Reflections on mindfulness

Picture by Michel Le Photographe from Morlaix Ballet Camp - when dancing together in the corps de ballet, you also need continued mindfulness of the body to ensure you move together as one team.

 It is the end of the year, and naturally a time to reflect, so I decided to take up blogging again, also to process how much happened this past year. Meanwhile, I still have a few slogans to go with the #lojongchallege, so let's see how far I will get. I certainly won't finish before the end of the year, but maybe I can make some headway in the first week, when things are still a bit more slow.

The next slogan on the list is slogan 47, which says "keep the three inseparable". With "the three", the slogan refers to body, speech, and mind, which are the three components of a person with which they can act in the world. According to Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche in his book Intelligent Heart, the idea is that we should keep these three--body, speech and mind--inseparable from mindfulness. It is an invitation to remain mindful of whatever actions we commit with our body, speech and mind. I think in the West, a kind of simplistic notion of mindfulness has emerged which is only about paying attention. In that notion very often mindfulness is also equated with doing things very slowly. Surely slowing down is good, especially for a busy person like me, but sometimes this is not practical. Here, instead, mindfulness refers to the ethical dimension: remain vigilant of the effects of your body, speech and mind. This sense of mindfulness is therefore not so much self-focused, and instead focuses on awareness of the impact of your actions on others. Funnily enough, I think this often can be quite liberating, because if you only focus on yourself, it can lead to so much hope and fear.

As I was running today, I was thinking about what I accomplished in the past year, and whether that was what I set out to do. I honestly could not really remember specific goals I set myself at the beginning of the year, short of possibly achieving promotion so associate professor. I sadly failed at that one. Nevertheless, I am actually quite happy at things I achieved, but mostly those things involve making an impact on those around me. I was happy with having been nominated for teacher of the year in our AI programme because of my concern for mental health of the students. I was happy that some of my students' papers were published, PhDs were finished, or almost-finished, students got jobs, and I was able to share my knowledge in a series of workshops for students in India. I think for me those mean more than titles or prestige, because they are the things that someone in the end may remember. Of course I still do my best to get grants, and to publish and all those things, but this is not the most important. The most important to me is being aware of the impact of all small actions of my body, speech and mind on others. For related ideas, see the preprint my colleagues and I recently put out in which we call for more kindness in academia: preprint

Explorations of mind-wandering in Ljubljana

 Last week, I taught at the TECT (Training Embodied Critical Thinking) summer school, which this year took place in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Just like last year's summer school in Iceland, it was a treat to be there. What is cool about this summer school is that it is a very interdisciplinary place where students with backgrounds ranging from architecture and design to philosophy to neuroscience to artificial intelligence get together to investigate the mind and experience. This investigation is very much grounded in the body and uses techniques such as microphenomenology, thinking at the edge, and exploring the mind through meditation.

During the summer school, I was co-teaching the track on meditation with colleagues Urban Kordes and Toma Strle, and we alternated periods of meditation with a sharing of experience during this meditation to reach a better understanding of mind-wandering. During this track, we started by practising meditation, before everyone introduced themselves, with the reasoning that by practising meditation together, you get to know each other much better than by just sharing your biography. This was proven to be indeed the case, because at the end of the week, the group naturally started to feel very connected to each other during the meditation practices, wanting to hold hands in their imagination.

Probably quite critical in this process was a mid-week excursion to explore some of the beautiful nature of Slovenia, where we wandered around in a park with beautiful caves, springs and forest. We practiced among other things a "depth walk", in which we walked around in the environment with a companion, and traced a path driven by paying attention to subtle internal cues, while at the same time we verbalized what we noticed. It is amazing how much more you notice when you walk like this! Suddenly becoming aware of angular shapes in the natural environment, the springy nature of the ground, or the play of the light. It was also very interesting to notice how this natural environment shifted our thinking patterns.

Now back to our meditation course, exploring mind-wandering in the environment of the city, we ended up with very deep discussions about what is mind-wandering, with probably the most fascinating moment being a "mind-wandering meditation", where we asked people to mind-wander, instead of meditating, and suddenly all the thoughts were gone! We also deeply went into questions of why we mind-wander, whether there is agency in mind-wandering, and how mind-wandering compares to daydreaming and other mental processes. One interesting insight that came was of the parallels between wandering the city, and wandering in our own mind in meditation, and how good that feels when we can simply wander in a non-sticky way, which is the true definition of mind-wandering according to Kalina Christoff and Zach Irving. Yet, it is not so easy to get there, but I think the practices we did during the summer school helped us to tune into that.

