The point of poems is, of course, that they say something that couldn’t be said any other way. Despite that being the case, I thought it might be worth trying to say something about what one of my poems, Crackling Mindfulness, published by Northern Gravy, is about.
Long-story-short, as is pretty obvious, the poem is mostly about my ‘mixed feelings’ about mindfulness.
I’m going to attempt, here, to articulate what, precisely, is ‘mixed’ in those ‘feelings’, and to explain what I was trying to ‘do’ in the poem.
So. What do I feel about mindfulness?
Well, I’m in no doubt that mindfulness has enhanced my life. Crucially, it‘s helped me turn the volume down, if only very slightly, on some mental health crises that could, given my issues, have ended badly. Anchoring techniques have provided the means of hanging on while being assailed by some extreme emotions. Mindfulness doesn’t prevent or change emotions, but it does help me to change my relationship with them, very slightly, just about enough to enable me to live with them in the moment. I’ll take that.
On a more day-to-day level, mindfulness enables me to slow down my otherwise racing brain. It has trained me to pay attention, to see the finer grain, and thereby to appreciate life more fully. Remember how lock-down enhanced our appreciation of the beauty of the weeds growing in the pavements we walked on when we were allowed out for an hour? It’s that kind of thing. It’s the taking back of awareness into the immediate vicinity, the current field awareness, and noticing, rather than ignoring, the totality of what’s there. Although the general injunction of mindfulness is to be non-judgemental, my actual experience is that, when I pull my attention back in that way, I tend to judge positively. That weed I never noticed before, that I notice now because I’ve slowed down and am mindful, pretty much always turns out to be 'quite a nice weed'. It’s a practice that offers only tiny moments of mild appreciation, but the cumulative effect on mood, even if slight, tends, for me at least, to be positive.
Mindfulness also gives me a sense of presence. By this I mean that it enables me to feel, or even to be, (verb choice here is so interesting) embodied. This may seem like an odd thing to say, but, without going into details, certain life-experiences, combined with some of my own harmful behaviours, have had the effect of alienating me from my body. Being present and ‘in my body’ is something I’ve had to learn from scratch. And it still comes and goes. But I do partially at least, credit mindfulness, and the practices associated with it, with any chance I have for living in any kind of uncertain peace with my body.
Speaking less therapeutically and more existentially, I happen to be pretty sympathetic to some of the worldviews from which mindfulness comes. To get a bit more overtly Buddhist about it, I value the insights to be gleaned from the observation of the insubstantiality of my own thought processes and ego creations. And to take a slightly different tack again, practicing meditation has even given me a community and some very good friends. This is not a benefit that mindfulness enthusiasts usually think to praise, but to my mind it’s one of the higher-value ones. That said, I’ve also had to resist a strong desire to give a Sweaty-Betty-Wedgie to one or two pious mindfulness folk who think they’re super-empathetic and Awakened but are really just middle-class and thoroughly self-involved. Like the glowing mindfulness-mama on a retreat who told me (weeks after the second of my miscarriages, but that’s by-the by) that 'people don’t know the meaning of love until they’ve given birth.' Yes. Seriously. Very demure, very mindful, no doubt. I, personally, wanted to fashion her high-end Lulu Lemon leggings into some kind of rudimentary catapult. But, hell. None of us are perfect. Me, nor them. And a diverse community is, indeed, a precious thing.
