What’s Wrong With Mindfulness

1. MISCHIEF IN THE MARKETPLACE FOR MINDFULNESS

Marc R. Poirier

As we desire the natural order of our minds to be free from clinging, we must be aware of our greed.

— From the traditional Zen meal chant, as interpreted at Ordinary Mind Zendo

These days there is a wide-open market for mindfulness training, of that there can be no doubt. And a market is made up of consumers, not practitioners in any traditional sense.

Generally speaking, consumers are driven by desire and aversion. Those who buy a good or service can be expected to inform themselves before making a purchase (to a certain extent, at least — information is costly); to compare products; to buy one and, if dissatisfied, then switch to another or look for substitutes that will achieve the same goals by other means; and to seek out the best price for value. When something stops being useful, you stop buying it. These are normal, value-maximizing behaviors.

From the supplier side, whatever label or design will enhance the value or marketability of a product or service is fair game. The goal is to sell product. There is much leeway about how one can brand a product. And what the consumer ultimately does with a product is not the producer’s responsibility. The supplier sells, but he or she does not have an obligation to provide follow-up guidance or counsel. The consumer’s desire guides all. Once you take meditation off the cushion — out of its original religious context — and bring it as “mindfulness” into the marketplace, it appears that just about anything can be labeled and linked to mindfulness one way or another.

This commodification of mindfulness and meditation is increasingly prevalent and problematic for a variety of reasons. It obscures the importance of at least three key aspects of traditional Buddhist training: (1) a sustained commitment to practice over time; (2) the usefulness of a community of practice in stabilizing and expanding individual practice; and (3) the importance of guidance from a learned and trusted teacher or elder with whom the student develops a long-term disciple relationship. These three elements are essential for those who wish to explore more deeply what mindfulness and meditation can offer as a way of life.

People will always flit in and out of meditation and mindfulness training. When sampling becomes the norm, however, and when supposedly skilled teachers offer nothing more than a few weeks of occasional practice undertaken in order to obtain a short-term anodyne, there is mischief afoot in the marketplace for mindfulness. In this chapter, I explore some characteristics of this mischief, first from the teacher side and then from the confused student side. I also comment on the pros and cons of relying on the rhetoric of science to validate and market mindfulness. Finally, I discuss the core issue: greed’s central function in the marketplace and the importance of being aware of greed in a sustained Zen meditation practice.

A terminological note. I thought at first that it might be helpful to put blame on the widespread use of “mindfulness” these days in every possible context. But some skillful teachers use the word “mindfulness” to translate or expound in English what I view as credible Westernized interpretations of traditional Buddhist teachings: Joseph Goldstein, Bhante Gunaratana, and Bhikkhu Bodhi all offer a canonical perspective on mindfulness. At the same time, some current teachers of “meditation” offer it in ways quite foreign to the Zen practice I teach, as a technique to achieve a goal. So I will tend to talk about the two together; “meditation” as a more focused and ritualized practice of attention, and “mindfulness” as an extension of that attention into everyday life. The key question is whether mindfulness and meditation are deployed to explore and investigate and participate
and behold — or instead to help an imagined separate self achieve gain and avert loss.

MISCHIEF IN THE TEACHING OF MINDFULNESS AND MEDITATION

Approaching practice as a goal-oriented technique has troubling consequences. Although a teacher might present specific practices as tools in the service of the relief of suffering or as a skillful means to engage students at the level of their most immediate concerns, when this advertisement for meditation is presented without even an occasional acknowledgment of the practices’ links to wider, deeper, more transformative experiences and to the availability of accumulated wisdom in various traditions, the instructor does a disservice to the student, patient, or client. The wider road will not always be cut off, of course. In our information-rich culture, those who seek for more have many opportunities to find it, and Buddhist centers are no longer scarce. Still, I do not view offering meditation or mindfulness solely as a technique to a specific gain to be skillful.

The typical reply is that the practice will take care of itself. Just get folks to sit for a bit. At some point, presumably, the beginning student will find dissatisfaction inevitable, and he or she will back away from a results-based conception of what practice is about and begin to engage in an ongoing, wide-ranging inquiry with less thought of gain. But in my view, discovery of the profundities of practice is less likely to happen when the teacher articulates practice only in terms of short-term gain. Instead, the disappointed beginner will simply flit away, deciding to shop elsewhere.

