 So thank you so much. So we're now going to move into a panel discussion. And I'd just like to invite the panelists first to just come up and get comfortable. If anyone wants to stand up and have a stretch while they're doing that, please feel free. So our chair is Vishwapani Blomfield, who lives in Cardiff and teaches both mindfulness and Buddhism. He's the author of Gotama Buddha, The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One. And you might know him as a very regular contributor to Thought for the Day on Radio 4 since 2006. As a mindfulness teacher, among other things, he has pioneered mindfulness teaching in prison and probation settings in the UK. And he's currently the director of the Mindfulness Initiative in Wales. So I will hand over to Vishwapani. Going to show you something that caught my eye as I was looking in the news agent yesterday. This is mindfulness in public discourse. Snowflake kids get lessons in chilling. And that's it, actually. That is just about the story. There's two paragraphs on page 15, where Anne Whitcombe says, it's obviously not what any of the children have asked for. It's nonsense. Children should focus on work, because we know that what children always ask for is the opportunity to focus on work. Snowflake, by the way, means sort of precious and fragile and unique and distinct and all of that. So those elements of how mindfulness is perceived are still there. But we've heard from Rachel, from Dan and Joe today. And we're going to have more comment from the members of the panel. So we have Alison Armstrong. Alison gained a PhD in social psychology, exploring the links between consumer behavior and mindfulness. She offers research in mindfulness and mental health training through present minds and is director of research for a charity looking into well-being in older age. Byron Lee is an educator and mindfulness teacher, specializing in inclusion and leadership. He works with individuals, teams, organizations and communities to adapt how they operate into a diverse, complex and changing world. He delivers compassionate, inclusive leadership programs in the NHS and elsewhere as sports sustainable and mindfulness and mindful approaches to equity, inclusion and social justice. So I've got to know Byron through the Mindfulness Initiative and I've got to know Stephen, final panel member, because we are both in Cardiff. Stephen is the senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and his research concerns include the therapeutic cultures of late modernity. I hope you'll be explaining what that means. He is the co-editor of the handbook of the Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness and is currently leading a study mapping the mindfulness movement in the UK. So we have a lot of expertise here. I'm chairing the discussion but I'm also participating in it, which actually means I have to chair myself. I'm just going to say a few words to start us off. And I thought actually rather than, I think perhaps the most helpful thing I can do is to just remind us of some of the things that have already been said. So this panel discussion is entering the dialogue we've already been having. So I think most of you have been here all day. We started with Dan's paper or a summary of a paper, which I look forward to reading in full. And he talked about the significance of mindfulness in three ways. The importance for society as a whole in the capacity to pay attention and secondly to connect with our deeper values and thirdly to take a wider perspective, suggesting that these are transformational qualities for what can make for a better society. So then we had Joe and Joe was talking about mindfulness as a historical object. So she was inviting us, I felt I had been invited to stand back from the assumptions that we have through our experience of this mindfulness world with the reflection that who you think you are and what you think you're doing affects what you are. It affects things particularly in relation to mindfulness and that our view of mindfulness is influenced by changing views of self, particularly the sense that the self is malleable. So that's something that's the context in which mindfulness has emerged and that this also connects with prior ways of thinking about the mind and particularly about Buddhism that are firstly modernist and secondly romantic. So that was a very rich source of stimulation reflection. So then at this point, I think a lot of us started to ask, well, how much do we know about what mindfulness is? Can we simply propose it as a foundational capacity for society, as Dan was suggesting? Rachel reiterated some of those same concerns asking really, we're starting with the sense that we need different models for what mindfulness is. Not assuming that we know what the mind is, what mindfulness is, what emotion is and that these models, mindfulness comes packaged with a set of models and perhaps if we look at those models and we seek how we might reframe mindfulness for different settings, we can help make it more relevant, more potent and address some of the underlying assumptions in each of these models. And then Rachel moved on to the question of what it really is like to try and change things in government and what she feels she can contribute under that general rubric of mindfulness and that turns out to be a lot to do with what it is to be a human being and someone who's involved in government. It means being aware of emotions, of communication and particularly the need for difficult conversations and then also the systems and structures within which work takes place. So mindfulness in Rachel's work has that setting. So then the question of how we can take mindfulness and apply it to society as I think from what we've heard has become increasingly rich and multifaceted. Depends how you understand mindfulness, depends how you understand society, depends on how you frame the whole thing. So I've found this very rich source of reflections already and I hope that in our discussion we'll be both picking up some of those themes and adding our own perspectives. So I'm not going to say any more from myself about what I think about it all but I will introduce the question that we've suggested to the different people on the panel that they discuss. The question is, and Tessa and I worked this out and it's quite a deliberately broad question, what difference does mindfulness make to how we think about society and engage with its challenges? What difference does mindfulness make to how we think about society and engage with its challenges? So I'm going to invite Stephen to go first and then we'll work down the line. Thanks for your party and thanks Tessa for organizing what I think is a great event. I've really enjoyed it so far. So my name is Stephen Stanley. I'm a social scientist. I'm also a scholar practitioner, I would say at Cardiff University. And I'm leading, as Stephen said, this three-year social study of the UK mindfulness movement that's funded by the Leverhulme Trust. And our mapping mindfulness project is studying the people, places and practices that make up the UK mindfulness scene. Thousands of scientific studies have been conducted evidencing the therapeutic efficacy of mindfulness, but we're mostly in the dark really when it comes to understanding mindfulness as a movement and as a social phenomenon. We don't know the answer to basic questions about the provision of mindfulness such as who, where, what, why and how and what it means for the broader society. So if mindfulness is a movement, what kind of movement is it? Is it a therapeutic culture, a professional industry, or a social movement? Is mindfulness best understood as secular, spiritual, religious, or something new entirely? And indeed, what does it mean to make a mindful nation during times of Brexit? You would think you'd escape Brexit with mindfulness, but as we found in our research, and Joe's found too, you don't. So we're studying the community of teachers, trainers, coaches, supervisors, advocates and policy makers, the people leading the mindfulness movement and bringing mindfulness into the population. And just out of interest, how many of you here are mindfulness teachers? You teach mindfulness in some capacity or context, maybe about half of us. And how many of you are researchers? So you're engaged in researching mindfulness. Thank you so much. This is what social scientists do. Discourse about mindfulness in scientific, professional and popular fora, I've never used that word before, but now's the time to use it, tends to