As a mental health researcher who's first and enduring contact with meditation was from a contemplative perspective, I try to ignore annoying articles about meditation and mindfulness, like this one from TIME. I usually let them go, but when I read this one I’d just had a coffee and was early to an appointment, so jotted down a few key points.
There is evidence (including research I'm writing up right now) shows that for those already high in anxiety, and to a lesser-extent depression do not necessarily benefit from a mindfulness practice. In fact, it seems their low trait-level of mindfulness is not actually related to their high anxiety symptoms. It’s a fascinating result we can talk about some other time.
The point being that while I'm the first to accept that mindfulness training is not going to help everyone all the time or in the same way. And for some it might not help at all, most conversations around mindfulness in the media (and much of academia) are missing critically important points.
I'm trying to keep this short, so here's one of the most important issues.
What type of mindfulness?
In a mindfulness conference of psychologists, there are probably 10 different ideas of what mindfulness is in the front row alone and this is not semantics. If you and I define mindfulness differently, then we'll have different ideas about:
how to train in it.
how it should help your mental health.
where it could create discomfort or problems.
how to deal with these discomforts.
this list could go on a lot longer but we're all short of time.
From a Buddhist perspective, mindfulness is a technology developed to directly observe one's own mental states and is a tool that in and of itself is of limited use.
It's like a microscope - it can help you see things more clearly with less distortion, but it relies on a trained operator to look at specific phenomena to run tests and prove/disprove hypotheses to better understand.
Mindfulness was developed to clearly observe our mental states and activity, without being captured by them.
This alone can be helpful, even life-changing for people, but it's far from the end-game.
The real application of mindfulness skills is to examine these mental states and activity to better learn where they come from and (most importantly) the mechanisms by which they cause distress. Then you can test the hypotheses on how to undo these mechanisms and see if they help you get out from under overwhelm, stress, anxiety etc.
The end-game is to make a push for high levels of mental health.
The main reason we need this contemplative approach to meditation, mindfulness and mental health is that science currently has no technology which observes the mind or mental states. None at all. Ideally, science learns about a phenomenon by observing it, so here's a reason why there's been no revolution in the mind sciences to date - we don't even know where to look.
More soon, please comment with any questions, objections or random outbursts.
To learn this approach and how to implement it, my Balanced Minds Community will be opening again soon.