For all my appreciation of mindfulness though, I’m deeply suspicious of how it’s used to pressure individuals to ‘cope with’, rather than to change, intolerable conditions. There’s nothing so gaslighting as to require people to ‘develop resilience’ when you’re oppressing them. This happens frequently in the workplace, where mindfulness is sold by employers to pacify employees; to keep them in work and increase their productivity. When employers offer mindfulness without properly addressing unjust working conditions, they are sending the implicit message that overworked and under-valued employees are individually responsible for their distress. This is actually the ‘privatisation’ of distress, and the right-leaning political feel of that phrase is no accident. Employees experience shame about what they wrongly assume is their inability to cope with (actually intolerable) conditions and they become unable even to see, let alone to resist, the true origins of their distress. It’s a clever deflection, and one that serves only the profit margin. It's not just the work place. Even in healthcare or wider wellbeing settings, it can feel at best patronising, and at worst erasing, to be told that the ‘solution’ to legitimate emotional distress, or to the painful out-workings of trauma, is to ‘practice mindfulness.’ That injunction is packaged in such a way to make the (understandably) suffering person feel that along with everything else they’re coping with, it is their responsibility to somehow find it within themselves to ‘chill out’, relax, be happy, and practice ‘self-care’. As if the relentless, neoliberal focus on ‘individualism’, ‘self’, ‘happiness’ and ‘positive thinking’ wasn’t in fact a major driver of modern suffering (see Barbara Ehrenreich) and that their failure to be ‘just fine’ with everything is just that. A personal failure.
For me, the ubiquitous valorisation of ‘feel-good’ mindfulness often smacks of spiritual by-passing and repression on a grand cultural scale.
Yet still, I’m drawn to it!
I’ve practised meditation on and off now for more than 30 years. I’ve committed, at different times, to various formal meditation practices for reasonably long periods of time. I’ve done Vipassana, Mettā Bhāvanā and Zazen. Nembutsu too, if you’re inclined to class that as meditation. As well as having a personal sitting practice (a bit ‘on-off’, sometimes), I’ve done many short and a few longer retreats and sesshins led by teachers in several different traditions, some of which were at monasteries or temples, some in the UK, others in the USA and Japan. I’ve belonged to regularly-sitting groups for several years at a stretch. I have a Level 1 Mindfulness Teacher Training qualification from Bangor University, and I’ve taught it a little bit, too, with school children and with people grappling with substance use issues. I mention all this exposure, not to claim special skill — I struggle like anyone else — but as evidence of a longstanding interest and curiosity.
But what is mindfulness?
Mindfulness, at least as it’s understood in mainstream settings, is the practice of bringing the mind, gently but repeatedly, back to a focus on the present moment. This is a certain type of meditation. But mindfulness and meditation are not coterminous. They’re not ‘the same thing’. Many religious traditions recommend meditation, and many different things are meant by it. Explore the Pali Buddhist texts for example, and it quickly becomes apparent that what gets translated as ‘mindfulness’ has all sorts of surprising referents, like ‘remembering the Buddha’ or ‘focusing on unpleasant bodily processes.’ There’s not much about ‘chilling out’ or ‘being happy.’ Explore Tibetan Buddhist texts and you’re soon into realms of complex visualisations and symbology. There are real questions about what contemporary mindfulness has to do with Buddhism, and what is lost by its having been shoe-horned out of a religious context, separated from its essential companions of ‘wisdom’ and ‘ethics’, and repackaged for people wanting to fix their “white-people-emotional-problems” — as I once saw it so aptly described by an Asian blogger. But this is not the place to get into that. This is a good resource if you’re interested in whether contemporary mindfulness is Buddhist or not, and whether or not that matters.
In its popular form though, mindfulness is, principally, a practice of calming. There’s a whole Buddhist tradition of meditation called samatha - which is aimed at calmness and clarity. Contemporary mindfulness definitely promotes the ‘calmness’ element of that aim. And that’s not a bad thing. The ability to calm oneself is a precious, life-enhancing skill. In a hostile world of pressures and triggers, healthy ways to self-soothe can be truly life-enhancing, and even life-saving. This is especially so for those of us who haven’t been able to internalise skills of emotional regulation because they weren’t modelled in our primary carers, and/or those of us (hello) who may instinctively reach for short-term-effective, but longer-term-harmful, shortcuts to emotional relief. Developing the skills associated with calming does, unfortunately require some commitment and practice. People often think they’re not suited to it and drop it too early. Expecting elevated and mystical states, they discover instead that (surprise, surprise) they’ve got a ‘very annoying’ mind. They don’t realise the value of sitting with that, because they don’t do it. It’s not, let’s face it, immediately gratifying. Calmness, if it comes, is a return on practice, and practice is hard and time-consuming.