All in all, I view this development as harmful. Many beginning practitioners will be guided to the shallow end of the pool. Worse, some of them may experience insights or rushes of psychological turmoil that an inexperienced instructor may be ill-equipped to address or perhaps even to recognize. Well-constructed training programs that provide ongoing support can address some of the issues of a new teacher’s inexperience. But those who offer to teach practices that they themselves have acquired in an off-handed way may well not seek out the appropriate training to help them support their students — especially if they view what they are doing as a business, not a professional commitment.

This incorporation of instruction in mindfulness and meditation in institutional contexts such as corporations and law firms is very concerning. Such projects purport to be about the well-being and happiness of workers but are skewed in a direction of increasing productivity and marketable creativity. Google’s Search Inside Yourself project is an example. Starting in its title, it purports to promise “success, happiness (and world peace).” Google has just completed its first training of a group of independent trainers. They will use Google’s brand and corporate cachet to market mindfulness training to major businesses. A graduate of Google’s Search Inside Yourself program “considers it as sort of an organizational WD-40, a necessary lubricant between driven, ambitious employees and Google’s demanding corporate culture.”1

One recent New York Times article assessed Google’s approach (approvingly, I might add) as teaching employees “to recognize and accept inner thoughts and feelings rather than ignore or repress them,” which is “in the company’s interest because it frees up employees’ otherwise embattled brain space to intuit end users’ desires and create products to satisfy them.”² I object. This paradigm is especially insidious, as neither the sponsor nor the instructor is interested in the student exploring the free play of awareness. The instructor and the corporate sponsor have a stake in avoiding valorizing the experience of unsatisfactoriness. It is contrary to the employer’s goal of achieving more productive workers and to the instructors’ pitch to those workers that practice will make them happy and successful.

I have somewhat fewer qualms about the widespread adoption of mindfulness practices in healthcare and medical school contexts. This very important development is due in large part to decades of effort by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, based at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. A core ethical expectation of healing, or at least doing no harm, pervades the health care professions, keeping the interests of institutions, mindfulness instructors, and patients more or less aligned. So Kabat-Zinn’s very successful secularization of Buddhist practices is protected from the worst effects of commodification, to some extent, by a preexisting professional ethos in the health care fields; they also have developed a certification process for their instructors.

There is no similar secular ethical constraint that pervades the worlds of business and law. Maximizing productivity or wealth is about as close as one can come, and that’s not a good foundation for undertaking practice.3 Sooner or later, conflicts of interest are likely to arise when the consultant on mindfulness or meditation, who works for or is hired by the employer, works with employees as they discover roots of unhappiness in their work situation. Is the instructor’s allegiance to the employer or to the employee? Without a much clearer ethical code for secular instruction, I expect that serious harm will be done from time to time by instructors whose own financial interest is aligned with keeping executives in large corporations happy with results. In business contexts, the notion that mindfulness will produce happier, more productive employees is simply at odds with exploring some of the roots of life’s unsatisfactoriness.

Contemplative practices are also being systematically introduced into educational contexts.⁴ The circumstances and uses are quite varied. I don’t take a strong position on the use of these techniques to encourage youth to notice more deeply and to explore their intuitions. That’s legitimate education. One must wonder again here whether extended practice might present situations beyond the skill of an inexperienced instructor. No doubt, as some studies show, introducing mindfulness training in middle schools and high schools can reduce violence. But will the instructor be equipped for other consequences of young students engaging in mindfulness practice?

At the college level, young adults may well be looking for practices that will develop a sustained inquiry such as Zen practice. Hopefully these settings will provide resources for those moved to go further.

In professional contexts, such as the law school setting with which I am familiar, mindfulness training is typically being offered as stress-reduction and balance, in order to offset the acknowledged deleterious psychological effects of law school and the practice of law.5 As I’ve said throughout this chapter, that approach is unfortunate.

