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The Embodiment of Freedom

At some point it occurred to me that my whole point of view, my basic mode of experiencing life, would shift during certain moments from a dissociated, half-alive, going through the motions type thing, to a wakeful, clear-minded, energized state of pure awesomeness. Basically, I became fascinated by my peak experiences. There seemed to be a quality about them that was not dependent on content or context. In other words I felt like the same process was happening regardless of what I was doing. I got the funny feeling that I was peaking or “peeking” into the same place, or entering the same state of consciousness, whether I was hitting a groove on the guitar, entering “the zone” on the athletic field, writing a poem or a song, having great sex, communing with nature on a hike, or getting showered with insight during meditation.

My master’s thesis was really nothing more than a sustained inquiry into this process of personal transformation, which I defined as a shift in one’s basic mode of experiencing toward greater vitality, awareness and expressiveness. I found that various theorists and practitioners understood transformation in different ways, but I also noticed a common thread between the approaches that moved me the most. Psychologists interested in transformation talked about the movement from unconsciousness to consciousness; the spiritual folks spoke of the journey from ignorance to awareness or enlightenment; creative thinkers were interested in moving from inside to outside “the box”; somatic practitioners worked toward refinement of sensitivity and an expanded range of movement.

It was the somatic perspective, I thought, that could ground an integral, multilevel understanding of the transformative process. I was searching for some basic principles of transformation with which I could generate a unique set of practices, in a sense building an Integral Health regimen from the ground up. I appreciated the maps of others, but I yearned to wander from the well-worn paths, to know the joy of making my own way through the wilderness. I also felt that the somatic perspective, especially as understood by Thomas Hanna, had the potential to radically transform our understanding of both psychological health and spiritual growth. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if these loftier endeavors were plugged into an understanding of somatic education, they would become far more efficacious paths, less prone to pitfalls.

Hanna rejected the distinction between psychological and physical problems, instead using the term “functional problem” to describe limitations of the unified organism in its capacity for both self-sensing and self-expression. Central nervous system functioning is fundamental to all behavior and experience, according to Hanna. Ken Wilber would agree with this, although he would point out that psychological and spiritual levels of being are more “significant.” In any event, from a somatic viewpoint, there’s no separation of psychological from physical health, and the majority of the typical “mental” and “physical” diseases of our society are learned as people adapt to a culture that supports dissociation and alienation.

So, if we want to ground our understanding of transformation in the living body, we can start with the most fundamental aspect of the central nervous system–the division between sensory and motor processes. Our perceptions of the world outside our bodies, as well as our perceptions of our internal bodily states, come into the brain via sensory nerves. And every action we express, every movement we make in the world and inside our selves flows out from our brain and down through the spine by way of motor nerves. This structural division is functionally integrated within a single neural system, the brain integrating the incoming sensory information with outgoing commands to the motor system.

The continual interplay of sensory information and motor guidance is referred to in contemporary neuroscience as a feed back system which operates in loops. As Hanna describes it, “the sensory nerves ‘feedback’ information to the motor nerves, whose response ‘loops back’ with the movement commands along the motor nerves. As movement takes place, the motor nerves ‘feedback’ new information to the sensory nerves.” Acknowledging that there are indeed physical and psychological problems that are the result of structural deformity and/or physiological imbalance, Hanna argues that many of the health problems afflicting people today are not about bodies or minds breaking down, but about individuals who have lost conscious control of their somatic functions. These functional problems are ones in which the person suffers from a loss of memory: the memory of what it feels like to move in certain ways, and the memory of how to go about moving in certain ways. This type of memory loss is what Hanna calls sensory-motor amnesia, a state of diminished self-awareness that is quite reversible–that is to say, a state that can be transformed.

Sensory-motor amnesia involves a dual loss of both conscious control of a particular area of motor action and conscious sensing of that motor action. As the human organism adapts to repeated stressful conditions, whether resulting from cultural conditioning or from uncontrived environmental circumstances (like extreme ecological conditions or biophysical trauma), there is a loss of conscious voluntary control of specific somatic functions. For example, faced with the stress of ridicule and/or punishment for crying or screaming out in public, the sad or angry child will contract certain motor areas of the soma (i.e., muscles) in an effort to hold back their authentic response. Crying or yelling out simply cannot happen when the corresponding muscle systems are held motionless, because crying and yelling are the movements of those motor areas. As this stressful response of contraction is activated again and again in similar situations, the response eventually becomes habituated and the child loses awareness of it (i.e., the muscle contractions can no longer be consciously sensed) and control of it (i.e., the child cannot voluntarily relax the contractions). The child has been successfully conditioned not to emote in public.

