Critical Review of Mindful Nation UK;
Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 68(1),
pp.133-136, 2016,
ID: 1123926 DOI:10.1080/13636820.2015.1123926
Mindful Nation UK – Report by the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group (MAPPG) 82pp., October 2015 – available free online at http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk/
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Professor Terry Hyland – Education & Psychology, University of Bolton, UK – hylandterry@ymail.com /terry.hyland@mindfulness.ie
The Report was commissioned in 2014 as a result of the growing interest in mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in an expanding range of domains including health and care services, psychology, psychotherapy, leadership and management, work in prisons, workplace training, the military, and education at all levels. Members of the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group (MAPPG) – some of whom had experienced mindfulness practice for themselves – intended the project to achieve three main aims:
• review the scientific evidence and current best practice in mindfulness training
• develop policy recommendations for government, based on these findings
• provide a forum for discussion in Parliament for the role of mindfulness and its implementation in public policy
Recommendations – all generally favourable to mindfulness practices – are made for the introduction of MBIs in four key areas: health, education, the workplace and the criminal justice system (8).
This remarkable interest in practices rooted in Buddhist contemplative traditions by Members of the British Parliament – especially in a period of economic austerity and cutbacks in public services – stems directly from the ‘mindfulness revolution’ (Boyce 2011) which has swept virus-like through academia, public life and popular culture over the last decade or so. Mindfulness is a now a meme, a product, a fashionable spiritual commodity with enormous market potential and – in its populist forms – has been transmuted into an all-pervasive ‘McMindfulness’ phenomenon. As Purser and Loy (2013) argue:
While a stripped-down, secularized technique -- what some critics are now calling "McMindfulness" -- may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots (1).
The Foreward to the MAPPG Report (10) was written by Jon Kabat Zinn who – in establishing his mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 – is almost single-handedly responsible for the establishment of the current boom industry in mindfulness (Hyland 2015a). In the academic sphere, mindfulness has been taken up most energetically by psychologists, psychotherapists and educators, and there has been an exponential growth of publications measuring the impact of MBSR and related mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) programmes on anxiety, depression and chronic pain sufferers, on addictions of various kinds, and to enhance mind/body well-being generally. Since his original MBSR programme
has played such a large part in generating much of this research activity, Kabat-Zinn’s criticisms of contemporary developments are understandably nuanced. Acknowledging the ‘challenging circumstances relating to the major cultural and epistemological shifts’ as Buddhist meditation was introduced into clinical and psychological settings, Williams & Kabat-Zinn (2013) observe that:
Buddhist scholars, in particular, may feel that the essential meaning of mindfulness may have been exploited, or distorted, or abstracted from its essential ecological niche in ways that may threaten its deep meaning, its integrity, and its potential value (11).
Other commentators have been more forthright in their reaction to the growth of scales for measuring mindfulness. Grossman (2011), in particular, has been forceful in his criticisms of mindfulness measurement techniques, particularly those relying upon self-reports by MBI course participants. The key weaknesses are that they de-contextualise mindfulness from its ethical and attitudinal foundations, measure only specific aspects of mindfulness such as the capacity to stay in the present moment, attention span or transitory emotional state and, in general terms, present a false and adulterated perspective on what mindfulness really is. The proliferation of mindfulness measuring techniques which has accompanied the exponential growth of programmes has exacerbated this denaturing of the original conception and it is now no longer clear precisely what is being measured.
In a recent article in The Guardian designed to accompany the publication of the MAPPG Report, Kabat-Zinn (2015) re-iterated his definition of mindfulness as awareness of the present moment with curiosity and kindness, and warned against ‘opportunistic elements’ for whom ‘mindfulness has become a business that can only disappoint the vulnerable consumers who look to it as a panacea’ (1). The ‘opportunistic elements’ warned against by Kabat-Zinn have have now managed to mutate mindfulness into a commodified consumerist product used to sell everything from colouring books and musical relaxation CDs to “apps” for mindful gardening, cooking and driving. Such commercial activity, arguably, results in the misuse of mindfulness, whereas the inclusion of mindfulness in US army training regimes and by Google in staff development programmes (Stone 2014) clearly raises issues about the outright abuse of MBIs since foundational mindfulness values such as right livelihood, loving-kindness, compassion and non-materialism are self-evidently and fundamentally at odds with aspects of the core business of corporations and the military.
