Tag Archives: mindfulness

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diy dhamma drama or here we goes agin

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I posted this on my Facebook status:

We are The Holy Relic of the Misappropriated Matcha. Our rituals include eating Green Tea Ice Cream to show our unmitigated devotion to all things sacrilegious. In a “not-yer-mamma’s-non-duality” way, of course!

It’s a response to a series of posts from various places. The first series was in reaction to Wisdom 2.0 which berated secular forms of mindfulness programs (here we go again). These posts by various Buddhist teachers and organizations expressed concerns that mindfulness taught in profit-centered corporations would serve only to create worker drones and therefore lead to more oppression than liberation. This one’s been argued with accompanied flogging of the blindly-accepted prediction that teaching mindfulness in places of ill-ethical repute will end badly for the 99%.

Because I tend to believe that we, as purveyors of secular mindfulness programs, need to be clear on our own ethics which would guide who we serve, I also believe that we can discern when offering mindfulness programs may or may not be a good thing. It’s that nonduality thing. Samsara/Nirvana. At the same time, I do wish that those in the know – meaning those Buddhist scholars and teachers who are vehement about NOT bringing mindfulness programs to corporations who practice unwholesomely – would offer me some clear evidence that this oppression is a real outcome and not a theoretical one. It’s that science thing. You know, evidence. Because without evidence, I’m likely to not get in my car and drive to work each day because the stats say more people die from vehicle accidents than anything else (yes, yes, fossil fuels but my horse is too old to be galloped into the city).

So, please. Send me the facts. Or at the very least a well articulated argument for NOT delivering such a program. You know, it’s that risk analysis thing.

from DeviantArt.com ChopenWell, a bit further up my Facebook feed was this picture from Sharon Salzberg’s Facebook page and attributed to DeviantArt(ist) Chopen. It was underscored by the quote:

When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.

Sharon Salzberg
from Real Happiness at Work
Image by Chopen

Really? Really. The post boasts 15 shares and 51 likes. Really. Women in what one commenter called an “alienating job” being linked to the idea of “dissatisfaction at work”… which everybody feels… and the idea that it can be transcended by seeking to use it as a tool to wake up.

I once worked in a factory much like this one. It was the only way out of the Montreal slum-like housing and to stay in University. The 11PM to 6AM shift which required waiting in the dark at a bus stop by the Metropolitan underpass. I didn’t have the luxury of feeling dissatisfied. I did wake up. Not waking up was not an option  because after catching the bus at 6:30AM I had to get home, sleep an hour, and get to classes. But enough about me. In all the shares and comments there was only one that asked the burning question: Are you saying that being oppressed is an opportunity to wake up (I assume in the Buddhist sense of attaining liberation)?

Well heck. In that case, let us all descend on the corporations and encourage this oppression through misappropriated mindfulness because that might work better than good old fashioned Buddhism!

I’m not being rhetorical because I do wonder why that post and its implication did not draw the ire of dhamma purists. Maybe because it comes from within the dhamma circle and so is acceptable? Could it be that all this mindfulness practice does have a suppressing effect on our discernment of when something just plain is not right? Maybe these are not politic questions to ask.

However, I do ask why so many intelligent Buddhist scholars and practitioners are jumping on this bandwagon of bashing secular programs when they have the wisdom and knowledge to do better. I don’t have an answer for that however I think some of the critiques – not criticisms because many of those are just wildly histrionic – are important to consider. So here are my two questions for the Buddhist scholars:

What’s up with this term Mindfulness? It’s not an easy concept and comes with a boatload of  interpretations whose perspectives depend on the particular Buddhist tradition. What’s worse is that the secular Mindfulness, as in MB+something, is a mash-up of Theravada meditation systems, Mahayana philosophical concepts (like non-dualism), and some yogacara thrown in for good circulation. Good luck trying to line that up to some pure form of the Dhamma/Dharma. When Jon Kabat-Zinn put all this together he truly believed it was a working model and that scholars in time would work out the kinks. All I can say is the kinks have come home to roost and scholars are not happy about it. And it would be nice if, in the popular press, we spent more time understanding that “Mindfulness” is no more monolithic than Buddhism.

What’s up with this need for ethics and that damned sniper who is clearly doomed to Buddha Hell? Buddhists, interviewed about secular mindfulness, trot this example out: without ethics, a sniper whose fully-focused attention would be seen as mindful is not because the intent of his actions are unwholesome – i.e., he’s going to kill someone. Well, that’s true… but only partially so. Peter Harvey has a terrific section in his book on ethics¹ about who can break precepts and under what conditions. It’s not so clear-cut as it turns out. There are all kinds of contingencies but the bottom line is “it depends.” Killing is wrong, period. However, the agent of the killing is not, in Mahayana perspectives, immediately consigned to rounds of poor rebirth. It depends and (spoiler alert) it requires cultivating clear comprehension through sila. I’m no scholar but I sure would have liked to see this aspect pounded out in the criticisms of secular mindfulness and the implications of not having an ethical framework in its curriculum.

Why? Because it helps to provide a sound rationale for making changes in a practice model that may not be as good as it could be.