Some law professors do tie the value of skills developed through meditation and mindfulness techniques to lawyering competencies, especially in the areas of mediation and negotiation; Clark Freshman, for instance, argues that mindfulness training enables one to detect lying.⁶ But others argue that emotional intelligence, not contemplative practice, develops these competencies.⁷ Sometimes mindfulness is studied formally in law school, as part of a course on emotional intelligence, or in order to appreciate the role it may play in the successful practice of law. It is still all very instrumental, very take-it-or-leave-it. Only occasionally do voices in legal education go further, gesturing toward the authenticity and groundedness that a contemplative practice can offer the lawyer;⁸ describing meditation as a source of long-term satisfaction;⁹ or emphasizing the importance to the practice of law of teaching students to access a further spiritual and ethical dimension through contemplative practice.¹⁰

MISCHIEF FROM THE STUDENT’S SIDE

Beginning students almost always seek out instruction in a meditation or mindfulness practice because of personal pain or loss, the sense something is lacking, or a need to fix some aspect of their life. Occasionally, they wish to become enlightened. Consequently, impatience with unsatisfactory results, flightiness, and misunderstanding of how deep change in one’s life occurs are common aspects of a beginner’s practice. An encouragement to stay put and stick with it are essential to a skillful introduction to practice, helping it to ripen over time.

In my own life, after reading Philip Kapleau’s exhortations about sustained practice in The Three Pillars of Zen, I sought out a local Zen center and, after one evening’s experience, wrote out on a scrap of paper a commitment to practice Zen for ten years, after which it would be permissible to move on. That piece of paper stayed posted on my bedroom mirror for a decade. This was a little extreme, I admit, and I did not know what I was getting into, in more than one sense. Still, my own slogans for teaching law students and professionals who are too busy to sit captures some of this need to emphasize commitment: Show up, slow down, step back, settle in.

Workshop mentality and commodification are hindrances here. As Barry Magid argues, part of the function of sustained practice is gradually to attenuate the “curative fantasy” that beginners bring to practice, so as to allow the ripening of a kind of appreciation for life as it is, including especially its unsatisfactoriness and impermanence.11 When the beginner’s notion of gain is unexamined and even encouraged by commodification and instrumentalization, the student’s exploration of unsatisfactoriness may be postponed, perhaps permanently.

I can do no better here than point to the description of her investigation of mindfulness provided by Gretchen Rubin in her book The Happiness Project. Rubin was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and worked for a prestigious law firm. After leaving the practice of law, she wrote two well-received if unconventionally structured biographies. Smart and accomplished she surely is. At the age of forty, she decided to make her life happier. After doing considerable research on the science of happiness (as a Supreme Court clerk, systematic and wide research is a role she is clearly comfortable in), she discerned fifteen principles that lead to happiness. Then she divided the year up into twelve month-long projects, and set up a blog so that her followers could discover along with her how to achieve happiness.

October was to be the month for mindfulness, Buddhism, and paying attention. Unfortunately, Ms. Rubin found herself unable to set aside fifteen minutes a day to sit quietly, and so she resorted to post-it notes with messages reminding her of the state of mind she meant to achieve through meditation, so that she could will herself into that state throughout the day. When that approach did not work, she sought out a hypnotist, so that she could just skip over the effort of having to do a straightforward, simple meditation practice every day for a month. Rubin also explored koan study, which seemed more interesting to her than meditation; but she decided to choose her own koans rather than explore traditional Zen ones. Rubin’s month of exploring mindfulness also including keeping a food diary, laughter yoga, taking a drawing class to stimulate underutilized parts of her brain, listening to music (ABBA) as a mindfulness practice, and reexamining her habitual rules and expectations. A busy time! In November she moved on to “cram in everything [she] hadn’t covered” earlier in the year, focusing on attitude and keeping a contented heart.12

Rubin’s attempts to engage practice are surely misguided. They exemplify the hindrance of restlessness. She researches well, but then bypasses traditional forms of meditation practice, inventing her own. Having found practice unsatisfactory after a few days, she throws in the towel and moves on.

