 We're from the Mindfulness Initiative, which is a charity and a think tank. We've been working with politicians since early 2014. They've had a mindfulness training programme there since 2013, so coming into its sixth year now, where over 200 politicians have been on an eight-week mindfulness course, at least part of it. So an all-party parliamentary group is a little bit like a student society for backbench MPs. There's literally hundreds of them. Some are more active than others. Actually, the mindfulness APPG is thought to be a really vibrant, interesting and productive forum for discussion, for inquiry, for a kind of club, actually. Politicians coming together who have a practice in common. It's one of the few things in Parliament where people come together to do something that isn't about a con-electric policy language or debate and is a shared practice, a well-being practice for some of them. So the all-party parliamentary group inquiry in 2014-2015 looked at particularly the application of mindfulness training, mindfulness-based interventions in health, in education, in the criminal justice system and in the workplace, and it was primarily looking at interventions for the benefit of individuals. So particularly looking, for instance, at mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for recurrent depression, which has been available on the National Health Service theoretically since 2004, but in many areas it's not available. And the only option, if you have been depressed before three times or more, to stay well is often antidepressants. And so the parliamentary group, for instance, made recommendations that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy trainers, teachers should be trained up on a national basis and it should be part of the national psychological therapies programme. And that has been acted upon in the last two or three years. So it's an example of where these kind of parliamentary forums can actually have an impact in public policy. What's happened now in the last two or three years is that where we started out inquiring into how mindfulness could be helpful for individual students or teachers or people in the NHS, it's starting to become a conversation about how mindfulness might not just be an intervention for a specific issue, but might instead or as well be a more sort of foundational capacity that could be helpful for the flourishing of communities, the society more broadly. And in fact, in the words of one politician, potentially the functioning of democracy itself, helping through potentially its self-regulation benefits for people to be more able to engage with those around them in a pro-social way, engage with their community, engage with the state as active citizens. That's one hope. So it moved from individual benefits to the benefits in the whole and then the same kind of thing has happened in Parliament. So in the words of one member of the House of Lords, Baroness Ruth Lister, she said, we talk about mindfulness being helpful out there, but what about how mindfulness can be helpful in here? What about mindful politics more broadly? And so many of these politicians have been practicing mindfulness now for five or six years and starting to think about how it might be helpful for political process itself, how decision making might be better, how politicians in different political parties may be able to disagree better with each other to have a bit more perspective on their own beliefs and ideas and not take it all so personally. So this is what we have then moved to as a policy institute looking at, and Dan's been on board for a few months doing a piece of research and is now writing up a discussion paper that he's going to tell you about, which is that movement from individual benefits to benefits as a whole, how mindfulness, irrespective of how you develop it, how you cultivate it through a training programme, how the capacity of heart and mind could be fundamental for meeting the converging crises of the 21st century. So I'll hand over to Dan, I'll come back in to help with questions, but really he's been doing the heavy lifting here, so he'll continue to do so. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jamie and Tessa for such a warm welcome. So, I guess the stage is set to talk about this pretty big topic then. Today, as Jamie mentioned, there's increasing traction, increasing interest in mindfulness in broadly public policy settings and it's in that context that I thought I'd like to talk a bit about this idea of thinking about mindfulness a little bit more as something like a foundational human capacity to support a flourishing society. And as Jamie mentioned, we'll have a paper, a discussion paper on this coming out in the new year. So to begin as often needs must in these things with a definition, I mean the definition of mindfulness in kind of contemporary, largely secular context that we're working with here is paying attention to what's happening in the present moment, in mind, body and external environment, with an attitude of openness and curiosity and care. So mindfulness here points to something really very basic and as so many practitioners of mindfulness will point out, it does have this potential to really shape who we become as people. And so our discussion paper and the points I'll be making today are particularly targeted, if you like, at political leaders and policy makers and others broadly in the space of public policy or who otherwise are tasked with articulating a vision for a flourishing society. What does that look like and how do we get there? And at this time in particular this is so pressing, I think if we reflect on how much division there is, how much information overload we all experience and policy makers as well but all of us and how many really fundamental challenges and societies we're facing in coming decades, whether it's relating to critical thresholds regarding environmental sustainability through to artificial intelligence and other technological breakthroughs which could be set to really transform how we work and how we live in quite fundamental ways. So in that very broad context, one of the main points in our paper is there is a strong case for thinking about mindfulness absolutely in terms of specific solutions, if you like, to particular policy issues but also more broadly as