always returns to. In Zen practice it is, practically speaking, synonymous with living in the present moment: tracking with the breath and fantasizing about something else are mutually exclusive activities. But mastering this technique is only one of a long sequence of carefully cultivated practices that a serious Buddhist engages throughout a lifetime. This is especially true with the teaching matrix developed by the Zen Mountain Monastery, one of the two traditions in Zen that I have a little more than passing familiarity with.
Yet this simple practice of aware breathing has such profound benefits for so many people that it is easily adapted to many situations, including school settings and western religious traditions. It works with certain types of post-traumatic conditions, and has been researched extensively for use with anxiety and depression. It is so intimately associated with Buddhism that many believe them to be co-extensive. There are not.
Another practice that many people are very familiar with are the various gratitude practices, deeply associated with the “loving-kindness” exercises associated with Tibetan Buddhism. There are many others, many of them subject to empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative. Ms. Warner, like most middle and upper-middle class Americans, are shopping in this country’s vast psychological supermarket. And, as has been the case for the last fifty years, the most popular and effective self-help techniques are humanistic, easy to grasp, and results oriented.
Think of Carl Roger’s Client Centered Therapy, Abraham Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy, Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy. Mindfulness has had its table set by these approaches. These all assume that I am the central force my own life, that I must make meaning out of my experiences, and that I get trapped in counter-productive habits of thought and action. Americans on the various roads to recovery and self-improvement seem to assume that these things are true.
All of these approaches are rooted in the Existentialist critique that arose in response to the destruction of old Europe in the years 1914-1945, and the ascendance of consumer culture in post-war America. The growing popularity of mindfulness practice in all areas of western life follows a well-worn path. One might say that only those characteristics of Buddhism most like the existentialist or humanist frameworks will have any cultural traction at all. Zen practice, on the other hand, is not about making life easier or less painful. It is about living life directly, with all the worry and suffering that comes with it. I can ask: is my life easier as a result of ten years of deepening practice? My answer is that I cannot know. There is no other "me" to compare it to, and many other forces are at work as we all grow older. I am often much more sad, and much more joyful. Life may be richer, but it sure isn't easier.
Exploring the non-existence of an enduring self is the sine qua non of Zen practice. It will be many, many years before a genuine, American Buddhism can be said to exist.
Mindfulness practice makes modern life more satisfying; like the cognitive and client-centered therapies that emerged out of existentialism in the mid-twentieth century, it is an heir of Christianity and its doctrine of an eternal soul, an enduring self. Christianity is itself an heir of Greek Classicism, and Neo-Platonism. All assume a reality of the self. Buddhism rejects this.
Buddhism and Mindfulness meet only at one edge, and extend in very different directions. It is important to keep this distinction clear. However, we do live in a particular place at a particular time. There is probably nothing to be gained by scrambling your average teenager (whose nihilism and developmental confusion is hopefully at its peak) with abstract ideas of no-self. It is far better to emphasize the values we all share, such as community and self-reflection, and support them with techniques that have been empirically tested for 2500 years. Even if it runs the risk of hopelessly confusing just about everyone.
Every philosophical and religious paradigm must eventually leave the hot house of innovators and dedicated evangelizers and meet the marketplace. The “marketplace”, the bustle and endless distraction of the world outside of the meditation hall, is a very important metaphor in Zen. There, the rubber hits the road. Compromise, worry, the needs of others, the quotidian duties that come with food, shelter, and safety can do a real number on a would-be monastic.
The rubber is now hitting the road. Mindfulness has hit the big time.
I recommend reading Judith Warner’s New York Times blog from March 5 as well as a few of the comments. These provide a remarkable document of where mindfulness is at, right now. The writer writes clearly about a practice that she has an admittedly limited grasp of, and the hundreds of comments seem to come from a wonderful diversity of experience. To my way of thinking, she suggests several important conflicts and misunderstandings about mindfulness and Buddhist practice that will continue to represent its leading edge as it enters the mainstream of American culture.
One problem some of us face is simply definitional, and this is right at the heart of TAS’s quirky relationship to the public schools. This problem would be the difference between a spiritual practice and the techniques associated with it. Our curriculum is completely secular, but we teach and use certain techniques to support our students intellectual development.
The breath is a good example. The breath is the fundamental element of meditation. It is what one first concentrates on and always returns to. In Zen practice it is, practically speaking, synonymous with living in the present moment: tracking with the breath and fantasizing about something else are mutually exclusive activities. But mastering this technique is only one of a long sequence of carefully cultivated practices that a serious Buddhist engages throughout a lifetime. This is especially true with the teaching matrix developed by the Zen Mountain Monastery, one of the two traditions in Zen that I have a little more than passing familiarity with.
Yet this simple practice of aware breathing has such profound benefits for so many people that it is easily adapted to many situations, including school settings and western religious traditions. It works with certain types of post-traumatic conditions, and has been researched extensively for use with anxiety and depression. It is so intimately associated with Buddhism that many believe them to be co-extensive. There are not.
Another practice that many people are very familiar with are the various gratitude practices, deeply associated with the “loving-kindness” exercises associated with Tibetan Buddhism. There are many others, many of them subject to empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative. Ms. Warner, like most middle and upper-middle class Americans, are shopping in this country’s vast psychological supermarket. And, as has been the case for the last fifty years, the most popular and effective self-help techniques are humanistic, easy to grasp, and results oriented.
Think of Carl Roger’s Client Centered Therapy, Abraham Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy, Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy. Mindfulness has had its table set by these approaches. These all assume that I am the central force my own life, that I must make meaning out of my experiences, and that I get trapped in counter-productive habits of thought and action. Americans on the various roads to recovery and self-improvement seem to assume that these things are true.
All of these approaches are rooted in the Existentialist critique that arose in response to the destruction of old Europe in the years 1914-1945, and the ascendance of consumer culture in post-war America. The growing popularity of mindfulness practice in all areas of western life follows a well-worn path. One might say that only those characteristics of Buddhism most like the existentialist or humanist frameworks will have any cultural traction at all. Zen practice, on the other hand, is not about making life easier or less painful. It is about living life directly, with all the worry and suffering that comes with it. I can ask: is my life easier as a result of ten years of deepening practice? My answer is that I cannot know. There is no other "me" to compare it to, and many other forces are at work as we all grow older. I am often much more sad, and much more joyful. Life may be richer, but it sure isn't easier.
Exploring the non-existence of an enduring self is the sine qua non of Zen practice. It will be many, many years before a genuine, American Buddhism can be said to exist.
Mindfulness practice makes modern life more satisfying; like the cognitive and client-centered therapies that emerged out of existentialism in the mid-twentieth century, it is an heir of Christianity and its doctrine of an eternal soul, an enduring self. Christianity is itself an heir of Greek Classicism, and Neo-Platonism. All assume a reality of the self. Buddhism rejects this.
Buddhism and Mindfulness meet only at one edge, and extend in very different directions. It is important to keep this distinction clear. However, we do live in a particular place at a particular time. There is probably nothing to be gained by scrambling your average teenager (whose nihilism and developmental confusion is hopefully at its peak) with abstract ideas of no-self. It is far better to emphasize the values we all share, such as community and self-reflection, and support them with techniques that have been empirically tested for 2500 years. Even if it runs the risk of hopelessly confusing just about everyone.
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