It wasn’t the Buddhist ideals that underpin mindfulness meditation that turned me off, it was the people who call themselves Buddhists that I had to meditate with. This is no condemnation, or even rejection, of the Buddhist cannon. I’ve studied and continue to study it pretty carefully and find much to positively influence my life and the world. I don’t find my practice of Zen meditation contradicts my Catholicism in any way. But oh, those people I met on Buddhist retreats.
I learned a lot at Zen centers. The mandatory work monasteries make part of the daily schedule, called Samu practice, profoundly influenced my ideas on meaningful work that I still consider the highest form of meditation and cover extensively in my book Practicing Mental Illness. I’ve also had some tremendous teachers who stuck to the original sutras and distanced themselves from the new age dabbling’s of so many of today’s Buddhist teachers. Check out Stephen Batchelor, Brad Warner, Dave Smith and James Austin to get a feel for what informed and inspired me. While you’re at it, read anything by Red Pine. Anything. Then again, realize that some of the time you want to spend reading about meditation may be better spent actually meditating.
But what I sought more than anything in my learning and practice of mindfulness was community. I believe we live for other people, have a very real commitment to reduce suffering, and manage and even heal mental illness in love, which I believe requires other people to love and from whom to receive love. These people don’t have to be, and often aren’t, romantic partners. But they do make up a community founded on support and compassion.
I didn’t find this at Buddhist monasteries at all. Meditating with others is wonderful, as are retreats in silence. But at some point you have to sit down, eat lunch and have a conversation. That’s where the trouble started. Almost all of the people at these retreats were financially secure, white, and quite elite urban liberals. So far, no problem. I know all sorts of people like that and we get along just fine. But these practitioners were fixated on self-improvement above all else, and completely intolerant of views that contradicted their supposedly opening minds that in fact were already made up about the way the world ought to work and the way people in it ought to think and behave.
The me, me, me focus was also disturbing. For many the Buddha has produced offspring with Sigmund Freud and that’s what they read about and practice. All sense of community is gone and in a very twisted way this focus on the self, this relentless depositing of the meditator into the center of experience and neurosis, turns a tradition that questions the very nature of the self into one that is completely selfish, with no concern other than rectifying perceived wrongs that dare to upset this quest for self-centered equanimity.
Fundamental to the Buddha’s teaching was the concept of Sanga, or the community of practitioners. A room full of people focused only on self-improvement cannot be a Sanga. Add to this individualism intolerant views of how people should conduct themselves and what the world needs, in their very unhumble opinions, and community becomes impossible. I found the greatest irony, in those lunchtime conversations, a full embrace of ideas that would lead to suffering for so many people seriously discussed by people who, before lunch was served, chanted the Boddhisatva vow, one of the most beautiful religious statements in which the believer swears to put off his own enlightenment until all sentient beings are enlightened.
Days before the Covid shutdown I sat in retreat at the Upaya Zen Center. The people I met, so upset by Donald Trump, hoped the virus would be so severe and wreak such havoc on the economy that Trump could never be re-elected. I was flabbergasted, as this would lead to so much suffering by so many people not in these meditators’ class. Well, it happened, and the few people from this retreat I’ve stayed in touch with are smug about it.
Conversations also turned to climate change. A common comment was that humans were a scourge on the planet and when climate change finally wiped us from the face of the earth justice would finally be served. Well, our species has survived all sorts of climate change stretching back to prehistory. It will again. But this point of view that we are a pox on the world would again result in so much suffering by so many millions, perhaps billions, without the means and security of these Buddhist posers with the resources to do just fine. Yes, this made me very angry, especially when the friend I traveled to the retreat with later joined the intolerant who mouth the Boddhisatva vow without meaning, wrote me off as a conservative, and threw away our friendship.