this foundational capacity and of course this is a point which so many popular books and resources on mindfulness will make. It's more that what we're doing here is tailoring some of the most pertinent ideas there in particular to political leaders and others tasked with thinking about what is a flourishing society who may have passing understanding of mindfulness but where they see it to have benefits they may well assume that those benefits accrue primarily to the individual and to that audience then we suggest that mindfulness is foundational in the sense that it connects us to our deeper values and intentions as individuals and at the same time it speaks to the common ground that we all share through the very basic experience of being human. Let me unpack the ways in which cultivating mindfulness I think can support a flourishing society and I'll speak a bit later about some of the more explicitly pro-social outcomes if you like that we might think mindfulness could perhaps bring us but to begin with I want to say three fairly basic points about what's going on when we practice mindfulness, what mindfulness is which could support us to make wiser decisions wiser choices in our lives as individuals but also in the context of the wider society that we're part of and so the first point to make there is that to simply note that intentionally paying attention to what's going on in the present moment doing so on purpose is in itself quite significant I think it always is significant to do that and maybe particularly at this time when you know with our smartphones and various other distractions wherever we are and whatever we're doing it's never been easier to be doing something and for our mind to be somewhere else and so people often talk and write about how often we're living effectively in autopilot mode and you know if at societal level if we're living on that autopilot mode more of us more and more of the time I think there are real social implications of that and they may speak to our connection with one another our empathy or maybe our intimacy and many other things and you know to counter that of course we can learn to use technologies in a healthier way we might block our own access to certain apps on our phone at certain times and so on and that's really important but I guess in that debate just recognizing that nurturing our ability to pay attention on purpose to choose what we pay attention to and how we pay attention I think speaks to the more fundamental level of this issue of our lived experience so in a sense you could think that mindfulness then helps us to live our lives on purpose and that seems in itself really important the second thing linking mindfulness to the rise of choices in a again very general sense is the way that for instance really simple mindfulness exercises such as just taking a moment as we just did or even just in the space of one or two breaths to recenter ourselves around you know the sensation of the breath say and what's going on there in that moment this can be really helpful for us to gain clarity on what really matters for us in this moment so it can help to connect us to our deeper values to our intentions compared to a state where we're not fully present and maybe on autopilot mode and there's a tendency there to whether it's fairly passively consume information or maybe get very caught up in the minds thoughts and so on and instead of that through mindfulness we can connect to our values not necessarily through thinking about them although we might do but just through the practice of being fully present being embodied we discuss in our paper a few mindfulness training programs which explicitly link mindfulness practice with an inquiry an experiential inquiry into one's values and also noticing where one's actions maybe you know align or don't align with one's values but thinking about this for society as a whole I guess the point is that even if people hold really different values which as we know they do that people will connect to those values that they will take the time and find the way to connect to their values as opposed to living life more in the autopilot mindset that I discussed this again seems pretty crucial and pretty important in the context of what is our vision for how society could flourish and then the third thing here at a very basic level is the potential for mindfulness to widen our perspective so when I cultivate the capacity to be mindful I train myself to attend to thoughts and feelings as mental events it's sometimes called metacognition I will notice thoughts and feelings which come and go in the mind but maybe not get too caught up in those and as well as this metacognition psychologists also note the ways in which mindfulness can help us cultivate what they call cognitive flexibility which is the way to direct our attention in different ways so for instance it could be that we pay attention in a very focused way on something that we're working on but then we switch to maybe a more open monitoring of our wider environment and it's the ability then to switch between these quite different modes of awareness as we feel we wish to and as the situation calls for and that's a particular skill and capacity and the idea then is that both metacognition and cognitive flexibility can help us get a wider perspective on things it's a term, this idea of perspective and widening our perspective which comes up so much in qualitative feedback of participants who've been on mindfulness-based programs including the one in parliament that Jamie and Tessa noted and so for instance Lord Houth of Newport a former minister has described how his mindfulness practice has supported not only my focus but my perspective sense of proportion and balance so these three things paying attention on purpose connecting to our values and gaining a wider perspective on things they represent some of the ways in which mindfulness can help us to engage in our lives that works for us as individuals but I think with important implications for society as a whole and I'll say now a little bit more specifically on what's the potential for mindfulness to have pro-social consequences and I think we can see this most directly in terms of the subtle but really consequential level of our attitudes and our dispositions so for instance we can think about the very social