Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Potentially Positive News for Cultivating Compassion

Just in time for the Christmas season ... some more evidence that it may be possible to teach people to be more compassionate. I looked at this idea in a previous post, and pretty much concluded  (bah, Humbug!) that, as much as I WANTED to believe it was true, the evidence from the studies wasn't strong enough to support that yet.

But I recently saw a "Fast Company" post about research from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison,  (self-proclaimed on its website to be "a global leader in conducting novel research that has revolutionized how we understand the mind, our emotions, and how to nurture well-being for ourselves and others." They did get a few mentions in my "Science of Happiness" class from Berkeley.) Their study offered new evidence to support the idea that compassion is a trainable skill.

The Fast Company article describes a research project by Helen Weng and others, including lab chief Richard J. Davidson, which concludes:
...compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing.
Unfortunately, neither the abstract nor the FastCompany article gives details such as how many people participated in the study. This makes it hard for me to know how enthusiastic I should feel about the research, but the points that emerge from the Fast Company article do make it seem like they covered thoroughly what ground they covered.

The study included participants who received just fourteen 30-minute sessions of online training in compassion over the course of two weeks. (As with the study in my previous blog post on the subject, this included imagining compassion for one's self, then a beloved friend or family member, a neutral stranger, then a disliked person.) These participants were compared to an active control group that received training in "reappraisal training, which is an emotion regulation technique that asks people to re-interpret negative events to decrease negative emotions. "

The compassion training encouraged participants "to observe the thoughts and feelings that arise as they imagine a time that each person has suffered. The goal is to give participants practice at tolerating their reactions, rather than avoiding them or getting too wrapped up in them. The next part involves actively wishing others compassion—or wishing their suffering is relieved. "

All participants underwent MRI brain scans before and after the study and were were assessed for changes in brain regions linked to compassion. They were also assessed for compassion in a computer game in which they could contribute their money to others. According to the FastCompany article,  there was a correlation between brain changes linked to key regions of the brain, as shown in the scans, and altruism in the computer game:
"The participants who were the most altruistic playing the computer game showed the greatest changes in brain activation in response to suffering. In the most altruistic participants, activation increased in the inferior parietal cortex (a region of the brain involved in empathy and understanding others), in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional control), and in the nucleus accumbens (a region involved in rewarding emotions). This may reflect that compassion training increases detection of others’ suffering through neural circuitry involved in empathic resonance and sharing others’ experiences. It also suggests that these individuals may have been learning to change their emotional response to a more caring response for the person in need. The participants in the control group either showed no relationship between their brain responses and their altruistic behavior or a negative relationship. "
As would be appropriate for researchers who study compassion, the Wisconsin group will let you download scripts or mp3s of their compassion training sessions if you register here:  http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/compassion.html (It's a slightly odd system, in that you need to sign in, for free, and they e-mail you the link to the training 24 hours later.)

 I am going to keep my enthusiasm in check until I can actually see the full study, but in the meantime,  I've downloaded the compassion scripts and I'm going to give it a go this holiday season. It can't hurt, and who knows, maybe, just maybe, it's true -- that compassion CAN be taught (and the teaching of compassion can be scientifically studied and developed)...

Friday, October 31, 2014

Harnessing the Power of the Sun to Destroy a Village

The most divisive planning application to hit our village -- possibly EVER--has come to a head. As it happens, this is transpiring while I've been taking a marvelous "MOOC" (Massive Open Online Course) called The Science of Happiness (from UCal Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center).

At the beginning of the course, we learned about the importance of something called "social capital." I couldn't dismiss this as sociological mumbo-jumbo because it made too much darn sense. Plus it has huge implications for the health and welfare of our village--actually the happiness of people everywhere. But what's on my mind especially is my tiny village, right now, right here.

Social capital is the overall benefit that results from networks of trust and cooperation. In a village, that basically means neighborliness or keeping an eye out for other folks in big and small ways: working together on projects for charity--like the Famine Lunch; cooperating on projects to raise money for the village-- like Bonfire Night; or assisting with projects to benefit subsets of residents-- like a class to upgrade computer literacy for older folks. Social capital covers simple sociability and everyday kindness -- stopping to have a chat with a fellow dog-walker; retrieving their recycling box when the wind blows it into the street; picking up your neighbor's kid from school when you see he missed the bus. Maybe you take your neighbor some spiced nuts (you're welcome, Alf) or loan her your post-driver (thanks, Lynne!)

No one called it "social capital", but that is what led our village to rally to help residents of the four homes that were most affected by last winter's floods. People donated money, helped with cleanup and repairs, and provided alternative housing in the village--for several months--for the couple most severely affected. Village farmers and experts on the lay of the land spent hours helping with a plan to drain the floodwaters. When the main road was closed, we made arrangements to assure that a resident with medical needs would be able to get to the doctor. I'm sure there were dozens more acts of kindness during the floods that I will never hear about. People just got on with helping, because that's what we do here.

More signs of goodwill in the village include the turnout for events at the Village Hall and Fun Days on "The Rec" -- the wonderful playing fields and park in our village -- and support for art and history, including musical concerts; dragon tiles, mosaics, and a small stone carving; and interest in an archeological dig lead by the county archaeologist. We have a monthly needlework group and a weekly bowls club. We hosted a 'scratch' choir in the Village Hall this summer -- which raised an impressive sum for charity. The church has an occasional choir, the "Allerlooyas," which, like the cleaning and flower rotas, includes people who aren't members of the church. That's just what we do here, because we love our village and care for one another.

And that, as it turns out, is what would be called "high social capital." Beyond making our village the friendly, trusting place that accepted me as a foreigner and outsider these past seven years, high social capital has a host of important benefits. Sociologists have discovered that individuals living in communities with high trust enjoy: more active parental involvement with schools, higher student academic achievement, less crime, better health, greater longevity, higher voter turnout, fewer disparities between rich and poor, and reduced likelihood of economic decline.

Higher social capital is especially important for ageing populations because it helps preserve health and physical mobility as people grow older. High social capital means better health information, more frequent contact with people, and lower levels of disability. People in high-social-capital communities are more likely to volunteer and enjoy lower rates of depression, neuroticism, and Alzheimer's disease.

All this means Aller has been a great place to live. But right now, the social capital of my village is at risk in the battle over the controversial planning issue--a large solar park to be located on land rented from our village's most prominent farmer. Emotions are running high. There are threats and personal attacks, half-truths, exaggerations, assumptions, irrelevancies, and falsehoods -- all being dished up with passion and fervor in hopes of making the case for one side or the other.

I know from sad personal experience how these things go. My family's yard abuts the land of a rubber-crumb processing plant that was installed without planning permission. Folks at our end of the village opposed it for the noise and because it meant bringing a light-industrial plant--and all it requires for security, waste disposal, haulage... into a peaceful residential/agricultural area. The retroactive planning application was approved with conditions, but it was left to complaining neighbors to assure the conditions were met. We don't complain, because we see the plant owner as uncooperative and intimidating.

Call it NIMBYism, but I was devastated by the loss of peace and quiet in my garden. The wife and co-owner of the facility admitted at one point that they lived in fear of complaining neighbors, and felt rejected in the community. Years later, there is no love lost -- and limited circulation of social capital--at this end of the village. This mutual distrust disturbs my peace far more than the noise from the plant.

