Mindfulness in Eight Weeks. Michael Chaskalson
the case be the case.
Much of the time we may feel, instinctively almost, unwilling or unable to do this. We can put huge amounts of mental and emotional energy into refusing to allow things to simply be as they are. ‘They shouldn’t be like that!’ ‘It shouldn’t be like this!’ ‘I ought to be somehow different ...’ But things really only ever are as they actually are. However right, however wrong, however just or unjust, desirable or undesirable – they are as they are. And it’s only ever when we can allow this to be fact – that things are as they are – that choice can begin to open up for us. When we let what is the case be the case, whatever it is, then we can begin to choose how to respond to it. What shall we do about what’s showed up right now? What would be the most appropriate next step for us and for the situation as a whole?
When we can’t let what is the case be the case, then we’re stuck. We’re already rooted in a defensive posture of denial and we’ve closed down the possibilities for a more creative engagement with the situation. The wisdom element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness opens up the possibility for a more wholehearted creative response to the situations we find ourselves in. It allows for more creative choices.
Then, there is a compassion dimension to the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness. Here, to some extent at least, we still our inner critical voice.
For much of the time, many of us find that we run a kind of inner critical commentary on our experience. Sometimes that commentary can be directed at ourselves – ‘I’m not good enough.’ ‘I don’t measure up.’
How many of us actually think we’re thin enough, good-looking enough, smart enough, fit enough, strong enough, witty enough, rich enough, clever enough, fast enough ... anything enough?
Sometimes we turn that inner critical commentary on others – on their appearance, their intelligence, their emotional appropriateness and so on. Sometimes we run critical commentaries on our immediate environment – somehow or other, in one way or another, things just aren’t right. Nothing is quite as it should be. Nothing, ourselves included, is quite enough.
The compassion element in the non-judgemental attitude of mindfulness allows us to rest simply with things as they are – at least to some extent. We allow ourselves to be ourselves, we allow others to be who they are, and we rest a little bit more at ease with life as it actually is – with a bit more kindly acceptance towards ourselves, others and the world around us.
The quality of acceptance that emerges from mindfulness training isn’t simple passivity, however. It’s not that we passively allow the world to roll over us, or that we stop making ethical judgements. Far from it. Mindfulness training might even enable you to be more appropriately assertive. It might sharpen your capacity for drawing ethical distinctions. But all of this can be done with wisdom and with kindness.
With mindfulness training you begin to develop a greater capacity to allow what is the case to be the case and to respond skilfully and appropriately with a warm open-heartedness.
This book is based on a completely secular approach to mindfulness training. It is for people of any religion or none. For 2,500 years, however, the ideas and practices at the core of the approach were found almost exclusively in Buddhist monasteries in Asia. So far as we’re aware, the Buddha was the first person in history to use the idea of mindfulness as we use it in contemporary mindfulness approaches. He taught a number of mindfulness practices and other methods for developing and sustaining mindfulness and he spoke at length of the immense benefits that are on offer from engaging in those practices. That approach and a body of teachings and practices that came from it lived on in a wide variety of Buddhist monastic contexts in Asia but, for 2,500 years, people outside of Asia knew almost nothing about it.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century that began to change as European explorers, scholars and colonial administrators began to discover and translate into their own contexts some of what was going on in Asian monasteries. At first, only a tiny handful of these took up the practices for themselves, and the penetration of mindfulness approaches into European and North American culture was slow and gradual. But it built steadily and received a boost in the 1950s with the emergence of the Beats – poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, who began to publicly advocate the practice. It received more of a boost in the 1960s and 1970s with the psychedelic movement, when people like myself – hippies and wannabe hippies – began to get involved. But mindfulness practices were still largely to be found only in Buddhist contexts.
Towards the end of the 1970s, however, a very significant shift took place. Much of this comes down to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon had trained as a molecular biologist and was working as such at a hospital near Boston – the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical Center. In his student days he had come upon Buddhism and had established a regular daily meditation practice. Apart from his work at the hospital, he also taught yoga. He engaged with his scientific work, but two other questions kept bothering him. One question he expressed as ‘What shall I do with my life? What kind of work do I love so much I would pay to do it?’ The other was more to do with the patients who came to the hospital.
He saw that people came to the hospital because, in one way or another, they were suffering. But how many of them, he wondered, left the hospital with that suffering resolved? In discussion with physicians at the hospital he came to the conclusion that it was maybe something like 20 per cent of patients. What, he wondered, was the system offering to the other 80 per cent?
While on a silent meditation retreat in 1979 these two streams of questioning resolved themselves in a ‘vision’ lasting maybe 10 seconds, which Jon describes as an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications.
He recognised in that moment that the way he was working on that retreat on his own mind and mental states might have enormous benefits for the people who came to the hospital with their suffering. He saw that it might be possible to share the essence of the meditation and yoga teachings that he had been practising for the past 13 years with those who might never come to a Buddhist centre, and who would never be able to discover that essence through the words and forms that were used in such places. He resolved to try to make the practices and the language used to describe them so commonsensical that anyone might benefit from them.
Jon persuaded the hospital authorities to let him and his colleagues have some space in the basement, and there they developed what soon came to be known as the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. He and his colleagues worked to develop a contemporary vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the matter without reference to the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which those practices emerged.
Jon had trained as a scientist and knew the value of research, so he and his colleagues researched the patient outcomes of their programme and, bit by bit, what is now a very considerable body of research evidence into the efficacy of the training began to emerge. At the time of writing there are many thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers investigating the effects of mindfulness training. If you’re interested in these, you’ll find an extensive database of them at www.mindfulexperience.org.
It soon became clear that MBSR training enabled people to deal much better with chronic pain. They also became more adept at managing the various stressors that accompanied whatever issues had brought them to the hospital. The research indicates that the programme is successful at helping people deal with difficulty and, at the time of writing, more than 20,000 people have completed the eight-week course at UMass itself. More than 740 academic medical centres, hospitals, clinics and freestanding programmes offer MBSR to the public around the world, and interest in mindfulness training has continued to build as it has become increasingly apparent that it is not only stress and chronic pain that are positively affected when you learn to work with your attention in a different way.
Biological changes started to show up in the research as well. One early instance of this was the finding that, among patients who came to the hospital for treatment for psoriasis, the symptoms of those who engaged