Dispatches: Mindfulness in Society Conference 2013

Ed Halliwell, Mindful's "Examined Life" blogger, explores key findings and discussions from the conference. 

A remarkable week for mindfulness in the UK. Five hundred delegates have been attending the fully-booked Mindfulness In Society conference, braving unseasonal snow to converge on the northern English city of Chester. Another packed gathering follows in London as Jon Kabat-Zinn, pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), addresses a Mindfulness in Schools conference and gives a talk for the influential Action For Happiness movement.

The demographics of this weekend’s conference were interesting. A fellow attendee told me on arrival there were ten women here for every man. Most were professionals working in the field (what’s the collective noun for mindfulness teachers? A presence? An inquiry? An invitation?) and there has been a strong sense of shared appreciation at feeling part of a growing community. Jon Kabat-Zinn once had a vision that skilled and committed meditators might make an ethical living sharing their practice for the benefit of others. Walking around the conference hotel, that vision came to life around him. Chester felt like an attentive, non-judgemental place to be the last few days.

Saturday was the start of the conference proper, and the wealth on offer—dozens of presentations on various aspects of meditation research—felt at times overwhelming. It was a challenge to stay centred in the heart with so much material that engaged the head. With the question ‘are mindfulness courses helpful?’ seemingly settled among scientists, the major focus of study seems now to be shifting to how they help—the so-called mechanisms of mindfulness.

Shauna Shapiro, associate professor of counselling psychology at Santa Clara University and one of several visitors from the US, gave a passionate keynote on the importance of intention and attitude (or, quoting Jack Kornfield, “setting the compass of your heart”). Emphasising that mindfulness is a way of shifting our relationship to experience—re-perceiving—Shapiro suggested this was an extension of developmental stages that human beings go through as children, but which continue further if we consciously practise. As youngsters we realise we are not fused with other people, and in meditation we see we are not fused with our thoughts. When this unfolds, the separate sense of self, which emerged as we grew up, falls away again, this time not into unconscious fusion but to ‘simply awareness happening’. As the sense of self drops away, so can the suffering that comes with it.

This was a theme warmed to by one of the day’s later speakers, John Teasdale, co-developer of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Teasdale reflected on why zebras don’t get ulcers—unlike humans, they don’t abstract into past or future rumination, with all the stress that creates. But rather than romanticising the simple (and limited) life of a zebra, Teasdale explained that by holding our minds in kind awareness, we can move into what he called ‘post-conceptual knowing’—allowing the benefits of planning, reflecting, and learning, without the attendant distress. An enlightened zebra, perhaps?

With his complex models of modes of mind (not to mention the rest of a day jammed with ideas and data), Teasdale warned that our minds might get full, and so it was a delight to be released into a day of practice on Sunday, led by Kabat-Zinn. To the bemusement and amazement of hotel staff, their buzzing guests suddenly went silent and spent the day sitting quietly and attentively, with occasional breaks for walking and eating meditation in the foyers (cue even more bemusement and amazement). As our teacher joked from his meditation cushion at the centre of the stage: “It seems like something’s happening, and yet nothing’s happening.”

"If you're tweeting that you're meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn, then you're not!" Kabat-Zinn warmly warned conference-goers.

Warm, funny, sharp, humble and wise, it’s difficult to convey the joy of spending a day practising with Kabat-Zinn, and he effortlessly riffed his way through zen koans, cutting-edge science, the perils of technology (“If you’re tweeting that you’re meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn, then no, you’re not!”), stories from the early days of MBSR and the need for a new medical paradigm that nurtures what’s already right with people rather than just focusing on their ailments. Gently prodding his audience to greater insight through guided practice and keen dialogue, he reminded us it was time to live up to our species’ Latin name – homo sapiens sapiens (“Beings that know that they know”).

The day concluded with a celebratory dinner, prefaced by a stirring speech from UK Member of Parliament, Chris Ruane, who has recently tabled more than 400 mindfulness-related questions in the House of Commons. A confirmed advocate of mindfulness in politics, Ruane has rounded up an all-party group of MPs and Lords to take an eight-week mindfulness course, the final session of which Kabat-Zinn will be invited to address later this week.