As discomforting as it may be, our spat over the rubber-crumb processing plant is minuscule compared to the solar park. As things are going now, the split in the village over that issue could potentially spell the end of civility, trust, and social capital throughout the village for decades.

Here's my plea to everyone in Aller: Please do everything in your power to preserve goodwill in the village, now and in the trying days ahead. The damage that will result if we fail to preserve our social capital will far outweigh the damage from EITHER building or not building the solar park.

How can you help with that? Here are some suggestions based on my "Science of Happiness" class and other readings:

  1. Pause to consider all the cooperation that you are grateful for in our village -- times you have been helped; times we've worked together to help others; groups and activities you've enjoyed. Consider, in particular, the help given to the village by people who do not share your views on the solar park.  This might mean consideration of the farmer's helping with the Great Crane and archeology projects; providing generous use of buildings and land for village and church events; and trying to improve the land for wildlife. Or this might mean consideration of many villagers' work in the many cooperative projects I've mentioned above. Count those blessings; express your gratitude.
  2. Consider the common values we share. I'll bet we all moved here for pretty much the same reasons. We love the place -- the peace, the rural character, the birds, the views, the agricultural contribution of the active farms, the walks, the fresh air, and the neighborhood full of trust, cooperation, and goodwill.
  3. Strive to see things from other points of view. Put yourself in the place of the farmer, worried about depletion of the soil, unpredictable prices for milk, and numerous uncontrollable forces, including animal diseases, legal liability for people on his land, and the weather. Put yourself in the place of the resident whose greatest treasure is the view out her window -- a view that could encompass thousands of large solar panels.
  4. Disagree respectfully. Treasure your neighbor. Try to be as kind and generous as possible, even if you don't share his viewpoint. Don't intimidate or shout him down.
  5. Don't exaggerate or misrepresent in making your case, and trust the folks on the other side to do the same. There is a strong case to be made for either side and economies of the truth are both unnecessary and likely to be remembered for a long time. Calmly accept that there really are people who don't think the views will be so awful and who do believe solar energy is more eco-friendly than fracking or nuclear power plants. There really will be sheep grazing between the solar panels. There really are people whose views and deeply-held sense of the sacred, historic site will be spoiled by the large solar installation. There are honest people who have good reason to distrust energy companies.
  6. Do not make threats of mischief, sabotage, or withdrawal of cooperation if you don't get what you want. Whether you do or don't carry out your threats, people will remember them and it will be much harder--if not impossible--to rebuild trust. No one wants to live in a village fearing they will be the next targets of malice.
  7. If you can see both sides -- or grounds for compromise -- or if you are somewhere on the fence, reach out to people to start laying the groundwork for reconciliation when this is over.
  8. Realize this psychological truth: in a year's time, the outcome of not getting your way will not be as bad as you now fear, and the benefits of getting your way will not be as great as you now expect. This is a psychological truth, and it holds for people on all sides of this issue, however it ends up. The only thing that could block you from enjoying that happy truth is tenacious lack of goodwill for the village and your neighbors.





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Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Compass of the Heart & Measuring a Dose of Mindfulness

Researchers studying new medicines must often come to grips with "patient compliance" issues--assuring that participants actually take each dose of an experimental treatment. But the patient compliance difficulty factor goes up orders of magnitude when it comes to studying the effects of mindfulness.

I'm currently taking an EdX class (with 100,000 other people!) on The Science of Happiness from the University of California, Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. The subject for this week is mindfulness. One of this week's guest presenters--Shauna Shapiro from UCal Santa Clara--is a leading light in the academic field of mindfulness.

In her definitions, Dr. Shapiro highlights three core elements of mindfulness: Intention, Attention, and Attitude. It was her discussion of the role of Intention that has given me new appreciation for one of the most serious challenges of conducting mindfulness research. Shapiro sees Intention as "knowing why you are practicing" mindfulness or "setting the compass of your heart."

To drive this home, Shapiro quotes a confession from the father of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn:
"Your intentions set the stage for what is possible. They remind you from moment to moment of why you are practicing . . .  I used to think that meditation practice was so powerful...that as long as you did it at all, you would see growth and change. But time has taught me that some kind of personal vision is also necessary."
Personal intentions of participants in mindfulness studies are essentially the equivalent of "patient compliance" in studies of medical treatments. Each person's intention in pursuing mindfulness is a key determinant of the "dosage" of mindfulness that reaches his or her brain.

Miranda Bevis, my mindfulness teacher, framed intention with a light touch in one of the first classes.  She had us form small groups and invited us to say why we'd signed up for the class and what we hoped to get out of it. And, when telling us we needed to do our meditation homework assignments, she said learning mindfulness was like learning a foreign language. It doesn't do much good just to come to class once a week, she said -- you need to practice, practice, practice.

The drill of home practice no doubt is one necessary manifestation of intention to develop mindfulness. But it's probably not sufficient. I learned this from a close friend who studied mindfulness (but not with Dr. Bevis) and who had a very different experience from mine.

My friend signed up for the class on the recommendation of friends and colleagues. He had studied and practiced psychology and thought studying mindfulness would familiarize him with a new aspect of the field that had come along since he was at school. His intention was to learn about mindfulness techniques in order to help others. He was irritated to get a "pre-test" for various psychological problems in the first class, followed by instruction that seemed to be oriented toward resolving psychological challenges of class members.

My friend did do his home practice during the course, but it's fair to say he did not set the compass of his heart on becoming mindful himself. He found the voice on his practice tape irritating; the practices took too long; they didn't do much for him. He was especially irritated to get a "post-test" version of the psychological assessment again at the end of the 8-week class. Easily fudged and he saw it as more for subsequent promotion of the course than for the students' benefit. He hasn't practiced mindfulness since he finished the class.

My friend is case-in-point for why mindfulness studies are hugely difficult. A typical research paper would say that my friend and I both got the same "dose" of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction -- we both had an 8-week class with a trained Mindfulness teacher and did our home mindfulness practices. But clearly the difference in our respective intentions meant that we got very different doses.

Currently, the closest mindfulness studies come to measuring (and controlling for) participant compliance is data on class attendance and self-reports of home-practice. The degree to which these data approximate participants' actual intentions and efforts to cultivate mindfulness determines --and currently limits-- the reliability and strength of the studies' conclusions. Someday researchers may do better. Maybe cheap, easy, painless, convenient, home-use brain scanning? Or perhaps they can do a massive data crunch and find better correlates of actual mindfulness dose.  Controlling more precisely for heart-compass readings will make for sounder science.

Beyond this, finding better correlates of intention also could help improve the way mindfulness teachers advertise Mindfulness courses, the claims they make, and how and what they teach. It might change class composition, the way teachers relate to class participants -- or even help identify people who are wasting their time and money studying mindfulness.


Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Can Mindfulness Create Compassion?

See Updates at the end of this post--most recent 9 December, 2014

The most dangerous hypotheses are the ones you really want to be true.

I was re-tantalized by one of these thanks to an article on the "Greater Good" website (affiliated with UCal Berkeley's  Greater Good Science Center.) Therapist and psychology researcher, Hooria Jazaieri,
wrote about a Swedish study* investigating whether training in meditation could increase compassion and altruism.