It is also significant that Rubin shopped alone. She taught herself her practice without the guidance of an elder or teacher or the support of peers in a sangha, a practice community. She composed for herself a composite of various traditions, which she tasted and rejected within a month — which is all the time she left herself. All these missteps contributed to her going sadly astray. Perhaps just as unfortunate, she blogged about all this. She has many followers who may well look to her example of how to engage and abandon a practice.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a beginner wandering for a while, exploring various teachers and traditions, and then settling in. I personally spent the 1980s doing this, even while my Zen practice was also deepening. But the practices explored should have an expectation of eventual commitment; a practice group or congregation or sangha; and a teacher, elder, or guide.

There is a symbiosis between the beginner’s restlessness and teachers who play to the idea of gain through meditation. Scott Rogers’s advice to lawyers in The Six-Minute Lawyer, and his similar advice in similar short books for law students, judges, and so on, reproduces several authentic practices, but in a context where the reader is encouraged to pick and choose, much as he or she might take aspirin for an occasional headache. And of course the whole endeavor need not take more than six minutes a day. Similar quickie approaches can be found in many contexts.¹³

The eight-week training format originated by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is comparatively skillful in this sense, for it is long enough to provide the beginner a valid first encounter with a variety of practices. In the MBSR course I took, participants were encouraged to commit forty-five minutes a day to a series of contemplative practices, six days a week. That’s a good start toward establishing a habit. MBSR’s eight-week format now reappears in studies and in many other kinds of modular training.14

One issue with the modular format is that it may drop students at the end of the eight weeks with a goodbye wave, a wish of good luck, and perhaps a list of practice opportunities — many of them, in my experience, Buddhist or Buddhist-inspired centers. So regardless of its merits, an eight-week modular training structure can facilitate a perception that eight weeks of practice suffice. Sustained engagement in practice is supported by a relationship with a teacher, a sangha, and a place of practice. Eight-week modules provide none of these.

It is possible to construct a sequence of instruction that begins with short modules that lead those who find some value there to longer practice periods, and eventually to a sustained relationship with a teacher and a sangha. My experience with the Shambhala training in the 1980s reflected that approach. There the workshop model was used at the front end, but there was a door beyond it leading into a structure more supportive of sustained practice.

I must mention here that some MBSR teachers are organizing structures and courses that respond to these concerns. For example, in the New York City area, a Mindfulness Collaborative comprised of MBSR instructors states, as part of its mission, “the development of innovative curricula grounded in the 8-week MBSR cycle as pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Center for Mindfulness.”¹⁵ Some teachers in this group go beyond the eight-week format by offering monthly sitting groups or series of classes on aspects of mindfulness as taught by MBSR. So in this particular geographic area, MBSR teachers are exploring reintroducing some of the structure that was tailored out of the eight-week module. How widespread this retailoring is I do not know. To the extent that it solidifies into habitual longer-term structures as part of MBSR, it seems to me to be a movement back toward a religion-like frame within which to secure practice.

One of the more insidious aspects of commodified mindfulness is that it validates the practitioner’s pursuit of happiness 16— recall that Rubin’s book is entitled The Happiness Project. “Happiness” is a tricky premise. Barry Magid has authored an introduction to Zen practice entitled Ending the Pursuit of Happiness precisely to underscore the futility of undertaking a Zen practice in the hope of actualizing a curative fantasy. Other teachers hold out some sort of happiness as a way of encouraging folks to begin practice, though some of these, when read carefully, don’t promise the kind of happiness Rubin sought, only a relative familiarity and contentment with life’s ever-changing quality: Ezra Bayda in his Beyond Happiness, for instance. This is a more sensible and honest approach. As Barry Magid pointed out, rather than being a particular subjective state of mind we seek to cultivate, happiness is perhaps best understood the way Aristotle did, as eudaemonia — the “flourishing” that results from a lifetime of cultivating our virtues and capacities.

All in all, I question the skillfulness of too much talk about happiness, as it seems only further to entangle beginning students in their misconceptions and self-deceptions regarding the nature of practice and of life.