dimension of simply becoming more attentive and becoming less reactive in our day-to-day lives and so often when we cause harm for others to others if I snap out if I show my frustration or perhaps simply if I ignore someone because my mind's somewhere else in many of these instances it's because I'm reactive that this harm takes place and in contrast then if we can cultivate an open awareness to whatever's going on it allows us to step outside of this habitual pattern of reactivity that we so often fall into and that can have really positive pro-social implications so if someone says something to me which triggers a reaction instead of reacting from a place of maybe frustration or anger if I take a moment just to send to myself and just observe what's going on in the mind what's going on with emotions maybe where do I feel those in the body that opens up this space between some response that allows for a certainly a more considered and more creative response rather than a trigger reaction this is talked about a great deal pretty much anyone who's engaged with mindfulness personally and written about it but although it's a simple point I think it does need stating clearly again in the context of public policymaking and mindfulness as a foundational capacity the idea being that if we can all become even just slightly less reactive in our everyday lives then there is the potential to co-create a very different world there that we could reduce perhaps markedly the sum total of low level harm if you like that ripples out every time that we do react in a thoughtless manner so there's becoming more attentive there's becoming less reactive and there's also the potential for mindfulness to cultivate greater empathy and there's a few studies pointing to a significant relationship here between mindfulness and empathy and some other studies present evidence which is a little bit more mixed certainly more research in this area I think is needed but where there does seem to be evidence I think is in particular mindfulness in helping us just to see others perspectives just to see other points of view than our own that alone I think is quite an important thing and again that's the point which is reflected from MPs to go back to that example in the mindfulness in parliament programme so Tim Laughton former education minister for instance has talked about the rather more considered approach to exchanges of differing views among MPs who've been through the mindfulness programme and others also talk of mindfulness as effectively an antidote to what they see as the very adversarial setting which is Westminster politics now as well as evidence linking mindfulness to these social capacities our paper also looks a bit at the next step if you like which is mindfulness leading to pro-social behaviours themselves there's a few ways you can approach that topic I mean partly if you to the extent you believe that mindfulness does cultivate capacities like empathy there's a whole literature around then how empathy is thought to have a number of pro-social implications in terms of behaviours there's more directly qualitative feedback from individuals who practice mindfulness training programmes who so often for instance in the context of mindfulness based therapy and various others have so often reported really positive changes in their personal relationships now to approach this issue of mindfulness and pro-social behaviour more scientifically there is some literature there it's a more I guess nascent stage I think and I think there's a question for us to reflect on personally which is how much one would seek to find a concrete mapping between mindfulness practice and what's going on there and measured pro-social behaviours in that direct fashion but certainly there are interesting findings in the research that is there in this area linking mindfulness practice to reducing implicit bias implicit racial bias linking individuals higher in trait mindfulness to more environmentally responsible behaviours and one study finding that participants who just completed a mindfulness training course were more than three times more likely than a control group to offer help to someone in need so again this research we need to do more needs to be done and addressing some of the really tricky issues in that area but some of those findings I think at least give credence to the other points I think the more important points I've discussed it looks quite promising so a few words to sum up I think there are really good reasons to believe that by paying attention on purpose by allowing space to connect with one's deeper intentions by widening our perspective to make wiser choices and respond to challenges that we face as individuals and as societies and that there are pro-social implications if we think mindfulness can help us become less reactive less impulsive but more attentive more curious and you know able to accept at least other viewpoints as being there and to disagree better to find common ground through a direct and embodied experience of life as it is moment to moment so because of all of that for policy makers and thought leaders and so on, broadly outside of the mindfulness community reflecting on how to build the kind of society we all want to live in I think absolutely we should consider the specific applications of mindfulness for certain populations and their specific needs completely a space there to think a little bit more holistically around mindfulness as this foundational capacity and there are hints of that awareness bubbling up so one MP John Crudas has noted that mindfulness increasingly seems to be an area that more and more people are turning to as a whole approach to public policy making and Tessa mentioned my former life as an economist at the Bank of England public sector economics and I'm reminded for this demand for more holistic and integrated approaches to policy making to a speech that the governor Mark Carney made a few years ago on ethics and finance where he notes humans tendencies to compartmentalize things he could probably say that's economists tendencies in particular but I think the point he's making is as humans we do compartmentalize things and there's a real danger of taking that to extremes so he says that we can divide up our lives into different realms each with its own set of rules where