Mindfulness has huge health potential but McMindfulness i...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/20/mind...

Mindfulness has huge health potential

but McMindfulness is no panacea
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Britains robust cross-party parliamentary report on the benefits of mindfulness is a
model to legislators across the developed world: this way of being is no quick fix
Tuesday 20 October 2015 09.06BST

Mindfulness is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, supported by increasingly

rigorous scientic research, and driven in part by a longing for new practices that
might help us to better apprehend and solve the challenges that threaten our health.
This week a landmark British report will lay out recommendations for the provision of
mindfulness across many public policy areas. Mindful Nation UK, based on evidence
presented to an all-party group of the UK parliament, carries enormous promise for
health policy in Britain and the wider world.
The World Health Organisation has warned that mental ill-health will be the biggest
burden of disease in developed countries by 2030. We urgently need new approaches
to tackling this epidemic, and crucially more research to determine the ecacy of
mindfulness as a prevention strategy. Already, mindfulness training has been shown
to reduce the risk of relapse of recurrent depression by one third. A recent
meta-analysis of 209 studies concluded that mindfulness-based interventions
showed large and clinically signicant eects in treating anxiety and depression
eects, crucially, that were maintained through follow-up. These are promising
ndings for a condition for which there are still only limited treatments. The need to
both deepen our understanding of how mindfulness might eect these positive
outcomes, as well as to learn how it might help other conditions is expressed by a call
for more investment in high calibre research.
Mindfulness is often misunderstood so let us be clear about what we are
encouraging.
In essence, mindfulness being about attention, awareness, relationality, and caring
is a universal human capacity akin to our capacity for language acquisition. It is a way
of being in wise and purposeful relationship with ones experience, both inwardly and
outwardly, with oneself and with others. Thus there is an intrinsic social dimension to
its cultivation as well. It usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with
aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.

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These include our experience of the present moment, our own bodies, our thoughts
and emotions, and above all, our tacit and constraining assumptions and our highly
conditioned habits of mind and behaviour, both as individuals and in society at large.
While the most systematic and comprehensive articulation of mindfulness stems
from the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is not a catechism, an ideology, a belief
system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion, or a philosophy. It is best
described as a way of being. There are many dierent ways to cultivate it wisely
and eectively through practice. Basically when we are talking about mindfulness,
we are talking about awareness pure awareness. It is an innate human capacity that
is dierent from thinking but wholly complementary to it.
It is also bigger than thinking, because any thought can be held in awareness, and
thus looked at, known, and understood. Awareness in its purest form thus has the
potential to add value and new degrees of freedom to living life fully and wisely and
thus, to making wiser and healthier, more compassionate and altruistic choices.
In the past 40 years mindfulness in various forms has found its way into the
mainstream of medicine, health care, and psychology, where it has been broadly
applied and continues to be extensively studied through clinical research and
neuroscience. More recently it has also entered the mainstream of education,
business, the legal profession, government, military training (in the USA), the
criminal justice system, and more. The ndings of Mindful Nation UK suggest that
mindfulness has the capacity to address some of the larger challenges and
opportunities to be found in the domains of health, education, the workplace, and
the criminal justice system, by tapping into interior resources we all possess but that
are mostly underdeveloped.
Many challenges lie ahead. As critics are correct to point out, a real understanding of
the subtlety of mindfulness is required if it is to be taught eectively: it can never be a
quick x. Some have expressed concerns that a sort of supercial McMindfulness is
taking over which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and
traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and divorces it from its profoundly
transformative potential. While this is far from the norm in my experience, these
voices argue that for certain opportunistic elements, mindfulness has become a
business that can only disappoint the vulnerable consumers who look to it as a
panacea.
To address this, funding is necessary to bring a high-quality evidence base into step
with widespread popularity, to establish and disseminate best practice and train
teachers, and to identify and properly support those most in need of mindfulness in
accessing appropriate programmes. Governments and public bodies have a crucial
role to play in improving access to the best evidence-based courses, supporting the
development of teacher training and continuing to raise the bar for high-quality
research.
The Mindfulness all-party parliamentary group and its Mindful Nation UK inquiry has
heard evidence from leading scientists, practitioners, commissioners of services and

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policymakers, and makes rigorous, cost-eective suggestions for developing the

potential of mindfulness. As such, the UK may be taken as a model by legislators and
experts to establish similar programmes of inquiry in other countries.
If the unique genesis of the Mindful Nation UK report as a cross-party collaborative
eort is recognised, and its forward-looking recommendations for further research
and implementation acted on by government and other agencies, there is no question
in my mind that the repercussions and ramications of this report in the UK will be
profoundly benecial. Indeed, they will be addressing some of the most pressing
problems of society at their very root at the level of the human mind and heart.
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Topics
Mindfulness
Mental health
Health
Health & wellbeing
Health policy
Public services policy

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