However, while mindfulness is certainly meant to be calming, we have to recognise that it isn’t always. There is a growing body of research which explores negative, even profoundly damaging, experiences. These seem to occur especially, unfortunately, to the people for whom mindfulness is most often recommended; namely, people with pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities and/or trauma histories. It’s a worry that mindfulness is offered so uncritically, as a one-size-fits-all panacea. The work of Willoughby Britton and colleagues is a must-read for any meditation teacher and for any healthcare practitioner who refers for mindfulness.
And there’s also the horrifying ways that alternative wellness culture - of which mindfulness is a central plank - has become aligned with the alt-right. It’s not hard to see how this has happened, as mindfulness is so easily co-opted into a culture of personal optimisation, in which the success and prosperity of the individual becomes the driving, indeed the only, value. If people who praise mindfulness ignore or repress the negative political implications and affective risks of that dimension, and frame mindfulness as an apolitical ‘good’ regardless of context, then they are unfortunately contributing to the global lurch towards moral quietism and individualism, and ultimately towards the right.
I try to listen when people talk about, or sell, mindfulness. One thing I notice is that it is often presented as a ‘turning-away’ from the run of daily life. Think of mindfulness’s association with (cringe) ‘me-time’. People figure it as a ‘switching-off’ of thoughts in the pursuit of the elusive prize of relaxation. That isn’t meditation. It’s dissociation. Dissociation can actually be useful up to a point, but ultimately it becomes schizoid and harmful. Certainly, the development of what Buddhists would call ‘one-pointed awareness’, a single focus on, for example, the breath, is a valuable training. But its purpose is far from dissociation. Depending on the tradition, its purpose could be to build the capacity of the mind for focus and therefore for insight. Or it could be to allow discriminative thinking to fall away, making way for Awakening itself. Or it could be to develop the mind’s capacity to enter more fully into the vividness and completeness of the present moment.
Thinking about this latter aim, it makes sense to conclude that among the best of the mindfulness teachers are the poets.
Poetry
Poetry is a method for close focus on experience, on the question of what it’s actually like to be alive in our human and more-than-human communities, in the community of things, in nature, culture, space and time. Poetry requires a slowing-down and a supremely focused attention. There are some differences though. In modern mindfulness, that attention is often uncritically appreciative. In poetry, that attention may or may not be appreciative. Contrast, for example, the nature appreciation of Mary Oliver (so beloved of mindfulness teachers), with the denigration of war by Siegfried Sassoon. I’ve never heard a mindfulness teacher read a war poem. Or an angry poem. Or a bitter and resentful poem. For all its claims to non-judgementalism, those emotions tend to be disavowed in mindfulness culture. But whatever its affective tone, there is no doubt that the close, honest and disciplined attention of the poet is like that of the meditator.
Part of the purpose of my poem Crackling Mindfulness (pasted at the end, by the way), is to contrast the popular idea of mindfulness as a form of non-thinking relaxation, with the slightly different idea of mindfulness as an experience of entering more fully, even passionately, into the vividness, and the depth, of the present moment.
The poem draws on the spirit of the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis. His Zorba the Greek gave Jon Kabat Zinn the title of the ground-breaking volume that brought mindfulness to the attention of the medical and mental health communities and marked the genesis of the modern mindfulness movement - Full Catastrophe Living. Coincidentally, I read several of Kazantzakis’s novels in my early 20s. This was around the same time that my interest in Buddhist meditation was beginning to develop. I wouldn’t encounter ‘Dr Mindfulness’ (Kabat-Zinn) for another decade or more, so I didn’t know then about the link. I just happened to get into Kazantzakis while travelling in Greece. I read him avidly, went to his grave on Crete, got the t-shirt, and everything. Zorba wasn’t my favourite Kazantzakis novel, but I did appreciate the way he contrasted Zorba’s crazy passions with the narrator’s rather dry aspiration for the mastery of emotions. Of course, I was unpleasantly challenged by the implied critique of Buddhism, but, as Kazantzakis no doubt intended, I was way more attracted to Zorba’s childlike ability to ‘enter in’ to experience than I was to the narrator’s ability to ‘rise above’ it. There can, afterall, be something rather self-satisfied about someone invulnerable to falling passionately and stupidly in love, or someone who doesn’t suffer with jealousy or with anger, or who remains unmoved by life’s horrific slings and arrows. In calling his book Full Catastrophe Living, Kabat Zinn was actually, and rightly in my view, arguing for a full ‘entering in’, rather than a ‘rising above’.
