 Felly mae'n cael eu initiative a'r cael eu rhaid i'w gyflaenu i fy morhaol a i fi fyddwch i'w chyfnodd. Rhaid i am fyddai'r 50 o gyflaenu, a bywch chi'n gydag ei fyttwch i fynd i gael eu pwyddi o'r cyflaenu'l. A wnaeth i wneud eu dod agiglaenu. fewn oes eu cyfrannu Springfield, oedd yn amserio'r troi i gael o'r pobllwydau hynny oedd fy modd bwyddiol, oherwydd mae'n wneud o'r bromwys i chi gael o'r bobl yma o'r wnaeth i'w cyflaenu. Ond oedd yr hyn o'r gwreig yn ei abydig i meddwl am ychydig surtout iawn. Dychrymayais i wneud lleol. Felly mae'r hyn o'r hyn sy'n gatech, mae'r hyn o'r hyn o'r fac fleidais, mae'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hollu a mae'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hefyd. A hynny'n ffrind i meddwl sydd yw'n meddlattwch a'r bobl ffodol. Felly yw o'n meddwl gwisig sydd yw'n meddwl. o'r gweithnos i meddwl i'r pwysig sy'n meddwl arall color o'r enghreifftd ym i meddwl, o'r gweithno'r gweithnos o'r gweithnos i meddwl o'r gweithnos i meddwl, ond yr hynny'n cyffredin nhw i wneud i weithio'r fawr'veid, siech. Mae'n liebl iddych yn ei wneud i chi i wneud i chi, a'u wneud i chi i chi i chi oed yn meddwl sy'n meddwl yn hynny ymwysig. Mae'n rheswg mae'i bydd du chi'n meddwl meditation to get en Customer Lightened, or you're practicing to reduce stress? Sam, I think that far from being a timeless ancient practice meditation is fundamentally informed by the cultures and the Contexts in which it's ensconced. The forms of meditation that I to focus on in my research may be understood as introspection technics, that techniques by which people engage in reflective self formation, variously understood. So, I spent 10 years doing research about Burmese vipasna in Thailand. I worked and was ordained in a monastery, vipasna monastery, just outside Chiang Mai. I did that for about 10 years and then I started to get really interested in the introduction of medicine techniques into mental health care in the UK. So I was really struck that an awareness practice originating in Buddhism was being incorporated into therapeutic interventions in secular contexts in pragmatic and targeted ways in order to reduce the suffering of mental ill health. And so about five years ago I began an anthropological study of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with cognitive psychologists, healthcare professionals and MBCT participants. Now not long after that research began I was invited to conduct participant observation in the UK Parliament with the old party parliamentary group that was set up to investigate the policy potential for mindfulness in civil society, particularly in health, education, criminal justice and the workplace. And as we've heard not only were parliamentarians interested in the policy potential for mindfulness, they were also doing it and to date over 200 parliamentarians have completed a mindfulness course. Now I have to say that one of the most extraordinary things about doing research about this process has been meditating in Westminster Palace. It's a trip. So meditating in Westminster with MPs, parliamentarians, peers, special advisers is something that I think would have been unthinkable even five years ago. I think it's worth noting that this is an extraordinary moment and I feel very lucky to have been invited in to act as a critical friend to the process. So that is conducting participant observation, conducting independent research and also using my anthropological perspective to inform the process as it develops. Now in addition to that though, and I'm currently writing a monograph that I'm going to flipping finish very soon, but one of the most interesting things for me doing that research over the last five years has been the unprecedented uptake of mindfulness in the UK. So in the past five years mindfulness has regularly been in the press, the Huffington Post ran a full scale article in Branding 2014, the Year of Mindfulness and then the New York Times branded 2015 the Year of the Mindfulness Backlash equally loudly. So not only did mindfulness suddenly have media cachet, it had earned its own backlash, it was amazing. Even if people did not practice it or completely know what it was many of them, many people had now heard of it and many of those have developed quite strong opinions about it. In the UK mindfulness has been introduced into schools, universities, prisons, the probation service, the police force, the workplace, public, private and third sector and mindfulness based cognitive therapy has been mandated on the national health service for certain patient populations. Now it's so normal for people to practice mindfulness or think that they ought to that if you have an iPhone in your pocket you have an inbuilt mindfulness section in your health data app which tells you, and I quote, taking some time to quiet your mind, be in the moment, can make you less stressed and improve your health overall. So the present moment is having its moment. Now mindfulness is believed to help people cope with life from stress and anxiety and depression to impulse control, emotional regulation and intellectual flexibility and it is being introduced, interpreted as a positive intervention for societal problems as wide-ranging as depressive relapse, criminal