For the last few months I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the social side of mental distress. It feels really important to me to recognise how our suffering is embedded within our relationship dynamics; our workplaces, communities and other institutional systems; and our wider society.

I often notice what a relief it is for me – and my friends and clients – when we realise this social element to our suffering: particularly how the self-criticism that we do so constantly is something that everybody else does as well, because we’re all in this self-critical culture. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with us. It’s understandable.

This week I’m speaking at a few conferences which touch on themes of inequalities, individualising and intersectionality, and on mental health and mindfulness. So I thought – instead of the usual stand-up presentation – I’d make a zine that captures my experiences of these things, and makes some suggestions about how we might creatively engage with them.

It was also a good opportunity – for me – to get back into making comics: something I’d love to do more of, especially now I’m working on a comic introduction to queer theory with a professional artist. Here’s one of the comics I made for the zine. You can download the whole zine at the end of this post if you’d like to read it more clearly.

For my zine, the comics really helped me to understand how intertwined all these social levels are – as are the inequalities that we suffer from, and benefit from, and the ways in which we are individualised and individualise others.

You can download the zine as a pdf by clicking on the link below. I’d suggest printing it out as a booklet to get the full zine experience – or just reading it online. There’s also a whole book on mindful therapy by me here (including more comics!) if you’re interested in reading further on the topic.

SocialMindfulnessZine

The post New Zine! Social suffering and social mindfulness appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Kindness / honesty

The second tension which emerged, for me, over the weekend was perhaps less explicit than the other one, and harder to capture. It is about whether we prioritise kindness or honesty in our interactions with others (and with ourselves).

Of course, again, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed one understanding of mindfulness could be as a form of kind honesty, or honest kindness. It is not there in the early Buddhist definitions of mindfulness, which focus on open attention (which could, perhaps, be viewed as a form of honesty with ourselves), but recent western mindful therapies – for example – often bring together concepts of awareness with those of compassion or acceptance. And the kind of awareness which is advocated in mindful meditation, more broadly, is a gentle or kind one. For example, when we meditate we are encouraged to be aware of the thoughts and feelings that bubble up, but not to become too attached to them. However, we are also not meant to squash them or try to eradicate them. Rather the aim is to be compassionately aware of them, and to gently bring our attention back to our breath or other focus of meditation. This kind of practice reminds us of the sorts of stories and habits that we can get easily become caught up in.

When it comes to our interactions with others it seems that a prioritising of kindness can take us away from being honest, and a prioritising of honesty can take us away from being kind. For example, a mindfulness activity which I brought to the weekend (based on some writing I’ve been doing with Jamie Heckert) was about two different common strategies for dealing with situations of conflict where one person or group has more power than the other because of their social status. One of these strategies focuses more on kindness, where we try to compassionately understand where ourselves, and the other people, are coming from in the conflict and focus on reaching an understanding, being gentler with each other, and perhaps forgiving and accepting. The other strategy focuses more on honesty, where we look at what is going on in the conflict (perhaps explicitly and implicitly) and we name it publicly, drawing attention to the power dynamics which are at play and the privileges which one person or group has which means that their voice may be more heard than the others.

As I see it now, the dangers are that kindness-focused strategies may fall into ‘niceness’, whilst honesty-focused strategies may fall into ‘rudeness’.

When we are trying so hard to be kind that we prioritise compassion over honesty, we may find ourselves ignoring or avoiding tensions which are there in order that everybody gets along. We might fail to see the power dynamics and marginalisations that are happening because we do not want to have to face difficult conversations, or even irresolvable conflicts. We might lose our critical awareness of the complexities of the situation, and the differences between us, in a comforting sense of our shared humanity and connection which may well not be there for everybody. We might find ourselves accepting what we take for granted rather than questioning it in a critical way. In our attempts to be kind we might end up causing harm as we silence some voices and flatten the hierarchies that exist. If our aim is to increase kindness in the world, we may find ourselves doing the exact opposite as people feel even more hurt and raw and less inclined to engage with one another, or we ourselves behave passively-aggressively because we are suppressing any difficult feelings.