However, I think it’s fair to say that much of modern mindfulness comes across as way more dissociative and repressed, just like the narrator in the novel. Mindfulness asks us to visualise our emotions, and our thoughts, as nothing more than ‘leaves drifting down a river’ or ‘clouds floating across the sky’ - in other words, as effectively meaningless because they only ‘visit’. I agree they are mutable, and that is such valuable information about them, but to conclude that they’re therefore meaningless is, frankly, nihilism.
People are often attracted to the wellbeing worldview for which mindfulness is the mainstay because, in truth, they don’t want to feel things. Here’s a personal example. I had a memory that I found difficult to bear. It caused flashbacks and self-hatred, and it impacted my life and my relationships in a number of negative ways. Fourteen years ago, I sought help from a mindfulness and NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) practitioner, who, in fairness to him, did exactly what I asked for. He taught me a technique. He taught me, in a semi-hypnotised state, how to visualise that memory as photograph, watch the upsetting scene freeze, desaturate the colours, turn the picture to sepia, watch it fade away and finally burst into flames.
Keep doing it, he instructed.
Did I feel better?
Maybe a bit.
I felt I had at least tried to take responsibility for my anguish and the profoundly troubling ways it was playing out for both me and others. But to be honest, I didn’t feel MUCH better. The memory didn’t go away. It never has.
‘Deleting’ memories may, in fact, be a rather tall order. More importantly though, I began to wonder if trying to do so might be attempting a form of repression. Support that I’ve had since that time has helped me explore how that awful experience shaped me and organised my personality in ways that cause me and others real trouble. Rather than trying to minimise or delete it, truly getting to grips with the horrible reality of that memory — a memory that I had worked extremely hard, in many different ways (not only through fancy therapeutic ‘techniques’), to eject from reality, or in other words, to repress — has proven to be far more productive in terms of learning to live with it and to begin to address its endlessly rippling negative effects.
Back to the poem…
As I was writing the poem, I was thinking about Kazantzakis, and about that stupid old fool, Zorba, and what the mindfulness movement owes to them both. And I was thinking also about what it has forgotten. I was thinking that maybe Jon Kabat Zinn really was trying to say ‘Be More Zorba’. Enter in. Don’t ‘rise above’. Greek culture and literature is, after all, famously passionate. In this Greek frame of mind, I was reminded of the story of Eros and Psyche from Greek myth.
Psyche and Eros
Eros is a primordial god who can make gods and mortals fall in love by shooting them with his arrows. Having been sent to avenge his mother (long story), he gets accidentally scratched by one of his own arrows and falls unexpectedly, but completely, in love with Psyche. Psyche is a lonely mortal woman who is about to be given in marriage to a nasty serpent. She’s not happy but can’t do much about it. As Psyche is taken to the mountain upon which she will be offered to the hideous serpent, the dearest friend of Eros, Zephyrus, the West Wind, intervenes on his behalf. Zephyrus gently picks Psyche up and carries her to Eros’s palace. Eros hides from Psyche’s sight because he’s a god, and if she sees him she will inevitably die. He comes to her under cover of darkness and makes love with her. Psyche believes that Eros is her hideous serpent husband, yet her profound loneliness is assuaged and she falls in love. To cut a long story short, Psyche does eventually, accidentally, see Eros. Eros flees, but Psyche doesn’t die. Instead, she’s required to take on a series of strenuous, almost impossible, heroic quests. Her successful completion of them all means she becomes free to live happily ever after with Eros, and so she does.
Even though it’s cool that it’s a girl doing the heroic quests for once, there’s still a heteropatriarchal feel to the story. Looking at it through a contemporary lens, Eros, in hiding his identity, commits nothing short of rape. Monumentally off-putting, I know. And it’s hard to imagine any other readings. However, back when people weren’t so bothered by male power or sexual abuse, this myth was taken up by Carl Jung as an archetypal story of the self coming to completion through the experience of all-consuming desire.
