Adverse effects of spiritual practices were well-known within the religious contexts in which those practices originated. Yet as meditation and mindfulness moved from monastics to the masses, this essential information has been increasingly withheld. Why? I believe it has everything to do with attempting to separate the practice from its religious roots, to sell it to a secular public. You Can Take Meditation Out of the Religion, But…… can you take the religion out of meditation? If you present it in a lay-friendly, pseudo-secular, science-sounding way? I don’t think so. Not entirely. The Buddhist monk in colonial Burma who first started teaching meditation to laypeople wasn’t trying to take the religion out of it. Quite the contrary. Amid all the Christian missionaries running around, he was trying to keep his people Buddhist. My old meditation group presented its method as universal and inter-spiritual, suitable for a person of any religious background, or none. That was a good part of the draw for me, along with the promised practical benefits of the spiritual practices. But when it came right down to it, the program was rooted in a universalized form of Hinduism. Other traditions of East and West were incorporated in and interpreted through the Hindu lens of the founder. It’s no coincidence that the loaded language of that group (a high-control group, I finally realized) was heavy on Sanskrit. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), acknowledges his aim to remove the religious clothing — if not the actual religious worldview behind it — from mindfulness meditation. He believes that mindfulness ultimately does not belong to Buddhism, but speaks to “universal qualities of being human.” He was also well aware that science, not spirituality, was the key to getting mindfulness accepted into the medical model and secular settings. [i] “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism”..? [ii] Kabat-Zinn intentionally developed and described mindfulness practices in ways that would downplay its Buddhist origins, so as not to undermine “our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.” He pitched his program to medical colleagues as a way to offer “relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga.” Yet, his efforts were inspired by a vision he had at a meditation retreat, at the Insight Meditation Society. He realized that his “karmic assignment” or personal dharma was to “share the essence of meditation and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them .., with those who would never come to” a religious retreat center. His ultimate goal? To relieve the suffering of individuals, to foster awakening, and even to help bring about a spiritual Renaissance that would enable the whole planet to flourish. Quite noble. Also pretty darn religious. Specifically, Buddhist. Mindfulness has many meanings. It’s used as a catch-all term, understood by Kabat-Zinn to be explicitly tied to “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddadharma.” Mindfulness can be used “as a place-holder for the entire dharma,… [carrying] multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously.” Early papers on MBSR recognized its roots in Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism, as well as “yogic traditions” like Vedanta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ramana Maharshi. “Mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one,” Kabat-Zinn writes. He lifts up the need for advocates like himself to embody loyalty and vision “in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership, education, etc.” In other words, it’s not enough to have integrated an essentially spiritual practice with “important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances” (which are made invisible) into mainstream medicine — champions of mindfulness want to penetrate all other major social institutions, too. While Kabat-Zinn’s most immediate hope in his clinic teaching MBSR has been to ease the suffering of people in pain, he notes that what people learn in the clinic can take hold in their lives. Indeed, for many, formal meditation becomes “an ongoing feature of one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.” He’s pleased when clinic participants learning MBSR exclaim, “This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life.” Kabat-Zinn knows that in the freedom-of-religion U.S., Buddhism must be extracted from mindfulness — at least in its language and presentation — in a setting that serves the general public. But he still believes that the teachers of mindfulness in such settings should have their own fervent practice. They should sit long meditation retreats at centers (“a laboratory requirement” for teacher training), study with teachers from (usually) Buddhist traditions with well-defined lineages, and be firmly rooted in what sounds to me like Buddhist cosmology or theology. In turn, these teachers in secular settings will be capable of offering “direct transmission” to the people they teach in any group course. The student group in such a class, he suggests, is functionally a sangha. Such teachers, Kabat-Zinn writes, should not rely explicitly on Buddhist frameworks or vocabulary in teaching. Instead, they should cite scientific evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness, draw from direct experience with the practice, and help students accumulate and learn from their own direct experience. In sum, Kabat-Zinn stresses the importance of “embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development.” Sounds to me like a well-intentioned, humanitarian, culturally astute, and deeply religious endeavor. Sounds like stealth evangelism, 21st-century U.S. Western Buddhist style. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Thought experiment: How would decision-makers and end-users respond if a movement grew to take Christian contemplative practices, deeply rooted in Christian theology and culture, into secular settings? Would heart-centered prayer (or whatever was chosen, and however it was renamed) be threaded throughout American institutions and culture within a few decades? Would the same sorts of people who have championed Buddhist-style meditation regard quietly Christian practices as equally appropriate? