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Of the many reliable guides for living a mindful life, Ajahn Chah is hard to beat. He was a Thai Forest monk who was famous not only for his simple and direct approach but his training of several senior western meditation teachers. His tuition, alongside that of Thich Nhat Hanh’s, quietly exerts a grandfatherly influence on some of the more dynamic expressions of today’s secular mindfulness movement. A particular emphasis of Ajahn Chah’s teaching was how to be on more realistic and, therefore, better terms with life.
Now that ‘mindfulness’ is firmly established in our cultural lexicon, a pattern has become clear in how the broadcast media engages with this most mutable of concepts. A recent and worthy example is Mindfulness Manual, a three-part documentary streaming on Netflix and the latest televisual treatment of mindfulness following the inane Headspace Guide to Meditation and the awful Mindful Escapes. The bar may be low and Mindfulness Manual might even have elevated it slightly, but this programme rarely deviates from the same tired templates the media is keen to exploit. If you are considering watching it, here is a brief dissection that might give you pause for thought.
The benefits of a healthy mindfulness practice are numerous and well-attested, but not easy to put into words. Practitioners, when asked, tend to use indefinite descriptors like feeling more alert and aware, or being more attuned and open-hearted. This is because gains are subtle – so much so that that we aren’t necessarily conscious of them. This is true for one of the more profound benefits: the ability to decide a wise course of action by predicting its effect.
Anxiety is a common reason for people to be drawn to mindfulness practice. Anxiety has many forms and manifestations, but delving deeper into the subjective experience of it is an obvious place to begin. Mindfulness meets anxiety in an intimate encounter on two fronts: it seeks to know the direct experience of anxiety and all the inner reactions to it. Mindfulness opens up the gap between the raw physicality of anxiety and the mental patterning, conditioned through past events, it precipitates. Attuning to anxiety in this way means a new relationship with it becomes possible.
In 2013, when the mindfulness programme at the Palace of Westminster was established, its architects brimmed with hope and expectation. A radical transformation of politics was envisaged, with the UK at the heart of a family of mindful nations. Two years later, rhetoric undimmed, the Mindful Nation UK report gushed about pioneering a National Mental Health Service “to support human flourishing and thereby the prosperity of the country.” Not much evidence of any of that, is there? The gift to the nation turned out to be a decade’s worth of tame self-management programmes that have barely dented the status quo.
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September 2024
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