Mindfulness seems to be everywhere these days: A Google search for the term “mindfulness” in January 2022 produced nearly 3 billion hits. The practice is now offered routinely in workplaces, schools, psychologists’ offices, and hospitals across the country.
Much of the public enthusiasm for mindfulness stems from its reputation for reducing stress, but scholars and researchers who study mindfulness, and the Buddhist tradition itself, paint a more complicated picture than the mainstream media paints.
The medicalization of meditation
Mindfulness originates from the Buddhist practice of anapana sati, which means “awareness of the breath” in Sanskrit. Buddhist historian Eric Brown traces the modern popularity of meditation back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries in colonial Burma (now Myanmar), when meditation, previously practiced almost exclusively within monasteries, was introduced to the general public in a simplified form that was easier to learn.
The gradual spread of meditation from those times to the present is a surprisingly complicated story.
In the United States, meditation began to be practiced by various spiritual communities in the early 19th century, was adopted by professional psychotherapists in the early 20th century, and by the 21st century had become a mass marketing phenomenon promoted by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The process of translating Buddhist meditation practice across cultural boundaries has led to significant changes in that practice. Contemporary meditation may have different goals and priorities than traditional Buddhist meditation. It tends to focus on stress reduction, mental health, and tangible benefits in everyday life, rather than spiritual development, liberation, and enlightenment.
A pivotal moment in this transformation was the creation of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. This stress-reduction program introduced a standardized way of teaching patients to meditate, allowing scientists to more rigorously measure the health benefits.
Research into this new kind of “medicalized” mindfulness has only begun to gain momentum over the past two decades: the National Library of Medicine’s online database now lists more than 21,000 research articles on mindfulness, which is 2.5 times the number of articles published on yoga, tai chi, and reiki combined.
In a recent book, I trace the global history of Buddhism’s many contributions to medical development over the past 2,400 years or so. The Buddhist tradition recommends countless meditation practices, herbal remedies, dietary advice, and ways of syncing the human body with the environment and the seasons, all of which have a bearing on healing.
These ideas and practices have had a major impact not only within Buddhist communities in the U.S. but also around the world. These interventions have been particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example through the medical philanthropy of major international Buddhist organizations and health advice from prominent monks such as the Dalai Lama.
Buddhism has always had much to say about health, but perhaps its most important contribution is the teaching that our physical and mental health are intricately intertwined, not only with each other but with the health and vitality of all living beings.
Medicalized meditation has now become a self-help product that generates more than $1 billion a year in revenue, with some critics calling it “mcmindfulness.” But when we place mindfulness back in its Buddhist ethical context, we find that simply meditating is not enough to reduce stress or deal more effectively with the challenges of the modern world.
As I argue in my recent book, Buddhist ethics ask us to lift our eyes from our meditation cushions and look beyond ourselves. Buddhism asks us to understand the interconnectedness of all things and how our actions and choices affect our lives, our society, and our environment. Even in healing ourselves, the emphasis is always on being agents of compassion, healing, and well-being for the whole.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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