This innate tendency of human beings to develop automatic, unconscious responses in the face of stressful stimuli (i.e. the process of conditioning) was well documented by researchers such as Pavlov and Skinner. Hanna describes the loss of conscious volitional control as sensori-motor amnesia so as to emphasize two essential facts: 1) habituated, involuntary responses, like all somatic processes, are a reflection of sensori-motor functioning, and 2) what becomes unconscious, forgotten, or unlearned, can become conscious again, remembered, and re-learned. Thus, sensori-motor amnesia can be reversed by somatic learning.

Somatic learning is a process that results in the expansion of an organism’s range of volitional consciousness. This process takes advantage of the feedback/loop nature of the sensori-motor system and is described by Hanna in the following way:

“If one focuses one’s awareness on an unconscious, forgotten area of the soma, one can begin to perceive a minimal sensation that is just sufficient to direct a minimal movement, and this, in turn, gives new sensory feedback of that area which, again, gives a new clarity of movement, etc. This sensory feedback associates with adjacent sensory neurons, further clarifying the synergy that is possible with the associated motor neurons. This makes the next motor effort inclusive of a wider range of associated voluntary neurons, thus broadening and enhancing the motor action and, thereby, further enhancing the sensory feedback. This back-and-forth motor procedure gradually ‘wedges’ the amnesic area back into the range of volitional control: the unknown becomes known and the forgotten becomes relearned.”

So it is that a diminished state of self-awareness and a diminished range of conscious responsiveness can expand and transform at the basic level of sensor-motor functioning. Our emotionally inhibited child, now an adult, can learn to pay focused and sustained attention to subtle sensations in the forgotten contracted muscle areas and thereby recover in awareness the sense of being perpetually held back and fatigued. With this awareness that “I’m contracting my muscles” and “I’m holding myself back,” comes the realization that one can now begin to relax those inhibitions.

Although I’ve chosen to illustrate this transformative process with what would normally be considered a “psychological” example–the emotionally inhibited person–, the practice of somatic education (as typified by Hanna’s work and Feldenkrais’s Functional Integration) is normally applied to what are thought of more as “physical” problems. Middle-aged to older adults with gross-level range of motion restrictions or distortions, often the result of trauma or injury, are more typically the clients of somatic therapies. Many people who seek out and engage in somatic practices are primarily looking to feel better and healthier on a physical level, not especially considering the implications the work has for whole-person growth and healing.

The psychological implications of “body work,” although increasing evident and acknowledged, seem to be less than adequately understood. The example of the emotionally inhibited person hints at how an understanding of sensori-motor function can contribute greatly to psychological perspectives of personal transformation and vice versa. An integral viewpoint promises a deeper understanding of how various transformative practices can be utilized in a complimentary fashion to most effectively support an individual’s capacities for self-regulation, health and growth. This integral understanding also allows for the articulation of basic principles that can be applied to any number of experiences and life situations, principles that anyone can use to create their own unique practices and approaches to personal transformation.

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The Spiritual Atheist: Sam Harris’s “Experiments in Consciousness”

There are so many terms in the English language that fall flat from the weight of excessive baggage and unfortunate associations, but we’re especially hampered when discussing what theologian Paul Tillich called our “ultimate concern”—namely religion/spirituality. You see I’ve already blown it, putting the words together like that with a slash. Of the two, I prefer the word “religion”, because of its etymological elegance [re (again) + ligare (bind, connect) = “to reconnect”]. “Spirituality” evokes images of ghosts and New Age bookstores, and to me sounds a bit wishy-washy and disembodied. But then again, in terms of common usage (and practice), “religion” hardly seems connected at all to the cultivation of rarefied states of being.

For my money, the best adjective we have available when talking about experiences of the farthest reaches of human consciousness is not religious, spiritual, or mystical, but rather transpersonal—a term probably first used by William James, but nonetheless later associated with the likes of Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung. Unfortunately, Maslow’s bold vision of establishing a fully rational yet visionary branch of psychology to explore what he called peak experiences has, in my opinion, failed to live up to its promise. As in the human potential movement in general, once the originators and visionaries of humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Maslow, Rogers, Jung, et al) passed away, those who took the baton lost their grip and fumbled it. Perhaps they’ve gone too far in their commitment to define themselves as “outside the mainstream”, but whatever the case, the field has come to embrace too many fuzzy-minded New Age theories and practices, making it hard for a hyper-rational guy like me to stand behind it. But that’s another blog post.