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Buddhism and yoga seem to get a pass among many Westerners who are otherwise indifferent or averse to religious influence. Most Americans are familiar with Christian culture; whatever their own relationship (or lack of relationship) to Christianity, Abrahamic religion forms the basis of many people’s ideas of what religion is. Just because Buddhism — at least, as presented to Westerners — avoids god-talk, and offers a different diagnosis of and solution to the human predicament than Judeo-Christian faiths, does not mean that its worldview and practices are not religious. What happens when a person turns to (quietly Buddhist-rooted) mindfulness practices for purely practical reasons? If one just wants to manage anxiety, develop the skill of detachment, or improve patience, can they keep it at that? The Accidental Buddhist (or Hindu) Let’s return to Dan Lawton, a young mindfulness teacher whose spiritual crisis I described in a piece on the adverse effects of meditation. A “firm secularist” when he attended his first 10-day meditation intensive as a young man, Lawton did a breathing practice and an attending-to-your-bodily-feelings practice as a part of the retreat. It got intense. A lot of suffering came up; he remembers letting out a blood-curdling scream. He kept going through it, and got to the other side. “And then I spent the next three months in uninterrupted bliss,” Lawton told Rachel Bernstein. “And so this was the experience that really made me convert. And I didn’t have a context and I didn’t understand that experience at all.” [iii] Lawton explains that that experience “reorganized my entire reality. And it essentially made me reliant upon Buddhist ideas, because there was no other framework that I had at that point to explain what happened to me.” [emphasis mine] Over a decade of practicing mindfulness, and teaching it for several years too, Lawton reaped “extraordinary benefits.” Gradually, he absorbed much Buddhist doctrine. The idea that craving or desire is the source of all suffering particularly made sense to him. “I was also impressed,” Lawton writes, “by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.” [iv] [emphasis mine] Then, a decade or more after his first experience, at another meditation retreat, Dan experienced a deep crisis. The distinction between himself and the world dissolved, and he “was basically unable to turn the mindfulness off,” which was debilitating and distressing. He was later diagnosed with PTSD, stemming directly from his spiritual practice. Lawton reflects on how this experience affected him: “It led to a deep re-examination of my own involvement with American Buddhism, with the mindfulness movement in the context of wellness…. [and] a deep examination of many of the other actors in this movement… their various motivations, different power structures that were there, the history, a lot of the confusion. “I sometimes say that I’m not sure what was more unsettling to me, the symptoms that I experienced in the aftermath of this retreat, or the fact that I started to realize that I had been part of an organized religion, which I had never really comprehended during the time that I was in it. It was kind of like the floor fell out from under me in some ways.” [v] [emphasis mine] Lawton felt betrayed by the practices that had previously served him so well. And he felt betrayed by the community of teachers who had talked up the positives of meditation, treated negative experiences (when mentioned at all) as normal parts of spiritual progression, never offered guardrails, nor indicated that meditation could do real harm — and had only “keep plugging” platitudes to offer when adverse effects rocked his world. [vi] Intention vs. Impact I assume that people who have helped popularize mindfulness, in both Buddhist and secular contexts, have done so with a desire to help other people. I doubt anyone set out to cause suffering. Yet, what has happened has been a kind of lying by omission on the part of authorities —those who treat spiritual practices as if they can be severed from their religious roots, who downplay adverse effects if they acknowledge them at all, and who more often than not advise doubling down on a practice, even when it is not serving someone well — or blame the meditator for difficulties that are predictable. Indeed, it appears many of the people who become teachers of meditation and mindfulness are not themselves well-trained to understand adverse effects, or to know how to support people who experience them. Is it any wonder they are unprepared to help? Whatever the original reasons for softening the religious basis of contemplative practices —to benefit a public skittish of organized religion, to make meditation acceptable in neutral settings like hospitals and schools, or simply as a result of looking through the saffron-colored glasses of a true believer — the outcome is the same. Some people end up seeing their suffering INCREASE, in ways they never bargained for. Unless we change how we talk about, teach, and practice powerful disciplines like meditation, stories like Dan’s (and mine) will keep happening. Meditation advocates need to get real with themselves and others about the full spectrum of possibilities in these practices. It won’t be easy. Next time I’ll explore some of the forces stacked against the meditation teacher or organization that aspires to transparency and skillful support. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up. Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇 Power and Control in Groups … Into the Culti-verse ... Calming the Kundalini Fire Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life. Endnotes [i] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options. [ii] Ibid. All quotes and paraphrasing in the section “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism” are from Kabat-Zinn’s 2011 article. [iii] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. [iv] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack. [v] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. Except where otherwise indicated, the source of material in the section The Accidental Buddhist is this podcast conversation. [vi] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.
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