be characterised by polemics. And I want to present what I think of five of the most common positions on mindfulness in public discourse in a somewhat stark way to prompt debate and discussion. So the first is where evangelical corporate business advocates market smartphone mindfulness apps as a magic bullet panacea to ensure global mental health and world peace. Ched Meng Tan illustrates that position in his book, Search Inside Yourself. He was the one behind Google's mindfulness programme. Secondly, critics say that muck mindfulness, sold as a stress reduction technique in workplace settings, is a capitalist bandwagon designed to distract our attention from systemic sources of suffering and make us all individually responsible for our health and illness. Thirdly, professional practitioners tend to present mindfulness as a universal human capacity, trained through mindfulness-based applications which comprise ancient wisdom and are evidenced by modern science as being effective therapeutic interventions. There's two more. Fourthly, Buddhists are concerned that the ethics of mindfulness when it is taught in a secular way might have been lost in translation and therefore should be better tied to their Buddhist roots. Other Buddhists think mindfulness courses teach the essence of the dharma but without the Buddhist religious and cultural baggage that comes with it. And fifthly, and finally, although there are many others, proponents and critics alike variously celebrate or fear depending on their perspective that mindfulness is some kind of Trojan horse or I heard it described recently as a Trojan mole or a kind of cuter version. A crypto-Buddhist secular religion being wheeled by stealth undercover into public institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons and governments. This is especially a big fear in the United States where there are legal battles going on about mindfulness in schools. So our project, our lever-hume project which we have some flyers for seeks to ground our understanding of mindfulness as a movement by studying mindfulness teachers' views, experiences and practices on the ground. We want to bring more nuance, more context and balance and attention to social, cultural and historical contexts. So moving beyond the hype and the polemics in many ways. What really matters to mindfulness teachers? This question was posed before. So we'd love to discover more about mindfulness teachers' perspectives, their backgrounds, what they're teaching, why they're teaching and practicing in their various contexts of mindfulness, provision and practice both personally and professionally. So if you like the sound of this and you're one of the mindfulness teachers who put your hand up this is my Christmas appeal. You could say if you'd like to have your voice included in our project please do take a flyer, they're on the front desk and I have a bunch of them. Or visit our website which has just been relaunched which is www.mappingmindfulness.net www.mappingmindfulness.net We want to know what does mindfulness mean to you as mindfulness teachers? Thank you for indulging me in my Christmas appeal. Thanks very much. Baron. Thanks for your party, Ab. So thank you, Stephen. So I was listening to what Rachel was saying about the context, your own context, the kind of sort of frames thing. So I thought maybe the context of my work in relation to mindfulness because that seems really important. So I've spent my professional life, most of my professional life involved in work around inclusion and the qualities of work and the people in the room as well has probably been involved in that kind of work. The thing that's often really struck me about this area of work is that most people have an opinion when it comes to this. What I'm often struck is that people generally don't have a good understanding. And I think this is often one of the particular challenges you face, particularly when we start talking about it, how can mindfulness help to inform this conversation? So I guess I maybe want to share a couple of observations of on my own over the last work in this area for nearly 30 years around the sort of dangers and risks that mindfulness might find itself falling into other people who have already found themselves in the past. And maybe it's also maybe some of the opportunities mindfulness might have to address some of those things in a different way. So I'm going to refer to a couple of authors and if anyone's interested, there's a huge lineage of really good writers in this field that again I think people often don't refer to who often do challenge people's perspective of the world. So I'm going to refer to some of the writing of a woman called Ian Ang who talked about the importance of navigating cultural complexity. And what you tend to find in particularly policymaking is there is a reaction to complexity which is to resolve a sense of overwhelm by going for simplistic solutions. And when you look at policy and practice in this area, particularly when we start talking about inclusion, most of those things are well-intentioned but often very simplistic. And the danger of simplistic approaches is that people somehow feel like there should be a degree of gratitude from those to help in a sense that this is for you rather than saying yes, but that's not what we were asking for. So something quite interesting about the dynamic of that. And what she talks about is something described as sophisticated simplifications. I'm a great fan of George Box's quote who was a statistician who turned around and said, no, all models are wrong. It's just some of them are useful. And while that sounds a bit of heresy to people who spend a lot of time creating their models, for me there's something about the pragmatism that fits with this particular agenda. Is that if you're thinking about what works, then you have to ask yourself what works in this context. So for example, you know, with great faith in the kind of research methodology is you create an eight-week program that appears to work with the population used to do your research, then you take it to community and somehow it's not working the same way. The question you have to ask yourself is to what extent is this design with these people in mind rather than saying there's a problem with this particular community. Is that the nature of the narrative that we have around that? The other thing which I'll share with you is an observation which I think the mindfulness community as well needs to be aware of, particularly in terms of where it's going, is the wonderful TED talk that some of you may have come across by Jimmy Manda and Gozi Adici around the danger of the single story. And the particular area around the danger of the single story was emphasised as this idea that what we do is we write narratives on the position of where we are in the story. And the danger of the single story particularly about mindfulness is that if your intentions are benevolent, therefore you can do no harm. And I think it's really important to engage in a conversation about going back to the point made earlier about what's the intention behind what we're trying to do in relation to the different communities which you wanted to engage. So for me sometimes it's about reframing how we view things, particularly in light of some of the things we might observe. So for example, we often talk about disadvantaged or marginalised communities. If you just reframe that in a different way, so for example, under-invested communities would change our emphasis to understanding well, who do we then need to approach to resolve this? The communities themselves or the people who are meant to be investing the money. Who do we need to teach mindfulness to? The people who are affected by it or the people who are making the decisions in the first place. So there's something about recognising that these things have been explored in the past, by the way. One of the things I want to share with you is that there's lots of lessons been learned to avoid situations that you can replicate by simply looking about what people have identified. And I think the opportunity of mindfulness, particularly around the more sophisticated thinking and perspectivism, I think the potential is huge in terms of a different way of engaging in these conversations. I'll pause there. I was told to be less than five minutes. So I'm not timing myself. Okay, Alison. Okay, good afternoon. Is that better? Okay. Yeah, good afternoon. So I'm Alison Armstrong and I'm feeling a little bit of the lone female up here. My