Ironically, one of the people who I think is doing the best job of articulating a rational approach to transpersonal experience is the “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris has appeared so often in the media since his book The End of Faith came out in 2005, it’s easy to form an opinion about him without having actually read this signature work of his. But those who have read it will have noticed his strong affirmation of transpersonal experience in the book’s final chapter (Experiments in Consciousness). What I appreciate most about Harris’s approach is the way he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being:

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition; it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.”

So the distinction between our everyday personal experiences and the more extraordinary, deep, trans-personal experiences (experiences most of us have at least glimpsed and that give us the feeling of being connected to something greater than or beyond or transcendent to the confines of our personal egos) is simply a matter of how we use our attention. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has done in his work with mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), Harris articulates the essence of spiritual practice (namely Buddhist-style meditation, which Harris has studied and practiced for many years) in universal, common-sense terms, stripped of religious and traditional associations:

“[Meditation] merely requires that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity. Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative.”

While Harris makes it clear that experimenting with different methods of modifying our habitual uses of attention is very much a worthwhile endeavor, he takes pains to stress that such a project does not, in principle, need to have anything to do with either religious or New Age belief systems:

“The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.”

So there you have it. One of the “Four Horsemen” (along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) of the so-called New Atheist movement spent the final chapter of his religion-trashing opus validating spiritual—er I mean transpersonal—experience! In fact, the book’s concluding paragraph, from which the title was extracted, could have been written by Maslow himself. Well, except for maybe the final sentence:

“While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.”

I’m looking forward to reading Harris’s latest work, The Moral Landscape, as it promises to flesh out his vision of an appropriately 21st century pursuit of global well-being. Now that’s a project I have no trouble standing behind.

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Charles Tart & Shinzen Young: Progress in Meditation?

Dr. Charles T. TartShinzen YoungEarlier this week one of my former professors, Charles Tart (affectionately known as Charley), shared a fascinating exchange on his blog between himself and meditation teacher Shinzen Young. Charley presented Shinzen with an issue that’s coming up in his meditation practice:

“The problem. A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time…”

I can totally relate to this, having spent the past fifteen years or so practicing meditation intermittently, whenever the spirit moves me, so to speak (which could mean every day, or a couple of times a week, or a few times a month). While I know there might be benefits to doing some sort of formal sitting practice everyday, when it comes down to it I’m just not motivated to take more time away from the many other things that bring me joy and satisfaction. As Charley puts it:

“At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc. That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.”

Shinzen’s response was really interesting, and is worth quoting in full:

“I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it’s quite dramatic. However, it’s been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn’t happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don’t really realize how much they’ve changed.
The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn’t go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it’s difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.
So I would say don’t worry if you’re not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.”

The idea that progress can often be both hypothetical and a measure of absence is something that’s occurred to me lately in the context of my physical exercise routine. I was just telling my wife how I’m somewhat disappointed in how little I’ve seemed to gain from this past month or so of really disciplined exercising. Based on how my body responded to exercise when I was younger, I figured that by now I’d be seeing some difference in the way I look with my shirt off, at the very least. But that middle-aged-looking flab that’s crept into my midsection is still hanging on, and perhaps even making gains. My wife reminded me that, had I not been exercising so much lately, perhaps I’d be even more flabby! For some reason this “hypothetical, measure of absence” type of progress is not very inspiring! At least it’s not as motivating as the kind of good ol’ positive results you can see in the mirror.

As Charley brings up, meditation is a little tricker, because there’s this “promise” that if you keep up a disciplined practice for long enough, you just might get rewarded with the ultimate prize of spiritual enlightenment. Of course, you also might not get enlightened no matter how much you practice, or you might be meditating in a less-than-ideal way for years before catching yourself, or you might get suddenly enlightened without having to practice much at all. It’s almost as if too many secrets have been let out of the bag when it comes to spiritual practices. For instance, how can one earnestly pursue a Zen koan when one already knows, from reading Alan Watts or whatever, that one only really “gets” the answer after giving up trying? Knowing the punch line in advance robs you of the genuine belly laugh. It’s like knowing for certain that you’ve just taken a placebo. It’s probably not going to work its magic.

