Mindfulness in Eight Weeks - Michael Chaskalson

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to decentre, she pointed them towards the work being undertaken at UMass by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Looking into his work, they came upon this piece from one of Jon’s books:

      It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not ‘you’ or ‘reality’ . . . The simple act of recognising your thoughts as thoughts can free you from the distorted reality they often create and allow for more clearsightedness and a greater sense of manageability in your life.

      Segal, Williams and Teasdale made contact with Kabat-Zinn and his Stress Reduction Clinic at the UMass Medical Center, began to engage in various ways with his programme and, based largely upon it, formulated their own eight-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programme. Although similar to Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in many ways, MBCT contains elements of cognitive therapy and theory that address the specific vulnerabilities and exacerbating factors that make depression recurrent.

      MBCT itself was originally specifically designed for those vulnerable to depression. Subsequently, variants of it have been developed to help with a wide range of issues: obsessive-compulsive disorder, disordered eating, addiction, traumatic brain injury, obesity and bipolar disorder among others.

      When it comes to depression, the results of several large-scale randomised control trials suggest that, for people vulnerable to relapsing depression, a course of MBCT might more or less halve the rate of relapse and, if relapse does occur, those who have trained in MBCT appear to experience it less severely.

      My Own History with Mindfulness

      I come to this work from a Buddhist background. Born in South Africa and unable to reconcile myself to the apartheid regime, I left there at eighteen and settled in England. Driven to find a framework of values I could depend on and an understanding of how the world worked, I took up a degree in philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. But that didn’t really fulfil my need. In my final year, though, I had the good fortune to meet a committed practising Buddhist who had come to town to establish a Buddhist centre. He taught me to meditate and that changed everything. I committed to spending the rest of my life devoted to meditation, study, retreat and eventually to teaching others.

      I lived sometimes in retreat centres, sometimes in city-based residential Buddhist communities, and gradually came to teach and to publish books on Buddhism (using my Buddhist name – Kulananda), and I thought that was how my life was going to go. For several years I took a kind of digression into the world of business. With a number of Buddhist friends I came to establish a ‘right livelihood’ fair-trade company that dealt in handicrafts from developing countries. The company came to be quite successful in time. At the peak of its success it employed around 200 people, had sales of around £10 million a year and gave its profits – often substantial sums – to various Buddhist charities each year. But running a business turned out not to be what I really wanted to do with myself and in 1988 I returned to a life based more in teaching, studying and meditating.

      By 2002, however, more than 25 years after my first introduction to meditation, I began to feel the need to make another change and I looked about for a form of training that would build on my existing skills but which would allow me to earn a living in the world. I thought about training in psychotherapy. After all, I’d had many years doing informal pastoral counselling. Searching one day on the Internet, I came upon a master’s degree programme that was being run at Bangor University in Wales. The programme had originally been founded by Professor Mark Williams, one of the founders of MBCT, with the intention of training up a number of people who could begin to bring mindfulness into various clinical settings. That seemed like a marriage made in heaven to me. I joined the programme and graduated from it in 2006.

      Reading Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression – one of the set texts at Bangor – was a profound revelation for me. Here, for the first time, I saw the coming together of two great streams of tradition: Buddhist psychology, which implicitly informs much of what is found in that book, and Western psychology, founded in the tradition of scientific method, which explicitly informs it. Traditional Buddhist psychology, at its best, is founded on a detailed and scholarly investigation of the elements of experience revealed by a collective endeavour of deep introspection over more than 1,000 years. Plunging in meditation into the depths of their own minds, the founding scholars of Buddhist psychology provide us with profoundly valuable insights into the mechanisms of consciousness and the functioning of perception and experience. Western psychology at its best, on the other hand, brings a highly sophisticated scientific method and a well-developed scientific community to its investigations.

      In Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression I saw the first beginnings of what might be achieved as these two streams began to inform one another. I was deeply inspired by the way the authors illuminated some of the inner psychological processes at work in the client group they were concerned with. When we understand the processes that drive us and that make up our experience, we have a much greater chance of freeing ourselves from their unconscious grip. The intersection of mindfulness and Western science, I saw, opened up huge possibilities for human development and human freedom.

      Besides relishing the psychological acuity I was discovering, I was also deeply inspired by the explicitly secular nature of the trainings offered by MBSR and MBCT. Ever since discovering mindfulness and related practices for myself I have held a passionate conviction that they offer something deeply lacking in contemporary society. Here, at last, was a vehicle for getting some of these practices and their benefits out into the wider world without any strings attached. I love the freedom and openness of that offering. You don’t need to be a Buddhist or subscribe to any religious framework to get these benefits now. What previously had been taught mainly in Buddhist centres and similar locales could now be made widely available for anyone to try.

      While finishing my training in Bangor I had the great fortune to be introduced to John Teasdale, one of the founders of MBCT, who lives – as my wife and I do – in Cambridge. John and I took the mindfulness programme I’d been working with in Bangor, a hybrid of MBSR and MBCT, and tweaked it more particularly towards stress. We then spent some time teaching that programme, along with our colleague Ciaran Saunders, in public courses held in Cambridge. We made video recordings of each taught session and in between sessions the three of us would meet up, replay the recording of ourselves teaching, and comment on what we saw one another doing: what worked and what didn’t work so well. That was one of the richest learning experiences of my whole engagement in the process of mindfulness teaching.

      Soon after graduating I was invited to join the team of mindfulness teachers at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice that is located in the School of Psychology at Bangor. I’m now an honorary lecturer there and for many years taught a module on the master’s programme as well as co-leading mindfulness teacher-training retreats.

      In 2006 I founded a mindfulness training company, Mindfulness Works Ltd, and with my associates I have since led many public courses in London and elsewhere based on what I learned at Bangor and developed with John.

      But my interest in the world of work and business never went away and I’ve found myself increasingly drawn into that field. Part of this is because of what I keep finding on my public courses.

      The sense I get from the public MBSR courses I lead is that, for a very large proportion of participants, the greatest source of stress and distress in their lives comes from what they encounter each day at work. I am convinced that, if we can train more mindful leaders, if we can help to create more mindful workplaces, we can have a huge impact on the overall levels of well-being in our society.

      I wrote a book on this theme – The Mindful Workplace – and have come increasingly to teach in workplace and leadership contexts, as well as continuing with the public courses. More recently I have become an adjunct professor at IE Business School in Madrid, where I am honoured to be part of an extraordinary faculty teaching an executive master’s in positive leadership and strategy (EXMPLS), which has mindfulness training at its heart.

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