This brings me to the point of other practices we did during the summer school: apart from my teaching about mind-wandering and meditation, I also taught movement practices, in which we explored the body through different kinds of dance movement, to tune better into our bodies. Not only was that a great way to start a long day of discussions and thinking, but it also was so cool to bring my dance experience into work at an academic context.

In a way, the summer school was like a retreat, where I got to connect back to my embodied experience, ask big questions about my research and life in general. This is quite in line with the next #lojongchallenge slogan, number 43, which says "observe the two, even at the risk of your life". Basically the two refer here to commitments of the Buddhist teachings in general and the Lojong teachings in particular. In this case, for me the most important lesson is to not forget about the importance of and the power of meditation and tuning into experience, rather than being occupied with things that are visible from the outside, but do not lead to transformation. I myself find it particularly difficult to spend more time on meditation when I have an endless todo list (so this makes it great to have a summer school where you meditate for your job!). And yet, when I practise, I notice just how much sanity it yields, and what better way to study mind-wandering than to observe your own mind... 

Risky mindfulness business

Lojong slogan 36 is "Don't act with a twist." This slogan refers to misusing the practices that are intended to transform your mind. In today's world, there is quite some discussion about this point. Is meditation practice only used to feel less stressed, or even worse, to feel you are a good human being because you are meditating. Sometimes meditation is used to signal virtue, especially on social media. But, to put it in the words of John Dunne, the real signal of the meditation practices working is not how much you practise or what special experiences you have, but rather, whether you are less of a jerk.

I think that it is very easy when you are meditating, to think that that is the solution to everything, and that you are better than everyone else because you practise. Of course that runs completely counter to the idea of the meditation practice, which is to cultivate an open mind and humility. The challenge is to stay curious and open, and able to be with whatever arises. I think there are plenty opportunities for this in this time of COVID (not to mention the upcoming US elections!), during which there are so many strong opinions that often cause rifts in relationships. Is it possible to step away from your feeling that you know better and instead practise true curiosity into the thoughts and feelings of others, without being swept away by those. I find that when I manage to do that, there is often a lot more commonality with the other person, and often they then can become more open to solid arguments (and maybe you yourself change your views as well).

In addition, it is also very easy to get caught up in the idea that rather than being on your cushion, you should just help people. There is merit in sitting on your cushion and observing your mind, or practising these patterns of loving kindness and compassion, because otherwise your mind may be too disturbed when you meet difficult people or difficult emotions. I find one important case where this is very obvious that meditation (which I practise way too little) helps me to inhibit my immediate impulse to always do something and constantly look for new input. Instead it allows me to practise staying with what is, and repeatedly contemplating different courses of action. I often find that in the space afforded by the practice, new ideas or courses of action appear spontaneously. This not only makes me feel less stressed but also these responses may be a bit more thought-through and adaptive.

Finally, what are we to do to prevent ourselves from going off in meditation? Probably the most important to do is to not take yourself too seriously. So I am curious: how are you trying to make sure your mindfulness or meditation practice succeeds in making you less of a jerk, instead of going off the rails in self-absorption?

Connecting mindfulness (research) to societal action: a report from the Dutch Mindfulness Symposium

A few weeks ago, I attended the National Mindfulness Symposium organized by the Radboud Centre for Mindfulness. This is a yearly event in which researchers and mindfulness practitioners (mostly the latter) get together to discuss current topics in mindfulness interventions and research. Obviously this year's meeting was online.

The meeting started with a talk by Stephen Batchelor. He emphasized the need to not focus so much on mindfulness as a way to temporarily relax, but instead developing the tools to lead more flourishing, wise and compassionate lives. While I do not agree with him that Buddhism gets in the way of this, and needs to go back to its secular roots to do this, I still found he made some helpful points. He summarized the way to flourishing in terms of four tasks: (1) saying yes to whatever is going on ("embrace life"), (2) letting go of habitual reactive patterns, (3) stopping of reactivity so you can respond more wisely and (4) actualize a way of life. So the main point is to act without aweareness, and with "fearless engagement" as he put it. Those are definitely sensible points in my book, and critical to face the disasters of today's world, ranging from covid-19 to climate change. A good document summarising this can be found here.