Then again, maybe it’s good to drop all expectations when it comes to meditation. After all, it’s really about dropping into the present moment and learning to hang out there with attentiveness and curiosity. In that state of mind, one can allow whatever happens to happen, without resisting or grasping, and that’s its own reward.

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Erich Fromm interviewed by Mike Wallace, 1958

The Society for Humanistic Psychology blog posted the following video of Erich Fromm being interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1958. [A complete transcript of the interview can be accessed via the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) website.] A couple of things stuck me as I watched this fascinating exchange. First, Fromm’s essential critique of modern society is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Second, I find it difficult to imagine any news program today featuring this kind of in-depth, philosophical discussion. We’ll see weeks of non-stop news coverage on say, the death of Michael Jackson, but when it comes to exchanging thoughtful perspectives on our most pressing societal problems, we’re offered little more than partisan sound-bites and propaganda disguised as journalism.

The program below is introduced as a “Special series discussing the problems of survival and freedom in America”. Mike Wallace begins by saying that his aim in talking with Fromm is to “try to measure the impact of our free society on us as individuals. Whether we’re as happy as we like to think we are, or as free to think and to feel.” Imagine Bill O’Reilly or Brian Williams or Katie Couric devoting an entire program to such questions! These kinds of questions are incredibly important, yet conspicuously absent from public discourse. In terms of Integral Health, it is simply impossible to understand individual health and happiness without understanding the way our individual lives are shaped by societal forces.

During the discussion, Fromm talks about the “marketing orientation” of the American citizenry of the 1950s: “Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality – or as one says sometimes, our ‘personality package’ – for something.” Fromm (I’m paraphrasing here) goes on to describe modern social relationships as shallow, with real intimacy being hidden by a superficial friendliness. He suggests that the average American is only genuinely concerned with private affairs, never losing sleep about the pressing societal problems which threaten our very existence. He says the average person prefers to leave such things to specialists in the government, talking about problems shown on the news with friends and coworkers, but with no more sense of urgency than one would talk about a car that needs repair. Fromm asserts that, despite our apparent preoccupation with it, true love remains a relatively rare phenomenon. He laments that it is all too common that the most important things we talk about on Sundays are the very things that we pay relatively little attention to in our everyday lives. Again, he’s talking about life in the 1950s, but it’s easy to be struck with how little things have changed, at least in many respects. Like when he says: “I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing. I mean, we talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom – and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God – and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.”

Speaking of the “religious renaissance” he was seeing back then, Fromm describes it as “the greatest danger that true religious experience has ever been confronted with.” He goes on to say that man today, being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little energy and time to devote himself to the true religious experience, which Fromm defines (in response to Wallace) as “the capacity to feel deep love and oneness with others and nature.” Wallace also asks Fromm to define “happiness” and “democracy”. Regarding happiness, Fromm offers: “People today seem to define happiness as the experience of unlimited consumption. Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness – awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life – to man, to nature.” Regarding democracy he says: “Democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is – feels – responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making. I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent – not forced consent, manipulated consent -and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.” Fromm adds, “We have a mass man, a mass bureaucracy, a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly but with an illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.”

Fromm gives Wallace–and the people watching this ABC News Special–a lot to chew on. Again, I think many of Fromm’s concerns and observations are just as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Without further ado:



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Mindfulness training in elementary schools

Elisha Goldstein posted the following video on his Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog. It’s very heartening for me to see this type of mindfulness training being offered to children at such a young age.

Mindful Schools, a community outreach program of Park Day School in Oakland, CA, seems to base their training on the principles of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR model (adapting it to the context of elementary school). According to the news story above, Park Day School (a private school) paid for the training to be offered to students at nearby Emerson Elementary School (a public school serving many economically disadvantaged kids). Ah, sweet hope! I would love to be involved in this kind of work one day.

Elisha Goldstein also did an interview with Susan Kaiser Greenland a few months back on the topic of teaching mindfulness meditation to children. This is a very positive trend as far as I’m concerned.

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Understanding addiction

It seems reasonable to assume that if you want to know about a given topic, a good place to start is by checking out what the leading experts in the field have to say about it. For instance, if you google the word “addiction,” you pretty quickly are led to HBO’s Addiction Project site, which contains loads of information backed by such heavy-weights as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). So what is addiction, according to the leading experts?

Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease. Brain imaging shows that addiction severely alters brain areas critical to decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control, which may help to explain the compulsive and destructive behaviors of addiction.

Ah yes, the brain. The three pound hunk of tofu that is the ultimate source of all problems and all answers. (Deep, prolonged sigh.) Of course it’s true that any human behavior or experience can be understood in terms of neurobiology and brain states, and it’s also pretty clear that this understanding is valuable and worth pursuing. But it simply doesn’t follow—in theory or in practice—that therefore dysfunctional behaviors and experiences are neurobiological diseases. In our everyday lives, we take for granted that human life is complicated and plays out on many levels. And long before “neuroplasticity” became a buzz word, we already knew that what we do, how we use our attention, and how we relate to one another affects the quality of our lives (and the structure and function of our bodies/brains).

I worked on a chemical dependency unit in a psychiatric hospital for several years, and I’m fairly certain that most of the professional staff would accept information provided by NIDA (and most everything on the HBO site) uncritically, as I’m sure it fits seamlessly with what they learned in graduate school. But young people tend to question everything, and the patients I worked with were anywhere from 12 to 18 years old. Part of my job was to lead educational discussion groups with these kids several times a week. I also accompanied them to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings several times a week. These kids constantly questioned staff members about all the contradictions they perceived between AA’s philosophy, the treatment center’s information packets, and their own life experiences. For the most part, the contradictions the kids brought up were crushed by the weight of authority, not cleared up by reasoned argument and explanation. I was quite often in the awkward position of covering for and/or attempting to recast the many misconceptions served up daily and repeatedly to patients, some of whom were desperate for accurate information. The kids (who were almost all cigarette smokers) would inevitably point out things like: “Nicotine is super addictive, right? Well, I personally know several people who quit smoking on their own, without any treatment centers or twelve step groups. So, why is everybody here telling me I can’t stop getting high on my own, that I’m powerless over the ‘disease of addiction’?”

As Stanton Peele (one of the few clear-thinking “leading experts” on addiction I’ve come across) has been pointing out for decades, addiction is and has always been politically and socially defined as much as it has been scientifically defined. Peele covers this ground thoroughly in his recent article The Fluid Concept of Smoking Addiction:

The neurobiological model of addiction is static. It is built on the difficulty – often stated as the near impossibility – of quitting or moderation. The model does not attempt to explain how (or, more accurately, why) people cease addictions – even though such cessation is more typical than not with every type drug. The neurobiological model really has nothing to say about why smokers quit (as a majority do), for example due to the pleading of a spouse or a child. In the terms of the model, cessation is unexpected, unexplained, unpredictable, and simply falls beyond its purview or boundaries.

I used an Integral Health framework to help my patients make sense of their substance abuse problems. In practice, our entire staff operated under the integral premise, i.e. that we must address every conceivable dimension of the patient’s life if we hope to make the most effective impact. Some patients, especially those who were heavy opiate users, were given (non-narcotic) drugs to deal with their withdrawal symptoms. Other than that, there was little about the treatment program that had anything to do with directly impacting brain chemistry. We helped patients become more aware of their thought patterns. We taught them healthy coping strategies to deal with the challenging situations and emotions that would inevitably continue to crop up in their lives. We brought their families in for counseling sessions. We contacted teachers, probation officers, judges—anyone who would be working with these kids once they were discharged back into their respective communities—and developed detailed aftercare plans. We covered all the bases, because we knew that substance abuse problems both develop and are potentially resolved in a multidimensional, bio-psycho-sociocultural context. Surely, most thoughtful people (including the folks at NIDA) know this to be true, and yet the “leading experts” continue to present their oversimplified, disingenuous “brain disease” model to the public (complete with brain scan images that often signify very little, and the obligatory lip-service footnote containing the term “biopsychosocial”). I confess, I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. I suspect it has something to do with how government and academic institutions secure their funds. The more influence the pharmaceutical industry has on research and policy processes, the more traction the brain disease model seems to get. And, of course, the public eats up (literally, in the case of pills) easy answers and quick-fix remedies that require as little life-style change and psychological work as possible.

So, although it may seem reasonable to rely on the opinions of leading experts in a given field, this doesn’t always hold true when it comes to the field of mental health. Integral and integrative understandings of addiction and other problems do exist, but they haven’t yet had the appeal and/or financial backing required to capture the imagination of either the leading experts or the general public.

On the bright side, I’m sure all this will change once I click the “Publish” button and everyone on the internet reads this blog post!