home is distinct from work where ethics is distinct from the law and where the individual is distinct from the system and such a reductionist view of the human condition he argues will serve as a really poor foundation for a long time human prosperity and so to rebuild that foundation we really need to avoid this excessive compartmentalization of our lives and I think in that context mindfulness and seeing mindfulness more than just from a policy context more than just the sum of its specific applications is really relevant here to help us integrate different spheres of our lives mind and body, self and other and look across different policy domains in public policy towards a more integrated vision of the whole and I mentioned in my introduction the relevance of thinking about mindfulness in this more foundational way in the context of really big global challenges that we're facing in coming decades and one of those is around technology and on this in his recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st century the historian Yvonne Harari discusses some of the risks for society if we don't balance advances in artificial intelligence and technology with advances in our humanity and he wants a dystopia in which downgraded humans misused upgraded computers to wreak havoc upon themselves and the world which is interesting but it's his advice on how to respond to this situation which I think is especially pertinent here because he says that for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute investing in advancing human consciousness so I wonder whether investing if you like in mindfulness and the capacities of heart and mind which it in turn can help us to foster could form a central part of an overall vision for a flourishing society whether political leaders and others engaged in commenting on these big picture questions about our future should consider with putting greater attention and resources into mindfulness as a basic and perhaps even essential component of societal flourishing but while these questions of so what should we do and what should leaders do are of course absolutely important for the work that we've been doing on this particular piece and what I've been talking about today the main point is just seeing in a policy context mindfulness as a foundational capacity is in itself an important step on this journey and I think ultimately that comes down to the issue of really recognizing fully what the possibilities afforded to us through mindfulness can be what mindfulness is in that broader sense and so I'll end with a quote that I heard recently on a podcast and it was Oprah Winfrey interviewing John Kabat-Zinn and pushing him exactly and what is, how should I think of this thing saying mindfulness and he responded that it's a gateway to the full dimensionality of being human so thank you very much. Thank you so much Dan and Jamie so we could have some time now for comments and questions and we've got students helping us with mics that can go around the room so if you'd just like to raise your hand when you've got a question or a comment and they'll come with microphones. Yes sir, thank you very much. You mentioned the problem of acting like automatons and or on autopilot but of course an essential as a human being is to form good habits and habits are also we acquire them by doing things repetitively and unthinkingly how do we distinguish, how can we because in the end things like smartphones are just a new bit of technology about which we are with which we are forming new habits so how do we separate out good habits useful habits which are essential to survive because we can't think about every single thing that we do every day and the danger of acting on autopilot. No, you've got something to say. It would be totally exhausting if we didn't have a cerebellum or mechanisms in the brain to automate things and we'd need a tremendous amount of will power every day just to keep ourselves doing things that keep us alive and clean and going through the world. I think that you can be aware of what you're doing when you're doing it even when it is a habitual thing and have the choice to do that so having that awareness that you are in a habit routine doesn't stop you from being a habit and taking much less energy and sort of concentration to be able to do it so I can sort of have mindfulness while I'm tying my shoes, have mindfulness while I'm doing my teeth and if I want to I can then also think about other things staying tethered in the present moment but going into abstraction and planning and having creative leaps there's some element through the training of mindfulness as a habit, as a tendency for you to not get lost when those habits veer into unhealthy territory or when your thoughts get ruminative and repetitive you're able to go through life with some habits and lapse into abstraction and have some kind of tethered to the present moment so there's an element of choice there that's why it's actually, my friend's teacher would probably be able to do a better job of saying that You spoke quite a lot about how mindfulness can benefit those in positions of power cultivating empathy and helping them to disagree better how would mindfulness be of benefit to those who are powerless So there are, it's a really very good question and there are innovators in the mindfulness training world that are most interested in creating types of training that are culturally accessible for those in most disadvantaged sections of society and to be tailored for those lives and I see actually the role of public policy potentially to help those communities access mindfulness training who can't afford it so it's finding its way into board rooms and yoga centres and places you might expect but there are still places where they're kind of high and dry and haven't heard of the word before So John Credys' MP, as Dan mentioned thought that mindfulness might be particularly helpful and the way that he described for these kind of communities and the way that he described it is he's an MP for an area that has a lot of social deprivation I think it's something like two or three thousand cases a month come into his surgery asking for help, emailing him, having interviews and what he said was that there's behind a lot of these quite complex and seemingly intractable problems he said there's kind