Our world, the celestial body we call planet Earth, has apparently come down with a fever. The diagnosis is serious, the prognosis not good, and things could get a lot worse, according to the majority of planetary scientists, who, for all their knowledge and supercomputer modeling, have never seen a case like this before and so cannot be certain about how the patient needs to be treated. Some of the symptoms that led to this diagnosis are a temperature rise worldwide, thanks to an enormous increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from our burning of carbon-containing fuels, and a very rapid melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps. This fever is primarily a result of our activity as human beings, now that there are so many of us on the planet. Our agriculture, livestock, and industries, coupled with our destruction of the rain forests and pollution of the oceans, is disrupting the natural cycles that have kept the planetary homeostasis finely balanced for tens of thousands of years. As a result, the world itself, our very home, is now being stressed in ways that have never happened before in the span of human history. The potential consequences of this accelerating trend for the future, and for the future of our children and their children and their children’s children, indeed, for our entire species and other species as well, are largely unknown but do not portend well.
So perhaps it is time for us to wake up to the unforeseen consequences and costs of our actions not merely as individuals, but also as a species, not only for our own health, but also for the health of the whole world going forward. For all these phenomena are interconnected. All stem from the human mind and human activity. When the human mind knows itself, we get wisdom and all the beauty and understanding and compassion that human history has given us—the arts, the sciences, architecture, technological wonders, music, poetry, medicine, everything that is found in the world’s great museums, universities, and concert halls. And when the human mind does not know itself, we get ignorance, cruelty, oppression, violence, genocide, holocausts, death, and destruction on a colossal scale. For this reason, mindfulness writ both large and small is not a luxury. Writ small, it is a liberative strategy for being healthier and happier as an individual. Writ large, it is a vital necessity if we are to survive and thrive as a species, if we are to fully embody and enact our species’ name: Homo sapiens sapiens … the species that knows, and knows that it knows, in other words, the species that is aware and knows that it is aware. Whatever unfolds from here out in human history, given the condition of our fragile planet and its ecosystems and homeostatic cycles, mindfulness will of necessity be an important, potentially critical factor. So it is a good thing that it seems to be finding its way into both political and economic discourse and action, as we will see.
Harking back to the previous chapter on food and food stress, we tend to take the abundance of wholesome food for granted in the first world. But planetary changes such as drought are severely straining the food supply in certain parts of the world, and with the warming of the planet, the pressures on our food sources will only increase. So again, given that we live in a highly interconnected world, we would do well to begin to recognize how much our individual well-being and health, and that of our families and descendents, will depend on these larger ecological and geopolitical forces. For instance, in the future it will be increasingly difficult for us to choose a healthy diet in a polluted and food-stressed world. There are too many factors we don’t know about that might have long-term negative effects on our health.
For instance, you could be eating a low-cholesterol, low-fat, low-salt, low-sugar diet high in complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, and fiber and still be at risk for illness if your water supply is contaminated with chemicals from illegal dumping, or if the fish you eat is polluted with mercury or PCBs, or if there are pesticide residues on the fruits and vegetables you are eating.
So when we think about the relationship of health to diet, it is important to think about diet in a broader sense than the way we usually do. The quality of the food we buy, where it was grown or caught, how it was raised, and what was added to it are important variables. Awareness of these interconnected aspects of diet and health will at least allow us to make intelligent decisions about what to eat a lot of and what to eat only once in a while, to hedge our bets so to speak in the absence of absolute knowledge about the state of particular foods. The writings of Michael Pollan, mentioned earlier, are very helpful in this regard.
Perhaps, in this day and age, we need to expand our definition of food altogether, and what we include within it. I like to think of anything that we take in and absorb, that gives us energy or allows us to make use of the energy in other resources, as food. If you think in this way, you certainly need to consider water in this category. It is an absolutely vital food. So is the air we breathe. The quality of the water we drink and the air we breathe directly affects our health. In Massachusetts, some water supplies have been contaminated to the point where towns have had to import water from other localities. Many wells in the state are now highly polluted too. There are many days in Los Angeles when there are air pollution alerts due to high concentrations of chemicals in the air. Children, elderly people, and pregnant women are advised to stay indoors on those days. And if you drive into Boston from the west, there are many days when you can see a mass of yellowish brown air hanging over the city. It is hard to believe that it is healthy to be breathing such air day in and day out, as a steady diet over a lifetime. Many of our cities are like this now, some even most of the time. In some other countries, it is a much bigger problem.