Eros, of course, is desire, and Psyche is breath, or the self, the personification of the human soul.
In this psychoanalytic reading of the myth, desire is at first blind — Psyche cannot see Eros — just as projections are blind. Projections are the unrecognised contents of one’s own unconscious mind (positive or negative) ‘projected’ on to the other. When those projections are ‘taken back’ and the serious work of self is finally undertaken (symbolised by Psyche’s quests), flourishing can eventually prevail. This story is all grand passion and aching desire, but it is, when read in this psychoanalytic way, fundamentally about self-development and self-realisation. It’s a story of coming to wholeness through experiencing the power of desire, decoding it and learning what it teaches. Mindfulness too is about self-development. However, it speaks out of a very different model of self than this psychoanalytic story of development does. In fact, unlike in Buddhism, there isn’t much thought given to what ‘the self’ is in modern therapeutic mindfulness. But even if there were, it wouldn’t look like the psychoanalytic model. In the latter tradition, the self comes to individuation or maturity through the quest, or desire, to integrate the contents of the unconscious mind into the conscious mind. Mindfulness, on the other hand, doesn’t really admit to an unconscious mind. Neither does it give space to desire. Rather, it might talk about getting ‘hooked’ by an emotion - and that’s a 'bad' thing. Mindfulness is not directed towards a liberative restructuring of the self, rather to a disciplined refocusing of attention that ideally brings about a greater sense of comfort with life.
In psychoanalytic thought, desire is not some grubby biological urge, Quite the contrary. It’s a sacred drive, representing the drive for individuation, integration and for wholeness. The story of Psyche’s desire for Eros, the desire that drives her on through her heroic quests, certainly articulates something of that archetypal force and sacredness. The story is a dramatization of the way the self comes to wholeness and completion through the encounter with and experience of desire. In fact, it’s a story of what it takes to live with the reality of desire. What is a self without desire, after all? The post-Freudian psychoanalysts, including the feminists of the psychoanalytic tradition, have a great deal to say about desire and what it is and what it stands for. They don't agree with each other of course, and there is much nuance to explore, but there is a general psychoanalytic assumption that overwhelming emotions - like desire, or like fear - are massively meaningful.
I can’t help but resonate with that view. I’m also open to the idea that there might be levels of meaning in those big feelings. They don’t just mean what they appear on the surface to mean. A strong attraction or aversion to somebody might not only be about them. It could be the ‘transference’ of a previous, perhaps primal, feeling or experience, or it could be ‘projection’ of disavowed parts of the self. Given that’s a possibility, I’m not prepared to place any of my massive emotions, even the ones I really don't want to have, on a leaf, and wave them off to float down a river. I’m keen to look within and discover what those big feelings really are. I want to face up to what my unconscious drives might be, no matter how much I might not like what I find. I’m prepared for the possibility that it might be quite difficult, technically, as well as emotionally, both to properly identify and then to come to terms with material that has been so effectively repressed over my more than five decades of life. And I’m also open to the idea that the material in my unconscious that drives my engagement with the world might not even be ‘mine’. It might belong to my parents, and to their parents, to my ancestors more generally, and to my culture.
What I wanted to do in the poem was to show how a mindfulness worldview cleaves to the surface of experience, potentially preventing the deeper exploration of the alienated material of the unconscious. The poem, as you can see, is a conversation, ostensibly between two people, one who is ‘teaching’ mindfulness and one who struggling to ‘learn’ it. It appears to be happening outside - in the bright blueness. A fresh day perhaps. The poem opens with the teacher telling the student, kindly of course, what they’re getting wrong. The student is apparently ‘overthinking’ and failing, according to the teacher, to properly access the present moment. The student internalises this criticism, and feels, indeed, like a failure. This part of the poem speaks to the dynamic of the privatisation of distress that I outlined earlier. While it might be good news for some that improving their mood is simply a matter of the practice of a technique, that same news so easily becomes an insidious form of victim-blaming when the structural conditions of mental states are ignored.