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Orgasm Inc.

It’s starting to become fashionable to call out the pharmaceutical industry for its corrupting influence on both the practice of health care and on the general public’s conception of what it means to be healthy. I, for one, think this ripping of Big Pharma is a good thing, a necessary thing, and a thing that’s been long overdue. As with our political system, the undue influence of corporate money is threatening not only the integrity of our health-related institutions (hospitals, university research centers, graduate school programs, etc.), but also the integrity of people’s bodies and psyches.

In an integral health model, moving toward optimal health is not possible without acknowledging, engaging with, and addressing all dimensions of our lives, including the dimension of social systems and institutions. And as long as corporate profit is the highest organizing principle of our health care institutions, our conceptions of health and well-being will be distorted accordingly, leading to interventions that can often cause more harm than good.

ORGASM INC., a new film by Liz Canner, “is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire — and that ultimate moment: orgasm.” Check out the trailer:

Orgasm Inc. Official Trailer from Astrea Media on Vimeo.

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Psychiatry’s sorry state

I just finished reading HEAD CASE: Can psychiatry be a science?, an excellent article by Louis Menand in the The New Yorker. The article makes clear what I’ve already come to realize over the last twenty years studying and working in the field of mental health — namely, that the field is a freakin’ mess. My field, the one referred to on those degrees I spent so much time and money on, is almost hopelessly mired in conflict-of-interest corruption, bad philosophy, and wrong-headed (although often well-intentioned) approaches to alleviating human suffering. The situation is almost hopeless I say, but despite the sorry state of the field, I continue to consider myself a psychologist at heart. And I’m getting tired of wallowing in the muck and mire of it all, tired of hearing myself whine about how stupid everyone must be not see things the way I see them.

So I’m making a concerted effort to be more constructive in my rantings and ravings instead of merely tearing into whatever pushes my buttons. I don’t want throw out the babies with the bath water, so to speak, because there’s usually some truth to be found in most perspectives. That’s the whole point of an integral approach to health, to weave together what’s useful so that problems can be approached more effectively.

The challenge though, is to figure out exactly which perspectives are appropriate or useful in what specific contexts, to articulate how various partial truths fit together into a comprehensive plan of action. I’m hoping to rise to that challenge in the coming weeks by diving deeper into this integral inquiry through engaging others’ perspectives, reflecting on my experiences, and writing about whatever struggles and insights come along the way.

I’ll sign off for today with what I think is the most interesting part of Menand’s piece, where he ventures into this integral territory with some provocative reflections:

Mental disorders sit at the intersection of three distinct fields. They are biological conditions, since they correspond to changes in the body. They are also psychological conditions, since they are experienced cognitively and emotionally—they are part of our conscious life. And they have moral significance, since they involve us in matters such as personal agency and responsibility, social norms and values, and character, and these all vary as cultures vary.

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

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Toward a Mindful Society: Shambhala Sun interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn

From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun:

MINDFUL LIVING: THE PIONEER

Jon Kabat-ZinnAs creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn has brought the benefits of meditation practice to hundreds of thousands of people and inspired a movement that is changing our society in many ways. In this exclusive interview with the Sun’s Barry Boyce, he discusses the philosophy, goals, and promise of the mindfulness movement.

Barry Boyce: Does mindfulness go beyond simply cultivating our attentiveness?

Jon Kabat-Zinn: The ultimate promise of mindfulness is much larger than that, more profound. It helps us understand that our conventional view of ourselves and even what we mean by “self” is incomplete in some very important ways. Mindfulness helps us recognize how and why we mistake the actuality of things for some story we create, and then makes it possible to chart a path toward greater sanity, well-being, and purpose.

Based on that understanding, how would you describe the central mission of your work?

In part 2 of Coming to Our Senses, I talked explicitly about the word dharma—describing it both in terms of the teachings of the Buddha (with a capital D, often spoken of as Buddhadharma) and also as the way things are, the fundamental lawfulness of the universe. So although the Buddha articulated the Dharma, the Dharma itself can’t be Buddhist any more than the law of gravity is English because of Newton, or Italian because of Galileo. It is a universal lawfulness. I specifically asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life XIII conference in Washington, D.C., in 2005 whether there was any fundamental difference between Buddhadharma and universal dharma and he said “no.”

