Fairbairn is one of my heroes – as a child we have no choice but to greedily eat what our parents put in our mouths. But often we felt poisoned, but because we needed them so badly, it was easier to believe there was something wrong with us, and they must really be perfect. It can take a long time to understand this situation, to feel our hunger, and dare to STAND our need and not just blindly swallow down what others offer. Read More
The faint dot in the middle is the Earth seen through the rings of Saturn!
The following gem comes from pathwork lecture 165:
“You are using the busy mind, the overemphasized reasoning faculty, to fit your feelings into pictures, to build theories about why you feel a certain way. The mind is so trained in overusing reason that you think you need a reason to feel a certain way. Thus, your real motives and the actual situation often escape you. Since you fear feelings and see reason as the saving measure, you concoct reasons for feeling. You are always full of explanations of why you feel a certain way, until no feeling remains — only theory and explanation. This is so important, my friends, because if you learn to see through these “explanations” it will teach you the art of self-observation.
Let us say, for example, that you feel hurt. In many instances, you completely deny the hurt, even to yourself. You often manipulate it into an elaborate accusation — sometimes even using distorted facts about the perpetrator of the hurt. But this can be at best only a tiny part of the whole picture of your personality or the motives for the hurting act. There is thus no longer any reality behind the elaborate, reasonable-sounding explanations. The denied hurt turns into anger, which is also denied. You explain the anger away by theorizing about what caused the hurtful action. All the explanations and theorizing make it impossible to really experience the hurt. And when you deny an actual experience, you cannot put it truly behind you. You cannot really be done with it. And so you often build on top of this structure a false, exaggerated hurt — the game of, “See what you have done to me? My hurt now will force you to act differently.” This kind of artificially exaggerated hurt results from all the false layers that separate your consciousness from the original hurt. The false hurt creates an unbearable pain that leads to desperation and never to a satisfactory conclusion. The real hurt is a gentle, soft experience, never unbearable, always leaving the essence of the personality intact.
If you can let yourself feel such a hurt, simply and without adornment, stating the fact and why it hurts you, you create a new pattern. You learn to deal safely not only with your feelings but also with your surroundings. At the same time, you establish a new lifeline to your creative nucleus, your true identity. If you can endure your real hurt and let it be — even if you do not know or understand what hurts you — you will not have to become angry or destructive. These are merely reactions to a feeling you do not want to endure. This is the harm of denial: It builds further layers that remove and alienate you from your true self.
Back in 1984, I lived in the pathwork community in upstate New York, where these extrordinary lectures were given – this is one of the most incisive, exploring the link between the part of us that that can argue with our partner trying to force him or her into giving us the love we believed we failed to get as a child. However, the belief is based on deeply erroneus assumptions – as this lecture explores..
Our last discussion was about the fear of loving. The subject of love was presented at great length and from various angles in past sessions. You will remember that I frequently mentioned how the child desires to be loved exclusively and without limits. In other words, the child’s desire to be loved is unrealistic. Yet it is also true that the child would be very satisfied with real mature love. In fact, if it were given, the unrealistic demand for exclusive love would be diminished considerably. However, the capacity for tendering genuine mature love is rare.
Since children so seldom receive sufficient mature love and warmth, they continue to hunger for it throughout life unless this lack and hurt is recognized and properly dealt with. If not, as adults they will go through life unconsciously crying out for what they missed in childhood. This will make them incapable of loving maturely. You can see how this condition continues from generation to generation.
The remedy cannot be found by wishing that things were different and that people would learn to practice mature love. The remedy lies solely in you. True, if you had received such love from your parents, you would be without this problem of which you are not really and fully aware. But this lack of receiving mature love need trouble neither you nor your life if you become aware of it, see it, and rearrange your former unconscious wishes, regrets, thoughts and concepts by aligning them to the reality of each situation. As a consequence, you will not only become a happier person, but you will also be able to extend mature love to others — to your children, if you have any, or to other people in your environment — so that a benign chain reaction can start. Such a realistic self-correction is very contrary to your present inner behaviour, which we shall now consider.