When we are trying so hard to be honest that we prioritise awareness over kindness, on a very practical level we may find that others are unable to hear what we have to say. The privileges, oppressions and power dynamics which we clearly see, and the problematic behaviours which we want to highlight, may well be so hard for others to own up to that they just respond defensively and shut down. This may particularly be the case if we communicate with them in an accusing or insistent way which doesn’t include listening to their perspective at all. If our aim is to improve awareness and to encourage honest exchange, we may do the exact opposite as people feel far too unsafe to speak openly, and put up their defences such that it becomes even harder for them to see the problematic things that they are doing. It may be much easier for them just to dismiss us as rude people, or over-the-top activists, and walk away from the exchange. We may, ourselves, become so aggressive in our manner that others are scared or hurt by the exchange, meaning that we are perpetuating the very violence which we were trying to address.

There is a danger, in mindfulness, that we prioritise compassion to such an extent that we close down debate and difference and – unwittingly perhaps – prevent ourselves from seeing some of the problems that we are so keen to address. There is a danger, for those of us who are critically socially engaged, that we fall into judgement of others and shoring up our own sense of ‘rightness’. Without compassion we may be unable to see our own potential for harming others (because it is too hard to face when we aren’t being kind), or the personal and painful reasons which may lie behind other people’s actions.

Perhaps this is social mindfulness: the attempt to be honestly kind, compassionately critical, and gently aware.

Where is the social?

I hope that these explorations may go some way to answering my colleague’s question about ‘where is the social’ in mindfulness. To summarise, I think it is (or can be) in there in the following ways, and probably many more:

• In recognising the inherent socialness even of our very internal experiences: the ways our interactions with other people throughout our lives have shaped who and how we are, and how much of our internal life is devoted to our interactions with others and the wider world.
• In employing meditation, and other practices, to ‘swim against the stream’ – noticing how wider assumptions and accepted behaviours operate through us, and committing to do otherwise.
• In mindfulness as a methodology – individually and in group processes – for understanding the complexities of how social aspects such as power and privilege operate through us.
• In mindfulness practices which are explicitly social. One example would be writing about how we, ourselves, experience being on two sides of an opposition (for example when we feel marginalised, or when we marginalise others), in order to understand the other perspective better. Another would be mindful dialogue, when we have conversations with the explicit intention of listening, hearing the other, and being aware of what we bring to the situation. A further example is in ways of making people’s stories available in ways which illuminate what their lives are like within the current social context (e.g. of healthcare systems, or global politics).
• In ‘retreating’ in ways which leave us more able then to engage, rather than feeling too ragged ourselves to intervene in ways which may be useful to others.
• In using mindfulness to bring an ethics to our work on social issues which might mean that we make more of a difference, because we understand better how to communicate what we are saying in ways which can be heard and acted upon by others.

Find out more:

I’ve written another post on kindness and honesty here.

• Thich Nhat Hanh‘s community of interbeingrepresents one very social version of mindfulness.
• Gregory Kramer’s ‘insight dialogue‘ is an example of a social mindfulness practice.
• Steven and Martine Batchelor’s website is another interesting way into mindfulness which considers many of these issues.

The post Mindfulness and social engagement: Kindness / honesty appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

My excitement about mindfulness may seem a bit peculiar to those who know that the other areas which I’m passionately engaged in are all very social: issues around relationship structures, discrimination of marginalised groups in society, and power and conflict. Mindfulness seems such an internal, individual thing, how can it possibly be relevant to these matters. As somebody asked in an Open University seminar on the topic: ‘where is the social?’

Such questions were the motivation behind a weekend workshop/retreat which I attended earlier this month. Steven Stanley and I put together the weekend with a group of colleagues to address the question of social mindfulness. The weekend consisted of a combination of periods of meditation and other mindful-type practices (such as Qigong), together with presentations and discussions linking mindfulness to various social issues including sustainability, interpersonal and intergroup conflict, prejudice and discrimination, mental health and communication.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the weekend was the way in which the kinds of challenges we were discussing were so live within the group itself. Perhaps – particularly as a relationship therapist – I should have expected that these psychosocial issues would come up in the process of our interactions as well as in the contentof them. But I really didn’t anticipate it, and I found it tough indeed to notice how much my thoughts, when meditating, kept returning to niggles about my exchanges with other people, and how many of our group discussions themselves became conflictual or manifested some of the very power dynamics which we were trying so hard to address.