Next up was Jamie Bristow, who also emphasised skilful action. According to him, the main reason mindfulness works is that it allows us to engage in intentional action. This is beautifully written up in a document by the Mindfulness Initiative. According to this document, mindfulness helps to develop three dimensions of agency: perception, understanding, and doing. This helps to face the crisis of this world, which is our collective inability to act in accord with the complexity of the world. This includes the ability to face uncomfortable truths, and deal with information overload. Our attention is so easily distracted by the big corporations that we just act habitually without thinking. Mindfulness helps us to reduce this doing mode and engage more in a reflective being mode in which we can perform more intentional action.

The last keynote was by Femke Merkx, a Buddhist teacher who has been engaging a lot with climate change. She reminded us that the compassion cultivated in Buddhism is not as much a difficult moral imperative but rather through the practice is an effortless gesture. So we have to start by cultivating our minds in order for compassionate action to become effortless, like the image of green tara. As Joanna Macy puts it: start by honouring your pain, then letting compassion arise, which allows you to see with new eyes, such that you can go forth, and finally engage with joy, which allows you to have more courage to feel the pain, and the cycle starts again. She finally mentioned being part of the Climate Tables, a series of conversations in which the pain of climate change is deeply faced, and from a space of compassion these issues are thought about to allow people to start to act from their intrinsic values.

In the afternoon, there were contributed symposia. I attended a symposium about the effect of mindfulness interventions. There was a lot of discussion about mindfulness for parents of children with ADHD. Corina Greven presented work in which the interpersonal mindfulness in parenting scale showed improvements after such an intervention. Eva Potharst showed how this scale correlated with several other self-report scales, including acceptance and emotional communication. Importantly, it also correlates with objective behaviour such as the amount of mother's gaze towards the child. Mira Cladder-Micus investigated MBCT for very chronic and treatment-resistant depression. The good news was that even in this group, depression was reduced after the intervention, although it did not completely go away. A final study that was presented was an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of MBCT interventions, by Annelieke van Velthoven. Sadly, the MBCT was not cost-effective compared to continuing anti-depressant medication.

In the last session of the afternoon, I organized a panel on the ethics of being a mindfulness researcher. How can we use the principles we learn in our mindfulness practice to deal with the ethical challenges and the competitiveness of the academic world? The panel started off with very personal stories by Anne Speckens and Katleen van der Gucht, who shared how it was challenging to follow their own path instead of going for the route of perceived success. We then went into small groups and discussed how it is sometimes challenging to practise generosity and kindness when faced with a pressure to compete and excel. One issue we discussed is how peer review can sometimes be a brutal exchange, rather than a process of constructive criticism. We can all do our parts to be a kind reviewer (instead of being =="reviewer 2"). Another thing that came up is the importance of reducing your own sense of self-importance and practise humilty: both as a person and about your scientific findings. This all requires a slow change of culture, but hopefully we can all do our part and make this world a better place.

Seeing the buddha in your chance encounters

Today my retreat finished and I am easing back into daily life. I already had my first interaction with a friend I randomly ran into in the marketplace. But in the end, the whole purpose of retreat is not to run from life, but rather to prepare to engage in life in a more productive way. This is why I felt it was quite a good idea to write these blogs while I was on retreat so I could think about how to interact with the world once I got back into it.

The 31st slogan of Lojong is "don't malign others." This is quite an obvious slogan: don't speak ill of people. As I mentioned quite a few times before on this blog, sometimes it feels good to take others down, so we can feel better about ourselves. But apart from the fact that this feeling good is only short-lived, in the end, it also does your relationship with the person you are talking with no good. After all, who likes to talk to someone who only complains about others?

Khandro Rinpoche also says that it's very easy to judge--it doesn't give the other space to make mistakes, to work with themselves. it may sound naive, but giving others the benefit of the doubt usually improves the quality of your interactions. If you assume others have good intentions then I find that often people feel that and proceed to interact with you in a more positive way than when you assume others' bad intentions. I find this relatively easy now but when I was bullied as a little kid, I always had the feeling that other kids were speaking bad about me, and this made me very anxious. So this habit is definitely shaped a lot by your experiences with other people. Now most people approach me positively I find it quite easy to do.