All people, including even those few who have started to explore their own unconscious mind and emotions, habitually overlook the strong link between the child’s longing and unfulfillment and the adult’s present difficulties and problems, because only very few people experience personally — and not just recognize in theory — how strong this link is. Full awareness of it is essential.
There may be isolated, exceptional cases where one parent offers a sufficient degree of mature love. Even if one parent has it to some measure, very likely the other does not. Since mature love on this earth is only present to a degree, the child will suffer from the shortcomings of even a loving parent.
More often, however, both parents are emotionally immature and cannot give the love the child craves, or give it only in insufficient measure. During childhood, this need is rarely conscious. Children have no way of putting their needs into thoughts. They cannot compare what they have with what others have. They do not know that something else might exist. They believe this is the way it should be. Or, in extreme cases, they feel especially isolated, believing their lot is like no one else’s. Both attitudes deviate from the truth. In both cases the real emotion is not conscious and therefore cannot be properly evaluated and come to terms with. Thus, children grow up never quite understanding why they are unhappy, nor even that they are unhappy. Many of you look back on childhood convinced that you had all the love you wanted just because you actually did have some love.
There are a number of parents who give great demonstrations of love. They may overindulge their children. Such spoiling and pampering may be overcompensation and a sort of apology for a deeply suspected inability to love maturely. Children feel the truth very acutely. They may not think it, or consciously observe it, but inwardly children keenly feel the difference between mature, genuine love and the immature, over-demonstrative variety offered instead.
Proper guidance and security are the parents’ responsibility and call for authority on their part. There are parents who never dare to punish or exert a healthy authority. This failing is due to guilt because real, giving, warming, comforting love is absent in their own immature personalities. Other parents may be too severe, too strict. They thereby exert a domineering authority by bullying the child, and not allowing its individuality to unfold. Both kinds fall short as parents, and their wrong attitudes, absorbed by the child, will cause hurt and unfulfillment.
In children of the strict parents, the resentment and rebellion will be open, and therefore more easily traced. In the other case, the rebellion is just as strong, but hidden, and therefore infinitely harder to trace. If you had a parent who smothered you with affection or pseudo-affection, yet lacked in genuine warmth, or if you had a parent who conscientiously did everything right but was also lacking in real warmth, unconsciously you knew it as a child and you resented it. Consciously you may not have been aware of it at all, because, when a child, you really could not put your finger on what was lacking. You were outwardly given everything you wanted and needed. How could you draw the subtle, fine borderline distinction between real affection and pseudo-affection with your child’s intellect? The fact that something bothered you without your being able to explain it rationally made you feel guilty and uncomfortable. You therefore pushed it out of sight as far as possible.
As long as the hurt, disappointment, and unfulfilled needs of your early years remain unconscious, you cannot come to terms with them. No matter how much you may love your parents, an unconscious resentment exists in you, which prevents you from forgiving them for the hurt. You can only forgive and let go if you recognize your deeply hidden hurt and resentment. As an adult human being you will see that your parents, too, are just human beings. They were not as faultless and perfect as the child thought and hoped; yet they are not to be rejected now because they had their own conflicts and immaturities. The light of conscious reasoning has to be applied to these very emotions you never allowed yourself to be aware of fully.
As long as you are unaware of this conflict between your longing for a perfect love from your parents and your resentment against them, you are bound to try remedying the situation in your later years. This striving may manifest in various aspects of your life. You run constantly into problems and repeated patterns which have their origin in your attempt to reproduce the childhood situation so as to correct it. This unconscious compulsion is a very strong factor, but is so deeply hidden from your conscious understanding!
The most frequent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in your choice of love partners. Unconsciously you will know how to choose in the partner aspects of the parent who has particularly fallen short in affection and love that is real and genuine. But you also seek in your partner aspects of the other parent who has come closer to meeting your demands. Important as it is to find both parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and more difficult to find those aspects which represent the parent who has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the one more resented or despised and for whom you had little or no love. So you seek the parents again — in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect, in your marital partners, in your friendships, or in other human relationships. In your subconscious, the following reactions take place: since the child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot understand and accept, this very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win out in the end in order to finally master the situation instead of succumbing to it. Losing out means being crushed — this must be avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire strategy is unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish cannot ever come to realization.