Mindfulness retreats, in my experience, are often humbling experiences in this way: in the silence and stillness we are forced to confront the kinds of petty judging and competitiveness that we fall into a lot of the time, and it is not a comfortable experience. At times I found it frustrating. Perhaps on some level I wanted us to prove to everyone how socially beneficial mindfulness could be by having some wonderfully experience of perfect connection, simply because we were all being so mindful! But perhaps what really happened was a lot more useful because it reminded us that what we really were was just a group of human beings, with all the messiness that entails. The inevitable tensions, scratchiness, miscommunications and disengagements – if we are courageous enough to face them – provide a perfect arena for thinking about how all our mindful ideas and practices could usefully be brought to bear on other social situations.

In my next two blogs I want to focus on two tensions, which emerged for me, from the weekend, which I think are key to this question of how mindfulness ways of understanding the world, and living our lives, might be useful in terms of wider social issues. The first is about whether we focus inwards on ourselves or outwards on the world around us. The second is about a tension between kindness and honesty. In both cases, of course, these are not mutually exclusive things, and perhaps the important shift is from an either/or way of seeing them (either I can focus inwards or outwards, either I can be kind or I can be honest) to a both/and way of embracing each ‘side’, or perhaps bringing them into dialogue with each other, or seeing what it is like to oscillate between them like a pendulum rather than prioritising one ‘side’ over the other.

Focus inwards / focus outwards

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of the weekend, for me, was one about internal or external focus.

Some of us found ourselves arguing for the social benefits of very internal mindfulness practices because – if we do not look into ourselves in this way – we may well find ourselves intervening with others in ways that are harmful to them. One way in which we are all social is that our exchanges and interactions over the years (with close friends, wider groups and society at large), leave us with painful feelings, fears about ourselves, and uncomfortable habits. For example, we may have grown up in a family where it was expected that everyone be tough, or we may have been bullied at school for being a misfit, or we may have taken on board a wider societal habit of judging people by their appearances. If we are not aware of these things we may find ourselves just acting on them when we interact with others (e.g. trying to be the tough guy all the time). Or we might try to suppress them and keep them hidden, but find that they blurt out, or that we project them onto other people (e.g. using an appearance word like ‘fat’ as an insult without meaning to, or viewing somebody else as a misfit because we’re trying not to be one ourselves).

The extreme ‘internal’ position might be that putting our ‘stuff’ onto other people like this is so inevitable that the best thing we can do is to focus inwardly a lot, and just endeavour not to cause harm in these ways. Trying to intervene with others is just too dangerous and will likely involve us imposing ourselves, or our society, onto them in ways that are deeply problematic because we can’t ever know enough about their situation.

Perhaps the opposite view to this is to see the social benefits only of external practices where we do actually go out into the world and intervene. This view might look at internal practices, such as meditation, and ask what good they are doing. In a world where there is so much suffering, meditation, therapy and the like seem like incredibly privileged activities, only available to a few who have the necessary time and resources. They can also appear like a kind of self-indulgent naval-gazing which encourage us to focus inwards on self-improvement or on beating ourselves up, instead of outwards on activities which might actually diminish suffering or help other people. Wouldn’t it be better if all the time, energy and resources spent on such internal-focused practices was put into activism or directed towards those with greater needs?

The extreme ‘external’ position might be to focus entirely on intervention: to get out into the world and find out what the most pressing issues are (the threat to the environment perhaps, or poverty, or war), to develop our skills and knowledge in these areas, and to do something which might be of help. External mindfulness practices might take the form of encouraging people into mindful dialogue to resolve conflict (for example, by teaching listening practices), or they might be ways of increasing sustainability through encouraging awareness of ‘conditioned arising’ (e.g. where the pair of jeans we see in the supermarket came from, and what the impact is of buying them).

The well known mindfulness teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, was presented with just this challenge of inner or outer focus. In the 1970s a monk asked him what the best response was to the crisis of refugees in Vietnam after the war: should the monks stay in their monastery and meditate, or should they get out there and try to feed and house the refugees. Thich Nhat Hanh responded that they should do both, and his book The Miracle of Mindfulnesswas written as a fuller response to this social issue. This is why the book focuses on bringing mindfulness into all our daily activities, rather than it just being something that we do sitting on a cushion.

