The Secularization of Meditation
Is meditation a fundamentally religious idea? Is it possible to separate the psychological elements of buddhism from the dogmatic ones? These are important questions we were asking ourselves when we began putting together the Focused Awareness Technique. We decided it was a clear goal right from the start to limit our techniques to mindfulness based psychological exercises, without unloading any religious or spiritual claims on the student. Is this a good approach? or does divorcing the notion of mindfulness from the carefully constructed metaphysics and ethics found in buddhist scripture devalue the practice?
In this post I want to open up the topic of secular meditation. I know the practice of teaching mindfulness without any of the additional teachings from buddhism is a widely understood and appreciated perspective. Allowing people who otherwise would not have been interested in the cultural aspects or the specific dogmas of buddhism the opportunity to benefit from its core teaching, which is merely being present and embodied in this moment.
First though, let me tell you about my Dad. is a little older than fifty, high blood pressure, smoker, probably not the greatest diet and exercise either, so I recommended he sit down twice a day and start a formal meditation practice, alongside some cardiovascular exercise his doctor recommended.
‘I don’t wanna meditate, thats a new agey thing’ was the stock reply
and it occured to me that a great many people don’t practice the positive secular non-religious/cultural aspects of meditation, because it has such a loaded cultural history.
This got me seriously thinking about the secularization of meditation and whether or not I really wanted to continue in the direction I was going of teaching meditation in settings that rarely came without the trappings of spirituality.
After I explained to my dad that mindfulness practice was no different from learning to pay attention to your body and the moment in a certain kind of focused away, he had no trouble understanding its practical value. When people stop thinking of mindfulness as a ‘type of Buddhist or Hindu practice’ and realize that its simply the act of coming back to our senses as Jon Kabat-Zinn would say. Training our mind to refocus on this moment of our life, this opportunity for action, is fundamentally no different that training a muscle to lift heavier weights, or a runner training to run a faster mile.
Mindfulness training is certainly a part of buddhist and hindu, as well as a variety of other contemplative spiritual traditions but its strength I feel really lies in its secularization and adoption by plain old joe shmoe corporate suit. Or the practical use of mindfulness as demonstrated by a quarterback who keeps his mind focused in the middle of a hectic game and delivers his throw right into the waiting hands of his team mate through all the chaos.
When we begin to view mindfulness as somehow outside the domain of every day life and elevate it to the level of ’something special’ we’re already getting into a new kind of spiritual materialism as Trungpa Rinpoche would call it. By learning to focus on the moment for pragmatic reasons we let the spiritual dimensions reveal themselves in their own time, without lust for some kind of fancy new spiritual state.
The Focused Awareness Technique neither endorses nor denies the metaphysical aspects of the ancient and modern contemplative traditions. We only assert that all too often packaging something as simple as mindfulness with the elaborate truth claims of the wisdom traditions causes too many potential buddhas to throw the baby out with the bath water.
-Chris
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