Intro Series I: Mindfulness Practice: The Beginnings of Metabolisation
Evidence Base, Mechanisms, and Connection with Bigger-than-Self Reality
This is the first post in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this Substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and it is necessary to go over each piece individually in order to be able to then put the pieces together in such a way that leads to an ability to address bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis from this perspective. Here are the links to parts II, III, and IV in this series…
Bigger-than-self distress can seem overwhelming, with us as individuals infinitesimally small and planetary or civilisational issues several orders of magnitude larger than us. How, then, could it be possible that we could begin to break this down in our own experience and learn to grapple with such issues in our own lives? Is it not just impossible, should we not simply leave such issues to people who have the power to actually make a difference, such as world leaders, heads of large organisations, and Greta Thunberg? Or, alternatively, is the only way to make a difference by engaging in protest and direct action, and then only if hundreds or thousands of people join together to do so?
Obviously this is not what I’m going to be arguing for here. We can do things in our own lives that in their own way can add up to important differences. I suggest here that a way of starting to find ways to make a difference with our own lives can begin with a psychological process.
I suggest that we can metabolise these bigger-than-self issues in our own embodied cognitive systems, to make sense, using our brain and body, of our environment, and to in the process find ways to move towards getting a grip in responding in our own socio-ecological niches in ways that are in some way better and more wise than what we are doing now. This requires staying with the difficulty - grappling with the issues and our own response to them - for long enough for insights to begin to emerge.
While this grappling might also include intellectual learning or up-skilling and action in the world or one’s socio-ecological niche, from a psychological angle, this grappling-with process is greatly helped by the practice of mindfulness, which enables the beginning of a psychological metabolisation process of these bigger-than-self concerns. Mindfulness can also connect us to bigger-than-self reality by connecting us with our embodied responses in relation to aspects of bigger-than-self reality.
Mindfulness is a pivotal skill in learning to metabolise bigger-than-self distress. So I’ll spend some time in this post talking about what it is, and then how it links with metabolisation of such distress.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a way of being, centred in present moment, sensory experience. It is a way of perceiving and being in relationship with reality that is paradoxically both a practice and (with sufficient practice and understanding) a naturally unfolding way of being. But before we go any further, let’s do a quick review of some relevant evidence on mindfulness, why it has been such an area of interest for clinicians, researchers, and the general public alike, and how and why it can play an important role in allowing us to stay with and begin to metabolise the experience of bigger-than-self distress.
While not a panacea, research has shown (regular, skilful, well-informed) mindfulness practice to be associated with a range of desirable clinical and non-clinical outcomes. Clinically, meta-analytic evidence suggests that MBIs (Mindfulness-Based Interventions) are comparable to evidence-based treatments in their effects on depression, anxiety disorders, pain management, smoking cessation, and addictions (Goldberg et al., 2018; Sancho et al., 2018). There is also preliminary evidence supporting the use of MBIs in the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; Mitchell et al., 2015), as a treatment or adjunct treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD; Key et al., 2017; Kumar et al., 2016), and as a treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, especially in the reduction of avoidance symptoms (PTSD; Banks et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2018).
In non-clinical domains, there is evidence to suggest mindfulness training can boost pro-social emotions and behaviours (Luberto et al., 2018; Kreplin et al., 2018; Donald et al., 2019), nature connectedness (Howell et al., 2011; Unsworth et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2016), intrinsic values and sustainable behaviours (Ericson et al., 2014), pro-environmental behavioural intentions (Tang et al., 2017), and engagement in pro-environmental behaviours (Brown & Kasser, 2005; Jacob et al., 2009), as well as a range of wellbeing outcomes (e.g., Lomas et al., 2019).
Taken together, this evidence is suggestive of mindfulness practice having something to do with a way of being that is both beneficial to mental health and which is conducive to pro-social and pro-environmental emotions and behaviours. So, why might this be, and how might these beneficial effects come about? Why, and how, might mindfulness work to create these effects for regular practitioners of it? Answering this question might get us a little closer to being able to understand what mindfulness is, and how it might be utilised in metabolising bigger-than-self distress.
Why and How Does Mindfulness Work?
In their review, Hölzel et al. (2011) proposed four major mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation operates, that are supported by empirical psychological and neuroscientific research:
Attention regulation;
Body or interoceptive awareness;
Emotion regulation (including reappraisal and exposure, extinction, and reconsolidation); and
Change in perspective on the self or changes in self-referential processing.
Attention regulation refers to the ability to voluntarily centre and maintain one’s attention on a particular target stimulus. Most often the target stimulus in mindfulness meditation training is the breath or body sensations. This trains the brain to maintain attention in the absence of particularly interesting or alluring sensory stimulation, and generalises in daily life to an increased ability to steer one’s attention in useful ways. Attention regulation is often touted as foundational for other mindfulness skills and mechanisms to be learned or effective. There is evidence for a beneficial impact of mindfulness training on attention regulation from behavioural research into executive attention tasks, neuroimaging studies mapping brain regions implicated in attention regulation, and changes in clinical populations that involve alterations in attention regulation (Hölzel et al., 2011).