This entire procedure is utterly destructive. In the first place, it is an illusion that you were defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion that you can now be victorious. Moreover, it is an illusion that the lack of love, sad as that may have been when you were a child, is indeed the tragedy that your subconscious still feels it to be. The only tragedy lies in the fact that you obstruct your future happiness by continuing to reproduce the situation and then attempting to master it. My friends, this process is a deeply unconscious one. Of course, nothing is further from your mind as you focus on your conscious aims and wishes. It will take a great deal of digging to uncover the emotions that lead you again and again into situations where your secret aim is to remedy childhood woes.
In trying to reproduce the childhood situation, you unconsciously choose a partner with aspects similar to those of the parent. Yet it is these very aspects, which will make it as impossible to receive the mature love you rightfully, long for now as it was then. Blindly, you believe that by willing it more strongly and more forcefully, the parent-partner will now yield, whereas in reality love cannot come that way. Only when you are free of this ever-continuing repetition, will you no longer cry to be loved by the parent. Instead, you will look for a partner or for other human relationships with the aim of finding the maturity you really need and want. In not demanding to be loved as a child, you will be equally willing to love. However, the child in you finds this impossible, no matter how much you may otherwise be capable of it through development and progress. This hidden conflict eclipses your otherwise growing soul.
If you already have a partner, the uncovering of this conflict may show you how he or she is similar to your parents in certain immature aspects. But since you now know that there is hardly a really mature person, these immaturities in your partner will no longer be the tragedy they were while you constantly sought to find your parent or parents again, which of course could never come to pass. With your existing immaturity and incapacity, you may nevertheless build a more mature relationship, free of the childish compulsion to recreate and correct the past.
You have no idea how preoccupied your subconscious is with the process of re-enacting the play, so to speak, only hoping that “this time it will be different.” And it never is! As time goes on, each disappointment weighs heavier and your soul becomes more and more discouraged.
For those of my friends who have not yet reached certain depths of their unexplored subconscious, this may sound quite preposterous and contrived. However, those of you who have come to see the power of your hidden trends, compulsions, and images will not only readily believe it, but will soon experience the truth of these words in their own personal lives. You already know from other findings how potent are the workings of your subconscious mind, how shrewdly it goes about its destructive and illogical ways.
If you learn to look at your problems and unfulfillment from this point of view and follow the usual process of allowing your emotions to come to the fore, you will gain much further insight. But it will be necessary, my friends, to re-experience the longing and the hurt of the crying child you were once, even though you were also a happy one. Your happiness may have been valid and without self-deception at all. For it is possible to be both happy and unhappy. You may now be perfectly aware of the happy aspects of your childhood, but that which hurt deeply and that certain something you greatly longed for — you did not even quite know what — you were not aware of. You took the situation for granted. You did not know what was missing or even that there was anything missing. This basic unhappiness has to come to awareness now, if you really want to proceed in inner growth. You have to re-experience the acute pain you once suffered but you pushed out of sight. Now you have to look at this pain conscious of the understanding you have gained. Only by doing this will you grasp the reality value of your current problems and see them in their true light.
