The mindful sceptic
embarked on his journey he was a new age sceptic armed with the hard questions, but what he found left him with a permanent smile on his face.
It’s a crisp autumn evening in Kelburn, Wellington and I am one of 12 strangers who file into the bright, cosy lounge of George Packard, a mindfulness and meditation teacher.
I’m here because I want to take a break from the constant chatter inside my head. I’m always thinking about what will happen next, I struggle to live in the moment, and life is whizzing by faster than I can keep up with. Each of us gathered have our own reasons for wanting to silence the chatter in our minds.
Over the next six weeks, we meet every Wednesday evening in a ritual to develop the practice of mindfulness. We’re encouraged to share our experiences with the strangers beside us and our meetings bear many similarities to Bible study groups I attended as a teenager. Many talk of stress and anxiety, and one of our group has even been referred by their doctor.
Packard, who has been practicing meditation and mindfulness for 34 years, can relate to this. When he first started meditating he was prone to panic attacks.
‘‘I first got into it because I wanted to be happier, I wanted to feel less anxious and so I started meditating, and what I found in doing this was a very useful bag of tricks. Over 34 years my understanding of the practice has grown significantly and my feelings of security, calmness and peace have also increased significantly.’’
An Auckland-based HR professional and mother of two speaks of how she used mindfulness to take herself off antidepressants for anxiety and mild depression. ‘‘Mindfulness has helped me get through the really tough times. I am now able to be aware of the negative voice in my head and can better recognise stress signals as they appear.’’
On the course I learn that we are not our thoughts. This is a profound revelation. Through mindful practice I become aware of the constant stream of thoughts filtering through my mind. Some are good, some are not, many are complete nonsense. When I am conscious of this, they somehow lose their supremacy. It gives me a freedom to accept them for what they are – thoughts – and to understand they don’t define me.
A core principle we are taught is the practice of grounding. This is the very simple concept that even if our thoughts or emotions are caught up in the future or the past, the body is in the present and shifting our attention to it enables us to experience the current moment. It’s a straightforward enough concept and I noticed the benefits immediately but like exercise, it requires constant practice.
Throughout the week we are encouraged to take 30 seconds out of our day at regular intervals to pause, ground ourselves and focus on the moment. Helpfully, Packard texts us reminders at random intervals.
At first I find it unnatural, distracting even, to ground myself, and I often I ignore the texts. Gradually, though, the exercise becomes easier and I glimpse the potential power of the practice.
Rose Patterson, a research analyst from Wellington, first attended one of Packard’s courses five years ago.
‘‘When I did my first course I was going through a really rough time with a relationship break-up and it was exactly what I needed to get out of my head and into my body.’’
She now has more appreciation of the here and now. ‘‘If we are constantly thinking ahead about the next thing we have to do, we are basically running towards our graves. Life is now. It’s easy to think, ‘once I’m earning a bit more money’ or ‘once I’ve got a house’, ‘then I’ll be happy’.’’
As Grant Rix, operations manager at Mindful Aotearoa – a Mental Health Foundation initiative – describes it, mindfulness is ‘‘paying attention to what is currently occurring, with kindness and interest’’.
In 2013, the foundation teamed up with Auckland University of Technology to run an eight-week programme for 126 primary school children aged 6–11 in five schools across the country. The results were so positive they have since run three further studies in other primary schools, as well as a high school.
‘‘What we have measured is significant increases in wellbeing, and increases in the ability to self calm, pay attention and focus, in those students who have participated in our programme,’’ Rix says.
Children who have completed one of Rix’s courses often say they find the strategies helpful as a way to regulate their emotions. ‘‘A child might be in the playground and witness an altercation, and they can feel themselves getting hot with anger. Having been introduced to mindfulness they start to recognise that emotion in their body. They notice how they are feeling and they then have another strategy to be able to respond to that emotion rather than giving into it and just lashing out.’’
But I discover that although mindfulness can be a very useful tool for improved personal wellbeing, it can also be misappropriated to serve a particular agenda, often with negative consequences.
Take the weight-loss industry, for example. Dr Andrew Dickson, a health sociologist with Massey University’s School of Management in Palmerston North, says the industry has enthusiastically seized on the concept of mindful eating over the past five to seven years.
‘‘If you are practicing mindful eating for the purpose of weight loss you are not accepting yourself, you are purposefully trying to change yourself to fit a norm that you think is better. It doesn’t fit. That’s misappropriation.’’
Justin Connor, a business strategy consultant living in Sydney, is another who has had a negative experience of mindfulness. He came to realise, after many years, that the version he was taught was not so much about connecting with his inner self but instead about detaching from himself and his own personality.
Connor grew up in Wellington ‘‘playing Lego around the legs of meditating parents’’ who were members of the School of Philosophy, a worldwide movement.
From a young age he was exposed to mindfulness, grounding and meditation practices. His definition is not dissimilar from the one given by Rix, except there is no use of the words ‘‘kindness’’ or ‘‘interest’’. But the version Connor was taught involved a process of becoming aware of his own thoughts and feelings in order to then detach from them so as to become part of a ‘‘universal self’’, a form of collective consciousness.
Those who follow this sacrifice of personality to ‘‘attain godliness’’ are prone to manipulation, he says.
Although Connor does not practice meditation today he does believe mindfulness can be a useful tool if the emphasis is right. ‘‘Mindfulness can get us out of a limited perspective. It becomes a bit freaky when it moves into the territory of defining who we are. There are probably a number of areas where mindfulness can be co-opted in a very positive way or in a very sinister way.’’
Dianne May, co-director of Mindfulness Auckland, says researching courses and trainers is vital. Her organisation offers the eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme, which was designed by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979. KabatZinn is a Zen Buddhist who secularised mindfulness into the form that is most often practised today.
Although most people are accepted on May’s courses, not everyone is. She says focussing on the inner world might not be helpful for people who are actively depressed, extremely distressed, or suffering from high levels of posttraumatic stress disorder. In these cases professional treatment would be better.
Dr Ruth Gawler, President of the Meditation Association of Australia, agrees it is vital that mindfulness teachers are properly trained. It was for this reason that the association was established eight years ago. Currently, it has 158 members in New Zealand and Australia, including Packard. To become a member, teachers must undergo 110 hours of face-to-face meditation training.
Gawler encourages potential students to choose their course carefully, as ‘‘anyone at the moment can call themselves a meditation or mindfulness teacher’’.
She says it is also not uncommon for teachers to be refused membership to her association. ‘‘Largely the reasons we would refuse membership to someone would be related to a mental health problem they might have. There are definitely some flaky people who are out there teaching meditation.’’
Ihave come away from the course with greater insight into my inner world. I have glimpsed something which I can see is a really helpful tool for better appreciating the here and now. But it’s difficult, it takes constant practice and, for the moment at least, my mind is still busy running on to the next priority.
But for those who do persist, there are benefits that Packard sums up: ‘‘More and more I just enjoy the myriad of beautiful moments in life and often I find myself happy for no good reason.’’
There are probably a number of areas where mindfulness can be co-opted in a very positive way or in a very sinister way. Justin Connor