29 Sep 2019

The problem with mindfulness

From Sunday Morning, 11:25 am on 29 September 2019

Having been brought up in a Buddhist household, New Zealand-raised Cambridge University graduate student Sahanika Ratnayake practised mindfulness and continues to do so to this day. But she has her reservations.

Mindfulness is the ability to be fully present - aware of our thoughts and feelings - in the moment and to not be overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

Furthermore, the Mental Health Foundation says research suggests that when we intentionally practise being mindful, we feel less stressed, anxious and depressed, and more balanced and in tune with what is happening inside and outside of our bodies.

However, Ratnayake questioned aspects of modern mindfulness in a piece she wrote for the journal Aeon. She says she can't stomach the modern rhetoric that surrounds it and the general lack of awareness about the movement's deep historical roots.

Young woman meditating with her eyes closed, practicing Yoga with hands in prayer position.

Photo: 123RF

“It’s full of these just completely overblown claims about how it can help you with anything and everything, and [as if] it’s the sort of thing you can slot into anyone’s life," Ratnayake told Jim Mora.

“It’s not that it’s not helpful, and I think it’s very good at some of the things that it promises to do like alleviating stress - the data one that seems pretty solid - but all these claims about it being able to help you become more creative, or understanding your true self, has gotten strangely very disproportionate to what I think it’s able to do.”

She says she’s had her own experience with the downside of mindfulness while studying for her Masters degree at the University of Cambridge.

“They ran this long-term study, so they were checking the effects of mindfulness on the stress of students and basically everyone I knew was involved, and even if you weren’t taking part in this study there were just so many mindfulness courses anyway.

“So I’d gone from doing mindfulness exercises, just dabbling in it, to doing it in an everyday or a couple of times a week way.”

On the one hand, she says she did feel calmer, but then she became troubled by a cluster of emotions she felt she couldn’t recognise.

“And slowly, I started to feel really just disconnected from myself, especially from my thoughts and feelings and I had a lot of trouble understanding, going ‘why do I think this? Why do I feel the way I do?’

“I felt like someone had shoved some really strange ideas into my head and I didn’t really think those things, but it was affecting how I was thinking about myself.”

As a result, for some people even the casual or ‘shallow’ practice of mindfulness may be disturbing in that it tends to negate the self. But Ratnayake acknowledges that those effects may not necessarily be true for everyone.

The problem with modern mindfulness, she says, is that it’s been taken out of its historical context and treated as a one-size-fits-all response for everyone – regardless of background, beliefs or values.

“I think once you see the historical story you can see what these practices were used for once upon a time and even though they’ve tried to extricate it from a historical context, you can’t really shed context that easily.

“It’s pitched as this totally innocuous thing that has no historical roots but actually it’s got deep historical roots in Buddhist theory, and Buddhist meditation practices, all of which are kind of associated with this particular idea of the self.

“And it’s actually quite a radical idea of the self where, across all the Buddhist schools, there’s this understanding that there’s not actually such a thing as the self, and insofar as you think there is you’re just labouring under a delusion.

“So the whole process of becoming enlightened and understanding Buddhist philosophy is supposed to lead you away from this idea that there is a self, and that you should stop being attached to that self.”

Another worry she has is that modern mindfulness may potentially result in people shoving reality aside and ignore sources of anxiety and stress that need to be addressed.

“If you were just told to watch these feelings or critical thoughts arise and you just do nothing but watch them arise and pass away in this kind of drifting away sense, you don’t really take the opportunity to interrogate why they’re arising in the first place,” Ratnayake says.

“Because the claims of mindfulness are so overblown, it’s being sold as ‘this is the only thing you have to do’ - you don’t have to do any further deliberation on top of that, you don’t have to probe why you keep feeling bad in the first place.”

Those who practice it routinely may potentially end up in a pitfall where they aren’t sure which thoughts or emotions to take seriously, like she experienced, Ratnayake says.

“And you can see how over time, because you can’t figure out why you feel the way you do, there’s no further meaning beyond just staring at the thought.”

After writing her piece for Aeon, she’s had varied and polarised reactions. She says some wrote to her relating to her experience and were able to make more sense of it through her piece, and some therapists told her they’ve had reservations about the practice for a while but haven’t had a chance to speak up because they felt shut down.

Meanwhile, those who are more pro-mindfulness have felt her piece was an attack, she says, but she doesn’t see it that way.

“I think I’m not saying anything that negative, I think I’m offering a different and potentially historical perspective on mindfulness that should make people think a little more.”

Ratnayake doesn’t condemn the practice but is encouraging people to be wary and to use it as a casual technique.

“I think it would be best if you thought of it as a tool, as part of a broad array of how you make sense of your life, and what you should be doing with it.

“We shouldn’t kind of equate it with every kind of engagement that we have with ourselves, we shouldn’t think ‘okay, I’ve done my mindfulness, I don’t really need to think any more about this or why I feel this way’ it shouldn’t be a replacement for that kind of deliberation.

“If people feel very overwhelmed by their emotions or something I think it would be a very helpful tool to step away from [those feelings] for a little while, but this thing where you’re encouraged to practice it every day and people see it as this cure-all for all their life problems that really is very troubling.”