I speculated about this in my blog in December, 2012. These were just personal ramblings -- wondering if mindfulness meditation training might offer me an escape hatch from self-preoccupation to the fresh air of concern for others. I really hoped it might, and imagined it could--perhaps through mindful,  intentional focusing of attention on others rather than self. Instead of focusing on breath, sensations, or gentle yoga movements--as you do in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)--I imagined directing my full and kind attention to another person-- i.e. deep listening.

Jazaieri describes how the Swedish study compared altruism in 20 people randomly assigned to an eight-week course in Buddhist meditation with 22 "control" subjects randomly assigned to the waiting list for the class. At the start and end of the eight weeks, the investigators surveyed the participants'
"...levels of empathy, stress, mindfulness, self-compassion, and ...  'altruistic orientation'—the ability to feel empathic concern rather than personal distress when faced with the suffering of others."
The meditation training sounds like it is similar to MBSR in teaching the value and practice of meditation; in the length of the course, its meditation and gentle movement exercises, and required home practice.

But the program departs somewhat from MBSR in being more explicitly grounded in Buddhism's "four immeasurables" -- loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity.  Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the founders of MBSR, developed mindfulness meditation by rejigging aspects of Buddhist meditation. The Swedish researchers likewise drew on Buddhist practices, but particularly those thought to foster altruism. For example, meditation exercises included imagining the presence of another person and directing compassion to him or her. Gradually the exercises moved from envisioning empathic concern for a loved one to empathic concern for a "neutral" stranger, and finally to a disliked or non-valued person.

 Jazaieri says the key item of interest in the study was whether people with eight weeks of this training would be more altruistically-oriented than the wait-list group. The abstract of the study reports:
 "Results indicated a trend towards increases in altruistic orientation in the intervention group—an increase that significantly correlated with meditation time, decreases in perceived stress, and increases in self-compassion and mindfulness." 
Depending on your outlook, the good or bad news is that both the wait-listed group and the compassion-trained group improved their scores on the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ).  And in a twist that spoils the picture I wanted to emerge, the experimental group, although improving in altruistic orientation (defined as "empathic concern" minus "personal distress"), ends up at a point less altruistically-oriented than the wait-listed group--which started out with higher values and declined slightly over the eight weeks. 

 The trained group improved their mindfulness, self-compassion, and decreased stress compared to the control group (consistent with data on the effects of MBSR). And the increase in altruistic orientation in the experimental group was correlated with how much time was spent practicing meditation. The increases in altruistic orientation were also correlated with the other benefits of mindful mediation (reduced stress, and increased mindfulness and self-compassion).

Another trait that increased for the experimental group was "perspective taking" -- flexibility to see things from another vantage point. Improvements in this trait were significantly related to increases in one facet of FFMQ mindfulness. The researchers speculate that mindful detachment from one's own issues might enhance "the ability to adopt the perspective of another" and may thus be the way mindfulness promotes perspective taking. Other studies have linked perspective taking to "reducing prejudice ... and promoting greater social connectedness..."

The authors of the pilot study acknowledge it has limitations -- many shared with a lot of research in the young field of mindfulness. The study was small and looked at quite a few variables, so it is not surprising that some significant differences turned up. While these may have been statistically significant, it is disappointing that the magnitude of the changes from the eight weeks of instruction and practice did not even compensate for initial differences in altruism between the study participants and the control group.

As with many mindfulness studies, the control group did not participate in an active intervention and the study was not blinded -- that is, subjects (and researchers, presumably) knew participants' group assignments. These factors could bias results (for example when the researchers discarded "outliers" in the data) and could permit placebo effects to color participants' responses. The study looked for correlations--not causation, so it's possible the results are actually due to some unstudied factor. The selected participants were predominantly women, and may not have been representative.

Jazaieri writes,
"Although the conclusions that can be drawn from this study are limited, likely due to the small number of participants, the results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting a relationship between mindfulness meditation and altruism or compassion."
As part of this growing body of evidence, Jazaieri cites research by Paul Condon and David DeSteno at Northeastern University in Boston, and Gaelle Desbordes and Willa Miller at Mass General and Harvard, respectively. She also cites a study from the University of Wisconsin. These studies were published last year. 

The Swedish investigators connect their findings to research on psychotherapists who did mindfulness meditation, and were found to be 
"...more successful in therapy as compared to non-meditators. Patients of meditating therapists showed a significant decrease in symptom severity and rated their therapist significantly higher on clarification and problem-solving skills as compared to patients treated by non-meditating therapists."
The web page with Jazaieri's article also includes a link to a YouTube video by Shauna Shapiro, How Mindfulness Cultivates CompassionShapiro, an associate professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, mentions six or seven randomized controlled trials she's conducted over the past 15 years showing that mindfulness significantly increases compassion for others. Accepting the claimed link between mindfulness and compassion, Shapiro says she is playing with ideas about mechanisms for how mindfulness leads to compassion.  The Swedish study may lend some insight into this. 

I haven't been digging into all these studies yet -- but am hopeful that these or future studies will hold more meaty data and a clear, credible mechanism for the hypothesis I've wanted to believe all along -- that meditation really can reprogram the brain to compassion, just as it can reprogram away from anxiety and depression. As I wrote here previously, mindfulness research is still a wild frontier.  Until I see more solid evidence, I remain apprehensive that the connection between mindfulness and compassion -- at least for me -- still owes a debt to wishful thinking.
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*Promoting Altruism Through Meditation: An 8-Week Randomized Controlled Pilot Study. Mindfulness 2013 4:223-234. Erik Wallmark, Kousha Safarzadeh, Daiva Daukantaite and Rachel E. Maddux






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UPDATE: 

Today I spotted a really good example of how people fell into the very trap I fear above, namely being too quick to embrace science that appears to support our wishful thinking on the social benefits of positive psychology.

In this case it was a take-down of a paper published in 2013 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The original study of 80 healthy volunteers claimed to find that people who seek happiness by pursuing pleasure -- as opposed to pursuing deeper meaning in their lives--show changes in the expression of genes similar to those found in people experiencing chronic stress.

 The new study re-analyzed the data and concluded that the "widely publicized claims about the effects of different dimensions of well-being on health-related gene expression are merely artifacts of dubious analyses and erroneous methodology."

The researchers who debunked the study found that replacing the psychological data just with random numbers still yielded "large numbers of apparently statistically significant effects" when they did the sorts of analyses performed in the flawed study. The authors of the new paper -- an international team from England, The Netherlands, and the United States -- write beautifully about the response to the first paper and their motivation for looking again at the data:
"...Given the apparent importance of their findings, which appeared to amount to nothing less than a true breakthrough in behavioral genomics research, we eagerly and with great earnest read the article with the hope that science might finally have been able to illuminate true pathways to 'the good life' (or at least help to divert people from a not so good life). Unfortunately, what we encountered did not strike us as a breaktrhough. In fact, after an extensive reanalysis of of Fredrickson et al.'s data, we concluded that their study suffers from numerous problems that render its conclusions unfounded and potentially misleading..."
I am not saying the paper on mindfulness and compassion that I write about above has the same statistical flaws as were found in the first PNAS paper --I'm too puny a statistics midget and this is complicated stuff. But I do worry that investigators in the young field of mindfulness research might easily stray into  "a nebulous and largely exploratory correlational study without any solid founding in available theory and research"-- as the 2013 PNAS study was branded.