Saying hello to the door. Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

Yet, I don't think this means you can never criticize people. I actually sometimes have that tendency because I don't want to make other people angry. But that in itself doesn't help either because tensions are built and never spoken off. Or even worse, people who behave poorly and harm others get never any headwind and therefore step by step make their behaviour even worse because they think they can get away with it. So, just like all these slogans, I think they should be applied with care. Nevertheless, seeing things from the perspective that all people are inherently buddhas-to-be, and therefore inherently good, definitely makes the world a better place.

Playing the unpredictable in an uncertain post-COVID world

We are halfway in the #lojongchallenge! The 30th slogan is "don't be so predictable." This refers to our tendency to respond very habitually whenever we are challenged, mostly by feeling sorry for ourselves. Do you recognize this? I certainly do! In these days of COVID-19, this tends to happen for example when the internet breaks down just at a moment that an important meeting or teaching is happening (like yesterday). My natural reaction is to make a big drama out of that, which obviously won't make anyone feel better, not even myself.

More specifically it also refers to the case where someone causes you trouble. Our natural reaction is to respond nastily in response. In a way, this is also what society expects from us. But what if we don't follow that pattern? In a way, when someone causes you trouble, they hope you get annoyed, and if you don't, that not only surprises you but them as well, thereby breaking the chains of action and reaction that we call karma.

Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

Breaking this chain of karma is very significant because it helps us to break our habitual patterns of reactions. If you are able to do so, it feels so good because you have gained freedom! However, it is not so easy, so you have to start with small actions. Khandro Rinpoche for example suggests surprising yourself by being generous, or maybe try being patient. For example, right now it is quite hot. A natural reaction is to feel very sorry for myself it is so hot, and then to slump down in tiredness. But maybe I can also just feel the heat and enjoy it while it lasts (I mean, next week I am going to a sauna: even more heat, and then voluntarily ;-) ). 

The practice of meditation is also very much about not being predictable. Our predictable patterns are to indulge in thoughts, especially self-related thoughts, and forget about everything else. Meditation is instead an invitation to be curious: to watch your mind, to see where your awareness comes from, to explore just being, and just doing nothing, taking space. In our busy society that is almost a revolutionary act.

And maybe, when we are less predictable in how we respond to things, we can also respond better to an unpredictable world, which very much characterizes this COVID-19 situation, and which is probably one of the biggest challenges of it for most people. Maybe the attitude of playfulness towards our own reactions can also translate into a playfulness towards the daily surprises that COVID throws at us.

Dropping the self from the meditation

We're moving along quite nicely in the #LojongChallenge! Today I want to discuss slogan 29: "give up poisoned food." Of course it is never good to eat food with poison, but obviously here this is meant more metaphorically. The idea here is that when you practice, you do it not so that other people think you are an amazing person, but rather, for the benefit of others. This is not surprising, since the whole Lojong is pretty much about that. Nevertheless, it is important to keep examining your motivation in whatever you do.

Here I would like to focus a little more on the case of meditation, since I am currently doing a meditation retreat. In meditation too, it is attractive to want it to be a kind of quiet and peaceful state in which we feel good and feel like we are a great meditator. But of course, meditation isn't always like that! Often meditation is just like a big mess of turbulent thoughts that go all over the place. And many of these thoughts--in fact--are self-related. We know this from neuroscientific research: whenever people are left to their own devices, a brain network known as the default mode network turns on, which consists of a set of mostly midline areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex that are thought to be strongly involved in self-referential processes. And in my lab I have demonstrated that the moment people are prompted to think about themselves, they get distracted and do worse on cognitive tasks such as a memory task.

So what to do? One strategy I am playing around with right now is to focus on the process rather than the result. Just the fact that you sit down to practise is awesome. Sometimes the practice will feel good, sometimes it won't, but slowly you will make progress anyway. It is also said that it is better to leave your analysis and judgment of how the meditation went until afterwards, and to during the practice mostly focus on being relaxed and spacious. One quote of Sogyal Rinpoche that illustrates this well is "meditation is becoming naturally assimilated in it." It says that instead of working hard to do something, it is more about un-doing, and trusting that you will land in your buddha nature. What a beautiful and soothing idea in this stressful world!