Steven Batchelor, in Buddhism Without Beliefs, also emphasises a kind of oscillation between retreat and engagement. He says that our practice cannot be abstracted from the way in which we interact with the world, which needs to be with integrity, but perhaps we cannot know what the ethical way to act is if we do not take time to tune into ourselves and to consider others with empathy. However, we can never reach a certainty of the impact our actions will have, so we have to act, to be open to learning from our mistakes, to notice when our habits kick in when we are acting on self-interest, and then to act again, attempting to avoid this.

‘At times we may concentrate on the specifics of material existence: creating a livelihood that is in accord with our deepest values and aspirations. At times we may retreat: disentangling ourselves from social and psychological pressures in order to reconsider our life in a quiet and supportive setting. At times we may engage with the world: responding empathetically and creatively to the anguish of others’ (Batchelor, 1997, p.42).

Perhaps it is useful, also, to be aware of the risk of meditation – and other more ‘inner’ focused practices – to become a mode of self-monitoring, done with the aim of self-improvement, which takes us away from engagement with others, as well as of the risk that externally focused activities may be done in a way that hurts others if we do not attempt to be aware of what we bring to those situations in terms of our personal hopes and fears.

My next post will focus on another tension from the weekend – that around kindness and honesty. I’ll also conclude with a summary of social mindfulness and some places to read more.

The post Mindfulness: A strategy for social engagement? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

So what can I offer? In the news reporting, one word has jumped out at me time and time again, and that is ‘mindless’. As an article in the New Statesman pointed out, this is the ‘explanatory cliché’ that politicians and journalists are constantly falling back on: ‘”mindless acts of violence and destruction” and “mindless criminality” carried out by “mindless thugs”‘.

As someone who is currently writing a book about mindfulness, mindlessness does seem like something that I am knowledgeable enough to comment upon, so here are my thoughts.

What ‘mindlessness’ does

When news reports label those who are rioting and looting as ‘mindless’, I don’t think that they generally mean it as an opposite of ‘mindful’. They are not simply pointing out that acting in violent ways displays a lack of awareness of the implications of what people are doing, and a lack of compassion for those who it affects.

Rather, dismissing acts as ‘mindless thuggery’ serves to distance us (the authors and readers of the accounts) from those perpetrating these acts, and to dehumanise them in the process. If we think of a ‘mind’ (or consciousness) as the thing that is often regarded (albeit somewhat problematically) as the defining feature of human beings, then describing somebody as ‘mindless’ is similar to stating that they are somehow less than human. In this way, we set up an ‘us and them’ situation where we are individuals with humanity who could never act in ways which would be so violent, so potentially harmful to others, and they are people who don’t have the capacity – the mind – to respond in a human way to the situations they find themselves in.

Such distancing achieves multiple things. First, it enables us to locate all of what is disturbing and nasty about what people can do in this other group: the ‘mindless’ thugs. This stops us from having to look into ourselves to acknowledge the potentials we have – given the wrong situation – to wish harm upon others or to act in ways which we know will hurt (perhaps ways which are less direct than smashing a shop-window, such as buying products that are the result of exploitative labour, or failing to stop and help a stranger who is struggling). Secondly, the individualising explanation that a particular group of ‘others’ are ‘just mindless’ means that we don’t have to consider wider – often social, political, economic, and historical – reasons which may be a large part of why these things are happening (this is a similar point to one I’ve made before about why we prefer simplistic explanations of violence).

Finally (although there are probably more reasons still than the three that I have outlined), ‘mindlessness’ as an explanation means that we don’t have to address the complexity and multiplicity in why things happen. Generally we tend to see the full situations which result in our own actions, whilst we put other people’s actions down to individual flaws within them, such as mindlessness. However, it seems more likely that, as with most human actions, there are many different reasons why people act in the ways that they do. In the case of the riots, as an article in The Guardianpoints out, there are many different people involved in rioting and looting, with many different motivations for doing so. Even within one person, there are probably multiple motivations at work. As Dave Hill says, in his commentary:

People who riot do have minds, and in these lie the reasons for their rioting…These may be greed, hatred, a craving for status, for battle and excitement and for an antisocial sort of liberty. Some deep, possibly incoherent rage against authority and a safer, kinder more prosperous world they can’t join might be part of this story too. None of this is evidence of mindlessness, and to declare it so is to hide from reality.

