Science of Mindfulness - Jon Kabat-Zinn, Meditation, and Spirituality

Recently American Public Media interviewed Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He explores how, through both science and experience, mindfulness practice in one's life mitigates stress and thus plays a key part in the prevention and treatment of illnesses.

Due to the character of the times (what with economic instability, the fast-paced stride of American daily life, and over-inundation with information) Americans experience a huge amount of stress in our lives. What Kabat-Zinn has done is researched and published significant findings on the positive affects of meditative techniques on mental and physical health and de-mystified (or clarified might be a better term) the practice of mindfulness.

The chief import of Kabat-Zinn's work is that it shows, using scientific methodologies, that how one chooses to view life and what one pays attention to can have demonstrable influence on one's well-being. Also, it makes these traditionally spiritual or religious techniques much more palatable to the non/a-religious in the modern/post-modern West. People who would normally never touch these practices due to the religious, cultural, or linguistic baggage that they often come with are now presented with scientific evidence that they work and in a linguistic universe that isn't threatening to their sensibilities.

We in Unity have always acknowledged the reality of the affects of contemplative techniques on the mind and body (I'm thinking of even early works of our founders - for example, see C. Fillmore's Atom-Smashing Power of Mind [1949]), and have readily pointed to past scientific research that has suggested this is the case (such as Andrew Newberg's work on prayer and neuroscience).

Kabat-Zinn's research can be added to the growing list of scientific corroboration of ancient mystical-spiritual truths. However, his work is interesting also because, though it recognizes that many people link mindfulness with religion, it doesn't propound to be dealing with explicitly "religious" or even "spiritual" techniques; he argues that these techniques don't have to be associated with religion or spirituality.

Though I thoroughly respect and admire his work and feel it's doing much good, I feel he's dissociated these practices from religion too much. They are historically and culturally grounded in religious contexts, which speaks to the role religion plays in their actual engagement and effectiveness. That is, because these practices emerged from religious individuals and communities with explicitly spiritual concerns, these meditative techniques are intrinsically geared toward and infused with spiritual aims and purposes. I think that stripping them of their religious connection is somewhat degrading to the religions from which they've come and prevents a full experience of what these techniques were created to do - experience the Ultimate and live according to these insights.

I'm not saying that using them for the purpose of stress-relief is unwarranted. To the contrary, I think it's wonderful that people can benefit from these mindfulness practices without recourse to religious concerns. The non-religious may think that meditative techniques only have non-spiritual benefits, but I'd want to ask for a definition of spirituality here. I view spirituality as the human being's process of making meaning, discerning value, and bettering oneself through specific practices to this end (religion has more of an institutional or social form of spiritual concerns). Thus, according to my understanding, spirituality and religion are not the same thing and aren't mutually inclusive to each other - they can occupy different spheres. Mindfulness is spiritual in at least the sense I've suggested. This, coupled with the intimate historical-cultural connection, leads me to believe that it is almost impossible to say that there is absolutely no spiritual aspect to these techniques. My argument is probably grounded in semantics or word usage, but it's something to think about.

Nonetheless, Kabat-Zinn has done some great work at the Stress Reduction Center and I highly commend him for his efforts in helping people to live better, more health-ful lives.

Listen to the interview with Kabat-Zinn on Speaking of Faith on American Public Media.