The student in the poem does their best. Maybe. Or maybe they’re resisting. They ‘jam their fists deeper into their pockets’ while verbally accept the criticism, despite the sense of failure. Their body (clenched fists and furrowed brow) seems to be saying something different to their words.
But then suddenly, the tension is dispersed. The arrival of Zephyrus in the poem summons all the psychoanalytic implications of the story of Eros and Psyche, and the poem is no longer a conversation between two people but a conversation between two worldviews, a mindfulness worldview and a psychoanalytic worldview. The arrival of Zephyrus also fills out the character of the student - the speaker of the poem – gendering her and positioning her as Psyche, on a serious and heroic quest for individuation and the completion her self. And it frames the mindfulness teacher, not that he appears to be in any way aware of it, as Eros. The wind, Zephyrus, is the ‘friend’ who facilitates the communication between ‘the self’ and ‘desire’ at the necessary meaningful level, below the level of consciousness. As is so often the case in the presence of a charged erotic connection, the moment is infused with meaning, purpose, movement, and life.
The poem frames the teacher as anti ‘thinking’. He’s right of course, that mindfulness and all the meditation traditions problematise the attachment to ‘false views’ and to processes of proliferation and reification of concepts – prapañca. The student, however, ignited by Zephyrus’s arrival on the scene, smiles at her thoughts. Her first-person experience is that her thoughts unlock symbolic meaning, releasing her to dive under the surface and to experience layers of meaning contained within the moment.
The wind lifts up her hair, and the rules of nature are put into abeyance. The moment takes on the feel of a religious experience. Hair is normally considered non-sentient, and, wholly unlike skin, unable to ‘touch’. Not only is her hair sentient, she’s able to touch, not just the person of the teacher, but the moment itself. The rational boundaries of corporeality and time are abandoned in the poem to make a point about the ‘present moment’.
What is ‘a moment’ and what does it really mean to be ‘in’ the present moment?
In Auguries of Innocence the poet William Blake asks the reader to consider what it means
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
In Crackling Mindfulness, like here, the reader is invited to consider the moment as something more than just a linear second in linear time. Rather it contains all space and all time, and accessing it involves the dissolution of all the natural boundaries of, to use the Buddhist phrase, habitual discriminative thought. The most famous of all the mindfulness teachers, Thích Nhất Hạnh, describes the present moment as containing the ‘miracle of life.’ A miracle is an event in which the laws of nature are suspended. In this poetic moment, in which the usual laws are suspended, the student is accessing the miracle of life.
There is, however, another potential reading. The idea of sentient hair conjures another Greek figure - that of hideous Medusa. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Medusa is a beautiful woman who is raped by Poseidon and then punished for the rape by Athena by being turned into a gorgon, a terrifying beast with snake hair and eyes that can turn men to stone. The Medusa myth is a perfect allegory of rape and its consequences. The rapist isn't punished, the victim is. She, the victim must bear not only the rape itself, but all of the ways that she’s changed by it. On top of all that, she must also, somehow, cope with the ways that her rage makes her monstrous, dangerous, threatening to the status quo and socially unacceptable.
For all his mindfulness orthodoxy, a teacher who chastises her for ‘over-thinking’ is failing to connect with any of this material. But in the end, the poem shows us it doesn’t matter. The student has a different way of engaging with the present moment. For her the present moment is truly alive, saturated with colour, not de-saturated and sepia. She enters in to experience, rather than rising above it. She experiences the fruits of meditation as an ecstatic unmasking of the unconscious, in a similar vein to this description by Franz Kafka.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
No. 109 of the Zürau Aphorisms
Crackling Mindfulness
'You overthink,' gently scolding,
In the bright blueness.
'Are you ever in the moment?'
I look ahead, furrow brow,
Jam fists deeper into pockets.
'You’re right. I’m hopeless at this mindfulness lark.'
Then Zephyrus - our friend, I smile to think,
Whips up my hair, and it brushes you.
Sparking and crackling with the voltage of connection.
Oh, I'm in the moment,
So fully present in this moment,
I can even touch it with my hair.
@WEDossett