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Mindfulness” Now

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Mindfulness” Now Chapter 2 A History Exercise to Locate “Mindfulness” Now The practice of mindfulness is an experience that from a certain perspective is inexpressible. You gain a tacit knowledge of it that is yours alone; you “know more than [you] can tell,” as Michael Polanyi (1966) phrases it. Yet, from a different perspective, the practice is also a product of all the communications that you have around your experience. Your explicit knowledge, what you can tell, is co-created in relationship with all of those with whom you share your experience now or in the future, from your mindfulness teachers and fellow students, to your colleagues and supervisors in working with mindfulness-based interventions, to the clients or patients that you teach. This co-creation takes place most obviously in verbal language. You learn from a talk or a book by a teacher, a conversation with a colleague, or a dialog with a client. But the nonverbal dimensions are also important. There is much to be learned from a teacher’s posture, gestures, tone of voice, and rate of speech, or from the way a colleague meets your eyes, or from the quality of the pause before a supervisor responds in a tense moment. So, within such relationships, within your own small community, there is an evolving discourse, through which you learn to better understand and, thereby, better express your tacit knowledge of mindfulness practice. Further, it is within such a community and its discourse that you are learning, or will learn, to teach mindfulness as a professional. The small community, even in an isolated place, is meaningfully connected in its discourse to larger communities of discourse and practice. For example, an MBSR program at a local hospital is connected to the MBSR community and its founders and senior teachers through ongoing personal relationships supported by writings, recordings, retreats, trainings, and conferences. There is a further connection to the discourse of all the mindfulness-based interventions, which are increasingly associated (e.g., Baer, 2006; Didonna, 2009; Hayes et al., 2004). From there, it is anticipated that teachers and practitioners make connections as well to the valuable insights and long history of mindfulness and acceptance within the psychodynamic, humanistic, and experiential psychotherapies. Last, but perhaps most important, connections may be made even further out into the many other cultures of spiritual practice. In the current discourse of mindfulness-based interventions, these cul- tures are predominantly Asian in origin, specifically certain forms of Buddhism D. McCown et al., Teaching Mindfulness: A Practical Guide 31 for Clinicians and Educators, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-09484-7_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 32 2 A History Exercise to Locate “Mindfulness” Now that have become popular in the West. It should be remembered that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Jainism, and Sufism could be easily connected as well, as is evident in Linehan’s work and in the work of many individual teachers within the interventions. To teach effectively, it serves well to have awareness of the history, language, images, metaphors, and assumptions of the current discourse of mindfulness. That is the reason for this chapter. We present here a sketch of how the context in which you are learning to practice and teach has been shaped historically by a rapproche- ment of Western and Eastern philosophical, religious, medical, and psychological thought over the past two centuries. Given space limitations and our very prag- matic intentions, what follows is not meant as an exhaustive critical analysis. Rather, it serves two parallel purposes. First, it provides essential background for the attempt at defining mindfulness that occupies in Chapter 3. Second, it acts as an appreciation of how our Western culture, particularly in the United States, got to this exciting moment in history, and offers some jumping-off points for deeper exploration of this discourse within which you are teaching, or will teach, as a professional. Early Encounters It is possible to date a European intellectual connection to Eastern spiritual thought and practice as early as the ancient Greek histories of Herodotus, Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign in 327–325 BCE (Hodder, 1993), or, to Petrarch’s mention of Hindu ascetics in his Life of Solitude, written during 1345–1347 (Versluis, 1993). A more substantive start, however, would be 1784, which marks the founding by British scholars and magistrates of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, from which quickly flowed first translations of Hindu scrip- tures directly from Sanskrit texts into English. Sir William Jones was the preemi- nent member of the group. His tireless work included translations of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala (1789), Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (1792), and the influential Insitutes of Hindu Law (1794). His early tutor in Sanskrit, Charles Wilkins, holds the distinc- tion of making the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). In 1788, the group founded a journal, Asiatik Researches, widely circulated among the intel- ligentsia, including the second U.S. President John Adams, an enthusiastic sub- scriber (Hodder, 1993; Versluis, 1993). The effect of this flow of scholarly and objective information about Indian culture and religion began a profound shift in Europe’s view of the East: “from the earlier presupposition of the East as barba- rous and despotic, to a vision of an exotic and highly civilized world in its own right” (Versluis, 1993, p. 18). The new language, ideas, images, and narratives embedded in such texts imme- diately touched something in poets, philosophers, and artists, particularly in England and Germany — powerful influences on the development of American Early Encounters 33 culture. In England, the Romantics embraced all things “Oriental” as a celebration of the irrational and exotic. Their use of the scriptures, stories, lyrics, and images becoming ever more available to them from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam was not discrete, but rather an amalgam. Their drive was not for a practi- cal use of these new elements of discourse in expressing some tacit knowledge heretofore inexpressible; to the contrary, as Versluis (1993) notes, “their Orientalism was not serious but rather a matter of exotic settings for poems” (p. 29). The later confounding of international relations by “Orientalism” (Edward Said) was an unforeseen serious consequence. Herder, Goethe, and the Romantics who followed them in Germany found “Oriental” thought a refreshing alternative to the stifling rationality (and then nationality) of their time. Yet, again, their usage of the new material available was not entirely pragmatic. Their philosophical and poetic insights could have been expressed in the preexisting discourse of Christian mysti- cism, Neo-Platonism, and Hermeticism and the charismatic movement. What the use of Oriental religious discourse by a poet of spiritual power such as Novalis (Freidrich von Hardenberg) did do was to suggest that the full range of Eastern and Western religious expression pointed to a Transcendent reality, and that all — in essence — offered truth (Versluis, 1993). It is this last point that brings us to America, to the Transcendentalists, and, at last, the pragmatic use of the Eastern discourses to better understand and express a personal tacit knowledge. In writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the utopian vision of the Transcendentalist Old Concord Farm and other communi- ties, the influence of Eastern thought is evident (Brooks, 1936; Versluis, 1993; Hodder, 1993). Through the Dial, their journal that did much to shape American Transcendentalism, they brought out translations of Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian texts, and of the Sufi poets, such as Hafiz, Rumi, and Saadi. In these “transcendentalations” a new, rich brew began to find ways to give voice to tacit experience. It is possible to see both Emerson and Thoreau as both natural (and learned?) contemplatives whose entwined literary and spiritual lives reflect experiences that demanded a larger discourse than the West provided for more explicit understand- ing and more elaborated communication. Emerson’s early (1836) essay, “Nature,” written before his deep engagement with Eastern thought, contains a description of such an experience: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear I think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and a sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye- ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 34 2 A History Exercise to Locate “Mindfulness” Now As Emerson began reading the amalgam of Oriental writings in earnest, which consumed him for the rest of his life, his enterprise became the essentialization (distillation) and integration of the insights that supported his experience and vision on both a personal and a cultural scale. Versluis notes that, “For Emerson… the significance of Asian religions — of all human history — consists of assimilation into the present, into this individual here and now” (1993, p. 63). He was reading and feeling and thinking his way towards a universal, literally unitarian religion.
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