And because saying “You’re wrong, Just do it our way” is authoritarian and has a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of getting people to listen. Especially, scientistic materialistic types like me. Not to mention that it triggers retorts like “If all things are impermanent then accept this change in your dogma.” Or “If there is no fixed self then doesn’t that mean mindfulness is not just one thing?” Or “I feel for your dukkha. Here’s a brochure of my next course; it might help deal with the stress.”

I don’t worry about misappropriations. Green Tea Ice Cream was my last rant over the evil use of good matcha. Before that, I railed against the way psychiatrists used therapy as a quick-fix for their medication fails. And before that, I railed against physicians doing psychotherapy because they were burned out from their overloaded family practices. If you think you own something and are defined by it, you are going to see someone as taking it away and being incompetent at it. But that’s different from holding them accountable for learning how to be competent at it.

That’s what’s missing in this lop-sided furore over the use of mindfulness and the dire consequences thereof.

All right. I’ve ranted enough. I want to acknowledge the following scholars for their forward-looking attitudes: Bhikkhu Bodhi in his article in Contemporary Buddhism, Robert Scharf in his video on how Insight Meditation came to the lake, Richard Payne for his insightful comment on the reality of corporations and not thinking we can teach them ethics, Seth Segall for his post that we not lose sight of the good that is possible even if these programs are seen as half-measures.

¹An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues By Peter Harvey

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not yer granny’s buddhism

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bear

 

There have been a few posts lately about the true nature of Buddhism, whether that nature has been defiled, and (mostly with erroneous logic and lousy data) whether one of the greatest defilers is the Momentum of Mindfulness. A sub-clause to all this cogitating is a need to prove that the Mindfulness Movement is really a pernicious process of oppressing the masses to be sheep and fodder for the Capitalist Overlords. I actually have no argument for the latter because, in my experience, the mindfulness modality is becoming a bit of a dumping ground for hard-to-treat and hard-to-diagnose mental health issues; those Capitalist Overlords may be the over-burdened health care systems that want relief through a 21st century mode of chemical constraints and the ice-water dunking baths of yore. But I digress.

Justin Whitaker, my favourite male Buddhisty philosopher, wrote a great post on the differentiation of Buddhism as a philosophy and a religion. And it is accompanied by a mind-blowing work of art in which his photo-shopping places the Buddha smack down in the middle of a symposium or a wonder of philosophers. I really liked it. Not only does it place the Buddha in the scrum representing various branches of knowledge but specifically placed in the one related to understanding through the determination of primary causes.  The post riffs on an article by Michael McGhee asking “Is Buddhism a religion?” Other than a bit of a sniper shot at the Momentum of Mindfulness and the NHS (UK’s health care system) decree that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is the cat’s meow these days, there is much of worth in the article.

I am compelled yet again to dig into the reality that today’s Buddhism in North America (being much more driven by the American zeitgeist than we care to admit) is not my granny’s Buddhism. But then again, today’s Burmese Buddhist vihara is not my granny’s sangha either. It seems a tough notion to resolve in our minds. And perhaps that’s the start of the problem: we’re trying to think our way through this evolution rather than actually experience it. But thinking is what we do.

McGhee points out that the while a-religionists claim Buddhism is not a religion, they go on to accessorize their own beliefs with the language and conceptual hooks of Buddhism. This seems to be a bad thing, a sort of theft or spiritual plagarizing – which I can see may be hurtful because if you’re going to say the meal offered is not suitable for your purposes, don’t then walk away with the silverware. But I do feel his pain. And equally, I love the reactivity when I say that Buddhism is about renunciation; the dilemma it poses if positively Freudian!

And although I’ll skip over McGhee’s silly sidebar swipe about therapeutically-used meditation allowing for better killers, it is interesting to follow his reasoning that Buddhism being a program of ethical preparation, ironically may move it into the realm of philosophy. (Hence the serendipity of Justin placing the Buddha at the gate of the philosophers!) McGhee writes:

In that case Buddhist practice becomes a form of ethical preparation, reducing the forms of self-preoccupation that impede a concern for justice. This aspect of Buddhism has led some commentators to say that it is more like a philosophy of life than a religion. This contrast with religion relies too heavily on the assimilation of religion to religious belief and it neglects the ceremonial and ritual and community-building aspects of the various religions, including Buddhism.

Now that leads us to the graphic above about bears. (You were wondering, I know.) In my first retreat, all the talks and exchanges were in French. My friends and the facilitators were very kind to translate everything for me, despite my assurances that I was perfectly bilingual. On the second day of the retreat, we were called to a meeting and warned that there was a black bear loose on the grounds and to be careful. Those camping by the centre were invited to sleep in the zendo. I realized after the meeting that no one had translated any of the exchanges for me. From this I concluded that it was vastly more dangerous to not have an accurate understanding of the Dharma than of a potentially lethal bear.

The evolution of Buddhism and of various modalities of psychotherapy is like that. Better to be accurate in one’s intention to practice which directs one’s attention to the details of practice and improves one’s stance to the inner experience which includes ethical prepardeness. How this plays out in your life of practice will depend on whether the bear gets to you before the Dharma.