UPDATE TWO: ON the other hand ...  A  "Fast Company" post about research from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests they were successful in training people to be more compassionate Please see my post for 9 December 2014.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Dear God, Please just SHUT UP!

In mid-March and mid-July of this year, people were severely wounded by young women who heard God tell them what to do. This is the evil flip side of the evangelical belief that God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit) speaks directly to people. This is why I wish the church would just stop claiming God speaks--just drop the whole metaphor. It doesn't work on many levels, or possibly ANY level.

In the March incident, according to the New York Daily News, a 23-year-old Tennessee woman (who acknowledged to police that she was a frequent marijuana smoker) said God told her to drive her car into a church. After causing serious damage to the church, she phoned her husband, who rushed to the scene and found her lying in front of the altar.
...as he checked on her, she stated, 'The devil is in me', and stabbed him on the right side of his chest with a large kitchen knife 
In the July incident, a 25-year-old woman in Indiana told police that “she was driving and out of no where God told her that he would take it from here and she let go of the wheel and let him take it.” When she did, her car swerved into a motorcycle and its rider:
 The car ran over his midsection breaking all of his ribs on his left side, damaging his spleen, bruising his kidney and leaving him with road rash that covered much of his back and extremities. It’s amazing that he lived.
Of course these two instances of people hearing God tell them to do evil things are not the first or even the most dire. David Koresh comes to mind...

I've written before about a local lecture series, presented by Keith and Nigel, the Diocesan church renewal experts, on "Listening to God." As I wrote in my blog post "God's Saying the Same Old Thing,"these expert priests
Evidently... have discerned that the way God speaks is by planting an idea in your head that you should pursue churchy things. ... You just need to have a heart-to-heart conversation with God, Keith advised.
They acknowledged three voices that might be heard in your head: God's, your own, and the devil's. "But fortunately, we're given the gift of discernment, they said."

The thing is, if the church is going to claim all the wonders produced when God speaks in this way, it also needs to claim all the idiocy -- or do a lot of handwaving and qualifying to explain why sometimes the "gift of discernment" works in such evil ways. Perhaps God only gives some people discernment? And how do you know if you are one of those?

In my second blog post on the lecture series, "Voice of the Dollhouse God," Keith and Nigel invited members of the audience to relate times when God had spoken to them and the pair related times when they had detected signs and wonders. All the messages and signs were experiences that non-believers would probably not have noticed, and if they did, would have attributed to happy or unusual coincidence: a fortunate move; dragonflies flying in the house after reading a story about dragonflies.

It seems, at best, this version of a talking God is handing out goodies that aren't actually any better than the workings of an observant brain in a wonderful world full of pattern and randomness -- not to mention chance that looks remarkably non-random. At worst this version of God tells Christians to do horrible things.

Of course I don't propose God's shutting up is the solution. It's religious humans that need to change -- to stop pretending that the wonders of our wishful thinking, imagination, observation, and questioning--and influences such as psychoactive drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and suggestive subliminal messages from videos, songs, movies, vines, t.v., friends, etc.-- are anything other than human. There are always some people incapable of comprehending the difference between the metaphorical and the literal.

If you're going to do God, please don't listen for a God so feeble he can be blamed for such human stupidity. Or as I wrote before,
...the only kind of God I can start to imagine is a Creator far beyond human imagining. More wonderful than a God who runs his Earth and its inhabitants like an elaborate dollhouse, I would see a God who made the Ultimate Awesome: Creation that keeps on creating through cosmic and atomic forces (increasingly understood by physics); geologic processes; evolution; human discovery, growth, societal change...  ... Between the Ultimate Awesome of creation and our neurons that perceive it, there is no end of "messages" we could be getting from God every minute, every place we look, every sound we hear, every breath we take. The only question is which messages, which signs, which instincts, which input we're going to take in, which we're going to ignore, and what significance we attach to them. This is the pallet from which we create our lives.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Boring Rocks and Amazing Spiritual Encounters

The blindingly frustrating, yet brilliant thing about Jesus is that, while he gives us hints on how to live our lives, he is largely inexplicit on details -- even when it comes to something as important as what his church should be like.

I was reminded of this by a blog link, "Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me." recently sent by a friend.

As I argued earlier in this blog, I see Jesus' fundamental rule being to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. When you look to Jesus' life and words to eke out more details, often you'll find ambiguous parables and metaphors.

One of these is a foundation for Christian churches and leads the blog by +Lillian Daniel that my friend sent me. It's Jesus' pun, namely that Peter (whose name Greek name was very close to the word for 'rock') was the rock upon which he would build his church.

Aside from being one of the most consequential puns in history, whatever did--and does--it mean? What were the details of Jesus' vision of his church--beyond Peter's saying he believed Jesus was the son of the living God? (In the preceding verses, Peter had given this reply when Jesus asked his disciples who they thought he was, and this prompted Jesus' quoted pun at Matthew 16:18.)

In her blog entry, Ms. Daniel, a minister in the United Church of Christ, says she favors the company of church-goers and takes issue with people who are "spiritual but not religious." For her, churches offer a more challenging, rich place to work out spiritual experience than does "having deep thoughts all by oneself."
"What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself." 
I pretty much agree with Ms. Daniel. Where church is done right, spirituality is challenging and people find inspiration and help in living out their faith in the world. They are the better for it, and so are the people around them--just as debaters at the Oxford Union hone and inform their citizenship and understanding of politics more sharply than do folks who grumble alone at the 6 o'clock news.

Daniel does get a bit snarky in her caricature of spiritual but not religious people:
"Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating."
I would raise my hand to this, guilty as charged. These days I spend a lot more time in solitary contemplation of my spiritual navel than I do in church. And were I to go back to church, I think my preference would be for the Society of Friends, where the spiritual working out is done within the silence of your own head, although your head is part of a congregation.

Ms. Daniel characterises the spiritual-but-not-religious as boring and uniform -- dazzled by pretty sunsets but missing God as encountered by and through others, past and present. This is the reward for her brave church people, whose companionship she prefers, especially in difficult times.
"Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community?  Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church."
I would say two things to Ms. Daniel: First, far too frequently, what goes on in religious institutions is not "church done right" and has little or nothing to do with working out one's spiritual stuff or even kindly putting up with one another. And second, by instantly tuning out the "spiritual but not religious" she may be missing a profound opportunity to develop her own faith, as well as to demonstrate the love and finding-God-with others that should be at the core of her Christian faith--the very experience she treasures in church. [And I won't mention the possibility that this might be the way to start opening bridges between the churched and spiritual-but-not-religious.]

 As I've written before, the list of reasons people have abandoned -- or chosen not to explore -- religions is probably as long as the list of people who've done so. As Ms. Daniel says, some find ancient religious practice dull. But others are discouraged by hypocrisy when they encounter church folks who fail to respect their neighbors, much less love their enemies. Some walk away deeply hurt by churches preoccupied with the judgment and condemnation of other people's sins. Others despair at churches that focus on the rewards of heaven while ignoring urgent human needs here and now. Some churches are little more than social clubs -- no less, but no more spiritually salubrious than the W.I., the PTA, or the Rotary Club. I don't mean this as an insult. Social interaction is a good and healthy thing.