starting point really for coming into doing research on mindfulness was to bring together my meditation and yoga experience and also my views on ecological issues and by necessity a PhD has to narrow. And so I looked in the end at consumer behaviour and the with the obvious side that when we consume a lot of stuff we're doing a lot of environmental and ecological damage and what could mindfulness offer? So there were lots of things that came out of that in terms of the way we use consumer goods in order to define and express our identity the way we use consumer goods at least some people use that for emotion regulation and therefore if mindfulness helps us to be clear about our sense of identity and also to have a sense of our value and to have emotion regulation within it then it was going to be a helpful thing. My study was very small but quite in depth and there were some positive things to be seen from that. And I'm happy to talk about that more if there's the interest. I finished the PhD six years ago and I think it's perhaps helpful to reflect on the fact that I'm now in a state where I'm not quite sure what I mean by mindfulness or where I sit in being a mindfulness teacher and what I'm offering. So I took a step back from teaching I took a step back from academia and I returned to my own practice and what I found was that my ongoing mindfulness practice was feeling dry and it was feeling clinical. So I went further back and rediscovered my yoga roots and when I talk about yoga I'm not talking about a weekly exercise class I'm talking about the bigger sense of yoga as a broad spiritual practice and as a if you like a lifestyle and I found a richness there that I hadn't found in mindfulness. On stepping back out of the mindfulness world I also noticed and I've been saying this for years but noticed even more clearly class issues the economics around mindfulness I found it increasingly difficult to stay so-called up-to-date with the training that I was supposed to be doing in order to stay registered as a mindfulness teacher I found that and this is just a personal reflection and it's just what I've observed over the last couple of years I noticed that it feels a little bit that even though we haven't fully defined what mindfulness is we're selling it and we're sometimes overselling it and there is this turning mindfulness into something that is a commodity and I'm on all these email lists where you get all these updates and I don't, to be honest, read them all I hardly read any and I was fairly horrified last month when I don't know who it came from but there was a mindfulness email coming out with the words also in the email of Black Friday and it's where we start to see that how mindfulness gets co-opted by these kind of materialistic values that are broadly in society so I don't think I've answered the question I was posed I just wanted to open up a few things that I'm noticing and I'm really happy to talk more about my research which probably does more closely answer the question but these are some of the things I'm noticing and I still teach mindfulness by the way and I'm still very happy to do so but what I've done is narrowed the context into which I offer mindfulness which is much more the context that I'm comfortable in and understand Okay, thank you Okay, so I think what we can do is I'd like to say a few things for my own and then I think we'll just open it up to questions and this is really our opportunity for a plenary in relation to the things that we've said but also in relation to the whole day so as we talk about these things as we think about things they become more and more complicated and I certainly recognize and resonate with the concerns that have been expressed about mindfulness but I I also want to just come back to why I'm a mindfulness teacher myself I mean my background is as a Buddhist and well it's a way for me to earn a living but that's not enough actually, the reason I do it is that if so maybe I'll just say a little bit about what I do I teach in quite a lot of different contexts I teach NBCT courses I sometimes teach breathworks courses I teach I sometimes find myself going into prisons I do quite a lot of work with men on probation coming out of prison I am very interested in developing mindfulness for community settings and peer mindfulness I'm interested in training people in communities to be able to share mindfulness etc so I find myself doing a lot but the the key to it for me and I think I would generalize this the reason that is spreading so effectively is what I mentioned to Joe earlier when I asked a question it's suffering people come on my mindfulness courses because in some way they're suffering with depression, anxiety, stress whatever it might be and that is a motivator a lot of the more abstract things about well-being might be a nice idea but the fact that I'm experiencing intense personal or emotional suffering either now, or if I'm in danger of relapsing I have in the past, I fear that again that is the heart of it and mine John Kabat-Zinn and Mark Williams and those people have I'm very happy to say being able to adapt you know distill something that actually works and helps people gives people tools that really help them address their suffering and it also interests me as a basis for social change because where, you know global warming is for most of us something of a an abstraction I mean obviously it's real but we don't feel it in the way that we feel our mental anguish so it's a starting point for a wider kind of change so this rubbish in the Daily Star I don't know how seriously it really needs to be taken snowflake kids get lessons in chilling what's wrong with that and what's wrong with Anne Woodcombe's comment on it is the reality that children are experiencing so much mental distress and in Wales we've got Liz Williams here who is really the powerhouse behind what is quite a revolution in education in Wales or at least potentially there's so much interest in schools because the needs are so great mindfulness then speaks to people individually in their minds and I know that that is a problem it's not so much a problem for me coming from a Buddhist perspective because that's what Buddhism's always done it started with the individual in their mind but it does raise the question for me it raises lots of questions can we analogize do you see an analogy between the individual and our patterns our own suffering and societal suffering we've also been hovering around issues around values and ethics and views of the mind and again I'm not sure how much to say now but my own perspective is from a Buddhist perspective where the mind is very much seen as an ethical domain and values and our actions spring from our states of mind within the context of Buddhist psychology so I come back again to that starting point which is suffering and I teach mindfulness out of the faith that bringing awareness to suffering is a key to many of the other issues that we've been talking about societal issues personal issues and what in the end are ethical issues so that's my little bit thanks to everyone for saying their little bit and I think we need to open it out now so do we have a mic roving around somewhere roaming, roving whatever the mics do we have a mic so yes thank you very much and thank you to all the speakers it's been a super rich day I wanted to really make a comment and then maybe ask for your views I'm quite concerned about talking about cultivating a flourishing society investing in human consciousness and the concern of human suffering without hearing us doing more of a sort of social political analysis of why we're suffering who is suffering and who is getting to ask those questions so I guess I'm wanting to advocate that actually the mindfulness movement itself is swimming in a social, political economic and a historical context and that we need to be recognizing the context in which we're in in order to recognize what impact the work that we have is doing and I find it really interesting coming a little bit more from that perspective when we talk about mindfulness in schools my mind automatically goes to well if kids are stressed in schools what are we doing about the provision of schooling the education system trainers when we talk about working with marginalized communities my mind goes to well why are they marginalized when we're working with politicians or power holders on how mindfulness can support a deeper inquiry into how we might actually be maintaining power and privilege so for me I guess I'm referring back to a