recidivism, children's academic performance and work of burnout. So given the range and character of these societal challenges it is striking that a form of awareness training is being promoted as an appropriate solution in all quarters. So this is where we come to the title of my talk today, if mindfulness is the answer what is the question. How have we come to think of meditation as normal and not only that but appropriate in areas where meditation has not been appropriate before. It's worth saying, I was brought up by really hippie parents so I've been meditating since I was about that big and my parents both had meditation practices when I was a kid and it was weird. It was kind of a joke at dinner parties. So there is something really interesting going on here. So this is where I'd like to contribute something to our conversation today. I'd like to suggest that the popularity of mindfulness in the UK is part of broader transformations in our ideas about self, mental health and human flourishing. And I'd like to argue that in the UK we've increasingly come to think of the self as malleable and that we can affect positive change on ourselves, our habits, our impulses, our reactions by learning to relate differently to our minds. So I think of this as the third wave of self-cultivation. The fitness revolution beginning in the 1960s is now received wisdom. But when jogging began as a popular practice it was disparaged by non-jogers as ludicrous. Now even if people don't do some sort of regular physical exercise many people have the sense that they ought to and that they would feel healthier and happier if they did. Now I think of the, for the geeks among you there is an interview with Foucault where he's really disparaging about joggers, which is really interesting anyway. Now I think of the food revolution beginning in the 1990s as the second wave of self-cultivation. Historically the UK is not famous for its culinary leadership. But beginning in the 1990s and extending through today a focus on healthy good food has influenced the sense that people have of the benefits of eating well. So five fruit and veg a day, omega threes, superfoods, those awful chia seeds, or even just a balanced diet are culturally valorised as contributing to human flourishing even if in reality people choose foods because they are easy, cheap or cake. So exercise and diet have both in recent years become sites and technologies by which people work on themselves as part of a commitment to what they think of as living well. So the site of the third wave of self-cultivation as I see it has been the mind. Beginning relatively recently and informed by the popular uptake of scientific theories of epigenetics and neuroplasticity many people in the UK have come to think of the mind as a site for work in a new way. It is a new cultural phenomenon to think of the cultivation of attention and awareness learning to develop a metacognitive relationship with one's own mind as a central constituent of the good life. And this is bound up I think with changing ideas about mental health and human flourishing. So popular discussion in the UK about depression and anxiety has shifted significantly in recent years. Beginning in the 1980s major depressive disorder came to be understood as a relapsing or recurring condition. This meant that people who would not qualify for a clinical diagnosis following recovery came to be understood as maintaining a latent vulnerability to depressive relapse. Now since then successive psychological understandings of depression have been transformed by successive theories of causation and therapeutic approaches for intervention. It is part of these changes that mindfulness based cognitive therapy or MBCT was developed as a psychosocial intervention for the prevention of depressive relapse for people who had experienced three or more depressive episodes but who were currently well. MBCT was introduced onto the NHS after three randomised to controlled trials to be as effective in the prevention of relapse as maintenance antidepressants. So this term that's central to MBCT that we heard in Dan's presentation as well, metacognition is a description for higher level cognition. It's normally attributed to the founding work of John Flaville and metacognition in MBCT that is cognition about cognition or awareness about awareness involves both knowledge about cognition and strategies for the regulation of cognition. Through mindfulness training MBCT participants learn to step aside or shift gear into a different way of relating to internal and external states in the prevention of depressive relapse. They learn that they can have a relationship with their own minds and they learn practical techniques for doing so that require ongoing practice that is metacognitive training. As such living well comes to be characterised by metacognitive ability and the cultivation of a kindly relationship with one's own objectified mind. Now as with the development of maintenance antidepressants MBCT was developed as an intervention for people who are not depressed but who are statistically likely to experience depressive relapse because of their history. That is at the time of the intervention they would not qualify for a clinical diagnosis. Now I think