I've found that even within denominations, churches vary enormously. Some really are places where you're encouraged to do the brave working out of spirituality -- to thrash out your own translation of Jesus' metaphors into the daily living of your life. Sadly, most churches, as I've experienced them, would really prefer that you check your brain at the door. Please don't challenge the minister or other members of the congregation. Please don't make a fuss. Please don't be different. Please don't be yourself. Please don't get personal or too honest as you work out your spiritual stuff. Let's stick to the script and keep this superficial, like we've always done it.

It's not just my perception. Anglican priests at the last deanery synod I attended said leaders of the diocese are focused on:

  • getting more people into church
  • maintaining old church buildings
  • worrying about the ageing of their congregations
  • getting folks to give enough money to keep the church going

This just doesn't seem like what Jesus had in mind for his church, and hardly the "true and lively word." In fact, unlike Jesus and his work, unlike a beautiful sunset, and unlike a selfish hour spent in the small world of my own brain, it's... well... boring. As for the commonplace rush of spiritual impetus inspired by nature, I'd say it's a great place to start. Maybe if she just fanned that little flame a bit...

So now I imagine myself plunked down on an airplane seat next to Ms. Daniel in her clerical collar. She finds spiritual-but-not-religious people boring and knows the odds are good that I will fall in this category. I see her collar and presume that she's caught up with the mind-numbing details of running a typical, park-your-brain-and-shut-up church. We both take out our books. We don't speak to one another, expand our spirituality, or extend our love beyond our own little tribe.

And thus it is that we both miss out on the opportunity to listen kindly, patiently, and deeply. We don't
Random gift of kindness from a stranger
on the train from Carlisle
. After we chat-
ted about the beautiful starry ceiling in
Carlisle cathedral, a lovely lady crocheted
 this copy for me.
hear about the other's extraordinary experiences of creation--sunsets or otherwise. We don't hear about their profound, humbling human encounters -- how they lucked into a random act of kindness, or witnessed amazing love and gentleness in the care of a dying friend. We don't hear that story about how, when everyone else gave up, those foster kids are turning their lives around. Our spirituality bears no fruit.

As happens in 99.9% of human encounters, we fail to find holy ground in the very place we are--outside of church ... away from an inspiring sunset ...  in the presence of a stranger. Our lazy assumptions about the other's spirituality stop us from reaching what might be the real rock that Jesus meant was the cornerstone of his church: two people encountering one another in faith and love, suspending pretence and prejudice, asking important questions, and accepting the vulnerability of honest answers. If that's the Rock Jesus had in mind, "church" and "spirituality" could be found in human encounters everywhere and anywhere. Maybe not what church leaders, my friend, or Ms. Daniel have in mind, but it rocks my boat.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Eulogy for a Once-Worthy Career

Today I said farewell to my 26-year career as a science writer. Oh, I may linger around the coffin for a bit, just to see if the corpse magically returns to life, but I've never been great at wishful thinking and taphophobia (the fear of being buried alive) has never been my thing.

It's also possible I shouldn't be writing this eulogy until my feelings are more settled, but then again, it's immediate and heartfelt.

My feelings are a mixture--that all-too-familiar hollowness of mourning combined with an expansive sense of freedom; Fear of the future and its stoic opposite; Disparagement and bewilderment--what the hell took me so long to get to this point? I berate myself for behaving like a conceited princess, "I'm too good for this!" but simultaneously for being a feeble old has-been, "I'm no longer good enough."

The circumstances of the ending are just my stumbling blocks. Maybe I wouldn't have tripped if I'd had my eyes open in the first place--or been more fastidious about my working conditions, or less patient with the folks I worked for. But now I am where I am.

The slow-motion downfall started in December when the small, New York-based magazine I've been writing for -- almost 7 years now -- was sold to a large publisher of special interest magazines in another state. I had a contract with the small publisher. The agreement stipulated that if either party wanted to change or end the contract, they had to give 60 days notice. I thought that gave both parties a measure of predictability and safety.

But when the magazine was sold, my contract evidently wasn't part of the deal. No one bothered to notify me until the deal was complete -- about the same time as I'd finalized the copy for the next issue (March-April) of the magazine.

My contract specified that I was to be paid $1000 upon acceptance of copy for each issue. That sum never changed. I never missed a deadline. But the old publisher had gotten quite sloppy about paying me on time. I once asked for a raise and was told they didn't have the money for it. I also complained (very nicely) that I would like to be paid on time, but they took no notice of my requests and I let it slide.

When the magazine was sold, the editor said the new owners still wanted things to continue as they had. She said I should go ahead and prepare another column as usual. At that point, I was owed for four months' work, so I thought it would be good to get some assurance that I would be paid what they owed me before doing more work for them. The new publisher's back office told me that it was their policy to pay freelancers when each issue of the magazine ships, not when the copy is accepted.

At that point I realized that neither my editor -- the third I've had since I began writing for the magazine -- or the new owners even realized I had a contract. So I dug out a copy and sent it to them. But I also told them that since my old contract had been voided, I would like to make some changes. I told them I would take the usual fee for past work and for the next issue (May-June), but thereafter expected an increase in my fee to compensate for 7-years of inflation:
I appreciate  that there are market forces at work eroding the value of my craft such that it's dead cheap -- even free -- to acquire writing services. But I am guilty of further undermining this valuation by accepting fees that have declined in real monetary value. Just factoring in inflation since 2006 (when I began writing for the magazine and was paid $1000 per column) would mean that just to retain constant purchasing power, my fee should now be $1225 going by UK inflation rates and $1155 going by US inflation rates. My proposal of a fee of $1180 falls between these inflation-only increases. I must accept responsibility for not being more aggressive in seeking greater compensation ... sooner -- or otherwise finding more rewarding opportunities.
Amidst all the details of getting paid, I've failed to congratulate [New Publisher] on its acquisitions. I've long felt that the magazine and its sister publications have great potential for helping people with chronic health conditions. (In fact, I've suggested other areas where I see even greater opportunities along these lines.) In the avalanche of information available today, it's great to see that someone is still willing to try find a niche where personal information needs meet commercial endeavor.
The new publisher agreed to pay me upon acceptance, and said they would pay part of the fees that banks now charge to deposit checks. But they said there would be no contract -- just issue-to-issue assignments -- and no fee increase.

The good news is that, as of February 18, the new publisher has paid me for my work in the Jan-Feb and March-April issues. My editor said the woman in charge was working out other problems associated with moving staff -- and letting people go -- but there might still be hope they would find more money for me. The bad news is that the editor and her staff haven't yet gotten back to me to finalize the May-June copy.

Since last hearing from the magazine editor almost two weeks ago, I've had time to reflect -- and to have a brief dalliance with the idea of writing for a new client, in this case a major UK book publisher.

