Satipatthana Sutta

The word “mindfulness” itself is the modern English word or translation of the Pali word sati. Sati refers to memory: the Wikipedia translation of sati is “to remember to observe.”

The Satipatthana Sutta is a Pali text. Its title means simply, The Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness. As you can probably guess, this puts it in both the 1) Buddhism as religion, and 2) Buddhist philosophy buckets.

There is potential to have a very long conversation about cultural appropriation here. I’m opting not to dive into that too deeply here, mostly in the interests of time and space. That being said, I do have mixed feelings about the particular path by which mindfulness-based techniques came to the United States. Jon Kabat-Zinn was seminal in this regard. Kabat-Zinn studied with a number of Buddhist teachers. Generally, I feel grateful for his work in developing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. MBSR is an effective, non-pharmacological intervention that helped put mind-body medicine on the map. It got people to take seriously the health impacts of stress. And it taught people to slow down, and listen to their bodies. All of which I love.

Recently, though, I came across this quote. Which I did not love. Regarding teaching mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn said this:

“I wanted to offer instead a kind of translation of a universal understanding or approach that was never really about Buddhism. The Buddha himself wasn’t a Buddhist, and the term Buddhism is an invention of Europeans. And, of course, Buddhists could really care less because it’s all about non-duality."

That last bit pissed me off. It seems to conflate all Buddhists — from Malaysia to South Korea, India to Japan — and ascribes to them the beliefs of (you guessed it) your drug dealer who says, “Whatever, man! It’s all love!”

Saying that Buddhists couldn’t care less because [insert pet stoner phrase here] is like saying that American Christians have no concerns about the US losing its cultural identity, because you talked to a bunch of priests and pastors. Talk to Christian clergy — or Buddhist monks — and you will walk away with a very different view of Christianity in America, or Buddhism in Asia, than if you spoke to non-ordained Christians in America or Buddhists in Asia. Not to say the clergy and the monks don’t have a right to their opinions, but they generally have different views than the everyday folks.

It’s fair to say that the Buddha wasn’t Buddhist. But you know what? The people of Vietnam certainly are, and it matters to them. The nearly 10,000,000 Buddhists who remain in India are Buddhists, and it matters.

And then I caved

Somewhere along the line, even though I get angry about the slicing and dicing of Buddhism into convenient, consumable little bites, I genuinely fell in love with mindfulness meditation, and — as cliché as it sounds — trying to bring mindfulness into my everyday life.

On top of all of this is my work as a psychotherapist. What I’ve found, over and over, is that I can’t make heads or tails of any psychology that doesn’t take account of the human mind/heart, and body. For that, I need Buddhist psychology (which does indeed go much deeper than mindfulness) and somatic psychology. Embracing mindfulness has allowed me to ground myself and my patients, and it has been an absolute lifeline when it comes to working with stressor-related disorders (MBSR is, again, incredibly effective) as well as addictions. I can honestly say I wouldn't know how to work with addictions without Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention.

If you wanted to learn more about the history of Buddhism in the US, you kind of can’t dive into this without talking about race. A great book on the topic is Be the Refuge, by Chenxing Han. Roughly two-thirds of Buddhists in the US are Asian or Asian-American, a fact that is often unknown to the White folks who are interested in or even practicing Buddhism. I don’t agree with every take on things Han has (I mean, I don’t agree on everything with anyone), but she offers important corrective information on the cultural history of Buddhism in the US.

As before, I want to offer you a quick invitation to pause. Maybe close your eyes,, and consider whether you want or need to stay on your screen after this. If it’s time for a break, maybe step away from your screen, let your eyes adjust, and have a quick stretch. I swear, the internet will still be there when you get back. :)

I confess that I enjoy making my patients laugh. One of the easiest ways to do so is to share my honest opinion: life absolutely sucks, a large proportion of the time.

And I mean it. I think it’s profoundly confusing, exhausting, emotionally painful, and excruciatingly boring to be human. Either that, or we numb ourselves to it. I think it’s hard to be a person. As a result of my cheerful pessimism, there is no faster way to piss me off than by saying the phrase:

Focus on the positive!