of often a drumbeat of poor mental health issues and rather than wanting to sort of individualise and say we just need to sort of get those people to sort their individual health out he's sort of recognising that at the core of a lot of the issues that keep these communities deprived mental health is part of the picture as well as the systemic stuff and by improving mental health and self-regulation people may be more able to interact better and make positive changes but he's more than many if I'm very aware of the systemic picture as well that fits into and I think it's a really important piece to look at mental health and intergenerational trauma and basically include more psychology in our models for social change and for policy making because often it's just completely absent Thanks very much for your talk it may reflect on somebody who was a Zen practitioner that I used to meditate with who died about twenty years ago and because of his childhood experiences he created his life to try to foster compassion in society he worked in the mental health sector and every time he came across a situation that he felt represented in justice, prejudice, hypocrisy, stigma he would directly confront very very forcefully the policy makers involved and as a result of that he was sacked from a lot of his jobs but through his actions he did bring about a lot of change by shocking those people into thinking about what they were doing and as a result of his work he did make significant changes in the mental health sector but I guess his approach was very different in some ways to what you're referring to in terms of an understanding of the other perspective but possibly a more passive approach and I just wondered your reflections on those two different types of approaches to policy making and policy change I think that's absolutely touching on a really perennial issue to do with openness and maybe receptivity to one's environment including in that other's perspective other's value systems which may not fit with one's own and that on the one hand with seeing clarity to act and also drawing on courage to act and to speak up and like I said if you do connect with what you care about with your values and have clarity on the situation I think it's ultimately helpful to listen to other's views before jumping into action but at the same time when you feel moved to act to do so in a way which I think there's ways of disagreeing and I don't know the specifics there but I guess I think in the way that discourse takes place at the moment you could argue that the entrenched polarisation and division in and of itself isn't helpful to the system or to society as a whole and in that context it is not to say accept other's views as fine and don't act but it's acceptance of what people feel and are saying as the starting point to seek to move towards as the starting point for action rather than reacting against it but it's always a complex thing to disentangle those to I think there are many different roles in sort of change in resistance in society and we need people doing those different roles you know I've got a friend who's currently on an action in Preston trying to shut down a coal field and I feel like we're doing similar work just in very very different ways you know we have to be really neutral and even handed and diplomatic when we're talking about the different ways on this and starting to improve the way they see it, political discourse but it's not appropriate for me to try to shut down coal plants because I'd have my parliamentary pass revoked so all of us have got to be different petals of the flower opening at once in some ways at least that's the way I see it and sometimes I think you can get insights from personal practice and the kind of injunctions and teaching statements or encouragement that you get on a visual level and how that might apply relationally and one of our colleagues talks about the instruction in a mindfulness practice to be sort of firm or strong in the back and soft in the front and we're trying to balance these things the receptivity and the sort of relaxation element but also the aliveness and the awakeness and the strength and the rigor that requires you often to pay attention to things that are quite difficult and there's a tendency to go to sleep or shrink away from or you know so it isn't just about being all soft and nice there's also actually a sense of a bit of power there as well so yes I think there are ways of going about change that try and find the right balance between those things Hi, my question is I guess would it be enough as in it's one thing to bring greater awareness to a population have them being in touch with their true selves in the moment and that all sounds great but what happens then so it's like somebody might recognise their neurotic or neurosis but if they're not getting help with dealing with that where does that go on a wider scale? So there's a lot of ways to approach that but one of the simple ways to talk about particularly uncovering mental health issues which is a possibility points to mindfulness teachers needing high quality training so they recognise those signs they know where to sign post people they can help people through difficult experiences because we all have ways of adapting to difficulty and some adaptions defence mechanisms include repression and some people don't want to stop still because actually stopping still is quite difficult for them and when you do encourage them to do so actually anxiety can feel worse and there can be a lot of energy in the system and we're talking about here mindfulness as a capacity of mind and talking about it at that level we think is theoretically good for a lot more of that in society it's different from the question of how is it best to cultivate it and for whom and at what point and in what intensity and that question is a matter for innovation and research and science and there's two or three papers coming out in a day on mindfulness but it's still a very early field and a lot of that is small sample sizes and a lot more work is needed and that question of how do we help people through difficult experiences and what are the right signposts and what's the right level of teacher training is a really live one particularly say in the workplace but thank you. Thank you very much to Jamie and James.