Now, how can you manage to re-experience the hurts of so long ago? There is only one way, my friends. Take a current problem. Strip it of all the superimposed layers of your reactions. The first and most handy layer is that of rationalization, that of “proving” that others, or situations are at fault, not your innermost conflicts which make you adopt the wrong attitude to the actual problem that confronts you. The next layer might be anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration. Behind all these reactions you will find the hurt of not being loved. When you experience the hurt of not being loved in your current dilemma, it will serve to reawaken the childhood hurt. While you face the present hurt, think back and try to reconsider the situation with your parents: what they gave you, how you really felt about them. You will become aware that in many ways you lacked a certain something you never clearly saw before — you did not want to see it. You will find that this must have hurt you when you were a child, but you may have forgotten this hurt on a conscious level. Yet it is not forgotten at all. The hurt of your current problem is the very same hurt. Now, re-evaluate your present hurt, comparing it with the childhood hurt. At last you will clearly see how it is one and the same. No matter how true and understandable your present pain is, it is nevertheless the same childhood pain. A little later you will come to see how you contributed to bringing about the present pain because of your desire to correct the childhood hurt. But at first you only have to feel the similarity of the pain. However, this requires considerable effort, for there are many overlaying emotions that cover the present pain as well as the past one. Before you have succeeded in crystallizing the pain you are experiencing, you cannot understand anything further in this respect.
Once you can synchronize these two pains and realize that they are one and the same, the next step is much easier. Then, by looking over the repetitious pattern in your various difficulties, you will learn to recognize the similarities between your parents and the people who have caused you hurt or are causing you pain now. Experiencing these similarities emotionally will carry you further on the particular road toward dissolving this basic conflict. Mere intellectual evaluation will not yield any benefit. When you feel the similarities, while at the same time experiencing the pain of now and the pain of then, you will slowly come to understand how you thought you had to choose the current situation because deep inside you could not possibly admit “defeat.”
It goes without saying that many people are not even aware of any pain, past or present. They busily push it out of sight. Their problems do not appear as “pain.” For them, the very first step is to become aware that this pain is present and that it hurts infinitely more as long as they have not become aware of it. Many people are afraid of this pain and like to believe that by ignoring it they can make it disappear. They chose such a means of relief only because their conflicts have become too great for them. How much more wonderful it is for a person to choose this path with the wisdom and conviction that a hidden conflict, in the long run, does as much damage as a manifest one. They will not fear to uncover the real emotion and will feel, even in the temporary experience of acute pain, that in that moment it turns into a healthy growing pain, free of bitterness, tension, anxiety, and frustration.
There are also those who tolerate the pain, but in a negative way, always expecting it to be remedied from the outside. Such people are in a way nearer to the solution because for them it will be quite easy to see how the childish process still operates. The outside is the offending parent, or both parents, projected onto other human beings. They have only to redirect the approach to their pains. They do not have to find it.
Only after experiencing all these emotions, and synchronizing the “now” and the “then,” will you become aware of how you tried to correct the situation. You will further see the folly of the unconscious desire to recreate the childhood hurt, the frustrating uselessness of it. You will survey all your actions and reactions with this new understanding and insight, whereupon you will release your parents. You will leave your childhood truly behind and start a new inner behaviour pattern that will be infinitely more constructive and rewarding for you and for others. You will no longer seek to master the situation you could not master as a child. You will go on from where you are, forgetting and forgiving truly inside of you, without even thinking that you have done so. You will no longer need to be loved, as you needed to be loved when you were a child. First you become aware that this is what you still wish, and then you no longer seek this kind of love. Since you are no longer a child, you will seek love in a different way, by giving it instead of expecting it. It must always be emphasized, however, that many people are not aware that they do expect it. Since the childish, unconscious expectation was so often disappointed, they made themselves give up all expectations and all desire for love. Needless to say, this is neither genuine nor healthy, for it is a wrong extreme.
To be fruitful and bring real results, the process of giving up the recreation must go beyond mere intellectual knowledge. You have to allow yourself to feel the pain of certain unfulfillments now and also the pain of the unfulfillment of your childhood, then compare the two until, like two separate picture slides, they gradually move into focus and become one. Once this happens, the insight you gain, the experience you feel exactly as I say here, will enable you to take the further steps indicated.
To work on this inner conflict is of great importance for some of my friends who have made sufficient progress on this path. They need these instructions to give them a new outlook, and gain further clarification beyond the point at which they have arrived. My words will enable them to proceed in the proper direction. For others who are not yet that far advanced or for those who have not really begun a self-search, these words may perhaps be somewhat obscure. Intellectually you may understand quite well, but you will be unable as yet to apply them to your own emotions and life problems. Nevertheless, I urge you all to think about this: the time will come when you will glean a new understanding about yourself from these words. Perhaps an occasional glimpse even now, a temporary flickering emotion that these words may cause in you, will be of help and open a door toward knowing yourself better, toward evaluating your life with a more realistic and more mature outlook.
