Sermon | November 17, 2019 | Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
There is a story told of a rabbi in ancient times who gathered his students together very early one morning, while it was still dark. He put this question to them: “How can you tell when night has ended and the day has begun?”
One student made a suggestion: “Could it be when you can see an animal and you can tell whether it is a sheep or a goat?”
“No, that’s not it,” answered the rabbi.
Another student said: “Could it be when you look at a tree in the distance and you can tell whether it is a fig tree or a peach tree?”
Again the rabbi answered: “No.”
After a few more guesses the students said: “Well, how do you tell when night has ended?”
The rabbi answered: “It is when you look on the face of any person and you see them as your sibling. If you cannot do this, then, no matter what time it is, it is still night.”
———
The concept of “mindfulness” traces to the Pali words sati, which in the Indian Buddhist tradition implies awareness, attention, or alertness, and vipassana, which means insight cultivated by meditation.
Meditation used to be practiced almost exclusively by Buddhist monks and nuns – ordained people set apart seeking the path to enlightenment. By the 1960s, Westerners had learned about Buddhism, and Western teachers adapted the practice of meditation for Western audiences, downplaying some Buddhist elements and adding teachings from Western psychology.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and mindfulness has truly caught on – it can be found in all kinds of settings – from hospitals to corporate offices to sports teams – as a way to practice focus and attention.
But are there some limits to this mindfulness revolution?
In some contexts, has the concept and practice of mindfulness become so watered down that it has not only lost its full potential but even become possibly harmful?
Let me pause to say that this sermon is for you even if you have no interest in meditation or mindfulness.
This is about the ways our culture, even well-intentioned parts of our culture, tell us we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
It says: We need only fix ourselves, we need only heal our own minds, we need only be kind, we need only be aware, we need only be calm, we need only be present.
The capitalist and individualist thrust of our culture preach that if the individual fixes herself, it will trickle down, and ripple out and that will heal our world.
Will it?
Will it fix voter suppression, and corporate control of politics, and racist policies, and homelessness, and poverty?
As I’ve sermonized before, let’s have some both/and.
What if we talk about healing ourselves in our own minds and choices, AND about working together collectively to transform the whole?
An example before we get back to mindfulness …
Imagine you are a person…
… a person who is struggling with your health, struggling in your marriage, struggling in the day-to-day of life.
You hear all of this talk about self-care, and so you try to squeeze in a massage – with your meager finances and tight schedule of long work hours, maybe at minimum wage. You hear all this talk about not passing down generational trauma, and so you go to therapy and you work hard at it. You hear all this talk about mindfulness and so you start trying to meditate ten minutes a day, but really all you have time for is to pay attention to your breath at the red light sometimes when you remember –and you’ve gotten pretty good at eating your meals mindfully, at least when you’re alone. You hear all this talk about positive psychology, and so you’ve made a vision board for what you want in your life. You hear all this talk about “if everyone was just kind,” and so you try really hard to be kind.
And all of this has helped – maybe it has helped a lot.
But, man, maybe you’re still exhausted.
And there seem to be some BIG hurdles in the way of what’s on that vision board. And MAN, the world is often still a really broken place, with so much suffering and oppression and corruption, and what can YOU do about that, when you have all of these other things on your to do list, including that massage and therapy and 10 minutes of meditation a day.
I was talking to someone recently whose spouse’s health had improved dramatically after a long downward trajectory.
I said, “Wow – to what do you attribute that?”
As she responded, she realized it was those hospice workers coming into the house and helping them out… it was that next-door neighbor who’d just moved in who brought them dinner every Sunday… it was renewed relationships with family that led to more visits, more long conversations…
It was community.
We don’t lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
We’re not suffering only from a lack of self-improvement or self-awareness.
We’re also suffering from a lack of community, and even deeper, we’re suffering from a world that doesn’t affirm that interconnectedness – a world that needs to be reshaped and transformed into a world that sees interconnection first – not profit or power.
….
The students asked the rabbi: “Well, how do you tell when night has ended?”
The rabbi answered: “It is when you look on the face of any person and you see them as your sibling.”
….
Some critics have adopted the term McMindfulness (see, I told you I’d get back to mindfulness!) to describe the way mindfulness is being sold as a form of mental fitness training – to boost performance in school, business, athletics..for executives, for example, as a way to de-stress, focus and bounce back from working 80-hour weeks.
“Suffering is to be understood, and its causes abandoned; Freedom is to be realized, and its path cultivated.”
– The Buddha
But mindfulness – as Buddhism lite – or sometimes even Buddhism corrupted – is sometimes being sold not as a means to awaken us to the sources of suffering and abandon them, but as a way to become better cogs in a machine.
That puts it harshly, I know – cogs in a machine – and none of us want to see ourselves in that way, especially when all we’re doing is trying to improve!
But our individualist and capitalist culture is selling us…(and yes – I mean selling us, if you look at the profits companies are getting just by putting mindfulness in their title) …selling us a surface, self-help technique of mindfulness that perhaps, yes, helps us “lower stress, strengthen focus, and increase productivity.”
But is that what the Buddha would have wanted?
Just to help us be better 9-5 (or 9-9!) workers in the daily grind?
Some ways of teaching mindfulness tell us the causes of suffering are only within us, not also in the political and economic and social frameworks that shape how we live.
What we see in America today, in both the yoga boom and mindfulness fad, is an overemphasis on training in meditation (samadhi) to the exclusion of the trainings in wisdom (prajna) and ethics (shila). If we emphasize contemplative training without wisdom and ethics, we get temporary states of calm and peace [but we haven’t] reverse[d] the causal process by which suffering and stress are created.
Buddhist teacher Dr. Miles Neale. Source: McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga:
Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom
There’s a reason Buddhism developed not just awareness training but the four noble truths – the fourth consisting of an eight-fold path of correctly developed action, speech, livelihood, effort, concentration, mindfulness, intention and view.
Anything that offers success or “happiness” in our unjust society without trying to change it just helps people cope.
And don’t get me wrong – coping is helpful – sometimes essential.
I still love mindfulness, and I’ll personally continue to practice mindfulness, and I’ll try my best to meditate for ten minutes a day!
AND ALSO…I want to keep showing up – as you all have done this morning – for community.
Because we can’t get free without each other.
So next time you see something that tells you all you need to do is fix yourself, I invite you to apply the spiritual practice of “both/and” –“What if I also joined together with others to fix something bigger than myself?”
When we need healing, when we need support, what if we also looked outward.
Let us end with this prayer – or intention – crafted by my colleague Scott Tayler:
Yes, the world is woven with worry and pain.
And yet, the threads are not just tangled with trouble.
Grace and the golden strings of courage
are always waiting to be pulled,
to be tied tenderly
by committed hands
across the wounds that divide us.
May those hands include ours.
May we stay ever engaged
in this precious work
of reweaving the world.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
For further reading:
The Mindfulness Conspiracy – The Guardian
The mindfulness movement: How a Buddhist practice evolved into a scientific approach to life by Matthew Nisbet
McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga: Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom by Dr. Miles Neale
How mindfulness privatised a social problem – The NewStatesman