Clearly we have to start thinking about our air and water as food and pay attention to their quality. You can filter the tap water you use for drinking and cooking just to be on the safe side, or buy bottled water. While it seems a shame to have to pay even more for water than you might be paying now, in the long run it may be intelligent to do so, especially if you are pregnant or if you are trying to encourage your children to drink water rather than soda. Of course, this will depend on knowing how good your water is and whether bottled water is any better. In some cases it may not be, depending on what the bottle is made of.
Protecting yourself from air pollution is another concern. If you live downwind from power plants or other industry, or even just live in a city, there is little you can do at an individual level except to stay away from people who are smoking and maybe hold your breath when a city bus goes by. Only legal and political action over an extended period will have an effect on air and water quality. These are dramatic reasons why people who care about their health might want to put some of their energy into action for social change. It is in everybody’s self-interest to care for the natural world. The environment is easily polluted, but it is not so easy to clean it up. We as individuals cannot detect pollution in our food. We have to depend on our institutions to keep the food supply uncontaminated. If they do not, or if they fail to establish appropriate standards or testing procedures, our health and the health of future generations may be at significantly greater risk in countless ways that we are only now coming to realize.
For instance, pesticides such as DDT and industrial chemicals such as PCBs from the electronics industry are now found everywhere in nature, including, as we saw, in our own body fat and in breast milk. Pesticides that have been banned in the United States, such as DDT, continue to be sold by American manufacturers to third world countries. Ironically, these pesticides are used on crops that are grown for export to the United States, such as coffee and pineapples, so we get back, in our own food, residues of the poisons we exported for use elsewhere. (This has been described in a compelling account in Circle of Poison, by David Weir and Mark Schapiro.)
The trouble is that while the manufacturers of the pesticides know about this, consumers in general do not. We think we are being protected by our laws about what can be used on crops and what cannot, but our laws do not govern pesticide levels used on food grown in other countries, such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and the Philippines, where our coffee, bananas, pineapples, peppers, and tomatoes often come from. What is more, pesticides used in the third world are usually applied in the field by farm workers who are not given any instruction in the safe use of these products to minimize the contamination of the food, nor are they told how to protect themselves while using these chemicals. According to the World Health Organization, there are over one million cases of people being poisoned by pesticides in the third world each year, with thousands dying. Meanwhile, the global environment is rapidly becoming overloaded with pesticides. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that 5.1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the United States alone. The continued effect of this kind of saturation of the environment and of our food chain with pesticides is unknown, but is not likely to be beneficial.
Coming back to the earth itself, it is only relatively recently that we have come to realize that we live on and share a small and fragile planet that can be stressed and ultimately overwhelmed by the activities of our very precocious species. We now know that our interconnectedness extends to the planet itself. Its ecology, just like that of the human body, is a dynamical system, robust but also delicate, with its own homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms that can be stressed and disrupted. It has its own limits, beyond which it can rapidly break down. If we fail to realize that our collective human activity is capable of throwing its cycles out of balance, then we may very well be creating the seeds of our own destruction.
The vast majority of environmental scientists think we have already gone dangerously far along that road. The world is slowly coming to recognize that human activity can pollute the oceans to an unthinkable extent, create acid rain that denudes the forests of Europe, and raze the remaining tropical rain forests, which provide a significant fraction of the oxygen we breathe and that cannot be replaced except by rain forests. Human activity also degrades croplands to the point where they cannot produce food. It pollutes the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, thereby raising the average temperature of the earth’s surface. It destroys the ozone layer of the earth’s atmosphere by releasing fluorocarbons, thereby increasing our exposure to dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun. It pollutes our water and the air we breathe, and contaminates the soil and the rivers and wildlife with toxic chemicals.
While such issues may seem remote to us or appear to be the quaint saber-rattling of romantic and hysterical wildlife and nature lovers, the effects of these practices on us may not be remote at all in the next decade or two if the destruction of the environment is not slowed and if our release of greenhouse gases is not drastically reduced. We are already apparently seeing the consequences of this in storms of increasing severity, such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Hurricane Sandy, which inundated so many parts of New York City and New Jersey in 2012. Such storms may become much more common in the coming years, major stressors in our lives and in the lives of future generations. We may see an increased incidence of skin cancer if the atmosphere becomes less and less able to filter out the harmful ultraviolet rays in the sun’s light due to destruction of its ozone layer, and increased rates of cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects from greater lifetime exposures to chemicals in the environment and perhaps in food as well.
Although you can find these issues discussed and reported on in the newspapers daily, as well as on the Web, much of the time we pay them little heed, as if they don’t really concern us or as if it is hopeless. Sometimes it does feel as if there is nothing that we as individuals can do.