A FEW OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE SCIENCE RHETORIC

One important development of the past few decades has been the wave of scientific studies on various aspects and effects of mindfulness and meditation. Only a few years ago, there was but a trickle of studies, many of them funded by proponents of particular techniques such as Transcendental Meditation or MBSR. Now there may be four to five hundred new studies a year.¹⁷ Many well-respected research universities have major projects studying clinical applications, behavioral effects, and, in the last decade or so, neurophysiological patterns as they are affected by mindfulness and meditation practices.

To some extent, this scientific turn is welcome. It is a technique of secular legitimation. Science provides a basis to verify claims of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation and can be used to encourage the skeptical to dip their toes into a practice. Science, not a cult or a suspect human authority figure, tells us that it works. As one law student recently expressed to me, the scientific data gives him the faith to engage a mindfulness practice. This is an interesting juxtaposition of science and faith. I don’t purport here to sort through the burgeoning science literature, to parse the good studies from the weaker ones, or to put a fine point on how meditation techniques can be put to use (see instead, perhaps, Bob Rosenbaum’s chapter “Mindfulness Myths” in this book). Given the volume of the studies, that would be a life’s work. And I do not mean to gainsay what are clearly effective and useful therapeutic applications of meditation and mindfulness techniques, whether for stress reduction, treatment of grief and depression, improvement of focus, pain management, or some physical illnesses.

I do have some difficulty with the current claims for the benefits of mindfulness and meditation when based on neuroscience.18 Changes in brain activity or structure, one lobe lighting up more after a few weeks of meditation, is curious and interesting and perhaps important, but doesn’t in itself get at any of what is going on from the point of view of the practitioner’s experience or understanding. The brain is not the self. Brain science does not describe the experience of meditation or mindfulness in a way that can be used to help guide the practitioner’s explorations. Neither the neuroscience literature nor the clinical psychology literature begins to approach the descriptive richness or the compassionate wisdom that is sometimes articulated by Buddhist teachers, ancient and modern. Scientific studies are moreover no substitute for the tailored support for practice provided by competent and experienced teachers, a well-functioning sangha, and traditional ritual and wisdom. In a fundamental sense, the science is disconnected from meditative experience and practice and teaching, even as it seeks to investigate it. It is a different endeavor altogether.

The law student who found science a source of faith in his practice had something interesting to say about this. I asked if he engaged in a sport, and he turned out to be a runner. But, he pointed out, although he knew about physiological and psychological effects of long-distance running, he did not engage in his sport because of them. He did not think about generating endorphins when he experienced running. His running was a long-term habit that made him feel a certain way and that was part of his life. Why did he run? He just does. Why do I put on my robe at the sound of the bell? I do.

A more problematic aspect to scientific justifications for mindfulness practice is that they reinforce the model of gain from practice. Much of the therapeutic literature incorporating and communicating the science as it develops does so in the service of goal achievement, potentially obscuring the fundamental practice of just sitting. The definition of valid scientific work is to present results that can be reproduced. Pure science feeds into applied science, and both partake of a basic frame of usefulness and goal achievement and the predictable manipulation of events. That’s important in its sphere. But to justify meditation and mindfulness on the grounds that neuroscience is beginning to be able to establish reproducible results only serves to distance the practitioner from the kind of practice I recommend.

Even more problematic, the science is eagerly appropriated and repurposed by marketers. I’ve heard many a pitch for mindfulness that includes some dumbed-down version of its effects on neuroplasticity, the amygdala, the left prefrontal lobe, the hippocampus, the vagus nerve, and so on. Often the invocation of science is linked to rather large promises of goal achievement — try this for a few weeks because look at what it does to your brain! By peddling so hard the usefulness of meditation as technique, these approaches can obscure the basic Zen practice of just being, with its experience of noticing, stillness, and occasional joy.

JUST SITTING: NO GREED AND NO END OF GREED

Commodification and instrumentalization of practice are widespread. They are inevitable, because we are human. We will not be rid of them or of the greed that underlies them. Indeed, in everyday life, we must function in a world of this-and-that, picking and choosing, getting and spending.