Whenever I hear this phrase, I always imagine a smiling young woman saying this to me, with some hideous GLIB in her voice. But I’ve certainly heard it from my share of irritating Boomers. If and when anyone ever tries to silver line shit for me, I have a strong urge to punch them.

But let’s think about this a little more methodically. What I want to do is draw a distinction between what folks generally mean by the phrase, “focus on the positive,” and what I think of as finding or cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty.

A pox on your “Focus on the positive”

“Focus on the positive” generally means something like…try to find something good in your life, and place your attention on that, and try not to place your attention on the bad things. On the one hand, this isn’t a completely misguided approach (despite my grumpiness). Negativity bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, and there’s a strong argument that evolution resulted in negativity bias due to its evolutionary advantage. You are more likely to survive if you spot problems and do something to either resolve them, or at least reduce their negative impacts. There isn’t a lot of evolutionary advantage to, say, taking deep breaths and relaxing your shoulders and feeling a surge of gratitude for you and your family’s and your pets’ good health.

On top of all of this, there is research that suggests that folks with depressive disorders both 1) tend to make more negative predictions about the future, and 2) are actually inaccurate in their predictions. Whether this is a chicken-or-the-egg issue is up for debate. While I would never tell a patient to “focus on the positive,” if someone in therapy enjoys a lot of great things in life (safety, material comfort, financial stability, a romantic partner and or friends and family, good health, etc.), and they spend every minute of every session complaining, I’m certainly going to draw attention to this. I tend to believe that mood precedes thought (not the other way around), and I would start to wonder if they had a depressed mood that needed help. I would also — if their negativity bias was super-duper strong — encourage them to try to at least catch their negative, complaining, or critical thoughts and try to not feed them further.

“See the inner nobility and beauty of all human beings”

This concept is offered as “a first principle of Buddhist psychology” by Jack Kornfield. And here’s what happened when I read it the first time: I rolled my eyes and put the book down and didn’t pick it back up for about ten years.

In my defense, I was going through a rough breakup, and the idea of seeing the “inner nobility and beauty” of my ex made me want to gag. And I’ve discovered that Kornfield maybe isn’t always the best teacher for me. He veers pretty close to “focus on the positive” sometimes, and I just don’t vibe with it.

But… Life happened. And somewhere along the line, I realized I’d never been taught to see the nobility and beauty in myself, and that made it near impossible to do so for other people. I also think it helped that I eventually encountered people who advocated not just for more typically feminine positive traits that align with this principle (compassion, kindness, love, etc.), but also for more typically masculine traits that align as well. Things like dignity, self-respect, honor, and ferocity are all traits I appreciate a great deal, and I’ve come to see them as perfectly aligned with Kornfield’s principle.

This is what I’ve come to think of as cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty. And one of the ways you can cultivate these qualities is by — surprise! — focusing on them in others and ourselves.

From an ethical and even a justice perspective, it’s important to clarify that this doesn’t entail naïveté or permissiveness. I can see and honor the dignity and value of even those in prison. And I can believe that some of them need to remain there to protect the public. I can see and honor the goodness and beauty of political opponents, and still firmly, actively oppose their efforts. Kornfield calls this sacred perception, and he describes it this way:

“To see with sacred perception does not mean we ignore the need for development and change in an individual. Sacred perception is one half of a paradox. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki remarked to a disciple, ‘You are perfect just the way you are. And…there is still room for improvement!’”

Marsha Linehan almost certainly borrowed from these principles when she developed some of her basic assumptions within Dialectical Behavior Therapy, including, “Everyone is doing the best they can,” and “Everyone could be doing better.”

If you’re interested in reading more on negativity bias, I recommend this article. I don’t love the use of the word overcome in the title, but I do think that negativity bias needs to be addressed. And if you’d like to dig deeper, I recommend this podcast episode by Kornfield.

And as always, this is your quick invitation to pause. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “Do I want or need to stay on a screen right now?” And if you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule some time off-screen to give yourself a break. Remember: breaks are good.