The central mission of my work and that of my colleagues at the Center for Mindfulness has been to bring universal dharma into the mainstream of human activity for the benefit of as many people as possible. That’s a very broad calling, so as a skillful means I chose very consciously from the beginning to anchor it in medicine and healthcare. I thought that would be the most fertile ground for introducing meditation and the wisdom and compassion of the dharma in its universal aspect to a wider world, hopefully in an authentic and meaningful way. After all, hospitals function as dukkha magnets in our society, so what better place for the teachings of suffering and the end of suffering to be made available in ways that people might be able to resonate with and adopt as their own?

This year, we’ve been celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the UMass Medical Center. The original vision has in some sense come to fruition, because Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction has indeed spread to hospitals, clinics, and laboratories around the world. It’s being researched, offered clinically, and experimented with in ways that were virtually inconceivable thirty years ago. I think that has come about because the world is longing for authentic experience that transcends the usual limitations we impose on ourselves—through cultural traditions, ideologies, belief systems, and so forth. People are searching for ways to realize the full spectrum of their humanity.

Why do you think a scientific approach is important in spreading the practice of mindfulness?

I am not really interested in “spreading” mindfulness, so much as I am interested in igniting passion in people for what is deepest and best within all of us, but which is usually hidden and rarely accessible. Science is a particular way of understanding the world that allows some people to approach what they would otherwise shun, and so can be used as a skillful means for opening people’s minds. By bringing science together with meditation, we’re beginning to find new ways, in language people can understand, to show the benefits of training oneself to become intimate with the workings of one’s own mind in a way that generates greater insight and clarity.

The science is also showing interesting and important health benefits of such mind–body training and practices, and is now beginning to elucidate the various pathways though which mindfulness may be exerting its effects on the brain (emotion regulation, working memory, cognitive control, attention, activation in specific somatic maps of the body, cortical thickening in specific regions) and the body (symptom reduction, greater physical well-being, immune function enhancement, epigenetic up and down regulation of activity in large numbers and classes of genes). It is also showing that meditation can bring a sense of meaning and purpose to life, based on understanding the nonseparation of self and other. Given the condition we find ourselves in these days on this planet, understanding our interconnectedness is not a spiritual luxury; it’s a societal imperative.

Three or four hundred years ago, not so long in the scheme of things, people practicing meditation did so under fairly isolated conditions, mostly in monasteries. Now meditation is being practiced and studied in laboratories, hospitals, and clinics, and is even finding its way into primary and secondary schools. The people teaching and researching it have in many cases been involved with mindfulness for ten, twenty, thirty, or more years by now. They are not just jumping on some new mindfulness bandwagon. And their work has resulted in many professionals being drawn to mindfulness for the first time. That in itself is a wonderful phenomenon, as long as it is understood that mindfulness is not merely a nice “concept” but an orthogonal way of being that requires ongoing practice and cultivation.

What are some of the new frontiers that mindfulness has entered in recent years?

The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on his own experiences with ongoing practice. In so many different domains, it’s becoming recognized as virtually axiomatic that the mind and body are and always have been on intimate speaking terms, at least biologically. We need to learn to be much more tuned in to the conversation and participate actively if we are going to function effectively and optimize our health and well-being.

Does the synchronizing of mind and body bring benefits beyond functioning effectively?

The awareness we are speaking of when we are using the term “mindfulness” also encompasses the motivations for our actions, for example, the ways we are driven by self-aggrandizement or greed. In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, we’ve seen the effects of greed played out on a massive scale in the banks and insurance companies. Healing that disease won’t just be a matter of bailouts, stimulus packages, and magically creating greater confidence in the economy. We need to create a different kind of confidence and a new kind of economics, one that’s not about mindless spending but is more about marshalling resources for the greater good, for one’s own being, for society, and for the planet. Mindfulness can help open the door to that by helping us go beyond approaches that are based on conceptual thought alone and are driven by unbounded and legally sanctioned greed.

It seems that the notion that we can think our way out of our big problems has been tarnished recently.

That’s a key point. Even very, very smart people—and there are plenty of them around—are starting to recognize that thinking is only one of many forms of intelligence. If we don’t recognize the multiple dimensions of intelligence, we are hampering our ability to find creative solutions and outcomes for problems that don’t admit to simple-minded fixes. It’s like having a linear view in medicine that sees health care solely as fixing people up—an auto mechanic’s model of the body that doesn’t understand healing and transformation, doesn’t understand what happens when you harmonize mind and body. The element that’s missing in that mechanical understanding is awareness.

Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately, we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy for ourselves and the world at large.

On the other hand, if we continue to dominate the planet the way our species has for the past six or seven thousand years, it could be very unhealthy. Regardless of the beauty that’s come out of civilization, we could continue on a path of colossal upheavals that basically come from a human mind that does not make peace with itself—war, genocide, famine, grossly inadequate responses to natural disasters. These upheavals could destroy everything we hold most dear.

Earlier you talked about the promise of mindfulness being much greater than simply focusing attention. What are some of the keys to bringing about the profound effects of mindfulness that you’ve been talking about?

Ultimately, the path is uncertain. All we can do is listen deeply to the calling of our own hearts and of the world, and do the best we can. One of the ways that I have tried to bring the healing and transformative potential of the dharma into modern everyday life in the West has been through attempts to develop an American vocabulary, a Western vocabulary, for speaking about things that until now we haven’t really had a vocabulary for except within religious traditions. I emphasize the universality of the power of mindfulness and awareness, but I’m not talking about a universal church or a universal religious movement. I’m talking about understanding the nature of what it means to be human. I don’t even like to use the word “spiritual.”

Can we simply address what it means to be human—from an evolutionary point of view, from an historical point of view? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts itself up in the form of a human sentient body and being, and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that), and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential? A lot of the time we become so self-absorbed, so preoccupied, that we don’t pursue the kind of fundamental inquiry Aristotle proposed when he made the comment that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In addition to developing a universal, nonreligious vocabulary, I have tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else. This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people, because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else? If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.

What do you mean?

Quite simply, the future is not here, even though we can create as many illusions about it as we’d like. The past is already over. We have to deal with things as they are in the moment. So, it’s most effective to deal with them if you don’t perpetrate illusions on yourself about the nature of your experience, and then fall into wishful thinking or ambition that drives you to create more harm than good.

When we delude ourselves about the true nature of our experience, we not only harm other people. We also harm ourselves, because we don’t befriend certain elements of who we are, of our basic connection to others and to our environment. That’s very sad and very unsatisfying. Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality. This is not easy or painless, by any means, but it is both an embodiment of and a path toward wisdom and peace.

In this regard, we are trying to create a way of speaking about mindfulness as a practice, a way of being, and also as the culmination of the practice in any given moment that is so commonsensical that people will say, “Of course, that makes sense. It makes sense to be in the present moment, to be a little less judgmental or at least be aware of how judgmental I am. Why didn’t I notice this earlier? It’s so obvious.”

Who can we rely on to do the work of bringing this message to more people?

This is a huge challenge, given how imprisoned we are and how blinded by our own conditioning. It would be great if the Dalai Lama could do it all by himself, but there simply isn’t enough of him and the other great teachers to go around. Plus, not everybody can hear it in the language of the traditional meditation vehicles. So perhaps we need many highly dedicated and skillful meditation teachers, steeped in their own practice, to fulfill the need that’s waiting out there. There’s so much suffering in the world. Who are we not to respond to it in some way? That is why a lot of our efforts in MBSR go into professional training, toward developing a whole new generation of people deeply grounded in this universal dharma expression and committed to bringing it into the world in various ways as a skillful means for healing and transformation at a time that the world is crying out for kindness and wisdom.

What’s required to teach mindfulness other than a good human heart?

If we are teaching mindfulness in one setting or another, it really needs to be grounded in our own first-person experience. It needs to be grounded in humility and not-knowing, an openness to possibility but also a deep seeing into self and other. Since it’s available to all of us, it’s not really such a big deal or a special private possession.

Of course, some people will take mindfulness and other practices and put their own stamp on them. Some people are going to make a big campaign out of it without really understanding the depth of it, or understanding mindfulness only in a partial way. The inevitable possibility that some people may approach or exploit these teachings and practices in misguided ways is part of the price of the success of bringing mindfulness into the larger culture.

One of the big responsibilities of those of us who are doing this work is to nurture and mentor the younger people and those who are coming to it for the first time. We can remind them, or clarify for them, that it is not just a fad or merely a smart career move at the moment to become a mindfulness teacher or exponent. The value of mindfulness is both profound and unique. It calls us to take a deep look into the nature of experience itself, and the nature of our own minds and hearts. This is a kind of scientific inquiry, since the mind is really a huge mystery from the scientific point of view.

All of this work hinges on appreciating how awareness can balance thought. There’s nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.