Last month, in an event celebrating the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday, I met Dan Harris, ABC News anchor, author of “10% Happier,” and, like me, a mindfulness proselytizer. I was expecting a self-absorbed celebrity, but he was the complete opposite—refreshingly authentic and self-deprecating (for example, he said that if his wife had a choice, instead of “10% Happier,” she would title his book “90% Still A Moron”).
I like Dan’s definition of mindfulness because it is accessible to most of us: “Mindfulness is the ability to know what is going on in your head, right now, without getting carried away by it.”
Mindfulness is nothing but that. Still, so much misconception surrounds the practice. Here are the common ones:
Mindfulness is anti-Christian. After my first commentary was published (“Mindfulness for better work performance, less stress,” a brief instruction on sitting meditation, Opinion, 6/10/15), I got a note from a reader saying she wanted to try the practice but that she had read it was against her Christian faith. The truth is that mindfulness is nothing but a form of contemplative practice, of which Christianity has a long history. As early as the sixth century, the meditative practice called “Lectio Divina” has been a regular part of Christian monastic life. Then there is the practice called “Centering Prayer,” a post-Vatican II effort to bring back the contemplative teachings of early Christianity.
While mindfulness indeed has its roots in Buddhism, it will not sneak up on you and convert you from your faith (or, for that matter, your nonfaith). Neither are you required to be a Buddhist to practice it. It is mental training, plain and simple. As Sam Harris (no relation to Dan), best-selling author and neuroscientist, argues, “the benefits and truths derived from mindfulness exist independent of the religious coating it’s packed with.” In fact, according to Dan Harris, many people of faith say that meditation has helped them tone down the mental noise and thereby feel closer to God. Paul Knitter, a Christian scholar, even wrote a book titled “Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.”
Mindfulness is just a stress-buster. I got into mindfulness as a relaxation technique. I was in Geneva, living alone, when I was diagnosed with cancer. After four months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, I was pronounced clear of the disease, but I became paranoid: With every trivial pain in my body, I would call my oncologist. It was then that I got introduced to meditation, and the paranoia slowly subsided. What was interesting was that my teacher, whenever we met, would ask whether I noticed any change in the way I related to people, and my answer, for the first few months, was always “no.” But as I continued my practice, subtle but real changes were manifesting within me. When I asked a colleague “How are you?” it was not the perfunctory “Hi” one usually gives to people; I really took the time to hear what the other person had to say. It blew my mind that a seemingly simple practice was turning me into a kinder, more authentic human being.
Now, before you roll your eyes and think this is all woo-woo, let me tell you about this experiment done in Boston recently. Twenty participants went through eight weeks of meditation classes and the 19 controls were told they were on a wait list. After eight weeks all were asked to come to the laboratory, ostensibly to undergo testing on memory and other cognitive abilities.
Unknown to them, they were being tested for compassion: When a participant enters the waiting area, he sees three chairs, two of which are occupied. He therefore has to sit on the only vacant chair. As he waits, another person, an actor with crutches pretending to be in pain, enters the room. The other two people in the room ignore her. Will the participant give up his chair? Sixteen percent of the non-meditators do, but that number increases to 50 percent for those who have been meditating.
It was a noteworthy outcome, especially considering the well-known bystander effect in psychology—i.e., when a person sees others not offering any help, it was more likely he or she would not help as well.
Mindfulness is escapism. Leonard Cohen is an international celebrity. He was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. The poetry in his songs is heart-tugging—one of my favorites, from his song “Anthem,” goes: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In the 1990s, Cohen decided that he was tired of his “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” life and became a Zen Buddhist monk.
Pico Iyer, in his book “The Art of Stillness,” recounts his meeting with Cohen at a Zen monastery up on the hills outside Los Angeles. Cohen, without any irony, told Iyer that sitting still was the “real deep entertainment” he had found in his 61 years on the planet. In his book, Iyer declares: “Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”
Indeed, the real purpose of mindfulness is not to tune out and get away from the world, but to calm the mind and in the process gain a deep sense of clarity about ourselves and the world we live in.
Joel Villaseca (joel@mindbootcamp.org), a lawyer working at the United Nations in New York City, calls himself “a mindfulness guru-wannabe.” He is training as a teacher with siyli.org.