this ethnographic valorisation of metacognition for the prevention of depressive relapse demands that we move beyond the categories of health and illness and this shift away from treating depression in its acute state is part of these broader changes in the ways in which people understand and engage with mental health in Britain. Mental health is altered from being thought of as an either or categorisation of those who do or do not suffer from mental ill health to a presentation of mental ill health affecting one in four people to an understanding now I think of mental health and illness as fluctuating conditions of all human life. Sometimes described as a changing landscape sometimes as a scale location on which changes mental health has come to be thought of as something that affects all people to a greater or lesser extent at different points in their lives. This is reflected in preventative therapeutic methods for people with a history of clinical depression but it's also reflected in the adoption of these methods by people in non-clinical contexts who have never received a mental health diagnosis. Mental health is increasingly thought of as something we all have and something that can be actively supported through the cultivation of a kindly relationship with one's own mind. So, just to, so, mental health changing. But I'd like to just go back a little bit and talk about British fascination with both the mind and also British fascination with meditation because of course British engagement with meditation practice has a much longer history than this and I think that the interpretation of meditation as a proto-scientific technique for the amelioration of suffering in non-religious contexts may be traced back to modernist Buddhist trends of the 19th century. So, in the 19th century in Britain, meditation increasingly came to be framed as a method for psychological development in ways that accord with enlightenment ideas about the perfectability of man through moral reflection, self-observation and the control of the passions. But meditation has also been influenced by another significant intellectual and cultural strand of modernist thinking that is romanticism. Budding in the long 19th century and in full bloom today, interpretations of meditation appeal to two constituent aspects of romantic thought. Firstly, a deep concern that modernity is leading to isolation, atomisation and ill health. And secondly, an emphasis on a quality of engagement with ordinary experience in order to transcend the ills of modernity. The injunction in mindfulness to pay attention in a particular way on purpose finds a comfortable synergy with concerns about attrifying attentional capacity and worrying mental health statistics, offering the romantic possibility of a newly invigorated engagement with life and a healthy relationship with herself on the part of the practitioner. Practising meditation comes to be explicitly associated with aspirations toward living a life in which one is fully present. Bringing awareness to the present moment, learning to be with what is rather than try to fix or change anything is described as bringing a freshness to lived experience, a direct perception of the world. The world comes alive in all of its extraordinary ordinariness, not as a result of any external changes in the world itself, but as a result of the quality of awareness that is brought to perceiving it. So this idea has a very clear genealogy. It echoes what Charles Taylor has referred to as the affirmation of ordinary life in his work on modern subjectivity, a development of the idea that the good life is to be found in quotidian experience by engaging with it in a particular way and the possibility of standing back from experience through a kind of radical reflexivity in order to remake oneself through disciplined work. Contemporary engagements with mindfulness practice are informed by the modern valorisation of ordinary life as the location of sacrality. That's a quote. The merging of the ordinary and the extraordinary in what Virginia Woolf referred to as the interweaving of the prosaic... Virginia Woolf called the cotton wool of everyday life and moments of being. And what the historian of religion, David MacMahan, nicely refers to as the interweaving of the prosaic and the profound. Meditation becomes a therapeutic practice, a means for self-work through a sense of oneness or wonder in daily life, appealing to the human capacity for reflection. As MacMahan argues, and I quote him, the idea that all reality is mediated, ordered, and reflected by the mind, in the mind, has given unprecedented power to the mind. The capacity to relate to one's own mind comes to be understood as a human universal which can be cultivated to support health and well-being. So, genealogy. So if mindfulness is the answer, what is the question? And how did it come to be a question? What I've tried to do in today's presentation is to emphasise the importance not only of contextualising mindfulness and metacognition as historical and analytic objects of reminding ourselves that we are not the proverbial brain in a vat, but of contextualising our interest in it. Our inquiry into mindfulness and metacognition can be enriched by the work of philosophers, psychologists