But just becoming more aware and informed about these problems and their relationship to our health as individuals and to the health of the planet as a whole may be a significant positive first step toward bringing about change in the world. At the very least you have changed yourself when you become more informed and aware. You are already a small but significant part of the world, perhaps more significant than you think. By changing yourself and your own behavior in even modest ways, such as recycling reusable materials and being mindful of your consumption of energy and non-renewable resources, you do change the world.
These issues affect our lives and our health even now, whether we know it or not. And they are a source of psychological as well as physical stress. Our psychological well-being may depend on being able to find someplace in nature where we can go and just hear the sounds of the natural world, without the sounds of human activity, of airplanes, cars, and machines. And, more ominously, knowing that a nuclear accident or attack could in just minutes destroy large swaths of life as we know it is a psychological stressor we all live with but don’t like to think about. But our children know it, and some studies show that they are deeply disturbed by the possibility of nuclear destruction.
Unless we radically change the course of history with a new kind of thinking based on understanding wholeness, the examples of the past give us little cause for optimism. After all, there has never been a weapons system that has been invented that has not been used, except for the intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The destruction of these weapons by the United States and the former Soviet Union, coupled with measured nuclear arms reductions and attempts to secure existing stockpiles, was certainly a step toward eliminating the possibility of nuclear war, but it was only a first step. We ourselves, under other circumstances, of course, found it possible and morally defensible, we thought, to incinerate two entire cities of people. This shows that it is not just “others” who are capable of unleashing violence, even nuclear violence, on civilian populations, given the right combination of circumstances. We are “the other side.” Perhaps what is required is to stop thinking in terms of “us” and “them,” “good guys” and “bad guys,” and to start thinking more in terms of “we.” When we don’t think deeply and feel deeply in terms of “we,” it is entirely possible, as many experts assert, that our policies are more likely to create enemies and people who wish us harm than to create conditions for true healing on a global level.
We also need to be more conscious as a society of the threat to the environment and to our health posed by the radioactive wastes produced in nuclear weapons manufacturing and in nuclear power plants. We have no realistic ways at present of preventing contamination of the environment from these highly radioactive wastes, which remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The nuclear industries and the government have always downplayed the danger to civilian populations from radioactivity, and they continue to do so to this day. But the danger is undeniable. The plutonium our weapons plants have made is the most toxic substance known to humankind. One atom of it inside your body can kill you. Hundreds of pounds of it, enough to make many homemade nuclear bombs, have disappeared from stockpiles here and abroad.
Such concerns are definitely deserving of our conscious attention. We encounter information about these issues every day, whether we are aware of it or not. Perhaps we should expand our concept of our diet to recognize that it also includes the information, images, and sounds that we take in and absorb in one way or another, usually without the least awareness. We live immersed in a sea of information. The digital revolution has made this the age of information. Are we not exposed to a steady “diet” of information, which we take in daily through newspapers, the radio, television, and wireless platforms of all kinds? Does this “diet” not influence our thoughts and feelings and shape our view of the world and even of ourselves much more than we are apt to admit? Does not information constitute, in and of itself, a major stressor in many ways? Why else would the phrase “TMI,” for “too much information,” be so prevalent in our colloquial discourse? It is the truth. We are drowning in information, and it is too much. But at the same time, we do not cultivate enough knowledge, which could lead to understanding, which in turn could lead to wisdom. We are a long way from “too much” understanding or wisdom.
Take, for example, the fact that we are constantly immersed in a sea of mostly bad news from all around the world, a sea of information about death, destruction, and violence. It is a steady diet, so much so that we hardly notice it. During the Vietnam War, many American families thought nothing of eating dinner while watching the battle footage of the day and hearing about the body counts. It was surreal. The networks and the military reconfigured how the news is reported from war zones, so that we weren’t exposed in the same way to such images from Iraq or Afghanistan, although they can probably be found on YouTube if you want to see them. Keep your radio on for a while on any day and it is likely that you will hear graphic details of rape, murder, and, every so often, unthinkable school shootings. And that is to say nothing of the news from abroad.
We consume this diet daily. You can’t help but wonder what kind of effects it has on us, individually and collectively, to have such graphic and up-to-the-minute knowledge of all these disturbing upheavals and catastrophes, but with virtually no immediate capacity to influence them, other than our efforts, sometimes striking and uplifting, through social networking, to support those in crisis, both materially and morally. Still, one likely effect of drinking in all the bad news is that we might gradually become insensitive to what happens to other people. The fate of others may become just another part of the sea of background violence within which we live. Unless it is particularly gruesome, we may not even notice it at all.
