McMindfulness approach won’t get to root of problem
Meditative practice conceals a dark truth society must confront, says Emma Barnett
HOW does your mind feel? Slowly revving back up after the festive fug of Christmas? Chances are, in the slew of “New Year, New You” suggestions, you will have read about mindfulness.
Indeed, it was pretty hard to get through last year without noticing it.
The meditative practice, which has its roots in Buddhism and encourages you to focus on the present, rather than on the anxieties of the past or future, is now everywhere.
Schools, law firms, banks, governments, the US military . . . they are all offering mindfulness sessions to staff.
I’ve tried it, and failed abysmally in my quest to achieve mental peace. But, in the course of making a documentary on the subject, I have also attempted to understand it.
Over the past two months, I have visited projects and spoken to doctors, practitioners — even Buddhists — in an attempt to figure out how it moved from the mountains of Burma to the Hollywood Hills, where it has become a multibillion-dollar business.
Growing amounts of research indicate that, as a cognitive therapy, it works. Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence backs it as a treatment for those with recurring depression; indeed, it has been shown to reduce the recurrence rate by 40% to 50% over 12 months, and 30% of British GPs now refer patients at war with their thoughts for mindfulnessbased treatment.
But all those hours spent try- ing to be mindfully quiet have left me feeling distinctly fed up. Anyone attempting a quick fix, as I was (admittedly, I was only giving it five minutes in the dark before bedtime), has missed the bigger, scarier point: why are so many of us living lives we feel unable to cope with? How is it that we are so unhappy with our lots that we will willingly sit cringing in a room with our colleagues while remembering to breathe?
The British Mental Health Foundation estimates that one in four people will experience a mental health problem every 12 months. Work-related stress is estimated to cost British busi- nesses more than £3-billion (R52-billion) a year. And here lies the problem.
Some companies I visited spoke dreamily of improving their employees’ productivity and happiness with these new lunchtime sessions of “workplace wellbeing” (even though the two outcomes could well be deemed diametrically opposed).
And yet, this snack-sized approach won’t sort people out — it will only ever be a sticking plaster if the root cause of the stress isn’t being addressed. Twenty minutes of inhaling in a boardroom is pointless if a lawyer is going back out on the floor to complete a 16-hour day, endlessly interrupted by e-mail.
It also jars that an essentially peaceful practice is being used to help train soldiers to kill with greater precision, as well as cope with debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder at the other end of combat. What would the Buddha say?
I felt happy, and, at worst, a little full, over my Christmas break. Like millions of others I had no perceived need for mindfulness or anything else like it, until, you guessed it, I returned to work. For it is our lives and how we lead them that really need to change if we are to improve our mental wellbeing.
Ironically, this sort of moral and ethical world view is what the pure Buddhist version of mindfulness teaches.
As opposed to the lessons of the new, multibillion corporatised McMindfulness, which in the long term will do as much as a Happy Meal to sate a person’s hunger for a richer life. — © The