Body or interoceptive awareness refers to the ability to be aware of sensations in the body in the present moment, especially subtle sensations, and awareness of body is traditionally taught as the first of the four foundations of mindfulness. There is evidence of alterations in body awareness as a result of mindfulness training from self-report, functional and structural neuroimaging studies, and also evidence to suggest that increased body awareness is associated with increased capacity for empathy (Hölzel et al., 2011). As will be discussed in another article on the co-emergence model of reinforcement, body sensations can be seen as basic building blocks of emotional experience, and working skilfully with these can be crucial to regulating and changing our affective experience and landscape.
Emotion regulation refers to the ability to adaptively regulate one’s emotions. Hölzel et al. cite evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness meditation on emotion regulation from behavioural, physiological, and neuroimaging research, as well as in research into psychological disorders. Evidence suggests that emotion regulation through mindfulness seems to occur through two primary strategies: reappraisal and extinction (Hölzel et al., 2011). In reappraisal, mindfulness seems to allow the practitioner to decentre from the emotional experience and from this decentred place examine other ways of appraising the experience or the stimulus that was seen to be causing the emotional response. In extinction, practitioners turn towards unpleasant or uncomfortable sensations with an attitude of welcoming or acceptance and find that “the unpleasant emotions pass away and a sense of safety or well-being can be experienced in their place” (Hölzel et al., 2011, p. 545}. Over time, this can lead to the extinction of a conditioned emotional response and freedom from the reactivity inherent in that conditioning.
Changes in perspectives on the self refers to the tendency to perceive the “self”, the “I” which we might habitually think of as having a permanent form as being essentially illusory and conditioned. In mindfulness meditation, the practitioner learns to perceive internal experiences as mental events, continually arising and passing away, rather than as reality itself. To briefly explain what is meant by this, a metaphor commonly used to describe the emptiness of a permanent and unchanging self is of a river (e.g., Hanh, 2017). When one observes a river, there is a sense of continuity of form, despite the fact that the water flowing through the river is different from moment to moment, never the same. The perception of a self that is doing the thinking, inhabiting the body, carrying out the actions can be broken down into a series of moment-by-moment arisings through observation in meditation, and is reliably reported by experienced meditators (e.g., Ekici, Garip, & Van Gordon, 2020).
As the essentially illusory nature of the self is observed, it can lead to a liberation from the clinging and reactivity that is associated with unwholesome or highly self-referential thinking patterns. Things get taken less personally, and it is possible to give up things that the self was clinging to that are understood to be causing suffering. Hölzel et al. (2011) quote psychologist Jack Engler, who describes how “those who have understood this report a sense of spacious lightness and freedom. They exhibit deep concern and tenderness for others.” While this more extensive de-identification with the sense of permanent self generally takes dedicated practice over years to attain, shifts in this direction can and do happen within even eight weeks of participation in an MBI, and tend to be associated with reductions in self-referential processing.
Self-referential processing refers to thinking patterns that have a strong sense of a permanent self being implicated in them, for example statements that generally begin with “I am… (unworthy, unreliable, always too much, etc)”. Self-referential processing has been shown to be attenuated in mindfulness meditation, and for these changes to lead to reductions in mood dysregulation (e.g., Farb et al., 2010, 2007), such that there is a shift from narrative self-referential processing to non-conceptual, sensory focused processing of experience.
Hölzel et al.’s (2011) review article is obviously far from an exhaustive coverage of the topic, but offers a sufficient introduction for now. I will write on other mechanisms of mindfulness in the future, as the mechanism of acceptance (covered, for example, in Monitor and Acceptance theory; Lindsey & Creswell, 2017) and the mindfulness-to-meaning theory of Garland et al. (2015) point to topics that could easily be covered in their own articles. But for now, these four mechanisms offer a good-enough initial insight into how mindfulness might help lead to the beneficial outcomes covered above.
Mindfulness and Bigger-than-Self Issues: The Beginning of Metabolisation
An understanding of these four mechanisms of mindfulness can also point to the usefulness of mindfulness practice (formal in meditation, or informal in the world) in grappling with and beginning to metabolise bigger-than-self issues and one’s own relationship with such issues. I’ll discuss each of the above mechanisms in turn in how they might assist in relation to connecting with bigger-than-self issues and metabolising any bigger-than-self distress presenting in one’s embodied cognitive system in relation to such issues.
First, attention regulation: this is foundational for sustained work or gaining competence in any field or endeavour: we need to be able to sustain attention on any area that we want to move towards more mastery in. It need not be said how many distractions and pulls for our time and attention there are in modern life: the ability to regulate one’s attention can help make headway into not getting overly blown off course by distractions that aren’t in line with what’s important to us. In another post, I’ll talk about how many things there are to focus on that relate to bigger-than-self issues, the meta-crisis, and one’s own response to it: suffice to say there is a lot to give attention to there, and having a clear, calm mind that does not require excessive coercion is a big advantage in being able to do so effectively. Good attention regulation helps in all the other areas, so it makes sense as a place to start in developing skills to effectively metabolise bigger-than-self reality.