and scientists. But it is worth remembering that though the nature of awareness and its relationship to human experience is in many ways an age-old analytic and scientific question, the ways in which we approach it and of course the solutions we arrive at have their own histories, cultures and sociologies. They do not arise in a vacuum. The genealogy of mindfulness that I've described here, for example, has highlighted its distinctively modern roots in rationalism and romanticism, despite its appeal to older traditions, as well as the recent and remarkable upswing in public and political interest in the mind as an object of governance, both by the self and by others. Thanks. Hi. I want to thank you about your fresh mind, your beginner's mind, about the way you came into this room to us, but also about the way you make your research. Please don't become an expert. No, sure. No fear. Because I miss that too expert. And they are more focused on themself than on the people experience. And I find that to you. Thank you also because I don't know, in fact, what's the question, but I have some idea. For example, what's a good life, and maybe mindfulness can be an answer, or can I better my life? So thank you. Thank you. I thought I was doing expert quite well. I have kind of a question that if some of what you seem to be implying is that we're limiting what we're doing because we're framing it in this culture where we see the mind as this individual thing in our heads that we can work on and develop and improve. And I'm curious, what would you say we're really missing about the potential of this? If it is a 2,500-year-old practice, I mean, who knows really what people were doing between 500 BC and about 200 years ago when we started talking about it. What do you see as most missing in this way of conceptualising mindfulness? So thank you for that question. I think I have two things to say. First of all, my argument is not that current framings of mindfulness are being limited. It's rather to contextualise contemporary interest the current interest in mindfulness practice in the UK, both in terms of a genealogy of British engagement with Buddhism going back to the 19th century, and also British fascination with the mind variously understood over that same period. I'm really interested in the ways in which things intersect. My earlier work was on what's sometimes referred to as the mass meditation movement in Southeast Asia or the modernist meditation movement. So that meditation practice, Burmese vipassana, is based on the Maha Satiputana Suta. So it's based on the greater discourse of the four foundations of mindfulness. But what's really interesting about that, of course, is that that meditation movement really developed in the 1950s in Burma with the teachings of people like monastics like Mahasi Sayadaw or Ubakin, and then it came to Thailand around the 1970s and Nathalie to Nepal and beyond. And I think that one of the interesting things that we can compare there is the way that meditation is understood or in discourse as a timeless or ancient practice. Because, of course, it is true that Burmese vipassana is based on the sutas. It is also true that that was a reformist Buddhist movement. So the claim that meditation is a timeless practice I think is itself a religious claim. And so then in answer to your... So that's my answer to your first half of the question, I guess. My answer to the second half of the question is I'm an anthropologist. I'm not an advocate. So I don't really have skin in the game. I don't see my role as being... ...shoulding of saying we should do this or this is missing. I think what I've seen my contribution being as... I'm trying to get to an in-depth qualitative understanding of what people do, how they understand themselves and what they aspire to and why it might matter to them that they aspire in those ways and why it might make a difference that they do. Joe. Just going back to your question, if mindfulness is the answer, what is the question. And I think you talked about changing nature of selfhood and how mindfulness makes sense in terms of the current sense of selfhood. But as someone who teaches mindfulness what really interests me is suffering. And I think that's what's actually driving the whole thing. For some reason mindfulness seems to be an answer to the suffering that people experience. It's available to people. So I'm wondering whether the nature of that suffering has also changed such that mindfulness now becomes available. In other words, so we might think about rising mental health problems and so on. Or is it simply that these are perennial kind of issues but somehow the way we think about ourselves is different so that mindfulness is now available as a solution. So is there more suffering? No, is this changing nature of selfhood that you're describing also a changing character of suffering? That's a great question. So really, that's a cracker. And I think the two, what would I say to that? That's a really good question. I mean I think that one of the things that a longer historical or genealogical perspective shows is that the changing nature of subjectivity. And I think that is also an interesting thing to explore when we come to looking at suffering. So if you compared