But there’s something even darker lurking in the way mindfulness is presented that led me to stop studying, stop teaching, and even stop practicing mindfulness meditation: The insistence that your thoughts are responsible for your present reality and even if you are or have experienced a great wrong the way you think about the event shapes the present even more than the event itself. Companies that treat their employees terribly introduce mindfulness training to throw the responsibility for worker satisfaction back on the worker’s thoughts and perception, instead of on the way they are treated by the company. People with anxiety are taught that the event that led to the anxiety was long past, or that their present anxiety is fueled by thoughts about some fear rather than the fact that there may be something very real in their life to be very anxious about, regardless of how they think about it. Few of the elites that teach this stuff have ever known homelessness or life-threatening disease or severe mental illness. And victims of trauma are actually abused by the mindfulness industry when told that their thoughts carry the trauma into the present and these thoughts have more influence on them than questions of justice, forgiveness or redemption. Once again, the idea of community is belittled and all the suffering and healing are confined to an individual’s thoughts, alone, to be settled and healed in meditation.
Contradictorily, the meditative experience is presented as a panacea for everything from insomnia to side effects of chemotherapy. Mindfulness is all good, all happy, happy, and if this isn’t your experience you must be doing it wrong. And many people were made to think they were doing it wrong when their experience with meditation was unpleasant. I knew better, but it’s hard to sell classes and books that promise that what you will find while meditating is exactly what you are experiencing right now. Sure, if you’re happy you’ll be happy, but if you’re depressed or in pain or anxious that’s what you’re going to get and that session of meditation is not going to fix it. It’s just going to make you feel it completely and maybe offer some insight about yourself and where you fit in your community. You won’t necessarily feel enlightened, but you will notice what’s going on – and then be able to do something about it.
That’s the idea behind my teaching that you can use meditation to predict, prevent and manage episodes of anxiety, depression or mania. Once you’ve meditated a bit you begin to notice that every difficult episode is preceded by physical symptoms and subtle behavioral and thought changes. When you notice these things you can work with your doctor to change a medicine, or work with yourself to exercise, or sleep and eat better, or engage in some physical work to keep the worst of the episode away. That’s what my book is about, and what I think is most important about my book is the lesson that you don’t have to achieve this by engaging in seated meditation like a statue of the Buddha. You can achieve it through a number of methods of meditation, or exercise, or even work.
When I left the mindfulness industry I spent time in physical labor, working silently, body weight calisthenics performed with great focus, and meditating on the Psalms. All worked to make me better able to deal with bipolar disorder.
Still, there is something about Zen meditation, just sitting, letting go of thoughts, and focusing on the breath. Breathing, being distracted, having thoughts come back and returning to the breath, over and over again. If you’ve tried this and feel like you failed because thoughts always intrude and you can’t empty your mind, rest assured that this failure is the point. You don’t want to be empty, you want to experience how you are, all of it, right now.
During this extreme episode I’m experiencing at this time, in a terrible mental state and out of work, I’ve returned to this practice that underpins much of mindfulness meditation. I’m not deluded to the point that this should make me happy or lead to some great breakthrough that will reestablish full mental health. Or that I can do it all on my own. But when I meditate I do find some clarity. Afterwards, though, I feel terrible. But that’s the way I feel right now, and in that post meditative period I may just get some insight into why my emotions and moods are so unpredictable right now.
Understanding what I knew to be wrong with mindfulness has led me to be able to take the best of it, the stuff that really works, and apply it to getting better. I’ll admit I closed my mind and went overboard in my criticism of mindfulness and its teachers. Now that I’m doing it again, with the right purpose and the right expectations, and now that I’m doing it for a Sanga, which ranges from my family to my readers to the whole suffering world, the rage, agitation, lack of focus and flight of ideas I’ve experienced lately are moderating. I took the time to read my book again, I stopped being so critical, and I began to heal. I hope you’ll take some of my ideas, and if you had a bad experience with mindfulness, give it a second chance. In community, in faith and in the reality that sometimes the best we can do is very far from self-actualization and very close to personal failure and subsequent growth. It’s mental health, and it’s possible.
My book, Practicing Mental Illness: Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Manage Challenging Moods is on sale at Amazon right now.
George this is really good.
I've learned to use mindfulness as a debugging tool.
When I'm angry or upset I've learned to pull out the mindfulness bag of tricks to see what's going on. I only get down on the floor when I'm in very bad shape. I don't think it'll help but it's the last tool in the bag.
I agree that most of the people talking about mindfulness are the worst, just the worst. It's why I don't talk about it with anyone.
Red Pine's Tao is my favorite by a country mile by the way.