question that Tessa brought in at the beginning which is mindfulness neutral and for me mindfulness might be neutral but the way that mindfulness is taught or funded or promoted by the movement is political because when we make decisions about whether we work with the kids or whether we work with the politicians or whether we work with people who work within a corporation or whether we work with the shareholders of that organization or the CEOs that is actually a political decision so I'd love to get a little bit of views and I have to say I know that Stephen has lots of very good things to say about this topic so I'd love for one of the people to hear from articulate these points much better than me and any others that have views. Thank you. Okay so you'd particularly like to hear from Stephen and then we'll see who else. Given that I've got so much to say on this I'll keep it really brief and it's just one point that came to mind as you were speaking is that one of the potential reasons for that kind of focus on the psychological on personal well-being on the individual of the mindfulness world and the focus on mental health and so on is partly to do with the research and the focus of research I think if we think historically I think one of the big carriers for mindfulness historically is psychology and I mean psychology in its broadest sense the discipline of psychology and also psychotherapy psychoanalysis even actually if you look back historically and so psychology neuroscience they really are the key forms of research that are active in this area there's very little social science and humanities research in this field so even to ask basic questions like why are people taking a course in mindfulness most studies are not really looking at that actually when there's thousands of studies that have been published on mindfulness very few of them take a more social angle which would even ask questions like that to find out from people why are you taking a course in mindfulness so I think that's part of the issue and I think the other issue which I think people have kind of mentioned but maybe we just need to name it is the political economy aspect and the kind of parallel rise of what's been called the economy and they do parallel the rise of mindfulness in the west quite closely and I think that's the broader narrative that we need to take into account especially when we're evaluating the muck mindfulness critiques like Alison was discussing as well so that would just be two really brief things I would say and I can go on and on about it but I won't so yeah, thank you Steve so thank you Paula for the question and for me it's so there is a bit of research that shows that when mindfulness programs have been taught within communities, particularly communities of people who have been described as being marginalized so for example when they look at issues around race one of the feedback quite often the feedback is that those courses have lacked an acknowledgement of other things that people have actually struggled with and it hasn't been acknowledged within the kind of mindfulness teaching itself it wasn't that mindfulness teaching wasn't helpful it was the lack of acknowledgement with any skill and I think that's something I think the mindfulness again, talking about mindfulness as a social process of change is that it also needs to have the capacity to acknowledge its limitations when we talk about mindfulness about describing things as they are rather than what we think they should be and I think there's a degree because there's a really important difference between we talked earlier about empathy and there's a really important difference between empathy and cultural humility as part of mindfulness teaching but also it's a really important part of how we engage with some of these particular topics do we bring an element of cultural humility in this kind of shared learning experience and I was sharing with Dan earlier about this idea of co-creation and one of the problems with co-creation through empathy and attention is that it's an afterthought one of my criticisms of many organizations when they start considering issues around race, gender etc it's done as an afterthought in particular making policy decisions it's not their lived experience and as soon as you engage with people who is their lived experience they don't use the same language that people use within policy making they don't talk about these challenges they talk about life people talk about why don't they attend events well they're busy getting on with life so there's a very different narrative needs to be had and if you want to engage communities don't hold events where you have to come to go to those communities and have them there there's a whole range of things you can practically do so for me it's about recognizing how things are rather than how they should be clearly having a vision of where you want to get to but for me there's a different kind of narrative that people have and I think sometimes it comes as a surprise to people when they start listing into school conversations they may have never had before I think I'll just say something about language I can't help being a white female middle class person and I think that quite often the way we frame mindfulness interventions the way we advertise where we put mindfulness on we're automatically excluding large sections of the population and so I think there's some really important work there to do and I think it's very dangerous whenever we think that we're relying on mindfulness to help the individual without looking at the bigger systemic problems because mindfulness then as Stephen said it turns into oh it's my fault that I'm suffering and therefore and I should be able to do something about that without taking into account the context in which people sit and some of the challenges that people face that as a white middle class female I can probably never fully appreciate so I think there's a lot of sensitivity that we need around this and there's a job to do I would say in terms of it's not just how do we make mindfulness accessible in terms of affordable but accessible in terms of the language that we use to even talk about it okay yes of course which is there needs to be a conversation also about who are the people that are going to be offering in those communities even that conversation itself starts to have this kind of and I'm going to use this word not to offend anybody but this is something I'm kind of very aware of there's a risk it becomes kind of like a missionary kind of missionary process rather saying no no no don't be a missionary because actually even it's benevolent you're risking it's about how those communities are already organising themselves which they will be how those communities are already doing mindfulness which they will be and how do we then facilitate and engage people because they're not sitting there passively waiting for someone to come along it doesn't work that way and I think the frustration sometimes is when people aren't engaged in those conversations there are lots of assumptions that people are making and if you look at the work around mindfulness interaction which comes from the area around from the world of cultural studies the way that they've contextualised mindfulness is very different they talk about honouring indigenous practices as part of the process which is the origin so you wouldn't end up with an 8B program you'd end up with a co-created program that reflected the needs of those communities that would be the emphasis and so there's a very different way of framing these things so just kind of remind me about just wanted to mention that because I think it's important and how then do we support that it's not saying people have to feel somehow offended by that and how do we then support that with the genuine desire to change the way that social fabric is made yeah okay thank you yeah it is a it's a tricky area you know and it's an area that I can't help being aware of these issues you know for me I've partly just found myself taken into prisons for example and on one hand I know I have a sense I'm not the right person you know I'm white male doesn't matter but middle class and English and this is I mean Wales all those sorts of things and educated lots of things that set me apart from people sometimes I find that there is I feel I need to learn how to make that human connection and it's often about just asking the right questions you know that enable that meet people where they're at how do you stay safe in this place