Now, are there any questions in connection with this lecture?
QUESTION: It is very difficult for me to understand that one continually chooses a love object who has exactly the same negative trends that one or the other parent had. Is it reality that this particular person has these trends? Or is it projection and response?
ANSWER: It can be both and it can be either. In fact, most of the time it is a combination. Certain aspects are unconsciously looked for and found and they are actually similar. But the existing similarities are enhanced by the person who is doing the recreation. They are not only projected qualities, “seen” while they are not really there, but are latent in some degree without being manifested. These are encouraged and strongly brought to the fore by the attitude of the person with the unrecognized inner problem. He or she fosters something in the other person by provoking the reaction that is similar to the parent’s. The provocation, which of course is entirely unconscious, is a very strong factor here.
The sum total of a human personality consists of many aspects. Out of these, let us say three or four may be actually similar to some traits in the recreator’s parent. The most outstanding would be a similar kind of immaturity and incapacity to love. That alone is sufficient and potent enough in essence to reproduce the same situation.
The same person would not react to others as he or she reacts to you because it is you who constantly do the provoking, thereby reproducing conditions similar to your childhood for you to correct. Your fear, your self-punishment, your frustration, your anger, your hostility, your withdrawal from giving out love and affection, all these trends of the child in you constantly provoke the other person and enhance a response coming from that part which is weak and immature. However, a more mature person will affect others differently and will bring out that in them which is mature and whole, for there is no person who does not have some mature aspects.
How do we recover balance and well being, when we are suffering?
We become so engrossed in our personal dramas, that we no longer know what to trust. If we begin to recognise what is going on in our mind, to identify rather than be the identified, then we can deconstruct our drama and see how we got into the present situation. In terms of internal family systems therapy, this involves beginning to tune into a habitual defence, rather like turning the dial on an old fashioned radio, so that we can begin to understand what it is trying to achieve. As we do this, the defensive part of us actually feels relieved that we are beginning to understand why it is working so hard. Then it may begin to soften up enough to reveal what it has been trying to protect in us.
At this point, we are no longer seeing through the lens of a defence, and we begin to trust the perceptions of the natural Mind.
In Buddhist thought, this is the moment when we are no longer reacting emotionally and volitionally, but are beginning to be with, and to see clearly what is actually going on. Then it is possible, to just see, to just hear, and to just know a memory as a memory. This is the true potential of mindfulness – where we are no longer living inside our own personal reaction to Life, and we can see the chain of interdependent causation for what it is, rather than being whirled around by it.
Inside Out, Pixar’s latest animated film offering premiered June 19 and is causing not a little excitement. For one thing, it’s darned good entertainment. For another, it’s clean. It’s a movie the entire family can see and enjoy. Last but not least, the layman gets a bird’s eye view of what goes on inside the brain and how real people deal with memories, emotions, the imagination, and abstract thinking; and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s actually amazing how this one little cartoon film, Inside Out, so broadly appealing to adults and children alike, tells us so much about psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Maybe that’s because the story line of Inside Out is based on the Internal Family Systems Model (IFS), developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. In IFS, the personality is thought to be made up of valuable parts that each have healthy roles. But sometimes life gets in the way and the parts are forced to reorganize in unhealthy ways.
Think of the child of alcoholic parents—she’d like to go to medical school and become a doctor, but instead is forced to put her career on hold and take care of her parents. This is something you’ll see in most alcoholic families: a child putting her life on hold out of duty to her messed-up family. But while you see this in most alcoholic families, every single one of the children who end up serving as caretakers for their parents is a unique individual. They each have talents and interests having nothing to do with their families or alcoholism. And yet none of these children will get to realize their dreams or use their talents.
Duty has taken over the part that hopes and dreams, making self-fulfillment impossible.