What are we when we are mindless?

Social psychologist, Ellen Langer, has studied mindlessness in depth. The first part of her book, Mindfulness, is devoted to the common ‘mindless’ habits that human beings share. Her definitions of mindlessness includes the following:

Being trapped by categories: Ellen gives the example of a person opening their door to a wealthy stranger who is on a scavenger hunt and who offers them a million dollars if they can give him a 3 foot by 7 foot piece of wood. Because they never think of their own door as ‘a 3 foot by 7 foot piece of wood’ they don’t think of using that. In terms of the riots we might think of the categories of race, class, gender, and age which shape our assumptions of ‘crime’ and who commits it. For example, we tend to think of young men as perpetrators of crime and young women as victims, but young men are by far the most at-risk group as victims, and young women were also involved in the London riots.

Behaving automatically rather than paying attention to what we’re doing: Ellen conducted an experiment where she sent an interdepartmental memo to university offices which read ‘This memo is to be returned to Room 247’. When the memo looked just like a standard university memo, 90% of people complied, rather than asking themselves why the person sent the memo if they just wanted it back. If people were encouraged to pay more attention – by the memo being in a different-to-usual format – only 60% complied. When we see these events in the news it is helpful to do what we can to break from any habitual responses we might have and to pay more attention.

Acting from a single perspective: In another study, Ellen and colleagues planted an experimenter on a busy street. She told people passing by that she’d sprained her knee and needed help. When people stopped she asked them to get her an Ace bandage from a shop nearby. The shopkeeper then told them they were out of Ace bandages. All the people in the study returned empty-handed, rather than asking for advice or getting something different. Linked to behaving automatically, we might deliberately reflect on each news story from multiple perspectives. We might creatively imagine what it might be like for attacker and for the attacked, for the person observing, for the journalist writing the story for a deadline, for the politician whose soundbite is included, and for the police officer who responded.

Towards a more mindful response

In one of the most powerful responses to the London situation, writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe called for ‘careful listening’ to the young people who were caught up in what was going on. He had already been listening carefully for years and therefore was not at all surprised by what was now happening. Unfortunately, those interviewing Darcus did not even listen carefully to him, let alone affording this kind of respect to those actually taking part in the violence and looting.

‘Careful listening’ is one key aspect of mindfulness, which is generally translated as a form of deep awareness and full attention. When we listen carefully we are less likely to fall into our usual automatic responses, or to act from a single perspective, trapped in categories and ignorant of context. We are more likely to be aware of the full, complex, human beings behind various actions, and the multiple meanings that these events will have for them. As Penny Red highlights, one of the motivations behind the riots may well be a lack of listening, and Camila Batmanghelidjh suggests that compassionate listening to the human beings involved – rather than searching for a ‘mindless’ enemy to fight – is a more likely solution.

Mindfulness, however, is not about just listening and accepting and failing to act in any way. Rather it originally emerged in a time of social inequality as a form of political action (against hierarchical caste systems), and will hopefully have a similar impact today with all the people who are currently embracing it. The theory behind mindfulness is that suffering is largely rooted in craving. Several commentators on the London riots have linked the looting taking place to the wider economic climate: not in a simplistic way that the recession has caused the riots, but in the suggestion that the desire for consumption within our current economic system is also implicated in the desire for certain products – by people who do not have access to them – inherent in much of the looting which is going on.

As well as careful listening to those involved, we can also do with turning our attention to the multiple implications of living in a culture which advocates striving for more and more consumption, which encourages people to believe that they are lacking without it, and which only makes this available to certain people.

Find out more:

To find out more about social mindfulness, check out my zine.

Useful book on related topics include:

• David Loy: Money, Sex, War, Karma
• Barry Magid: Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
• Marshall Rosenberg: Non-violent Communication

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