In contrast, just sitting serves as the occasion, the regular time and place, of a practice of nonpursuing. Results do arise from just sitting — yet they are byproducts. Ideas around those results, framing them as goals, will also arise, stimulating recurring tendrils of greed and aversion. On the cushion, these events are noted, and one then returns to just sitting. For the experienced practitioner, more and more, instead of holding meditation and mindfulness to be a tool to shape daily life, practice becomes a habitual container of encounter, a nonjudgmental practice of “now what?” within which daily life off the cushion is held. Then we say to those reoccuring tendrils not “Oh, no!” but “Now what?”

This appreciation of clinging, one might notice, is very much the same process as Dogen’s basic instruction for just sitting: “Think not-thinking. What is not thinking? Nonthinking.”19 Dogen was not pointing to the suppression of thought, but rather to allowing thoughts and sensations to arise and fall, noting their insubstantial nature more and more deeply. If one approaches “not-thinking” in the purposive sense of suppression of some activity one is not supposed to be doing, then one is still “doing” something during sitting practice. That “doing” is “done” by a separate, active “self” that picks and chooses — and off we go! Instead, just note thinking, take it in.

Not-thinking may sound odd as a use of “not.” However, the same kind of “no” and “not” appear regularly in some core Zen texts. The “no” and the “emptiness” that are repeated throughout the Heart Sutra point to the effects of clearly seeing impermanence and interconnectedness — and thus misfortune and pain are shifted, transcended, not blotted out and replaced by goodies. “No path, no wisdom, no attainment; indeed there is nothing to be attained.” No gain. No hindrance.

To allow thought to come and go, not suppressing it, not using meditation to bring about particular states of mind, even those of clarity or calmness, is to appreciate what is known as the “emptiness” of thought and mental states. This emptiness is not itself yet another state of consciousness. It is the underlying nature of all things, transient and thus “empty” of any unchanging essence. Since all thoughts, all dharmas, are already empty, meditation leaves everything exactly as it found it. What changes is our awareness of our compulsive, clinging- and fear-driven attempts to deny, avoid, or control the flow of consciousness, the flow of life. And ultimately that fear, along with everything, is part of the flow.

For all of us (or just possibly for all but the very most advanced), there is hindrance, there is continued craving. Hence, this chapter’s epigraph, which comes from the traditional formal meal chant, as Ordinary Mind Zendo has adapted it. In this version, the sentence reads, “As we desire the natural order of our minds to be free from clinging, we must be aware of our greed.”

A more traditional version would state, “We must be free from greed.” But that formulation is a problem. It prefers one state (greed-free) over another (greedy). The tendrils of greed recur. This happens in a particularly clear form when one hasn’t eaten lately and is sitting still during sesshin in front of three bowls of food and drink, I can assure you. But it happens all the time. Our best bet is not to pretend otherwise.

We can note desires without encouraging them. In my school of Zen, that is how we understand both a daily practice of just sitting and everyday Zen. Our version of the meal chant expresses simply that the two things occur simultaneously in practice — a desire to be free from clinging and an examination of our greed. Where am I stuck, where am I clinging? What are its shape and texture? Sitting with that inquiry may soften some of the habit of attachment. As Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama wrote, Zen practice involves “opening the hand of thought.”20 Not to acknowledge our greed and aversion at all is being dishonest about our true nature, which does include those qualities, though it is not necessarily driven by them.

So I return to the problem of commodification and instrumentalization as a framing for mindfulness and meditation in the West. What is at stake, deeply at stake, is unexamined greed and aversion. “Do X and you may well get Y” as a premise for meditation and mindfulness leaves the particular kind of pain caused by greed and aversion unexplored.

The market ethos in fact depends on greed, unquestioningly. In the frenzied, short-term, workshop mode of mindfulness and meditation, tendrils of greed are watered and nurtured, rather than examined in a way that allows them naturally to settle out and dissipate. Meditation and mindfulness instructors who respond by marketing their products in a way claiming to offer some final satisfaction are stimulating greed and aversion, perhaps without even being aware of it. And they may themselves, if their own practice is short-term or shallow or disconnected from its Buddhist roots, not even be aware of the alternative mode described here.

Many benefits and fruits of Zen practice are real, but they are not to be gained, nor pursued. Just sit, regularly, for a sustained period, and see what is here right now.