But it does go inside us, just as all the advertisements we are exposed to are taken in. You can’t help noticing this when you meditate. You begin to see that your mind is full of all sorts of things that have crept into it from the news or from advertisements. In fact, advertising people are paid very high salaries to figure out effective ways of getting their message inside your head so that you will be more likely to want and buy what they are selling.
Television, movies, and our celebrity-obsessed culture also figure as a large part of our standard diet nowadays, brought to us 24/7 via cable, satellite, YouTube, downloads, and streaming to our television sets and mobile devices. In the average American household, the television is on for seven hours a day, according to some studies, and many children watch four to seven hours a day, more time than they spend doing anything else in their lives except sleeping. They are exposed to staggering amounts of information, images, and sounds, much of it frenetic, violent, cruel, and anxiety-producing, and all of it artificial and two-dimensional, not related to actual experiences in their lives other than TV watching itself.
And that is just television. Children are also exposed to images of extreme violence and sadism in popular horror movies. Grotesque and graphic simulations of reality involving killing, raping, maiming, and dismemberment have become extremely popular among the young. These vivid simulations have now become part of the diet of young minds, minds that have few defenses against this kind of reality distortion.
These images have enormous power to disturb and distort the development of a balanced mind, particularly if there is nothing of equal strength in the child’s life to counterbalance them. For many children, real life pales in comparison to the excitement of the movies and computer games, and it becomes harder and harder, even for the moviemakers, to maintain their viewers’ interest unless they make the images more graphic and more violent with each new release.
This pervasive diet of violence for American children must be having effects on their psyches. It is certainly having its effects in the society—witness the epidemic of bullying in our schools, and the horrifying litany of mass killings in schools and public places. Just think of Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, and Milwaukee, the latter three within a few years of each other, and the latter two within a few weeks. And then came the massacre of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There are already far too many reports of adolescents and young adults killing other people, some after seeing movies that they used as inspiration, as if real life were just an extension of the movies in their own minds, and as if other people’s lives and fear and pain were of no value or consequence. This diet seems to be catalyzing a profound disconnection from human feelings of empathy and compassion, to the point where many children no longer identify with the pain of someone who is being victimized. One recent news article on teenage violence reported that by the time they are sixteen years old, American children have passively witnessed on average approximately 200,000 acts of violence, including 33,000 murders on television and in the movies.
The bombardment of our nervous system with images, sounds, and information is particularly stressful if it never lets up. If you switch on the television the moment you wake up, you have the radio on in the car on the way to work, you watch the news when you get home, and then you watch television or movies in the evening, you are filling your mind with images that have no direct relationship to your life. No matter how wonderful the show or how interesting the information, it will probably remain two-dimensional for you. Little of it has enduring value. But in consuming a steady diet of this stuff, which feeds the mind’s hunger for information and diversion, you are squeezing out of your life some very important alternatives: time for silence, for peace, for just being without anything happening; time for thinking, for playing, for doing real things, for socializing with people face-to-face. The constant agitation of our thinking minds, which we encounter so vividly in the meditation practice, is actually fed and compounded by our diet of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, movies, and the Internet. We are constantly shoveling into our minds more things to react to; more things to think, worry, and obsess about; and more things to remember, as if our own daily lives did not produce enough on their own. The ultimate irony is that we do it to get some respite from our own concerns and preoccupations, to take our mind off our troubles, to entertain ourselves, to carry us away, to help us relax.
But it doesn’t work that way. Watching television hardly ever promotes physiological relaxation. Its purview is more along the lines of sensory bombardment. It is also addicting. Many children are addicted to TV and don’t know what to do with themselves when it is off. It is such an easy escape from boredom that they are not challenged to find other ways of dealing with time, such as through imaginative play, drawing, painting, and reading. Television is so mesmerizing that parents use it as a babysitter. When it is on, at least they might get a few moments of peace. Many adults are themselves addicted to soap operas, sitcoms, or news programs. One can’t help wondering about the effects of this diet on family relationships and communication. Same for the gaming devices that now are a must to keep children entertained and learning.
All these observations and perspectives are merely offered as food for thought. Every issue I have raised here can be seen in many different lights. There are no “right” answers, and our knowledge of the intricacies of these issues is always incomplete. They are presented here as examples of our interface with what we might call world stress. They are meant to provoke and challenge you to take a closer look at your views and behaviors and at your local environment, so that you might cultivate greater mindfulness and perhaps a more deliberate and conscious way of living in relationship to these phenomena that so color and shape our lives, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not.