finding that common ground but I actually that work has pushed me towards the current project that I'm developing which is around how can we train how can we empower people in these communities in these peer groups whether that's a prison or wherever to be sharing the mindfulness themselves I use this term sharing mindfulness rather than teaching mindfulness and mindfulness really has come into society as a bottom up as a kind of as a groundswell you know but it's groundswell among people like Buddhists caring professionals so on teachers who want something that they can use that will meet the suffering that they see in front of them in a way that engages the mind the mind's capacities but we need a wider groundswell we need something that that people in all of our communities can make their own I think and find their own language to share with each other and the only other no that's enough okay I'll thank you very much for organizing this so I'm Julieta Galante and I am a health mental health researcher this is I was very interested in Steven's comments I really appreciate the dimension of research and the impact that it had on all these developments so what I can say about health research leading this movement really not even health neuroscience is not really that much related to health because it's very experimental but all this psychology perhaps research so one thing is very practical and it's funding so it's much easier to get funding for applied mental health research or things like that or even neuroscience or technology than for social sciences so that's one big thing that we need to take into account but the other thing is the purpose of scientific endeavors is totally different from what Joe was saying about social science being about explaining the context which are very different so in scientific research which is related to biology at its core and to reductionist approaches it's all about generalizing things and in the context of meditation and mindfulness the assumption that lies behind all this research is that there's an effect that is independent of culture and that it's related to biology that's why people are looking at MRIs and doing research in different countries and not even taking into account whether you are teaching an MBSR course in China or in Sri Lanka or like it's just totally different teaching MBSR course they were bringing back what they developed in a way or all this context but so that assumption I would like to talk a bit about the assumption of something here being independent of culture so I think Joe said something in the beginning do you have a question no it's more a comment really do you mind? let's just hear your comment and then we can comment on that ok great so the importance of this is we don't yet know whether there is a biological effect independent of culture I don't think that the research is there yet and we sometimes assume that so actually that could be transformed into a question do you think that there is actually all the members of the panel are you working on that assumption that there is a universal thing here how do you see that point ok so your observation of the field is that there is an assumption a widespread assumption that mindfulness is you can think about it independently of culture yeah so you may well want to tie it to biology but not to culture so that's your and you're asked and then you're wondering if we've noticed the same thing or we operate within that same sort of assumption ok anyone like to comment on that I got a quick comment are you familiar with the work around cultural neuroscience so this so there's some really interesting findings around cultural neuroscience what they discovered is that depending on the cultural environment you're exposed to the question of structural change is quite debatable but there's certainly a lot of evidence around functional change in the brain in terms of the cultures you're exposed to so when you start doing MRI scans of how the brains were functioning the fact that you have a universal principle how the brains were functioning with one context may be completely different than other cultural contexts for someone else from another part of the world and that's the reason why a lot of functional MRI scans it's very, very embryonic and it's very risky to go and I think there's a lot of people who teach this stuff have been warning people don't overemphasize what it says I think I resisted a lecture once by someone's neuroscience saying MRI scans, functional MRI scans it's a bit like taking a helicopter over city you can see where the people are but you have no idea what they're doing there and it's saying it really is quite dangerous to make a kind of extrapolation but I do think the area of culture neuroscience is really interesting in terms of really challenging the idea of universality and that's why I always go back to this kind of usefulness question that we can get caught up in the kind of focus on the research and I'm sure academics and I used to work in the university you can very easily get very blinked rather than asking questions so how useful is this to the people who are trying to support and help particularly when we talk about some of the social challenges I don't have a big answer I can just give a very little example which is that the area that I'm really comfortable teaching mindfulness now is within engineering and science because that is who I was before I went and did a social psychology PhD I was an engineer for 10 years and so it's a very tiny microcosm of a culture that I get and so I think it's important that I mean it's already been said today context is important the language we use is important and I think we need to situate ourselves within the particular environments in which we have some understanding okay alright I don't have a comment so maybe yes okay so if you don't mind just waiting there's someone at the back who's been asking for a while sorry if I missed you Pauline a number of my questions have been answered but I just had one other question about assumptions so when the mindfulness world has gone out and approached other demographics or other communities and seldom heard voices the question on approaches is that what the seldom heard voice communities are actually saying that they're looking for so if that's the basis of what we're going out and saying to those different communities is that what they're asking us to do or is that something that we're assuming when we go there first so that's part one of my questions and the second one if that is is that what the seldom heard voice communities are actually saying that they're looking for the second one if that is then is our approach already skewed to what we think that they need rather than we're actually going in to say well what is it you're actually looking for yeah okay so is there an I was the one who used the word assumptions that do you like me to answer in particular or is it yeah okay so yeah do people want to relieve their suffering for my own experience so what I'm doing is actually going into different communities seldom heard voices and at the moment I am focusing on the BME communities and if my first step is actually going in to say that actually why would I want to do it is their first question what is this going to do for my community so take the approach of going to the elders suffering that's different to what we're already doing yeah I had used right in the beginning this idea about well we're looking at relief for suffering well their first question is is then if I'm going to talk to black bishops and pastors and they'll look at me and say well we already do that what are you talking about why are you coming here to tell me how to look after my people when we already do that so my question is when we're actually going into these different communities is the why they would need it their question back to me is to tell them why do I need this what are you doing that's different to what we've already have so that's part of that whole approach of when we go elsewhere Byron mentioned it about when we go elsewhere this missionary approach of going in and assuming that this is what this community is saying they're actually needing we do it overseas we never do that when we go overseas we actually go and we listen first and then we build but when we do it here because we all speak English supposedly yeah we come with the idea that what we are saying people are going to understand and they're going to want it and it's just that question on the approach in this country