IFS therapy would aim to help someone in this situation work at freeing the part of the person that is stuck and unable to get out there and pursue a dream. It would be about rebalancing these different parts of the personality, about having a conversation with the self, about becoming whole and happy. About becoming the person you have the potential to be.
originally posted by Varda Epstein
As we all know, it is so easy to be lost in the movies that go on in consciousness, and to feel hopeless – so I paste in below the Buddha’s words on how consciousness (just like a real movie) is made up of many states that are all arising and ceasing. Seeing this makes all the difference – states will actually dissolve, if you can ride the wave down into the ocean….Waves by their very nature are arising and ceasing – but we become blind to this when we are lost in thoughts, which can reify our mind…
Middle Length Discourses 38
‘This has come to be.
It comes to be from that nutriment
With the cessation of that nutriment,
what has come to be is subject to cessation.
_do you see this ?
_does doubt arise when uncertain about this?
_is doubt abandoned in one who sees this as it actually is with proper wisdom ?
_are you free from doubt about this ?
_has it been well seen by you as it actually is with proper wisdom ?
Purified and bright as this view is,
If you adhere to it, cherish it,
treasure it, and treat it as a possession,
would you then understand that
the Dhamma has been taught
as similar to a raft,
being for the purpose of crossing over,
not for the purpose of grasping ?
No, venerable Sir.’
My Zen teacher once described much of his practice as having been like a dog chasing its tail. I only recently really got how much of my own efforts to heal myself, practice the Dharma, figure things out have been like this too. Its so ironic that it takes despair (not seeing the connection between cause and effect, as Nisargadattta defines it) to challenge our melodramas about Life, to really stop us in our tracks. Only then can we begin to know what it means to just be the knowing. Its so simple that the thinking mind – which is addicted to liking and not liking, and revolves around a fixed sense of me in here, and the world out there, just cannot get.
IFS at its best, can help us listen into the melodrama – understand where its coming from, and disengage from it, so that you can (as the literal translation of the Chinese word for the Goddess of compassion renders it) just hear the cries of the world.
Having struggled to be mindful as a Buddhist monk building a road, tiling a roof, cleaning toilets, sitting through pain, I have often been puzzled by the way western psychologists have latched onto a convenient definition of mindfulness as non-judgemental awareness in the moment. Do they know how often emotions are raging, and carrying one away ? How hard it can be to relinquish an opinion you based your life on ?
They have taken the seventh step of the eight-fold path, and largely ignored the investigation that is needed to see through one’s conditioning.
That said I often think this style of psychotherapy (IFS) is a very valuable adjunct to ‘mindfulness’ – in recognizing and understanding the defences they soften up, and are often willing to step to one side, so that mindfulness/compassion/courage/curiosity can be there and embrace and understand and identify what the defences were working so hard to contain and exile – then there can be a surrender to being the knowing.
The following article appeared in the Psychologist, and is an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn who pioneered the growth of mindfulness in the West….
“Jon Kabat-Zinn is Internationally known for his work as a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic (in 1979), and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995).
Edo Shonin is a research psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, and a Buddhist monk. He poses the questions here.
Why do you think mindfulness is growing in popularity within psychology?
There has kind of been a kind of explosion of interest around mindfulness that’s actually been going on for years but it’s reached the point where it’s kind of like – not just the big bang but the kind of inflation of the big bang. I think there are a lot of reasons for it. One is the kind of momentum in the science that’s built up over the years around mindfulness. So if you look at the plot of the number of papers in the medical and scientific literature over the past 30-35 years, it unfolds at a very low level during the eighties and right into the late 90s. And then it starts to rise and through the early 2,000s, it went higher and higher and now it’s almost going straight up so that [there were] over 700 papers in 2014 alone on mindfulness, and that’s not counting some of the kind of mindfulness approaches like ACT and DBT.