Each one of us needs to come to our own way of seeing world stress. It affects us all, even if we think we can ignore it. We touch on these issues in the Stress Reduction Clinic precisely because we do not live in a vacuum. The outer world and the inner world are no more separate than the mind and the body. We believe that it is important for our patients to develop conscious approaches to recognizing and working with these problems as well as their more personal problems if they are to bring mindfulness to the totality of their lives and cope effectively with the full range of forces at work within them.
World stress will only become more intense in the future. In the early 1970s, Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame predicted narrowcasting and smart televisions, delivering only the information you want to know when you get home at the end of the day. That day is already here, but it is likely that, in terms of what is coming, we have seen nothing yet. Still, we are already in a world in which our access to information never sleeps, and goes with us everywhere through our various portable wireless devices, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and automatic downloads. Personal robots are on the horizon, their prototypes already at work in specialized venues such as the Mars rovers and available commercially in toys such as Furbys. Fully digitized houses are on the way. While these and other emergences may turn out to be liberating in some ways and give us more freedom and flexibility, we will also have to be on our guard against being sucked into a mode of living in which each of us is reduced to being a walking information processor and entertainment consumer.
The more complicated the world gets and the more intrusive it becomes on our own personal psychological space and privacy, the more important it will be to practice non-doing. We will need it just to protect our sanity and to develop a greater understanding of who we are beyond our roles, beyond our PIN numbers, user names, and passwords, our Social Security and credit card numbers. It is very likely that meditation will become an absolute necessity in order for us to recognize, understand, and counter the stressors of living in such an age of ever-accelerating change, and to remind ourselves of what it means to be human.
None of the impending changes and the challenges they might augur that we have touched on here is insurmountable. They have all been created by the human mind and by its expressions in the outer world. Such challenges can equally well be met and navigated by the human mind if it learns to value and develop wisdom and harmony and to see its own interests in terms of wholeness and inter-connectedness. To do so requires us to leap beyond the impulses of mind we call fear, greed, and hatred. We can all play significant roles in making this happen by working on ourselves and on the world too. If we can come to understand that we cannot be healthy in a world that is stressed beyond its capacity to respond and to heal, perhaps we will learn to treat our world and ourselves differently. Perhaps here too we will learn not to merely treat the symptoms we are experiencing, whatever they may be, and try to make them go away, but rather, to understand and come to grips with their underlying causes. As with our own inner healing, the outcome will depend on how effectively we tune our own instrument—the body, the mind, the heart, our relationships with others and with the world itself. To have a positive effect on the problems of the larger environment, we will need continually to tune and retune to our own center, to our own hearts, cultivating awareness and harmony in our individual lives and in our families and communities. Information itself is not the problem. What we must learn is to bring wise attention to the information that is at our disposal and to contemplate it and discern order and connectedness within it so that we can put it to use in the service of our health and healing, individual, collective, and planetary.
There are a few hopeful signs on the political, economic, and technological fronts. Mindfulness is increasingly making its way into the mainstream of society and its institutions, becoming a part of the colloquial discourse, and, we can only hope, increasingly becoming embodied in actual daily practice. For example, as was mentioned in the chapter on people stress, the highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world. Interestingly enough, he calls what he does “clinical economics,” very much parallel to and inspired by how a doctor approaches a patient. Based on a remarkable career treating economic crises in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa over the past twenty-five years, he diagnoses the problem of our economy as follows:
At the root of America’s economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America’s political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world. America has developed the world’s most competitive market society but has squandered its civic virtue along the way. Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery …
… We need to be ready to pay the price of civilization through multiple acts of good citizenship; bearing our fair share of taxes, educating ourselves about society’s needs, acting as vigilant stewards for future generations, and remembering that compassion is the glue that holds society together.… The American people are generally broad-minded, moderate, and generous. These are not the images of Americans we see on television or the adjectives that come to mind when we think of America’s rich and powerful elite. But America’s political institutions have broken down, so that the broad public no longer holds these elites to account. And alas, the breakdown of politics also implicates the broad public. American society is too deeply distracted by our media-drenched consumerism to maintain the habits of effective citizenship.
Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a “middle path,” a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, “leisure”), savings and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship. He writes: “We need a mindful society, in which we once again take seriously our own well-being, our relations with others, and the operation of our politics.” He then goes on to show in detail how this can be brought about, and he explains how urgent it is that all of us take responsibility for its success. In the second half of the book, Sachs enumerates eight dimensions of our lives in which mindfulness is crucial for individual fulfillment and happiness, and for social and economic well-being:
Mindfulness of self: personal moderation to escape mass consumerism
Mindfulness of work: the balancing of work and leisure
Mindfulness of knowledge: the cultivation of education
Mindfulness of others: the exercise of compassion and cooperation
Mindfulness of nature: the conservation of the world’s ecosystems
Mindfulness of the future: the responsibility to save for the future
Mindfulness of politics: the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions
Mindfulness of the world: the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace
This is a remarkable prescription for bringing both ethics and sanity to the body politic in practical ways that can restore its homeostasis, its health, and its promise. We can only hope that it will have a widespread influence, especially on what he calls the “millennial generation,” the children of the Internet (ages eighteen to twenty-nine in the year 2010), among whom he sees the greatest potential for transformation and healing. May we all, young and not so young alike, wake up to this new opportunity and inhabit it fully in the way we live our lives and pursue our work and our dreams. The alternatives are too grim and too horrific to contemplate. So maybe we should, in the spirit of knowing the full extent of what we threaten ourselves with. Perhaps the magnitude and urgency of what we face will motivate us to choose to live more mindfully on a global level.
There are other inspiring efforts we can point to that are already bringing greater mindfulness into various aspects of the body politic, in this country and abroad. One is the work of Tim Ryan, a six-term Democratic congressman from Ohio, mentioned in Chapter 14. Congressman Ryan is himself a committed practitioner of mindfulness meditation and yoga and a tireless advocate in Congress for mindfulness-based programs in areas as diverse as health, education, the military, economics, business, the environment, energy, and criminal justice. He says:
As a political leader, I know that to make the world a better place, we need practical applications that have been tried and tested. And when I find applications that work, I like to let people know about them. I believe I would be derelict in my duty as a congressman if I didn’t do my part to make mindfulness accessible to as many people as possible in our nation.*
Now there is at least one person in Congress, out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators, who is committed to the practice of mindfulness in his life and to its adoption and long-term application in critical areas of the body politic. With time, I can envision a lot more of his colleagues joining him. Tim Ryan may be a few years too old to be a member of the millennial generation that Jeffrey Sachs is counting on, but he is showing the way for the younger generation as he advocates for effective material support—both for more research studies and for strategic implementation of mindfulness-based programs to promote the deep well-being of the nation. He describes his vision as follows:
As a country of immigrants, innovators, and risk takers, we understand how to adapt and change and find the edge. Now we need to change our collective neuropathways and create a new dynamic in America. We need to join together and update our economic and governmental systems. The industrial model, which has resulted in large, overly bureaucratic organizations that don’t communicate well with each other and lose touch with events on the ground, is an outdated method for organizing and governing our society. We need new ways of thinking and new ways of mobilizing ourselves. We need to reinvest in the people of our country so that we can tap into their deep capacity for innovation to help us craft a new model to organize our society. We need systems that support our citizens to creatively participate in helping us meet these challenges. We may not know today precisely what ideas will positively transform the way we live, but mindfulness will help us to see the best emerging ideas in our rapidly changing time.… Mindfulness alone will not make this happen, but it will allow us to tap into the potential of every citizen and marshal all of the talents of this great country. A mindful nation is more able to change course and cut a new path when circumstances require it.†
Ryan’s is a profoundly inspiring narrative. I hope the millennial generation, and all other generations, are not only listening but also falling in love with what might be possible if they stay true to themselves within the larger embrace of interconnectedness.
This is certainly true for the movement of mindfulness in various ways into the domain of the new technologies, as recounted by Congressman Ryan in his book. For instance, Google has several mindfulness programs for its staff and promotes greater mindfulness not only at its headquarters in Silicon Valley but at its centers around the world. Chade-Meng Tan, one of the early Google engineers who originally helped develop Google searches in Asian languages, has, along with an august group of advisors that includes Mirabai Bush, Daniel Goleman, Norman Fischer, Marc Lesser, and Philippe Goldin, developed a mindfulness-based program for Google and for business environments worldwide called Search Inside Yourself (SIY). Meng recently came out with a book by the same name, which is a bestseller in the United States and in many other countries. In addition, Google has had an MBSR program for its employees for many years, conducted by Renee Burgard. Employees often go back and forth between these two programs as they deepen their mindfulness practice and seek out new ways of using mindfulness not only to regulate the stress in their own lives but also to catalyze greater insight and creativity in the next promising areas of innovation. Innovative leaders, such as Jenny Lykken and Karen May, Meng’s boss at Google, are bringing mindfulness to the challenges of creating an optimal work climate and work-life integration.