The neuroscientific and clinical evidence for the effectiveness of MBIs is, as the MAPPG Report outlines, robust, and this may justify the recommendations (9) for applications in the criminal justice system (randomised trials with offender populations), and the National Health Service (expansion of MBCT access for those with recurrent depression), but the extension of MBIs into education and the workplace is more problematic. Recommendations are made for the establishment of pilot schools to pioneer mindfulness teaching, and there are proposals for greater collaboration between the Department for Education and health providers alongside suggestions for the introduction of online training programmes for teachers (34). In relation to the workplace, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is asked to ‘demonstrate leadership in working with employers to promote the use of mindfulness’, and mindfulness programmes for public sector staff are recommended in order to ‘combat stress and improve organisational effectiveness’ (46).
Applications in the health service and with offenders are essentially remedial, thus directly connecting them with foundational mindfulness principles concerned with relieving suffering. In education and work on the other hand, there has been a tendency for this core transformational function to be co-opted in order to achieve specific operational objectives, and such pragmatic purposes have obscured the links with the foundational moral principles. In education, such practical aims have included enhanced self-esteem/control and improved focus/attention span and, in the workplace, reduction of employee stress, lower rates of absenteeism and enhanced communication skills (Hyland 2015b). All this seems quite some way from the ethical values which Kabat-Zinn and mainstream mindfulness practitioners would ideally wish to advocate.
Harvey (2014) has described in graphic detail how the voracious appetite of neo-liberal capitalism has come to devour all aspects of public and private spheres bringing about the total commodification of everyday life. The scramble by large corporations to jump on the mindfulness bandwagon has direct parallels with the expropriation of the Protestant Ethic to serve capitalist interests during the Industrial Revolution. On the current model, the capitalisation of mindfulness has produced an ideal consumer product with a handy dual purpose which, on the one hand, promises to alleviate stress in employees – often in organisations whose ruthless and draconian working conditions have caused such stress in the first place (see Purser & Ng 2015) – and, on the other, a commodity with infinite sales potential in a spiritually impoverished culture shot through with attention deficit disorder and late-capitalist angst.
It would be churlish, indeed, to discourage potential participants from gaining any benefits they can from the mindfulness sessions offered in schools and workplaces. The examples of MBIs at work cited in the MAPPG Report – such as the Finance Innovation Lab and Transport for London – note improvements in team working and the reduction of employee stress and absenteeism (44). However, all this is quite remote from the cultivation of the values and dispositions which form the heart of mindfulness practice. All those concerned with applying mindfulness in the workplace would do well to note Kabat-Zinn’s (2015) warning that ‘it can never be a quick fix’, and that there are grave dangers in ignoring ‘the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged’ (ibid).
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References
Boyce, B.(ed)(2011). The Mindfulness Revolution. Boston, MA, Shambhala Publications
Grossman, P. (2011). Defining mindfulness by how poorly I think I pay attention during everyday awareness and other intractable problems for psychology’s (re)invention of mindfulness: Comment on Brown et al. (2011). Psychological Assessment, 23, 1034 –1040
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Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London, Profile Books
Hyland, T. (2015a). On the Contemporary Applications of Mindfulness: Some Implications for Education; Journal of Philosophy of Education, 49(2),170-186
Hyland, T. (2015b). McMindfulness in the Workplace: Vocational Learning and the Commodification of the Present Moment; Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 67 (2), 219–234
Kabat-Zinn, J.(2015). Mindfulness has huge health potential – but McMindfulness is no panacea; The Guardian, 20.10.15; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/20/mindfulness-mental-health-potential-benefits-uk , accessed 3.11.15
Purser, R. & Loy, D. (2013). Beyond McMindfulness; Huffington Post, 1/7/13, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289.html; accessed 14/7/15
Purser, R. & Ng, E. (2015). Corporate Mindfulness is Bullsh*t: Zen or No Zen, You’re Working Harder and Being Paid Less. Salon, 25.9.15.
Stone, M. (2014). Abusing the Buddha: How the U.S. Army and Google co-opt mindfulness. Salon, 17.3.14
Williams, J.M.G. & Kabat-Zinn, J. (eds)(2013). Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins and Applications. Abingdon, Routledge
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