Zen teachers flew West. Maharishi Yogi taught the Beatles and Krishnamurti “maintain[ed] that Truth is a pathless land.” Exposed to a melting pot of Eastern philosophies and hippy culture, the young molecular biologist, Jon Kabat-Zinn, came up with an eight-week meditation course to manage chronic pain and the stress of living with chronic illness. To avoid any obvious Buddhist references, he called his course Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and so gave mindfulness its modern meaning. Two decades later, clinical psychologists tested a theory that mindfulness meditation could prevent depression and, success in clinical trials, made MBCT (Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy) a talking pill available on the NHS. Combined with new insights from brain science and rising awareness of mental health, mindfulness caught the public imagination as a stress-busting tool, a performance enhancing brain-training and the self-help craze of The Now.
We live in stories created from past experiences, which merge with perception of what is actually taking place. We are selective with the truth. We ignore information that conflicts with how we see things. Most of the time, we have no idea that what is going on in our minds is not reality. Our sense of self gets tangled up with our beliefs. We get trapped in patterns of thoughts, emotions and behaviour. Anything that conflicts with our views becomes a personal threat. We may not like it but things do change and, when they do, we need to adapt.
Reduced to its most simple elements, mindfulness meditation involves focusing attention on body-based sensations and developing awareness of body-based experience; as it happens from moment-to-moment. When the mind wanders and becomes absorbed in thinking, the task is simply to wake up and return attention to sensations e.g. in mindfulness of breath, sensations of breathing.
With practice, mindfulness meditation gives a person a chance to put down the story of “who I am” and what is happening and allow the mind and body to settle. It diffuses the feedback between the running commentary in our heads and the stress of relentless striving to bring us back to our senses. Thoughts become part of experience instead of reality itself. We notice what is new. It becomes easier to see things from different perspectives, move on and adapt as things change.
This makes it all sound very simple in principle but it’s often not so easy in practice; at least to start with. Like anything, leaning to meditate takes effort and, what’s more, because it forces us to leave so much behind, some part of us may protest and naturally we will resist. Most people will try for a few minutes and get agitated, frustrated or bored when they discover the mind has a will of its own. Some will try harder and end up becoming more tense. Some will fall asleep.
Buying a gym membership is easy but getting fit is another matter altogether. There are obstacles to developing an exercise routine as much as there are obstacles to learning mindfulness meditation. It takes intention. Motivation comes from wanting benefits it will bring. Making it as easy as possible to get to the gym will help.
If you want to run a marathon your training programme will build up running distances incrementally over several months. Whatever you do, you need to take one step at a time; develop competence and confidence at each stage before taking on the next step. If you over-extend yourself too soon you are likely to pick up an injury.
Mindfulness meditation is no different to physical exercise in many respects but people do do crazy things. Thousands of people have gone on intensive retreats, where people sit for ten hours a day for ten days with no talking and no eye contact. Why you may ask? Some do it because they believe it will make them enlightened. Perhaps some do it just to prove that they can but whatever the reason, it is hardly surprising that some experience severe psychological damage as a result.
Clearly mindfulness training for staff would never be offered as a means of attaining enlightenment and intensive retreats would not be the most appropriate format for the workplace but what about evidence-based therapeutic courses like MBSR and MBCT? Emergency doctor, Daniel Ingram, who runs and online meditation forum with 5,000 members, said in an interview with reporter Jolyon Jenkins on a Radio 4 programme, 16th March, 2016:
“It’s not just people who are going on long intensive meditation retreats… I get all kinds of calls from people who said, I just did a Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Course and all of a sudden I’m having these crazy experiences.”
These courses have been signficantly influenced by the thinking behind intensive ten-day retreats but the format has been adapted to eight weekly classes of two or two and a half hours. Participants are also asked to follow guided meditations of about forty minutes each day between classes and there’s a silent day of meditation towards the end of the course. They are designed to reduce stress, anxiety and prevent depression and are intended to stop people over-thinking, worrying and ruminating; learning to let go of questions and answers and just accept things as they are. Not much is explained and discussion is discouraged. It’s learning to feel what is going on rather than think about what’s going on in relatively long periods of guided meditation.
The way mindfulness is taught in therapeutic courses fits a psychological theory of mental illness or psychosomatically generated pain. Participants are motivated by their belief that the course will free them from their suffering. This is a powerful incentive to follow instructions without question and, as not thinking is part of the therapeutic process, it might not be effective if there was more explanation and less time learning acceptance.
Therapy has given mindfulness meditation a scientific foundation and has fed the mindfulness zeitgeist, however, very little work has been done to test different formats or understand what is actively having a benefit. Is it the silent meditation? Is it learning not to think? Is it the motivation to get well? Is it just about joining a group? Is it learning about how the mind works? Once tested and found to be effective, therapeutic courses, have be faithfully reproduced to ensure the same benefits when they are rolled out as treatment but no-one really knows how all the ingredients that make up a course interact benefiting participants.
Workplace mindfulness training may be about managing stress but it can also focus on leadership, decision-making, creativity, problem solving, relationship management, team-working, values and organisational change. Structure and pedagogy for the workplace courses must fit objectives relevant to the workplace and workplace culture. Courses, class lengths and guided meditations need to be as short as possible and delivered as training rather than therapy. A trainer must explain the why and the how before delegates apply learning.
A study on one short workplace programme, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2012, with staff at Dow Chemicals estimated an increase in productivity due to reduced burnout of 20%. On the basis of average salaries, this represented a cost saving of up to £22,580 per employer per year. In fact, several studies on short workplace courses have found that they may be as effective as therapeutic programmes. Could short workplace programmes be more efficient than what are effectively prototype mindfulness programmes designed as therapy as well a reduce the risk of crazy experiences?
By Mark Leonard
About the author:
Mark Leonard helped to establish the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, where he trained to teach Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which he adapted to a workplace training before working with Mindfulness4Change.
His chapter, Making Mindfulness Meaningful and Accessible, is included in Mindfulness in the Workplace: An Evidence-based Approach to Improving Wellbeing and Maximising Performance, edited by Margaret Chapman-Clarke, Kogan Page, May 2016.
There is a free online “Make a Change” mindfulness course available on www.mindfulness4change.com