I was swept off my feet when, shortly after all-but-kissing-the-old-client-goodbye, I saw a call for freelancers to work on a book on a subject I've long hoped to write about. They were only looking for experienced science writers. I wrote to the editor immediately, declared my life-long passion for the subject and desire to contribute to her book. She wrote back asking for my CV and a couple relevant clips (I had already included this information in my original response) if I was interested. She told me the pay would be £130 for a 600-700 -word "spread" for the richly illustrated volume. After I asked, she said the copy for the book must be done by early June.

I spoke with the editor on the phone to ask a few more questions and sat down and crunched the numbers. If I worked really hard and could manage a whole chapter of the five-chapter book,  I might just be able to stay at roughly the same hourly rate as I'd achieved writing for the old client -- but completing my year's work by June. I wrote to say I'd be prepared to begin next week, and would like to take on either chapter 1 or 5.

I should have twigged that this might be less than a dream job when the editor wrote back to invite me to look at comparable format work in two other books by the publisher. And she said they really only wanted freelancers for chapters 2, 3, and 4. She said it would probably be best if I just picked a couple of "spread" topics and had a go -- because I wouldn't be paid for the writing unless the publisher decided to use it. This essentially was a "try-out" or "writing on spec."

I can't say I was impressed by the publisher's format. I like fun, accessible, lively presentation of information, but this was more like bending the story/ picking the subjects  to fit the format, rather than starting with interesting science and good writing and finding the best way to present it. I swallowed my pride and e-mailed the editor to say I  was less confident about doing a full chapter. But I said I would take her suggestion, and offered to do two topics -- an easy one, and one that would be quite difficult because it required distilling a broad field down into 600 words. Just doing diligent research on that subject would take a few days.

The editor wrote back to say she understood. She reminded me again that the work would only be paid if the publisher used it. And she said it would probably be best if I just tried one topic -- the hard one -- for which she would send me the directions in a few days.

The penny finally dropped. This editor was retreating rapidly -- or else we just weren't communicating well with one another. Either possibility was dire. Despite having seen my C.V., and examples of my work, the editor had gone from enthusiasm for my services and encouraging taking on a whole chapter -- to suggesting two sample "try-out spreads" -- to suggesting it was chancy that my work on a single "spread" would be up to snuff. And even if I should be so lucky as to be accepted after my try-out -- the job would pay less than the amount new EU immigrants need to earn in Britain in order to be eligible for benefits. {A slightly irrelevant detail, as I am not a new EU immigrant, but this additional way of discouraging incomers had just been announced} And that would be my reward for writing articles I wouldn't be especially proud of. Having just awoken from my sleepwalking through diminishing conditions of employment at the magazine, I didn't think this was a promising place to start a new assignment.

Thus it was this morning I found myself writing two dear John letters to my old and not-to-be new clients.

So where do I go from here? Despite these blows to my pride, in my heart of hearts, I do still think I'm a good science writer. But the field is just too depressing. There are fewer and fewer staff science writing positions, and they certainly aren't to be found in rural southwest England. I wouldn't rule out moving, but I also don't think I would ever land an interesting science writing job in the U.K. I have applied for some and never had even cursory interest. I don't think the British "get" me. But it's also possible that I'm just crap at what I do, or crap at presenting myself, or just too old and lazy.

So that leaves freelancing. There are precious few rewards in freelance writing beyond what inherent interest is to be had in the subject matter and of course personal pride in a job well done. There's no admiration from colleagues; no prizes, accolades, or even the pleasure of a laugh with colleagues at the water-cooler. Sometimes I am able to give a friend a tip on a health condition that I know about from my work. And of course I am lucky to be able to live in a (usually) pleasant rural location and have the flexibility to fit my work to fit around laundry, housecleaning, cooking, gardening and unpaid writing and editing.

I don't think it's just the poor  pay that bugs me. I'm sufficiently well-off and historically thrifty that I don't need to earn massive amounts of dosh. Rather, I think it's the declining pay, combined with the dwindling personal satisfaction or sense that the work is particularly helpful to--or appreciated by--the world.

The only question that remains is, where do I now want to volunteer? I'm writing another unpaid article for a free local newsletter. But then? It's a question that is being asked a million times a day as the Baby Boom generation retires. In asking, I'm only a couple years ahead of other 61-year-olds.

Maybe I'll go on a silent retreat to find myself (again) and take the next step in mindfulness meditation. Or I might be happy going back to school. Maybe I should devote myself more seriously to poetry. Or learning to play the guitar. Or gardening. Or painting. Or turning our garden into a retreat center. Or starting a village cooperative store. Or writing the World's Greatest Cookbook. Maybe I should get a dog or finish turning all the photos from my summer travels into picture books.  So many possibilities await once I stop listening for my once-worthy career to rouse itself from death and ring that little bell!

Saturday, February 15, 2014

The Wild Frontier of Mindfulness

There's been some gushing about mindfulness recently following the publication of a mindfulness meta-analysis and a TIME magazine cover story, The Mindful Revolution. Perversely for an avowed "mindfulness evangelist," I will argue that this is a good time to check over-exuberant claims and expectations.

First, here's an abstract of the new report, and some links to articles in the lay press about it in Reuter's Health;  The Guardian's blog; and a Guardian editorial by writer Julie Myerson on how Mindfulness cured her lifelong anxietyThe story in TIME generated a loud rumble in the blogosphere, including one in The Huff Post mentioning a wide range of applications of mindfulness meditation.

The new meta-analysis, or "study of studies," analyzed 47 scientific reports on randomized controlled clinical trials of mindfulness programs to help people with physical or psychological problems or high stress.   Controlled in this case meant that mindfulness was compared to some other treatment program similar in duration and intensity -- such as an exercise-, muscle relaxation- or education program or cognitive-behavioral group therapy, for example. Having a control group for comparison helps to rule out placebo effects:  It's long been known that people tend to improve somewhat just from the belief that they are being treated, even when the "treatment" is completely inert.

Randomized means that participants in the studies weren't specially selected for one treatment versus another -- they were assigned randomly.  This helps eliminate bias that would result from deliberately or unknowingly assigning people likely to benefit from a new treatment to one arm of a trial and  tougher cases to the other. Random assignment to treatments can help reduce "self-selection bias." This happens when volunteers enroll in a study believing in advance that they'll benefit from it. With this bias, they may be more receptive to the treatment and more likely to notice and report benefits.

The 47 experiments covered in the meta-analysis included 3,515 people who participated in a trial of some type of meditation (mindfulness, transcendental meditation [TM], or mantra meditation). A large population like this is good-- small studies can yield fluke results due to chance or conditions unique to the trial setting, rather than real effects of mindfulness. Combining and comparing studies in a meta-analysis dilutes or cancels out some of these anomalies.

Sadly, the 47 studies were the few bits of cream that rose to the top of 1651 meditation research articles the meta-analysts could find. They had to discard 444 studies that did not include an active control group or randomization.

What the meta-analysis actually found was modest: "Moderately strong evidence" that mindfulness programs could improve anxiety and depression by 10-20% at eight weeks (i.e. at the end of a typical mindfulness training program) and after three to six months. The researchers wrote, "These small effects are comparable with what would be expected from the use of an antidepressant in a primary care population, but without the associated toxicities." There was also evidence that mindfulness meditation reduced pain. There was only slight evidence that it eased stress or improved quality of life related to mental health.