the role of suffering in ascetic or monastic meditation practice and with the role of suffering in the prevention of depressive relapse and the reduction of anxiety, suffering takes on a qualitatively different position. It's very clear that people engage with MBCT because they don't want to experience depression again. In that respect, the value of the practice is in some sense external to it. But what is also true and which I hope to have pointed to here is that the way that we're talking about mental health is not only the prevention of ill health, but the active cultivation of forms of healthy relationship to the mind. Such that this isn't only about the prevention of suffering but also as Dan put it, this is a nodding towards forms of human flourishing understood in a broadly Aristotelian way. I hope that's answered your question. It hasn't really. That'll do. Hi Jo, it's really interesting. I want to tap into your anthropological knowledge on this potentially and thinking about its mindfulness, the answer on the broader social scale. The areas that you spoke about, the parts of the world where mass meditation takes place as a much higher proportion of the population who use meditation, what is it possible to say about the nature of those cultures or the way people live that might be linked to that now? And does that hold any clues for us as we grapple the great social injustices and climate urgences of our time? Thank you, thank you. So the country that I'm most familiar with is Thailand. Many of you I'm sure know Thailand has had a reasonably tumultuous political history. One of the questions I suppose that I have there is the ways in which people with the development of the lay meditation movement in Thailand in the 1970s, meditation came to be understood as an appropriate technique for amelioration of suffering in lay life. So it is possible for people to go to the monastery to ordain in order to engage in meditation to see clearly into the truths of life of impermanent suffering and non-self and through that experiential insight cut attachment to the delusional, to delusion and thereby suffer less. So the monks and nuns who I wrote my first book about are committed to a life in which they are practising in order to gain this experiential insight both on the cushion and in the community. Now it's also true that lay people come to the monastery for a million different reasons. So people come to the monastery because they're having a hard time with their husband or because their dad was sick and as a boon they said, if my daddy gets well, I'll go and I'll practise for a week. They practise in order to cultivate forms of religious merit in preparation for exams. And recently, certainly since the 1990s, there has been a strong shift in ideas about engaged Buddhism, particularly bringing ideas about environmental justice and responsibility into understandings about meditative and ascetic practice. So the whole thing is wide open and part of the job of the anthropologist is to understand the specificities of particular engagements with practice rather than the generalisabilities of, I would say, that I'm cautious to steer away from the country. For example, countries in which meditation is a hugely popular practice like, for example, Burma and Thailand and Sri Lanka, there are some things that commonalities that they share such as the Theravada lineage and the monastic tradition. But the ways in which they diverge in terms of politics, gender, economics and political organisation, including recent historical turmoil and warfare, are significant. You're talking about mindfulness, and I think it's somewhat linked to your previous presentation. We're talking about mindfulness when your mind is full of something. How can you concentrate and focus on one thing? I recall your previous intention talking about mindfulness leads to intention and curiosity. But my understanding of mindfulness is emptiness. The other gentleman talked about your suffering. It's mindfulness, sort of a solution to suffering. When I mentioned your mind is full of something, that means we attach too many things. When we attach too many things, we cannot focus or intend on one thing. So my understanding, you talk about mindfulness, is against the exchange of mindfulness in terms of from Buddhist perspective. In the heart surat, the Buddha has nothing to achieve. That means mindfulness. Because when we want something, we get attached and then we suffer. That way, from Buddhist perspective, we focus on the emptiness, other than your mind is full of something. You talk about your... I happen to be in Thailand, in Sri Lanka, in Burma and also in Bhutan in Japan, and I think they got from talking about the practice of mindfulness. They have different practice. In Thailand, Sri Lanka, they got vipassana, but in Bhutan, in Japan, they got a different way of practice. Thank you. Thank you very much. So yes, just to echo that back to you, the question about what we think, the ways in which we understand mindfulness, also, as I already said at the beginning, a lot of interpretation of a lot of the reading of mindfulness in the suttas is also about remembering and recollecting. It's certainly the case that I also did some short period of research with a