Meditation and Religion
As you begin to introduce the concepts of mindfulness and meditation into your therapy practice, you may notice that some of your patients may be hesitant to meditate or practice mindfulness, especially if you live in an area where a fundamentalist religion is practiced. I began my practice in the Bible Belt, and I was surprised to discover that the word “meditation” is almost a dirty word here. In certain regions of the United States and the world, meditation is associated with cults and mysticism.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, in Wherever You Go, There You Are, had this to say about meditation and religious practice:
“When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it. It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie, vegetable, self-absorbed narcissist, navel gazer, “space cadet,” cultist, devotee, mystic, or Eastern philosopher. Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.”
–from Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
During my internship as a Marriage and Family Therapist, as I began to introduce the ideas of mindfulness and meditation into my clinical practice, I would occasionally come across a patient who felt that mindfulness was “the devil‟s work.” When I addressed this issue with my clinical supervisor, he advised me to simply use the techniques without referring to them as mindfulness techniques. As I began to do this, I noticed that the preconceived notions these patients had soon evaporated. I had eliminated the resistance to the therapy by not referring to it as mindfulness. By my doing so, the client was able to see the techniques for what they were, without any preconceptions or assumptions about their content.
Although mindfulness originated with Buddhism, it is not a religious practice. It is just a way of “falling awake.” Becoming more fully conscious of where you are and what you are doing at any given moment, you may enhance any religious practice. A careful reading of the Bible, or the Quran, or the Tao, or the Vedas, or most other works of a religious or spiritual nature, will reveal elements of mindfulness.
Spirituality
Somewhere between 90% and 95% of people on Earth practice some sort of spirituality. Obviously, spirituality must be pretty important. Studies tend to back this up. What the studies show is that the type of spirituality doesn’t really matter. Whether you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu or Pagan, practicing some sort of spiritual path yields benefits.
Since the particular type of spirituality is secondary to the benefits gained (in other words, since all spiritual paths lead to a better quality of life for those who practice them properly), what is it about spirituality that allows it to work its magic?
Suppose you could take all the spiritual paths practiced worldwide, put them into a cauldron, and boil them down to their essence. What would remain? I believe that the common thread to all spiritual practices is a feeling of connection. Connection to others, or connection to the divine, or simply connection to nature and to ourselves. In short: Spirituality is a sense of connectedness to something greater than ourselves.
If you think back on the spiritual experiences you’ve had in your lifetime, do recall feeling connected on some level? Many describe spiritual experiences as a sense of oneness. Oneness implies connection to something outside ourselves. In this sense, even an agnostic or an atheist could achieve spirituality through connection.
Mindfulness doesn’t offer a path to a specific god or a specific divinity. What mindfulness does is to increase awareness and enhance the stillness so a practitioner may experience the divine in his or her own way. Think of the religious path as the highway, and mindfulness as the vehicle. Just as you may drive a vehicle on any number of roads, so you may use mindfulness to experience any number of religious paths more fully. Mindfulness is the tool that makes those connections possible.
Second-Order Change
One of the concepts of Cybernetic Systems Theory (a founding theory of Marriage and Family Therapy) is the idea of Second Order Change. Oftentimes, families get stuck in a “game without end.” Solutions that families use to overcome problems sometimes only serve to maintain the problem. When this happens, the family is caught in a feedback loop that perpetuates the problem. In such a case, playing by the unspoken and unwritten rules of the family does not lead to a solution. What is needed is a change in the rules of the game. Such a change is called a Second-Order Change.
How many of your natural assumptions prevent you from finding solutions to the problems you encounter in your day-to-day life?
Mindfulness is more than just a meditative technique. It is a way of seeing the world is it really is, without the filter of our assumptions and expectations. By viewing the world through mindful eyes, we experience a paradigm shift. This shift in perception allows us to change the things we can, and to accept the things we cannot change. Such a worldview is at the heart of every religious practice. It is also at the heart of most, if not all, forms of therapy and counseling.
Beginner’s Mind
Mindful Ecotherapy is a way of achieving beginner’s mind through nature and natural experiences. It allows us to examine the assumptions we have made about our world and how we exist in it. Some of those assumptions may be useful assumptions, but some of those assumptions may not be. By beginning each day with a blank slate, we erase those assumptions that may lead to results we don’t want.
How do you tell which assumptions are useful and which ones are not? The answer is that we use the mindful skill of focusing on one thing at a time to really pay attention to our thoughts and feelings, and to the thoughts and feelings of those around us. When using mindful awareness to examine our own inner motivations, we are able to discover which assumptions are useful in our daily lives, and which assumptions might need to be modified, or even cast away. Mindfulness is the wisdom to know the difference between the things we can change, and the things we must accept.