In Silicon Valley, interest in mindfulness and its applications is not limited to Google. There are MBSR and other mindfulness programs at Apple, also taught by Burgard. Arturo Bejar and other engineers at Facebook are building mindfulness elements into their platform to address conflicts when they arise among Facebook’s 1.1 billion users, helping people become more aware of their state of mind, their emotions, and how they are communicating. They have a strong collaborative research program with Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley, and his group that is studying the effects of mindfulness and compassion in reducing such conflicts and improving communications among users. There are leaders at Twitter, such as Melissa Daimler, and other companies who are bringing mindfulness into the domains of organizational effectiveness and learning.
Some of the most respected innovators in Silicon Valley are incorporating mindfulness in their companies. For example, Medium (started by one of the founders of Twitter) and Asana (started by one of the founders of Facebook) regularly support mindfulness in their companies through programs, talks, and other efforts. Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, cofounders of Asana, put it this way: “Companies that are not mindful lose their way, lose their best people, become complacent, and stop innovating.” They have said that in the same way mindfulness and reflection help individuals with personal growth, these practices also help organizations evolve and find their full potential.
Each year a meeting called Wisdom 2.0, initiated, organized, and hosted by Soren Gordhamer, brings together the leadership of the tech world with the leaders of the mindfulness movement to promote greater dialogue and innovation. This meeting is especially meaningful and poignant because the inventors and stewards of the new Web-based technologies—for the most part members of the millennial generation, and in many cases extremely wealthy at a very early age—also understand the potential shadow sides of their own creations and are interested in how to use mindfulness to help identify new ways of using and living with digital innovation that do not promote addiction and a loss of the priceless analog elements of a meaningful life. Major philanthropists associated with Silicon Valley, such as Joanie and Scott Kriens of the 1440 Foundation (named for the number of minutes in each day), are using their resources to support mindfulness, and more broadly, authentic relationship skills in the schools, in wellness, and in the workplace.
To return to the domain of politics for a moment, mindfulness is also becoming part of the politics of the United Kingdom. A number of members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords are interested in mindfulness and its societal and economic potential, and have been practicing together in an eight-week mindfulness course led by Chris Cullen and Mark Williams of the Oxford University Centre for Mindfulness. One of the principals in this group is Chris Ruane, a former schoolteacher and member of the House of Commons representing a constituency in North Wales. Another is Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics and a member of the House of Lords. On December 4, 2012, Chris Ruane gave an impassioned and forceful speech in the House of Commons describing the potential of mindfulness for dealing with high youth unemployment, a gigantic problem in the United Kingdom. Lord Layard is engaged in advocating for a new economic metric, beyond gross domestic product, that would take into account psychological human elements in assessing the health of the economy and of the nation. He is championing this societal change through a group he founded called Action for Happiness. Many of Lord Layard’s views are expounded on in his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Together, Ruane and Layard are championing another cycle of the mindfulness program to meet the growing interest of their colleagues in Parliament. A similar flowering of interest and practice is taking place in the Swedish parliament, led by a filmmaker who is also an MBSR instructor, Gunnar Michanek.
As of February 2013, there is a mainstream magazine, Mindful, and its website, Mindful.org, exclusively devoted to covering this emerging field in all its various manifestations, especially the global community of practitioners and its efforts, taking so many different forms, to transform and heal our world. I receive emails from friends and colleagues who are MBSR teachers in such far-flung places as Beijing, Tehran, Capetown, Buenos Aires, and Rome, all reporting on what they are doing, how things are going, and when we will next be crossing paths at various international mindfulness meetings and training programs.
All the unfoldings that I have been recounting here would have been unimaginable even a few short years ago. Taken together, they give the distinct impression that what may have seemed impossible only a few years ago is already happening. And that is indeed the case. The movement of mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine, health care, psychology, and neuroscience itself would have been seen as inconceivable in 1979. Yet it has already happened. Equally impossible would have been the notion that the National Institutes of Health in the United States would be funding mindfulness research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually, which it now is, or that the National Health Service in the United Kingdom would recommend mindfulness, in the form of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, as the treatment of choice in the prevention of depressive relapse, which it has. I sometimes say that from the perspective of 1979, these occurrences were somewhat less probable than that the expanding universe—triggered by the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, according to cosmologists—would have suddenly ground to a halt and begun to collapse back onto itself in a “big crunch.” Yet they all happened, and much more as well. I see all these emergences as very promising signs, ones that I hope are only the beginning of a major global movement that will spur us to come to our senses as a species and cultivate greater intimacy with and understanding of various hidden dimensions of our own being.