Taiwanese Buddhist group called the Fo Guan Shan, for whom mindfulness is significantly about emptiness, absolutely, in the teachings of Master Shingen. So for me, this question about the relationship between who you think you are and what you think you're doing when you practice meditation and what you think the meditation is about will radically influence what happens and what your experience is. Thanks. Thank you for your presentation. I am an MS student at UCL. Great. Hello. My name is Kenichi. I'm from Japan, and I also have the experience of living in Thailand for four years. So maybe we should share something. Can I make sure that you mentioned about three waves of health waves? First was fitness, second food. The third is ongoing mindfulness. I think mindfulness is part of a broader cultural shift to think of the mind as a site for work. I think there are other things going on. I mean, this is quite a short talk, but I think that there's a few things happening that lead to the popularity of mindfulness. One is the particular imagination about Buddhism or the kind of particular construction of Buddhism. People will often say to me, well, I'm not religious, but if I was, I'd probably be Buddhist, because there's an idea of Buddhism that has developed through, since the 19th century, as an ethicised practice-based religion which is compatible with the tenets of scientific rationality. It's for that reason, so that is a very important part of it. I think another important part of it is the science. I think it's been evidenced. So I don't think that people would be having these conversations in Westminster if there weren't these scientific studies. Now, as an anthropologist, I find that really interesting because that is a particularly prized form of knowledge production. It has particular cachet, which does not say it's not real. I'm not saying it's not real. It's just that we really value that. I think the third is this shifting idea about Buddhism, the value of science, and also this idea that we can take, that we see in the cognitive framework for depressive relapse in the development of NBCT, that there is both a cognitive component to forms of mental suffering and that people can do something about it by taking care of there, by cultivating a relationship with their own mind. So yeah, the mind as a site for work, and also the mind as a site for work isn't limited to mindfulness. There's also, you know, the huge popularity of scientific discoveries like neuroplasticity. So it's very often school kids in the UK now learn that they can change their hippocampus. I saw one school kid with a little hippo, and she was explaining that this was her hippocampus. So this kind of, the idea of this, I think that these ideas about the mind are developing and they influence the ways in which people are learning to think differently about the nature of health and well-being, and also suffering. Can I add one thing? Yeah, of course. So I see now a strong wave about, maybe it could be a false wave about our health, and it could be either environmental protection or about sexuality, and both probably can be learned a lot from Thailand as well because the past king pumpon is very known for the strong environmental activists, and also Thailand is well-known for the free health, relatively free to think about their sexuality. And like in past few, several months, I see that there is a global kind of anti-plastic movement, and also we are already by the scientific findings, we have really all of us start to understand that climate change is real. Is it? I think so. Okay, okay. So I think so. And maybe BBC TV programme now broadcasts how plastic is damaging our health and health of environment, and also the talking of sexuality. So brain science maybe, or biological science, found that like being homosexual or being lesbian is, how to say, not seen, or it is a kind of biological phenomenon. So maybe these scientific findings have come to help change people's mind against like such as like LGBT activities, and I have heard by my tutor in UCL that they have found that the students in UCL, probably also in source, are kind of open to these LGBT tendencies. And what do you think about these two actions or movements? Yeah. So if I could open that out, so the question is about the, open that out a little bit to a question about the relationship between these ideas about self-cultivation, these ideas about mindfulness and broader political economy and social and social welfare movements and social justice movements. And I think that that's probably, I think it's fascinating. I think it's probably a good point on which I might pause because our next speaker is extraordinary Rachel who's going to speak on exactly these issues. But there are fantastic people in the audience who have been working on mindfulness and social justice and social change for a long time. And it's one of the areas that I think is most exciting in terms of my anthropological research. So yes, the question about how we locate mindfulness in political economy, how we locate it in relation to broader social change movements and the ways in which we think that through I think is a fascinating question that we're probably going to focus on when we come back from a break.