Dancing into the new year

As in several previous years, I spent the new year's eve at a moving meditation retreat, this time somehow as one of its facilitators. The latter fact also filled me with quite a bit of trepidation because I definitely did not feel ready to do this. But of course that is a great thing to dance with as well, because the idea of moving meditation is to dance with your habits. So what is moving meditation? Why move during your meditation? Let me give a try explaining a little.

image from Aarhus--on the way to the retreat venue

Moving meditation is a form of meditation in which you don't sit still while meditating, but instead you a moving. Moving can take place individually, but also in a dyad, or in a larger group. Just like sitting meditation can move through phases from being focused on an object, to simply being aware of everything, to letting go of even the idea of meditation, so can moving meditation. If you pay attention to it, you will find that there is always movement in your body, and instead of remaining silent you can just let this flow and move the body where it decides to go. And just like you have habits of thought that keep coming back, you also have habits of movement that you keep rolling back into when there is music on. When you become aware of these habits, you suddenly have the choice to not follow these habits and to instead take a different path. Then there is suddenly a lot more freedom! During the retreat I gave the participants a brief introduction to ballet movements as a way to expand their movement vocabulary. During the music, the meditators could then use these movements as well to follow the natural flow of the body.

What is interesting is that movements can be a different way to listen into our mind and our ideas and the external world. When we go into auto-pilot, we can become quite bored during moving meditation, but if instead we just flow what is, there is always inspiration, and there is always something happening. It is quite a wonderful exercise in just letting the movement and meditation arise out of itself. I found that I did not need to be scared about leading the retreat, because when I was simply there to listen, the retreat magically emerged out of itself.

In addition to the general process of moving meditation, we also went through a special new year's process, in which we first thought about what habit we wanted to dance a lovingly goodbye to, and what we wanted to welcome in the new year. We then entered into silence for a day or so (until new year's eve). During the silent period, we enacted the process of being born: from the appearance of matter out of space, to simple single-cell animals such as amoeba, to more complex animals that can crawl, all the way to elegant swans and birds, and finally to humans. While it may sound silly, this whole process of giving birth metaphorically is a wonderful way to reach a state of wonderment about life, and to give space to new ideas and new habits to arise for the new year. I mostly worked with the idea that I would like to simplify my life (I am also starting to work with the Simple Living calendar, the Simpel leven agenda in Dutch). Over time, the insight emerged that maybe I should plan more time to simply sit quietly with my project and listen to what project can dissolve to give more space to other projects.

A final remarkable thing about moving meditation is that it is a very beautiful way to be with other people, because we all practise being together in a very non-judgmental way. It was so moving to see everyone dancing together on New Year's eve: everyone with their own unique moves, no-one being ignored, everyone sharing joy and wonder with one another. These qualities are also cultivated in the moving meditation practices, for example a practice in which we listen into each other's being and use that to move together. As we listen into each other, we become more and more open to the unique texture of every individual, and their unique beauty. I hope that I will be able to keep some of that non-judgmentalness and wonder in the new year!

does mindfulness mean we have no judgment whatsoever?

In a video on the bodhi Facebook page, Kimberly Poppe asks an important question here: can we suspend our judgment for a moment? What does this feel like? There has been a lot of controversy on mindfulness promoting non-judgmentalness and thereby condoning injustice, bigotry and violence in the world. I think what is shown here is that it is not about getting rid of judgments altogether, but rather taking a moment to first perceive what is, in a way that is as unbiased as possible, and then engaging in a way that is usually a lot more sane because you had a chance to think it over.

In this way, mindfulness can allow you to not become a zombie, but in fact allow you to see injustice more clearly and act in a more skilful way. By reducing the reliance on forming an opinion before you have had a chance to actually see, you can potentially go beyond your habits of thinking, especially those habits that are quite "sticky", i.e., those that involve your hopes and fears. Instead of running through patterns such as "I am a worthless..." or "s/he probably thinks I am a loser" or "these people are really stupid" again, and thereby making them stronger, we can also have a fresh look at what presents itself. Then we may be able to see different sides of a situation, and choose to do something different than the thing we usually do. So we can still have a strong opinion, and a strong commitment to act on an unjust situation, but now it is founded in a bit more of a grounded response.

Georges Dreyfus has a much more scholarly discussion of this topic: http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Articles/Is%20mindfulness%20present-centred%20and%20non-judgmental%20A%20discussion%20of%20the%20cognitive%20dimensions%20of%20mindfulness_CB_Dreyfus_2011.pdf