Category Archives: Mindfulness

The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

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One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

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We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

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The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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Sudden and gradual together

03 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in East Asia, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Practice, Therapy, Virtue

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The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I had had good reason to be frustrated earlier with such traditions – for their rhetoric sometimes implies that that present-moment acceptance is easy, which it is not. It was a long and painful lesson for me learning how hard it is to be good. That made me a longtime advocate of what East Asian Buddhists would call the gradual path, but I increasingly also see the wisdom in its converse, the sudden. Can the two be reconciled?

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In praise of the present moment

19 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

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One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.

That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.

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Self-improvement by not-self-improvement

05 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Flourishing, Humility, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Self-Discipline, Serenity, Virtue

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Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.

I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.

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Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in External Goods, Gentleness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

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The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.

Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.

Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.

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Of perpetually vulnerable subjects

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What is that supposed to mean? Modern meditation is frequently described as “neoliberal” in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which Purser coedited, and especially the closing essay by Glenn Wallis (which responds to a thoughtful defence of mindfulness by Rick Repetti in the same volume). Wallis’s piece is a good illustration of how a concept with some legitimate and meaningful uses can get bandied around so casually that it becomes completely specious. Here is Wallis:

You don’t have to look too closely to see that Mindfulness’s most recent progenitors are, of course, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I mentioned earlier, Mindfulness has the same DNA and was raised on the same values that undergirds today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure (acceptance, resilience, self-help, etc.). So, of course Jon Kabat-Zinn [the creator of secularized and medicalized mindfulness meditation] cozies up to corporate CEOs and American military generals. (Wallis 499)

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Emotions are not primarily judgements

07 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Anger, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Fear, Human Nature, Meditation, Mindfulness, Practice, Psychology, Serenity

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I was struck by two things when I read Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness. On one hand, as I noted previously, I’m excited by Nussbaum’s new, and more Śāntidevan, normative approach to anger; it seems like she and I have moved toward the same position there. On the other, though, I realized that I have moved away from Nussbaum’s general descriptive theory of emotion. Nussbaum articulates this theory at length in Upheavals of Thought, and I don’t think her theory has changed much by the time we get to Anger (she offers a summary of it in the appendix). What has changed, in the roughly fifteen years since I read Upheavals cover to cover, is that I agreed with her theory then, and I no longer do – and reading the short summaries of the position in Anger helped me realize that.

Nussbaum’s theory (derived primarily from the Stoic thinker Chrysippus) is that emotions are fundamentally cognitive judgements of value, with a content directed at an object believed to affect our well-being. So fear, for example, is primarily a judgement that something could be harmful to us in the future; grief is primarily a judgement that something of value has been lost to us. I found this account plausible when I first encountered it. I no longer do.

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The Mary Ellen Carter and the secret of happiness

14 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Buddhism, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Mindfulness, Pleasure, Serenity

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I originally wrote this week’s post in a handwritten journal at age 21, more than half my life ago, in 1997 – possibly before at least a few of my readers were born. It was a reflection on my travels backpacking around Thailand and Laos, in the middle of the life-changing experience where I was learning to break with utilitarianism and move instead toward Buddhism. I have not made major edits, because I wanted to preserve the in-process nature of my learning at the time, so it retains the somewhat disjointed style of a first draft. I think it gives a very accurate picture of who I was at that time: someone who had discovered some very important things, perhaps even the most important things, but still had a long way to go.

The piece begins by exploring Stan Rogers‘s wonderful song The Mary Ellen Carter. (If you’re not familiar with the song, I would recommend first listening to it or at least reading the lyrics for the post to make sense.) I’ve been delighted to learn that this year’s youth craze – among people who are now the age I was when I wrote this – is sea chanteys and other sea ballads, so this seemed an ideal time to share this long-ago reflection with the world.

Utilitarianism is self-contradicting. The more time you spend trying to “maximize” happiness through sensual pleasure, fame and fortune, the less happy you will eventually be.

I think of this because I was just humming “The Mary Ellen Carter”. A utilitarian would think the narrator crazy: he digs up the boat not in order to be on a boat again (presumably he could get other work fairly easily), but because of a sense of gratitude, to an inanimate object: “She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale.” The utilitarian would agree with the owners: “Insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below.” The first thing they teach you in management school is to ignore sunk costs. What we have here is literally a sunk cost – and for its sake alone the narrator spends the whole spring diving, catching the bends twice.

And yet the sense of pride, contentment and satisfaction the narrator radiates in his quest is undeniable. This seemingly useless quest gives his life a purpose, brings him to sing some of the most inspiring lines ever written:

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Classical and nondual mindfulness

14 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

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Ron Purser’s critique of modern mindfulness is thoroughgoing, and extends beyond chastising its skepticism of political engagement. Purser also criticizes modern mindfulness on other grounds, grounds that I think are considerably closer to the views of classical (early) Buddhist texts.

In particular, Purser’s article “The myth of the present moment” (from the journal Mindfulness 6:680–686) points to a central element of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and other modern mindfulness practices which is not present in the classical texts. Namely: Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of MBSR and modern medical mindfulness generally, defines mindfulness as “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally”. So a key goal of modern mindfulness practice is “reducing thoughts and ruminations of the past and future, which keeps us from being in the present moment.” (Purser 682) Purser notes that this focus on the present moment is exemplified in the common introductory practice (included in BU’s mindfulness workshop) of mindfully paying attention to the experience of slowly eating a raisin.

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