I have written elsewhere that the human species can be seen in some sense as the autoimmune disease of the planet. We are both the cause of the earth’s distress and its victim. But this does not need to continue. We are the cause when we are unaware of the multiple effects our activity has on the world, many of which have become toxic. But we can also be the agent of healing and flourishing if we wake up. Then we will be a huge beneficiary of our own embodied and enacted wisdom. This work has hardly begun, and it will need virtually all of us on the planet to contribute in whatever ways we can. Perhaps this is our common work and our common calling, to discover and embody that which is deepest and best within us as human beings—for the sake of the world, and for the sake of all beings, human and otherwise.
And so we come full circle, from the outer world back to the inner world, from the larger whole back to the individual person, each one of us facing our own life, with our own breath and body and mind. The world we live in is changing at warp speed, and we are inexorably enmeshed in those changes, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. Many of the changes in the world today are definitely in the direction of greater peace and harmony and health. Others clearly undermine it. All are part of the full catastrophe.
The challenge, of course, is how we are to live. Given world stress and food stress, work stress and role stress, people stress, sleep stress, time stress, and our own fears and pain, what are we going to do this morning when we wake up? How will we conduct ourselves today? Can we be a center of peace, sanity, and well-being right now? Can we live in harmony with our own minds and hearts and bodies right now? Can we put our multiple intelligences to work for us in our inner lives and in the outer world, which have never really been entirely separate?
The thousands of extraordinary ordinary people who have been through the Stress Reduction Clinic over the past thirty-four years, along with perhaps millions of others who have encountered mindfulness through MBSR and other mindfulness-based programs throughout the world, have come to face these challenges of living with greater confidence, resilience, and wisdom by systematically and lovingly cultivating awareness in their lives, and thus discovering for themselves that there is indeed a healing power in mindfulness.
We cannot predict the future of the world, even for a few days, yet our own futures are intimately connected to it. But what we can do, and so often fail to do, is to own our present, fully, as best we can, moment by moment. As we have seen, it is here that the future gets created, our own and the world’s. How we choose to be and what we choose to do are important. They make a difference. Indeed, they make all the difference.
Having now looked at a number of concrete applications of mindfulness in this part of the book, it is time for us to come back to the practice itself, and to close with a final section in which you will find further practical suggestions for how to fine tune your cultivation of mindfulness, bring it further into your life, and find other like-minded communities and people who share a love for this way of being and doing.
HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR DEALING WITH WORLD STRESS
1. Pay attention to the quality and source of your water and your food. How is the air quality where you live?
2. Be aware of your relationship to information. How much do you read newspapers and magazines? How do you feel afterward? When do you choose to read them? Is this the best use of these moments for you? Do you act on the information you receive? In what ways? Are you aware of cravings for news and information, to the point where it suggests addiction? How often do you check your email? Your phone for messages and texts and tweets? How is your behavior affected by your need to be stimulated and bombarded with information, or to broadcast what you are doing and thinking? Do you keep the radio or TV on all the time, even when you are not watching or listening? Do you read the newspaper for hours just to kill time? How frequently do you actively distract yourself, and how?
3. Be aware of how you use your television. What do you choose to watch? What needs does it satisfy in you? How do you feel afterward? How often do you watch? What is the state of mind that brings you to turn it on in the first place? What is the state of mind that brings you to turn it off? How does your body feel afterward?
4. What are the effects on your body and on your psyche of taking in bad news and violent images? Are you ordinarily aware of this domain at all? Notice if you are feeling powerless or depressed in the face of the stress and anguish in the world.
5. Try to identify specific issues that you care about, and which, if you worked on them, might help you to feel more engaged and more powerful. Just doing something, even if it is a very little something, can often help you to feel as if you can have an effect, that your actions count, and that you are connected to the greater world in meaningful ways. You might be able to feel effective if you identified an important health, safety, or environmental issue in your neighborhood or town or city and worked on it, perhaps to raise other people’s consciousness of a potential problem or to alleviate one that has already been identified. Since you are a part of the larger whole, it can be inwardly healing to take some responsibility for outward healing in the world. Remember the dictum “Think globally, act locally.” It works the other way around too: “Think locally, act globally.” And as best you can, find other like-minded people to do it in community with, since you are always already part of a much larger whole, even as you are whole yourself.