Kabat-Zinn continued with a keynote yesterday morning, expanding on the need for a healthcare rather than a ‘disease-care’ system. He pointed out that meditation and medicine have the same derivation (meaning “right inward measure”), and that the Buddha’s four noble truths are actually a medical diagnosis (including favourable prognosis and treatment plan) that came from a physician who claimed to be not a God, but simply an awake person. He highlighted Norman Farb and colleagues’ 2007 study which showed that teaching people mindfulness enables them to shift their brain activity from the default, narrative network (active when we default to thinking in conceptual terms, often about ourselves) to an experiential network which comes on-line when everything—including us—is felt as more of an unfolding process. Concluding with a quote from Einstein (“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self”), it felt that we had come full circle from Shauna Shapiro’s opening talk two days earlier.

The conference continues until Tuesday, with presentations and dialogue on topics such as Mindfulness in The Workplace and the ongoing integration of mindfulness-based approaches into the UK National Health Service (MBCT has been a government-body approved treatment here since 2004), before the focus shifts south to London. We were reminded several times over the weekend that mindfulness remains “just a pimple on the elephant” in terms of its global influence, but is nevertheless becoming “a liberative meme” with the potential to relieve all manner of suffering in a stricken world. Something mindful surely seems to be happening in the UK right now, even if, in words Kabat-Zinn borrowed from our own William Shakespeare, it looks like much ado about nothing.

Mindfulness: Not Just "Brain Training"

I love that mindfulness practice is being investigated by science, and fascinated that many of the shifts reported by meditators throughout the ages are being corroborated by scientific evidence. The benefits of this are great—objective evaluations of practice can be encouraging, especially to those who might not otherwise be attracted to a "spiritual" discipline such as meditation.

Still, I often wonder if something is lost if we rely too much on scientific method and language as our way of approaching this work. I’ve written before about howscientific findings can bring expectation of future results, and that this can sometimes sabotage our mindfulness, taking us further into the stress of unfulfilled desire and out of the present moment. But I suspect there may be another risk too—that of unconsciously narrowing our experience into a conceptual frame.

Mindfulness is often spoken of these days as "brain training," especially in business settings. I do it myself sometimes, as a way of making sense of neuroscientific findings that show activity and structure in the brain can shift as a result of practice. This is fine, but traditionally, meditation has been considered more of a heart training than a brain training—a way of helping us to open our hearts to ourselves, others and the world. Indeed, the Sanskrit word sometimes translated as mind (citta) also means heart, and so mindfulness, as Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests, might just as well be called heartfulness.

Because scientific research is a matter of third-person observation, a conscious distancing in order to observe, and also a matter of logical interpretation, which happens at the level of thought and analysis, something of this heart quality can be missed when science is our only mode of engaging with things. The brain is an important organ, of course, but it’s interesting how much weight and attention is given to neuroscientific research as compared to evidence about what’s going on in the body. Brain is king, it seems.

On mindfulness courses, people often experience a realization that our supposedly logical minds, represented by the brain, are not always that logical—our thoughts are riddled with biases and preconceptions. Our thoughts are not as powerful as we make them out to be, and trying to think our way out of stresses or emotional upheavals is not usually very effective. The work of mindfulness for many of us, then, is a letting go of attachment to what’s going on in our heads, and a reacquaintance with what’s happening in our bodies—a willingness to connect with the feeling and tone of experience. This reorientation process makes us feel more balanced and whole, and often, more friendly, compassionate, and open.

Of course, thought is not bad—sometimes we just need to relate to it a little differently, realizing that it is only a part of who we are, and that our ruminations don’t have to dominate. Instead, many of us have swallowed not only "I think, therefore I am," but "what I think is who I am." When we come to mindfulness practice, part of what we’re doing is letting go of some of these apparent certainties and coming into a more fluid, more uncertain, but also richer and more rewarding way of being. As we let go of fixating on thoughts, we can feel the textures of our lives more exquisitely—we can get in touch with the heart of things. This is mindfulness as art, and it has rather a different flavor—juicy, vibrant, bubbling—than mindfulness described as "brain training," which on its own can sound rather flat and dry.

Our challenge, perhaps, is reject neither science nor art but to integrate the richness of experience with the clarity of observation. Indeed, isn’t bringing these two modes together an important aspect of what mindfulness really is?