Clearly something about mindfulness works for some people. But there was insufficient evidence that meditation increased positive mood, attention, eating habits, or sleep. Nor did evidence show it helped with weight control or substance use. There was no evidence that meditation was better than active comparison treatments, such as prescribed drugs, exercise, or other behavioral treatments. The researchers found fewer studies of mantra meditation and TM than mindfulness, so support for the other types of meditation was even sketchier .

The conclusion of the study was appropriately low-key:  Clinicians were advised that meditation programs could yield small-to-moderate reductions in "negative dimensions of psychological stress" (i.e anxiety and depression). They added that better-designed studies are needed to "determine the effects of meditation programs in improving the positive dimensions of mental health and stress-related behavior" (i.e. substance use, sleep problems, weight control, etc.)

So is this mindfulness glass half-full or half-empty? Is Mindfulness really only modestly effective for a few conditions? Or is it only modestly proven because the studies aren't good enough yet? Is Mindfulness too fuzzy, too full of uncontrollable human factors to ever be proven more effective? Or is it that Mindfulness is still in its infancy -- still identifying key ingredients to make it more effective and still groping for the best ways to measure benefits?

If the answers lie in anecdotes, the abundance of positive personal testimony would paint Mindfulness as perfect already. For instance, scan the comments following the Guardian blog and you'll find plenty of folks saying mindfulness has improved -- even saved -- their lives.  But just as all the personal testimony in the world will never convince Richard Dawkins that God exists, so positive testimony from mindfulness evangelists won't nudge the science. 

But on the flip side, might there be constructive ideas for improving Mindfulness in the negative testimony -- or in comparisons of people who did vs. did not benefit from Mindfulness? 

Returning to the comments following the Guardian blog, I found the following problems with Mindfulness--at least for some people: 
  • Some (as I predicted) don't like the Buddhist references in Mindfulness (see note #1 below). 
  • Some say it's just the latest in a long line of psychobabble fads, following neurolinguistic programming, transcendental meditation,  hypnosis, or other "neurobollocks (#2)"
  • Some say there's nothing to mindfulness -- they do it all the time already (#3)
  • Some are surprised to find you must continue to practice mindfulness meditation each day to enjoy its full benefits -- and it's hard to find the time (#4)
  • Others observe Mindfulness is not a cure for life-threatening depression and is incompatible or inappropriate in some settings where it's being tested -- such as the military (#5).
Below I address these issues  and consider the differences between my experience with an 8-week Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction (MBSR) Course and that of a close friend.  

Because I've written previously about including Buddhist or other spiritual references in Mindfulness, I won't say more, except to repeat that spiritual references may encourage some potential practitioners, but will close the door for others. Even a passing reference to ancient Eastern practices with the stipulation that "you don't have to be a Buddhist to benefit" from Mindfulness may put some folks off. The alienated won't try Mindfulness, may drop out, or, if they stick with it for some reason -- perhaps as part of a clinical trial -- they may be less likely to practice wholeheartedly. 

Mindfulness is just the latest psychobabble fadTime and subsequent research will tell. I would guess that an average of four scientific articles on mindfulness are added to the PubMed database at the U.S. National Library of Medicine each week. TIME reports,

"Altogether, in 2003, 52 papers were published in scientific journals on the subject of mindfulness; by 2012, that number had jumped to 477."
Academics are holding their first international conferences on mindfulness and there are now programs around the world to train teachers of mindfulness--and teachers of teachers of mindfulness. There's now a magazine devoted exclusively to mindfulness. The new meta-analysis is a sign that mindfulness is beginning to mature as a science. I'd say the best way to avoid Mindfulness becoming a disappointing fad is to be sure claims don't push past the most rigorous science.

In an interesting article in Mindful magazine, science writer Sharon Begley describes promising evidence that even the adult brain retains plasticity -- ability to rewire emotional responses. Unfortunately, she says, the study of emotional reprogramming (which includes mindfulness) is in its infancy. Meanwhile neuroplasticity is a bandwagon starting to roll.
It’s a shame to see something as scientifically significant as neuroplasticity— the ability of the adult brain to change its structure or function in an enduring way—overpopularized to the point that it could start losing its real meaning.
I agree. It would be a shame, and the danger is there: The TIME article cites an NIH report which found back in 2007, Americans were already spending $4 billion on mindfulness-related alternative medicine Lucrative practice for the merchants of mindfulness and feel-good popularity could entrench the young field, even without more solid scientific backup. This is what happened with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator,  a personality test taken by 2.5 million people per year.  An important money-maker for the company with rights to the test and for people who train and pay for a license to administer it, the personality test is widely popular in the business community, despite lacking  scientific validity.  

There's nothing to mindfulness. I think this is largely true -- or perhaps simple Mindfulness potentially lies in many things. You can pretty much summarize the practices and attitudes of mindfulness meditation in a few paragraphs. Conceptually easy-peasy. There are lots of books on it, and free talks about it on YouTube where Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of Mindfulness, calls it "Much ado about almost nothing." The MBSR course and other Mindfulness™courses take eight weeks (and a few hundred dollars or pounds) to school you in a series of specific exercises, such as sitting or lying down and focusing kindly attention on each breath, or parts of your body, or walking, or yoga movements, or a poem, or sounds, or something you are gazing at, or just the thoughts passing through your mind. (You can find links to some of these guided meditation exercises at   freemindfulness.org). 

These Mindfulness™exercises are simply well worked-out, more-or-less standardized techniques to an end: strengthening healthy control of focus and attention. Homework exercises in the MBSR course ask you to do something mindfully in your everyday routine -- eating, showering, brushing your teeth, washing the dishes. This highlights the everyday aspect of mindfulness--almost anything that engages attention presents an opportunity for mindfulness practice, helping you be present in the present and bumping aside regrets and worriesDear Husband finds that paragliding or riding his motorcycle at high speed snap his mind into the present (thank goodness). Maybe music, exercise, photography, hiking, gardening, the tangotai chi, aikido, crossword puzzles, or playing Tetris offer informal practice for other folks, even without Mindfulness™ training.

The hard part to mindfulness is actually doing it intentionally, and mastering the skill sufficiently that you can summon mind-refocusing when you really need to--when it's most difficult, and when you don't have your camera, garden, or tango partner at hand. I would guess that only the most disciplined informal mindfulness practitioners would be as facile as experienced meditators in commanding their focus in moments of crisis.

It's another question whether mindfulness courses should cost what they do for what you get from a "science" still in its infancy. I'd say if you're a highly disciplined person, you can probably get your 10-20% improvement in depression or anxiety by following a book. If you need the assistance of a class and can afford a course, do it.

Mindfulness requires everyday practice to be effective. True. As a mindfulness devotee, I find time spent practicing mindfulness is at least partially repaid through increased effectiveness and enjoyment in daily life. Done properly, mindfulness practice  should steer you away from rumination, irritation, worry, self-loathing, anxious fears, jealousy, and other habitual, automatic, and unproductive thoughts. The more you practice, the better you should be at intentionally refocusing. You may even discover your own personal uses of the skill, as I have.

But is there a decay curve for Mindfulness skills? Is this related to how well you acquire them in the first place? How often and how intensely do you need to refresh the skills? One of the shortcomings of Mindfulness research is neglect of how much, how well, and how long trial participants actually practice or how firmly they acquire the skill in the first place. Even less is known about what's needed to maintain skills. At this point it's assumed practice makes perfect. Given that, Mindfulness teachers should be upfront and emphatic about the importance of ongoing practice.