that we take is that different to the approach that we would take if we go elsewhere do we speak the same language okay so yes do we make assumptions that we know what communities need do we in a way that we wouldn't if we were going overseas do we have a prepackaged solution to their issues and yeah, anyone like to comment so I have an observation which is this is very nuanced and it's about understanding the unexpressed shared experience that people come into a room in the hope that people will know what they're coming to talk about or to at least resolve and that and it raises a very interesting question about the kind of formula you use for mindfulness communities by the way so for example having been teaching around issues of inclusion one of the things that often comes up particularly when I've been working with black workers groups is like why have you got a group of people all from one group working together and often the reason for that is that people don't have to explain themselves about their experiences of suffering in a way that feels in itself revisiting suffering the idea that people will ask when the question is where are you from it's often kind of like it's not a geographical question it's often an assumption behind those kind of questions and if you've been born in a country and this is your home it kind of raises very different kind of narratives so there's something about understanding that the nature there is suffering but the question itself already predetermines that people haven't thought that through and it's not that you don't ask that question it's about you work on the basic premise of how do I engage with this community as equal partners towards something that people might recognise already is something that people are experiencing and the reasons for why that community has become marginalised so I think it's incredibly nuanced and I don't think it's as simple as saying this is the questionnaire we go in and we ask people but it is about the nature of how do we understand and know and I think the same we can be true around gender the sort of treating of our person who has a century impairment there's a whole range of differences that people will simply tacitly or experientially know that are really important in terms of how we build as you were saying originally about context about people's lived experience and I think as a mindfulness community I think there's a sufficient capacity and engagement to understand that without it becoming what I often see as a kind of defensive reaction to something saying why are we being excluded it's not about exclusion it's about understanding the needs of those specific individuals or communities in that present moment OK, thank you I have a comment which is I think these issues that we're talking about I mean correct me if I am wrong but these issues are true in working with different communities whatever it is we're bringing in you know there's danger for the potential for that missionary zeal and the assumptions whatever we're doing and so why am I a mindfulness teacher and not a social worker you know not to say that social workers aren't needed for me I think the extra bit is a focus on the mind you know a sense that there's in some way it's possible to a certain amount an important amount of the suffering that we experience is to do with our minds and how we relate to experience difficult experience in particular and that it's possible to access different capacities of the mind and to gain a great insight to have more choice and so on and so forth that's what I feel I bring into the settings I go to what that means for people the language the connection between that social setting is going to be very variable and I suppose there's a question of sensitivity and adaptation and models but if it wasn't for that I wouldn't be interested in this whole mindfulness movement if it wasn't for the fact I felt we were onto something that is universal even if it takes so many different forms and that is to do with the mind and I mean they have to add something because there are so many different ways of engaging with the mind so it's a particular way of engaging with the mind seems to be quite helpful so that's my answer because I agree with you about the mind piece and I thought that and I think that for me the big tickish issue is about inequality if you look at society and all the kind of tensions and over the last 30 years it's increased not decreased so there's lots of things we need to address I think there's a wonderful example if you've come across Ruth Kingsbrook around mindfulness race she gives a really wonderful example about what people do when they come across particular struggles and suffering and she gives a really good example about someone who was from and it's the US example but I've had UK experiences of this as well so I think it's not unique to the US because she'd left her community because these people were very racist and she was pleased to now live in an environment where they weren't racist etc and Ruth King's gentle challenge back was so what would it be for you to go back to live in that place because that's your community and how could you then change and influence that place because it often feels much easier to go to the communities and on the receiving end of things and help those communities versus turning around and saying which people's way of dealing with the world is to lash out towards the world you know, the sources and I've worked in a mindful way with people with very right-wing views and it's hard work but the point being it's a different kind of way of working I do that work because the direct effect is on people like myself and others but often the people aren't necessarily as effective it becomes quite difficult I'm not saying people don't do that work by the way and I think it's not disagreeing on the basis of what we find it's about what are we paying attention to in terms of the important work that needs to be done and who's going to find it easier to do that work by the way if you're part of that community to start off with in a way you can have much easier conversations than if somebody comes in and looks very different who's the people automatically think well you're not going to agree with me so I think there's something about from that mindfulness perspective there's something quite exciting being amongst situations in the past that might have been the worst of what we did being part of very much agree with that Rachel would like to comment is there a mic that Rachel can have yeah there's something I'm finding slightly troublesome about the word suffering and how we're bringing it in and the idea that I really get the fact that there's something about mindfulness about how we meet our experience but maybe speaking from my own community of those kind of people with high A scores this idea of how we're meeting our suffering there's something about what I've recognized is that I got very angry about what happened to me and then the social you know the things that led to it and the things that came from it and in terms of the mindfulness actually meeting my suffering it kind of often quite negated my anger which was the thing that for many of us actually got us through in a way and I think I actually think anger gets a bit of a bad press in mindfulness and kind of compassion kind of world maybe not I've done lots of Buddhist retreats I think it gets a bit of a bad press and so really looking at that systemic thing you know there's something there about our assumptions maybe it's about our assumptions kind of thinking aloud really our assumptions about suffering even if we're talking about suffering what assumptions we might be making around that that's going a bit unquestioned and that kind of is my issue has been my issue with some Buddhist retreats and with mindfulness the complexity to this and it's a systemic kind of piece to this as well assumptions yes Jenny this is such a rich conversation it's really hard to work out what to come in I probably won't be very articulate I'm conscious that I'm seeing two sort of timelines here the one of mindfulness really developing and evolving in a very rich way different paths people are taking on this but at the back of my mind this probably is a sign I haven't done enough mindfulness I have an impatience that we've been told that if we don't take action in the world because of the way we live and what we're doing to our planet it's not going to continue beyond the next 6 to 12 years then it becomes unstoppable and I see mindfulness