Mindfulness is everywhere these days. We had the Year of Mindful Living and we’ve entered the age of the Mindful Revolution. My local burger joint has a mindful menu; Whole Foods sells Mindful Mayo.
Mindfulness is expanding from clinical and therapeutic settings and entering classrooms and boardrooms, congressional offices, and military bases. Each day, scientific research confirms the physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits of a mindfulness practice.
The more ubiquitous mindfulness becomes, the more people begin to ask questions about it. And let me just say for the record, I think both of those are good things. I truly believe mindfulness has the power to transform our lives and our world. And I absolutely believe that questioning is a good thing — knowledge is power!
Recently, parents of students in a Georgia elementary school complained about the “far-east mystical religion” of yoga, asserting that the school was “indoctrinating” children in mindfulness. (The school is still allowed to teach yoga, but can no longer use the phrase Namaste).*
Clearly, there are some things that need clearing up! (For instance, the above-referenced article described mindfulness as a technique for “clearing the mind.” Mindfulness is simply observing the mind — whether the weather inside is cloudy and stormy or clear and sunny!)
So let’s address the big question…
Is mindfulness a religion?
Mindfulness can be defined in many ways — the definition I like is simple: compassionate and intentional awareness. Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention — to thoughts, physical sensations, and the environment — without constantly feeling the need to judge what’s happening or to make it other than it is. To cultivate this present moment awareness, we pay attention on purpose, with an attitude of kindness to ourselves and others.
Words like “meditation” and even “mindfulness” may make us think of berobed hippies or esoteric practices conducted in the mountaintops of Tibet, but mindfulness can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths before an important meeting, or bringing our full awareness to a moment spent with our children. Cultivating this compassionate and purposeful awareness allows us to be present for the important people in our lives, as our kind attention is the most loving gift we can offer.
Mindfulness is a way of being in the world. It is being present and available. It is a fundamental human capacity. You’ve probably experienced it before, whether you’ve labeled it as such or not. Think of a time when you were so engaged in an activity — creating a work of art, playing a sport, reading a good book — that your entire being focused on that one activity. That heightened state of attention is mindfulness.
At a Mindful Schools retreat, program director Megan Cowan described mindfulness as “a human ability, that, when it is lacking, makes life more unbearable.” Mindfulness is a way of meeting our experience with the presence of mind to respond skillfully to life’s challenges, rather than reacting based on intense emotions.
Mindfulness teaches us an awareness of the habits of our minds and allows us to catch ourselves in negative patterns of rumination. We may see that a good deal of our suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves about the events in our lives, rather than from the events themselves. This human practice of compassionate and intentional awareness requires no dogmatic or spiritual beliefs.
But doesn’t mindfulness have religious origins?
Mindfulness has its origins in contemplative practices that go back thousands of years, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Stoicism. Some of these are religious traditions, and some are not.
Virtually every spiritual tradition has practices for mindful contemplation and silence, and direct awareness of experience, such as Catholic centering prayer, Buddhist meditation, the Jewish Shabbat, or Sufi mysticism. Many secular philosophies incorporate these teachings as well. The Roman Stoic philosophers Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius advocated an approach to life that today we might label as mindfulness.
And when it comes to compassion, well, there’s a reason they call it The Golden Rule. No tradition has a monopoly on empathy and love and kindness. Educator Daniel Rechtschaffen sums it up this way: “Mindfulness does not belong to Christianity, Buddhism, or Taoism, just as the breath we inhale and exhale does not belong to any one of us.”
The fact that so many of our traditions — religious and secular, spiritual and philosophical — come back to these fundamental practices of compassion and awareness suggests that mindfulness is simply part of the human experience.
As Daniel Rechtschaffen writes, “Everywhere human beings have lived, we have needed to cultivate attention; whether it was for hunting, fashioning tools or clothes, or intellectual pursuits. We have always needed compassion to live in harmony and enjoy our lives.”
Seen in this light, mindfulness is an essential and necessary component of being human, just as gravity is an essential and necessary component of the universe. The Buddha did not create mindfulness, Jesus did not create compassion, and Newton did not create gravity. These men simply gave us the language to describe why people all over the world can smile at their neighbors and cultivate attention without floating up into space, whether they are Buddhist or Christian or English or German.
The mindfulness that is taught today in hospitals, clinics, schools, military bases, and corporations is based primarily on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn (a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center) in the late 1970s. He created MBSR to treat patients who suffered from chronic pain, and hadn’t responded to traditional treatments.
Kabat-Zinn developed MBSR based on his knowledge of meditation and yoga, but he stripped them entirely of their metaphysical and spiritual components. Most amazingly, he found that simply teaching people meditation and mindfulness helped relieve their physical pain!
MBSR courses today (there are thousands of them across the US) teach basic meditation practices such as body scans and breath awareness, as well as gentle yoga and movement exercises. They are completely secular — they are essentially teaching life skills for coping with the human experience.
Mindfulness has become a core component of many mental health therapies today, including Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Corporations like Google and General Mills teach mindfulness classes to their employees, and incorporate meditation into the workday.
Many people around the world — Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and atheist — have begun to practice mindfulness simply as a way to live happier lives. (ABC news anchor Dan Harris suggests mindfulness can make you 10% Happier). In A Mindful Nation, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan writes, “Mindfulness itself is not a religion. Practicing it does not require giving up religious faith, or adopting a ‘foreign’ faith, or becoming religious if you are not so inclined.”
But CAN mindfulness be a spiritual practice?
Yes, if you choose to make it so. And for that matter, you can make a spiritual practice of gardening and walking and singing and dancing and reading poetry and washing the dishes.
Does it HAVE to be a spiritual practice?
No.
I’ll leave you with the following analogy:
Yoga originated as a practice in the Indian traditions that became part of Hinduism. You can go to yoga classes today that are very woo-woo, with chanting and om-ing, and an instructor who talks about finding your heart center and connecting to the ground of being and the divine within. Or you can go to a yoga class at your local gym where they make you use weights and do cardio intervals and play hip-hop music and you sweat and drip all over your mat during Down Dog.
Sometimes a workout is just a workout.
Silence can just be silence, attention can just be attention.
It will all work out.
* Namaste, traditionally used as a greeting or at the end of a yoga class, is a Sanskrit phrase often translated as “The divine in me bows to the divine in you.” As such, I find it understandable to not allow its usage in public school.
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