That’s one thing that’s driving it. Another thing that is driving it is the media has gotten a hold of it in a way where, say, in the past year, in 2014, it was the cover story, my work was, you know, the cover story of Time Magazine in February of 2014. Then there was CBS [news] 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper who did this thing in December. And so in 2015, Oprah Winfrey did an hour’s conversation on her big program with me about mindfulness. You know many of the people see these things in the United States and that drives it. Even internationally, I have just spent a number of days giving talks… Amsterdam was like sold out at 950 people, Belgium was sold out at 1,500 people. Paris was sold out at 1,700 people … and tomorrow night in London will be like sold out at like 900 people…
You have defined mindfulness using words such as ‘non-judgemental moment-to-moment awareness’. What exactly does this statement mean?
First of all let me simply say that we get almost no training in our education around awareness at all … It is in some sense trivialised and ignored how powerful the human faculty for awareness is. So what meditation practice in general does and mindfulness specifically is to intentionally cultivate access to awareness, intimacy with awareness. It is not that we have to set up awareness, it is actually already fully developed. What we need to develop is moment to moment access to it.
Why moment to moment? Well that’s really the only moment we are ever alive. But when we fall into extremes of thinking and emotion and so forth then often we are not in the present moment anymore … As children we naturally have the present moment but our education system in some sense squeezes that out of us in ways that are I think becoming apparent and the consequences – the very unwise consequences of it or damaging consequences of it – are becoming much better known now. So mindfulness in education and especially even in kindergarten and first grade and so forth, in primary schools, is becoming a major new vector of mindfulness in the mainstream world now.
I wanted to ask about the term ‘non-judgemental’. Don’t you think it is necessary to make some sort of a judgement call to be able to discriminate that which is right and that which is wrong?
That definition that you are asking me about is actually what I call an operational definition. It is not meant to be a final definition of mindfulness. It is more like a working definition of mindfulness. I don’t know if you know anything about the Zen tradition [of Buddhism] but it’s meant to be something of a koan – a deep question that is not completely amenable to a totally cognitive response. What the non-judgemental is pointing to is actually how judgemental we are. So you could think of it as an invitation to suspend judging as much as we can and just be aware of what is unfolding from moment to moment … I am also making a big distinction between judging which, in the way I am using the term, has to do with black and white thinking – I like this and I don’t like that, that’s good, this is bad – and discernment, which is what you are talking about, which is more the kind of operation of wisdom where you can see the subtleties – the thousand shades of grey between black and white – you know that kind of thing, which is absolutely essential to and part and parcel of the cultivation of mindfulness.
If you read that definition and you don’t know anything about it you might ask well why the hell would anybody want to do that – ‘pay attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgementally’? And you will notice in the definition I don’t give a reason for why one would do that. Again that’s part of the Koan, its part of in some sense what’s left unspoken has a kind of real depth to it. But you could say, if you wanted a reason for doing it, it’s in the service of self-understanding and the cultivation of wisdom and compassion.
Would you say mindfulness – in the manner that you teach it – is a spiritual or a psychological faculty?
Neither, just to be as provocative as possible. First of all, I really try to stay as far away from the word spiritual as possible. But what I will say is that if push comes to shove, my working definition of spiritual is what it means to be really human, which would be another koan because different people would say different things about that. But if I call mindfulness a spiritual practice then of course, there will be people that think that’s wonderful and there will be an equal number of people, or ten times as many people, that think well that’s kind of religion, voodoo, really its nonsense, and they won’t want to have anything to do with it.
I understand that while teaching it you might not want to use the word spiritual. But you personally, what do you think?
Here I have to say I am not a psychologist by training and I have never thought of what I do as a psychological intervention. I use a different terminology. So I would call it a mind-body intervention. We sometimes call the field that’s developed around this mind-body medicine. In other words, the recognition that the mind and the body are not two different things.
In what ways do you think mindfulness as a taught program, such as MBSR and MBCT, differs from the traditional Buddhist approach to teaching mindfulness?