as having potential to do something about that because that's trashy of our planet and the deepening inequality in our world and the sense of loneliness comes from our sort of collective mind being not working well and us being unwell and that many of the aspects of mindfulness could help to change that we need something that's quite catalytic we haven't got time to go for the slow process of social evolution that we might have done in the past some people are working in a bottom up way to make that happen and I think that sense of isolation and bringing empowerment through mindfulness could be part of that so that's a question can it be and what are the main things that we see working there but the other thing is the connection of those people we know have the most influence in this which are variously described as 100 people in the world and yet what Steven was describing in the sort of capitalist version of mindfulness can that get through to some of the people who are most closely connected and could start changing the story of the way that we live so my final point is I really liked what Vishwa Pani was saying about the analogy of our individual brains and emotions and us as human society and our brains and emotions I do feel that the people in this room and those who are connected to are the sort of nodes and synapses that can help bring a health giving property to the way that we live but I have that impatience I don't think we can wait 100 years for that so a sense of urgency and a sense that there is something really interesting going on here which I share I have a comment on that but would anyone else like to say anything sorry what are you all going on here do you want to go? Alison I invite you to I agree I'm also impatient I think one of the things that mindfulness is very helpful for is that although it's often a practice that we do sitting on our own bedroom floors day in day out it is inherently a social thing and it is inherently a practice that opens us up to connecting with each other and with our environment around us and the more we can tap into that and I think one of the words I've not heard too much I even strongly dislike the word mindfulness because partly it's overused and therefore becomes somewhat devalued but I miss in that definition or in the term mindfulness I miss the concept of of warmth of compassion of reaching out and that is going to be fundamental to us solving some of the ecological issues that we face whether mindfulness can do that quickly enough that's something I've been struggling with for a long time I have my own personal struggles with that I make commitments not to fly but I have a stepdaughter who lives in America I see her how do we start to resolve some of these paradoxes and how do we support those who are really doing the good work and I think the issues around habit are very interesting we're in habits around the way we buy things the way we even use our energy the way we move ourselves around but it's not just individual habit that we need to challenge the sort of cultural habit you know one example would be the cultural view that we have to always aim for economic growth now I'm not an economist but to me it's a simple argument if you're always aiming for economic growth you need a continual supply of goods and materials to feed that and that's clearly not sustainable so we need to start challenging some of these collective habitual ways of thinking to really give support to the people in power who we really trust and believe in their values and then ensure that our mindfulness practice contains the element of heart and care and reaching out that I think can be missing when we just use the word mindfulness it implies mind only and I don't think that limits us okay yeah yeah I agree one of the things that really how do we make mindfulness something that can be a lever for changing society more widely so I've said before that I think the strongest resource that mindfulness has is people suffering and the motivating power that that brings you know and I think those of us who teach see that all the time that people really commit to those courses but what frustrates me one of the things that frustrates me is that it's an eight week course and I think that as the mindfulness world we must find ways to move beyond the eight week course that begins and ends and then what you know and so much of what's been said is about context social context with social beings well that's why we need to make mindfulness something much more social much more cultural as a movement and I don't think trying hard enough to do that as a mindfulness world we're playing catch up trying to be able to deliver these therapeutic interventions in in many many different contexts but we've got to get beyond that and the other thing I have to say which I think speaks to hard is that personally I don't know how we resolve all of these issues and I don't think one thing my mindfulness practice teaches me is that when I start to feel like I do need to figure everything out I need to take a step back at that point and really I think where my mindfulness practice corrects me is to what feels simple in the face of complexity the kind of simplicity that helps make sense of it what feels authentic and what I kind of know intuitively in my heart and I won't try and sort of articulate that anymore but it is that sense that there's something very potent in these practices that is a catalyst for change potentially on all of these levels although what that looks like I don't know that's what keeps me doing it I hope I don't sound like an evangelist actually I do sound rather like an evangelist yes next another question if we finish here I guess it's an observation and a question I'm training to be a teacher I'm a leadership development person by background at the OT in the health service I came to mindfulness because of suffering if you said five years ago I was going to train as a teacher and try to change the culture in the health service that would have been a surprise to me but I think what I observe trying to learn to teach and embody it is how the system is designed to teach John Kabat-Zinn's work which was brilliant but was designed for patients most of the research has been done on that I was told by a very leading academic who was teaching me at one of the major centres that I had to teach that purely specific for the context of leadership development that I want to work in I met Rachel and I said Eureka there's someone that's doing things differently so my background is developing leaders and adults and so we need the system is designed for the results it gets because we teach trainers to teach that they're taught to teach that they're not necessary although we have gone to the workplace sessions at Oxford we're not necessarily teaching people about context about how you work in organisations or different contexts as part of that training or I haven't experienced that it also you have to be rich to train so as a white middle class woman I found mindfulness because I had money to pay for it and the resources to find it are difficult time in my life I have money to train and it's costing me a fortune but therefore I wouldn't have the access to train if I didn't have those resources so some of those fundamental systems issues are there in how we teach people sorry it's more of a statement than a question yeah so talking about professionalisation and what that then means and and how we train people because we train people and it's great I'm not saying the 8 week program isn't great but that is held as which came from John's work didn't it and how do we help people make it context specific yeah yes Stephen I could come in on that just very briefly that I've noticed today one of the things that's been at issue is whether mindfulness is one thing or is it multiple things you know and the former allies more with the universal idea and the latter allies more with the contextual idea I think this becomes very marked I think in workplace settings where you have two key other authors who use the word mindfulness but they mean quite different things to that of the John Kabat-Zinn tradition so I'm thinking about Ellen Langer firstly who's an American social psychologist who wrote books at the same time as John Kabat-Zinn but coming more from social psychology studies of decision making and thinking and she distinguishes between mindfulness and mindlessness actually if you work in education you're perhaps more likely to come across her work on mindfulness and learning and the other