Mindfulness is not right for all people under all conditions. True. As a field in its infancy, mindfulness is still identifying its goals, legitimate claims, and target populations --the meta-analysis is important for this.

The young field has a lush crop of published studies showing mindfulness is beneficial in a wide range of conditions, measured many different ways--a broad, but thin frontier. The way you measure mindfulness effects in post-traumatic stress disorder is quite different than in smoking cessationinsomniaattention deficit disorderpanic attacksfibromyalgia, or provoked vestibulodynia, for example. Frequently benefits of mindfulness are supported by small, uncontrolled studies of non-randomized, selected, atypical groups.  Many studies are one-offs.  For all these reasons, at this time, most mindfulness studies can't be pooled and meta-analyzed to wash out biases and anomalies.

But as broad as the applications of mindfulness might be, there are some proscribed applications. As one comment on the Guardian blog noted, mindfulness is not appropriate for the severely depressed and other people in acute crisis -- they should get emergency psychiatric help. I would hope that mindfulness teachers and others speaking and writing about mindfulness make that clear.

That comment and one about mindfulness in the military making soldiers more efficient killers and manipulators gets at another set of fundamental questions about mindfulness--what does mindfulness really want to grow up to be? What are its real goals?

 The research papers covered by the meta-analysis assumed that the function of Mindfulness is to improve measurable well-being or reduce the impact of particular health problems.  But, the authors write,
Historically, meditation was not conceptualized as an expedient therapy for health problems. Meditation was a skill or state one learned and practiced over time to increase one’s awareness and through this awareness to gain insight and understanding into the various subtleties of one’s existence. . .  The interest in meditation that has grown during the past 30 years in Western cultures comes from Eastern traditions that emphasize lifelong growth. The translation of these traditions into research studies remains challenging.
Some Mindfulness teachers -- even if they avoid invoking Buddhist traditions -- still resist a physiological view of the practice. Consider this from mindfulness teacher and author Ed Halliwell:
 Scientific studies might show that mindfulness improves well-being in material terms, but can they do justice to the inner transformation that occurs for many people who practise it? Isn't something lost by presenting its effects purely as a physical or mental health benefit? Indeed, by setting up mindfulness as something that produces guaranteed results, isn't there a danger of distorting one of its key messages—that striving for a concrete future is antithetical to the practice, which is about staying with the uncertain present?
The question about use of mindfulness to make soldiers better killers also reflects a different view of fundamental goals. My understanding of MBSR in the military is that it is aimed at preventing psychological injuries from war ('mental armour' from Mindfulness training before deployment) or treating such injuries (PTSD etc.) post-combat. Whilst I would like to think Mindfulness may contribute to responsible, respectful behavior toward others and ultimately contribute to world peace -- those objectives actually go beyond inner-focused MBSR remit.

Goal ambiguity may also start to explain why Mindfulness worked for me, but did little for my dear friend.  In the absence of universally accepted and communicated goals and unequivocal areas of effectiveness, mindfulness is a wide-open frontier. Like the Wild West--there's gold in them thar' hills -- promise and opportunity, but also hype, bravado, claims that won't pan out, and maybe some snake-oil, fast-talk, smoke, and mirrors.

People come to mindfulness with different expectations. Their motivations may be strengthened or diminished by what they find, as colored by personal traits of different participants and mindfulness teachers. My dear friend didn't start with the same open attitude toward MBSR that I had. He didn't "click" with the MBSR teacher.  I don't think his class attendance was perfect--as mine was. I can't say the same for my homework practice, but I probably did more than my friend. My ongoing practice tends to be brief, but daily. I expected more of MBSR than my friend; I put in more effort; and I continue to get more out of it.

What's needed now, in my opinion, is improvement of mindfulness pedagogy. Learning the practice should be like learning a foreign language, Aikido, or the tango. People considering signing up should know what they'll get (subject to specified effort and practice, as with any learned skill) and what it's good for. This will first require taming the wild frontier --narrowing, unifying, and clearly defining goals and then assuring -- based on research -- that practices and benefits are conveyed as efficiently, effectively, and honestly as possible.

Some downsides of Mindfulness (from comments following the Guardian blog
#1-The Buddhist / Psychological Basis of Mindfulness are problematic for some: Kikichan: I don't find the religious associations with mindfulness or any kind of psychological therapy to be at all helpful. Perhaps I've just... seen too many priests trying to milk too much money out of grieving people by means of emotional manipulation ... When my husband was a child, his grandfather died, and he was sent to a Zen meditation camp, where he was walloped by a monk for moving to avoid a wasp. Living among Buddhists, I really can't credit the religion with any power to make people healthy mentally.
PatLux: As an atheist I find the links to Buddhism don't sit well with me. However I did do a short mindfulness course and as a result when I go out for a walk I do tend to notice more of the beautiful details of the world around me. It is like any selfhelp programme for me. I take from it small aspects that are useful and then move on but my personality does not allow me to buy into the complete package.

#2-Mindfulness is the latest psychobabble fad, a reincarnation of neurolinguistic programming etc: Amendall: Some folk will believe anything. A new fad, lacking in evidence but harmless if kept to oneself.
CrewsControl: ... I wonder if the attempted scientific explanation, the uncoupling of the insula, as Prof Williams describes in his presentation isn’t just the sort of neurobollocks we’ve seen before.  It also has the strange feel of an embryo cult, following the path beaten by NLP. Discobedient: I suspect that after mindfulness the next buzzword in psychology is going to be "cheer up, love-ness". Fieldeffects: The only meditation technique recommended by the American Heart Association is Transcendental Meditation as they said that it has the best scientific evidence. A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials on TM and anxiety (which looked at 600 papers) found that it was better than controls.

#3-There's nothing to Mindfulness -- I'm doing it already! Mauinglionz: I don't get it. Based on the description in the article I feel like this is something I'm doing anyway?

#4-Mindfulness requires everyday practice to be effective: OxfordBiker: I've a friend who has suffered from lifelong depression and anxiety who got send on a mindfulness course by her GP. She enjoyed it but 'didn't realise' she had to go on doing it every day! 

#5-Mindfulness does not work to make all people happy under all conditions:
Elmondo2012: ...Speaking as someone who has been meditating and doing aikido for years (AKA Zen on Wheels) and who also has a hell of lot of experience with very severe depression mindfulness or whatever you ant to call it isn't that helpful when you're suicidally depressed. Jodro: ... One additional remark: mindfulness has become very popular in the US recently and now also is gaining a strong foothold in the UK. However, in Buddhist traditions mindfulness is always taught in conjunction with a set of values. These include respect for life, including of animals and plants, respect for the environment as a whole, not stealing, social justice, helping those in need and sharing our resources with them, and responsible sexual behaviour and responsible consumption. While very beneficial, IMHO mindfulness practice alone is not enough. Witness for example the fact that the US army has begun to use it. Becoming a more effective killing machine, or becoming more effective at exploiting the system and becoming rich, and so on, miss the point as these actions will not foster happiness or contentment, which is what it's about.