It partly depends on the quality of the teacher. If an instructor is well grounded in the meditation practices that underlie MBSR and MBCT then the essential difference might be zero. What is taught in Buddhist monasteries and what is practiced in Buddhist monasteries is essentially no different from what is taught in MBSR and MBCT – in the sense that one has an ethical foundation to the whole thing. In our case it is the Hippocratic Oath – first do no harm. And of course how would you know if you are doing harm unless you are cultivating mindfulness? And then, you know, it really is about the nature of the mind and the nature of what we call the self – and that’s what Buddhist practice is all about.
Some Buddhist teachers and scholars have criticized the popular mindfulness movement and implied that what is being taught no longer reflects the traditional meaning of mindfulness or Sati. In fact, in some papers we find the term ‘McMindfulness’ popping up. What are your views on this?
First of all, that term first came out of one person’s mouth or one person’s mind. When you say it is popping up, of course, every term like that tends to just go viral on the web, but it just came out of one person’s mind. This is not McMindfulness by any stretch of the imagination. What it is – now I have to use some Buddhist terminology – it is the movement of the Dharma [the Buddhist teachings] into the mainstream of society. Buddhism really is about the Dharma – it’s about the teachings of the Buddha. You know, in various Buddhist traditions, there are actually very big differences among Buddhists about what it is all about and what the best methodologies are and all of that stuff. So Buddhist scholars you know, love to, you know, stew with each other about the nature of all of those questions. And now that this is moving into the mainstream, I think instead of seeing that it has the potential to actually elevate humanity in profound ways that are just completely in accordance with the fundamental teachings of the Buddha about the nature of suffering and the possibility of the sort of transformation and liberation from suffering, they get into, kind of, what I might call orthodoxies that allow them to continue to basically throw grenades at something that is at least 99% healthy for people.
Today mindfulness is described as a form of meditation in and of itself, but in the Buddhist canonical literature, mindfulness is described as a factor that regulates concentration (i.e., it is not actually a form of meditation). What are your thoughts on this?
I think different traditions describe it differently. When I developed the language to describe what it is that I do – what i call Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR – there is no question its mindfulness. It’s often spoken of in the Theravada [Buddhist] tradition at least as the heart of Buddhist meditation.
There was a monk in Sri Lanka named Nyanaponika Thera who was actually a German who spent his entire adult life in Sri Lanka as a Theravadan monk, and he wrote a book called the ‘Heart of Buddhist Meditation’. It came out in 1962, and I quote from it in my books, and in that book it describes mindfulness as the heart of meditation, that’s what the book is about and the satipatthana sutta.
So you see I didn’t make up the idea that there is such a thing as mindfulness meditation. It is very much the case in the Theravadan tradition that it is seen that way. In the Vajrayana [Buddhist] tradition and in the Chan [Buddhist] tradition they don’t use that kind of language, but, you know, they also don’t necessarily refer to the Abhidharma understanding of mindfulness.
So yes in the Abidharma mindfulness is a factor – it is one of the seven factors of enlightenment. But I am also using the word, just so you know, as a kind of umbrella term for the Dharma in some much larger and more universal sense. Not just as my working definition.
A newspaper has described you as having done more to bring Buddhism into the mainstream than any other individual. Do you think this is an accurate statement and do you think this is a wise move?
The Guardian got it wrong. I remember that headline. If they had used the word Dharma, then I wouldn’t have an argument with it – the Dharma in its most universal form. But I was not happy with that headline at all, it is just not true. And just to say the Buddha was not Buddhist. This has never been about Buddhism per se as an ‘ism’. The word Buddhism was coined by Europeans in about the 17th or 18th century according to some scholars. So even the terminology sometimes creates a separation and orthodoxies that don’t actually exist.
Do you have any advice for psychologists wishing to use mindfulness in applied settings – such as in clinical contexts or with children, offenders, and so on?
I do have advice for them. I guess the most fundamental thing would be that mindfulness is not a concept, it is not a good idea, it is not a philosophy, and it’s not a catechism. It is a way of being but it requires practice. My strongest advice would be to actually practice it for an extended period of time and then applications for particular areas of psychology that are interested will become in some sense obvious – and from a very profound place of interest. And then they can change the field of psychology. At least I hope they will.”