person that comes to mind is Thomas Wikes Wikes is W-E-I-C-K and he has been developing his concept of organizational mindfulness for many many years almost independently of both Langer's work and John Kabat-Zinn's work so they all use the same concepts they're using it in quite different ways I think partly what happens in the workplace settings is people the practitioners, the teachers in that setting are drawing on maybe these different concepts at the same time and some of the confusion comes because we're not actually distinguishing between them and what they mean those latter two are much more to do with organizational change work and leadership than the John Kabat-Zinn tradition based in meditation neither of those Langer or Wike are based on meditation the assumption of meditation practice I think I found that really helpful and it keys into this idea of whether we and we need to be very careful of who we are as the question was raised earlier around what is counted as universal or not and I've also just very briefly found it really useful again from the history of religion like the point that Joe made that the idea that mindfulness is a timeless universal thing is a religious claim I found it really useful to be aware that suffering is a very particular word that was used in Buddhism in very particular ways and of course we all we could say we all suffer but when it's used in these contexts it's very helpful to see as a Buddhist code word in a way and I don't mean that in a disingenuous sense I mean it because we need to understand so-called secular mindfulness in relation to the development of Buddhism in the way that Joe described I think relating to that question earlier the proposal I would have and our research is in progress in the second year but maybe we need like interfaith work between secular mindfulness teachers and Christian mindfulness practitioners Hindu, Buddhist Jewish Muslim because you get actually all of these faiths and religious groups are engaging with mindfulness in different ways and to see the secular mindfulness perhaps a new domain actually where the secular is becoming moved in more religious and spiritual directions but it's partly informed by Buddhism might help to address some of these issues around missionary zeal and evangelism and be a little bit more upfront I think about some of the issues and the problems it doesn't relate to your question exactly but it's linking the other two with the universal point from earlier and sorry I was holding on to those things for a while I hope they're helpful okay so timing one more question well just did Byron do you want to respond to a really quick response to the point you made I've been delivering a mindfulness based program at Health Service about five years and I've adapted all of them so as a background in action research it's kind of worth noting that you can adapt these things the other thing which is more general observation I think I mentioned earlier people don't sit passively by and wait for things so there are individuals internationally who are developing programs for people to deliver training in communities through understanding of those communities so it's happening as you're speaking and I guess you know and I think there's a desire for people to engage with that type of thing but I think those things will happen anyway okay let's just keep going with this question and if we've got time for another one do you want to say something No okay I not being a stealth Buddhist but an actual one an avert one so it's just interesting to me that we have this modality which is MBSR and its variants and then that is a sort of distillation or something extracted from a wider Buddhist tradition that Stephen says has been a historical process of a century that led to that right so then you've just taken this bit out of a context and then so much of what we're saying is but this feels just decontextualized and we need to recontextualize it in our domains in leadership training or wherever it might be prisons it's really the case you've got to recontextualize in prisons and for me and the risk of universalizing something I do think about mindfulness in its Buddhist setting it's part of the eight fold path for example which is really saying that there's this capacity that the mind has to know itself and to be a balancing faculty between all of the different things that go to make up what it is to be fully human this is a balancing faculty but it needs to be contextualized in these other elements and yet at the same time there's another dimension that is not simply awareness it's not simply metacognition there's what sometimes called Jonathan Rosen calls a sort of a soul like quality that comes with mindfulness so it's a particular it's the awareness that arises when we pay attention in a particular way so for me when I engage with mindfulness in this decontextualized way I'm quite aware that actually it's a contextualizing faculty it wants context it wants to engage with these elements and that's I think if we're mindfulness teachers we need to be alive to that side of mindfulness so alright next word I think it might have been one very brief question on question time this is usually a funny one isn't it what would the panel do if they were I'll try to do my best to be concise and hopefully I'll be able to have my message across I would like to invite maybe Alison and Steve and perhaps Dr Joe perhaps answer this question because I don't have the answer I'm generally interested in the answer but the question is we notice the similar pattern in terms of movement in the yoga community decades ago and it's going on where part of the yoga practice was transformed in the main part of a traditional the main part of a practice that was very simplified and it nowadays when we talk about yoga they think that yoga is a kind of physical activity physical exercise you do to get fit now we have a similar discourse in the mindfulness which is you are improving your awareness you are being more in the present you are eliminating the suffering or trying to I wonder whether mindfulness is becoming the asana of meditation is mindfulness becoming it's like the technique the asana in the yoga is something very small in the yoga practice mindfulness is foundational as well in the practice of meditation I teach yoga meditation I don't use the term mindfulness but we do mindfulness throughout it's foundation something is foundation because you built something on the top of it what is being built on the top of mindfulness is this concern you came across to it I have a distinct impression that Rachel would like to answer this question if anyone else feels very strongly moved maybe we could add something but I think Rachel wants to say something I moved only because I trained yoga teacher and taught yoga for 15 years and actually this did become the debate in what have we done with yoga and then science coming in and saying actually some of these poses aren't great for people the fact that it's been made into exercise rather than like basically this has happened before it's happened in yoga what's happened with mindfulness has happened with yoga it's very interesting and how can we look at what's happening in yoga you don't really see that very much I'm very grateful you've brought the conversation up look at what's happening in yoga and how it's happening in mindfulness what's going on how can they inform each other the patterns there exactly it's exactly the same thing exactly the same thing happened with yoga and partly I think the issue was it's harder to go and teach yoga it's practically harder you do it but it's practically harder and so I don't know there's all sorts of reasons it hasn't quite made the same but the same debates are there and often you don't really hear people thinking oh that's happened already actually it's happening again yeah so very grateful and I think it's very valid great thank you Rachel thanks for that question thanks to everyone who's asked questions and thanks to the other members of the panel all the panelists and to the speakers earlier to Joe and to Rachel and to Dan and Jamie and thank you to Professor Pogl and so us for hosting this and to the Kensei Foundation which has funded this event also to Jerry who's our technician and to the students who've been helping and to all of you for coming and spending your afternoon here and debating these issues which I guess we've just scratched the surface of but there's lots for us to mull over so thank you very much and have a good rest of the weekend