Second, body sensations and interoceptive awareness: this mechanism and topic will be the subject of at least one or two future posts. In my own journey with bigger-than-self issues, awareness of body sensations and their co-emergence with cognitive appraisals has provided a crucial link between bigger-than-self reality (the environment) and my own internal experience and meaning-making systems (the cognitive agent). That is, mindfulness-based approaches focus on developing an awareness of body sensations and the embodied nature of cognition.
Each thought has interoceptive sensations that are associated with it, which we may or may not be aware of - mindfulness training develops this ability to be aware of these often subtle sensations through methodical scanning of the body for such sensations. There is a lot more to this process, to do it skilfully, which will be the subject of another post sometime, but for the purposes of the current thread, the crucial link is this: thoughts about bigger-than-self reality will have co-emerging sensations in our own body arising with them.
This means whenever I have a thought about bigger-than-self reality or an aspect of it: be it related to politics, economics, climate, systemic forms of bias and prejudice, or any one of the many aspects of our biosphere and civilisation that is problematic, unsustainable, or in crisis, then that thought necessarily has interoceptive sensations associated with it. These interoceptive sensations then form part of the building blocks of our emotional experience of the world.
The result of this link between bigger-than-self aspects of reality and our own emotional experience is perhaps easier to see in other people, in the more extreme or visible cases: the angry politics junkie, quietly depressed environmental scientist, anxious-about-everything teenage climate activist. But this link between bigger-than-self reality and our own emotional experience is happening all the time, in each passing moment. How we habitually relate to bigger-than-self reality, and process it, will change our emotional experience of it, and in turn change the possibilities for making meaning out of it. An underlying experience of anger or depression will tip our system to make meaning of the world in certain ways, just as an underlying experience of frequent states of calm resolve will tip our system in other ways. Mindfulness of body sensations begins to bring awareness to this process.
Third, emotion regulation: mindfulness can help to regulate our emotions as we navigate life. Mindfulness strikes a balance or middle path between avoidance of emotion and over-identification with it. Avoiding emotions, such as anxiety, is a common yet maladaptive way of regulating such emotions, as it leads to avoidance of the object of the anxiety, and not confronting the issue or issues that are associated with such anxiety, which gets in the way of living lives in accordance with our values and even clinical level mental health difficulties if used repeatedly over long time periods.
On the other hand, experiencing emotions to such an extent that we over-identify with the emotion is also not helpful. “I am experiencing feelings of sadness and depression right now” is different from “I’m such a depressed and depressing person”, just as “I’m distressed about the state of the planet” is different from “the planet is fucked we’re all doomed”. Experiencing the sensations associated with anger is different from feeding the anger through cathartic modes of processing such emotions, which evidence suggests is not effective in the long-run. With mindful emotion regulation, the emotion is engaged with, but not identified with: it is acknowledged in its impermanence, and not identified in relation to the self - which relates to the final and fourth mechanism.
Fourth, changes in perspective on the self: this is a nuanced topic, as traditional teachings of mindfulness have very specific understandings of concepts such as no-self, and how that is defined phenomenologically. I will discuss this further in future posts, but to quickly address some of the potential here: skilful mindfulness training allows the link between present moment experience and the sense of there being a self that is identified with that experience to become decoupled. As the sense of self is seen through, as being comprised of a number of component parts or aggregates, there is more flexibility to relate to experience simply as arising, without the need for a self.
This flexibility gives the skilled mindfulness practitioner more spaciousness to respond to different situations, and identify in different ways. Gradually, one’s own preferences and ways of seeing things can be held more loosely, and flexibly chosen whether one wants to keep it or let it go and change that belief or orientation. In the context of bigger-than-self reality, this can afford the possibility of identifying not only as an individual but as a living embodiment of larger wholes that we are part of, such as the physical universe, the planet and biosphere, humanity, or more local aspects of bigger-than-self reality, such as our bioregion or socio-ecological niche.
These kinds of perspectives of seeing ourselves as parts of larger wholes in turn afford us to see the interconnectedness of ourself and our health with the health of these bigger-than-self systems. Now, identifying with bigger-than-self aspects of reality, it is in our self-interest for these systems to be healthy. This kind of perspective is one that can be lived from, where there is a possibility of natural alignment of our actions with the good of bigger-than-self systems. This way of being is not about “being a good individual” as much as it is about recognising our inherent interconnectedness that before this kind of mindfulness training was perhaps an intellectual but not embodied truth.
This is the beginning of metabolisation: metabolising our own embodied experience of bigger-than-self reality such that it leads to a naturally arising will for harmony within ourselves in relation to bigger-than-self systems that we see ourselves as an inseparable part of. Mindfulness can lead to this kind of awareness, if practiced in certain ways, but other kinds of embodied practices can get us there or help in the metabolisation process as well. What’s more, as the evidence reviewed earlier suggests, it can potentially get us there in a sustainable way that is good for our wellbeing.
Thanks for reading - here are links to parts II, III, and IV of the Intro Series.