“Framing” Mindfulness and Citizenship" : My Visit to Ottawa for the IAACS Conference

The day is cloudy but warm when I arrive at Ottawa Train Station. Tiny drops of rain form like dew along the windows. I see nothing but rows of trees on the way, and I ponder their beauty. I marvel at the fact that so many kinds of species, big and small, can inhabit a shared space and yet still harmonize. I feel thankful to have such a smooth ride, as well as the opportunity to be able to share at the IAACS Conference.

For the last few hours, I have been sitting in the VIA train window seat, pondering the book in my hand: Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite. According to Merton, Zen cannot be expressed in any language, and even transcends the very cultures from which it had emerged. He distinguishes Zen as a direct, unmediated experience of the mind from the traditions of Buddhism from which it has emerged. I wonder if there is such a thing as a mind separate from culture. I go back to what I can remember from one of our teachers, Guo Xing Fashi, and his teachings at one of our recent retreats. He noted that all conditioned phenomenon are included in mind, but the mind is not the same as conditioned phenomena.  This seems a very significant point to me: we include our history as beings (our past conditions) but we are always more than the sum of this history. Does it make sense to violently shake the mind ‘out’ of the conditions that shape our experiences? Could such as thing as a ‘mind’ that is separate from context ever truly exist? Today, I inhabit my own anxiety. I feel the pressure of the upcoming presentation. I decide to take a stroll across the river bank toward the national buildings.

Ottawa is truly a peaceful city. It feels like a national holiday, even though officially it is not. School kids, about 13 or 14 years of age, are lining the streets close to Parliament Hill, with colored papers in their hands. I imagine that they are part of a field trip to learn about Canada’s history as well as the government. Perhaps they have to write an assignment when they return to school, to “report” their findings. But they are cheerful and carefree, even when they are running to catch their bus. And meanwhile the merchants and food peddlers are even more joyful as they collect their money from the students.

Throughout my visit, I see many war monuments:  a regally standing soldier, huddled soldiers, dignified soldiers. I am reminded that this country is a protected enclave of freedom and democracy.  People did have to fight to have what we have today, and many lives were taken so that we could enjoy the ability to express ourselves and share our viewpoints. I remember the importance of acknowledging how this country came to be, making it what it is today. As I walk, I feel an almost indescribable recognition of what the country means, even though I only vaguely recollect the history lessons from my own childhood growing up in Canada. I stroll down the city and get lost, almost as if on purpose. I know that no matter where I go, the towering green presence of Parliament Hill will guide me back to where I was before.

Mindfulness is a big topic in North America these days. As Jeff Wilson notes in his survey on the Mindfulness movement in North America (2014), there are books proliferating in the West about mindful living, mindful eating, and even mindful shopping. Mindfulness has come to be synonymous with everything that is happening now in the moment, with the disclaimer of doing it all wholeheartedly. Some of my colleagues working in spirituality and education express the concern: does the emphasis on ‘present moment’ awareness decontextualize mindfulness? It certainly seems to take it from its Buddhist moorings, by not showing mindfulness as one part of the Eightfold Noble Path. A mindfulness without right views about life could be temporarily satisfying and peaceful, but it potentially overlooks the broader view if what life is about. Yet, the experience of peace has to come from somewhere that is direct. Sometimes, true peace comes from seeing what is.  To see what is, one must drop the habit of seeing it through what was, especially when each moment is a new beginning.

Natasha presents before me. She presents a photo essay on the meaning of democracy, a propos the Ottawa attack incident earlier this year. Her photos symbolically represent to me the diverse and sometimes contrasting values that Canadians are able to behold simultaneously, as a single unified nation: peace and conflict, survival and sacrifice, nature and edifice. Stephen Harper, she reminds us, had remarked “here we sit” after the terror attack. As I listen to Natasha’s reminder, I am reminded of the sitting pose of a meditation practitioner. When we meditate in a group together, we are sitting for something, not just to keep our seats warm. What we sit for is the wholeness that we already are and already embody, even when we feel fragmented by our worries, our desires, our fears and our doubts. We sit with this basic faith and confidence that whatever emerges can be borne by mind, including the craziest inner conflicts. Even when we don’t feel ‘whole’, we remind ourselves that seeking wholeness outside the experience itself is not necessary. When we sit, we sit in peace, but it is not a complacent peace. It is a courageous peace that contains its own contradictions. Even the very desire for something else is not rejected, but is seen as a part of an unfolding experience that indeed contains our desires and vexations. Nothing is discarded from this experience. Everything is completely okay as it is, as long as it points back to the mind from which it originates. Again, I go back to a basic Chan Buddhist teaching that all phenomena are part of the mind. To see conditioned phenomena for what they are (part of mind, having no separate existence) is to have the courage to face the phenomena, accept it, deal with it, and let it go as needed. These four steps form a kind of ethic of addressing problems espoused by my teacher, Venerable Sheng Yen.

Many years ago, I remember reading a book by John Ralston Saul, called On Equilibrium. Saul suggests that the most humane philosophies embody a careful balance between ethics, common sense, intuition, imagination, memory, and reason. To try to dominate with one of these qualities is to blur or to potentially overlook the values of the others. For example, reason without memory would create an overly abstract way of looking at the world that ignores the rich lessons of the past. I wonder if one useful way to frame mindfulness is that it allows the contrariness of life to emerge without trying to separate the ‘contraries’ into different compartments. To live in a diverse community is to live in a shifting, ever changing space where there will be sometimes ungraspable tensions. But rather than separate these tensions into categories (‘this’ and ‘that’), mindfulness simply allows the tensions to unfold as they are. Similar to what happens when we sit in meditation, we don’t try to exclude pain from an experience or seek what is opposite to it. Rather, we see the experience to its fullest, and let go of seeking another, more refined version of that experience.  In this way, ‘peace’ doesn’t arise because we try to exclude any part of us that is not peaceful. Such a way would ironically be a form of violence, because it would deny the very conditioned experience that is happening within.

When I get up to start my presentation, many questions are on my mind. I wonder, how much is needed to capture the experience of mindfulness as a tool for citizenship? How could it best be presented? Would it be shown or told? Would the conference participants understand if I start with a breathing exercise? Would this be too simplistic, and would it overlook the subtleties of mindfulness practice? On the other hand, would too much explanation be overly abstract? There were many decisions I felt I had to make, as I stood to deliver a presentation. Though the slides Yishin and I prepared are somehow meant for a 30-40 minute presentation, I realized that I only had about 20 minutes at the most.

Happily or not, life has a way of making decisions on my behalf. It turns out that the mouse on the computer isn’t working , and I am unable to scroll between slides, much less upload the audio file with Yishin’s concise and beautiful talk. I am briefly mortified as I scramble in the silence. I decide that perhaps it would be best not to waste everybody’s time by looking for tech support, so I decide to talk orally about our findings. I start with the much-needed breathing exercise. I tell the audience that part of the reason for doing this is that I forget how to breathe when I present. Laughter punctuates the silence. I even forget about the script. Keep talking, I tell myself. I only feel more nervous as I talk, but this is what I have, and this is what is working for me today.

During the Q and A session, I am given a lot to reflect and ponder on.  Bill Pinar mentions to me that I present the notion of mindfulness as though it were panoramic, and he wonders if mindfulness is a process in itself that excludes such things as passion and time. Would an emphasis on being present overlook the role that the past or unfolding time plays in shaping experience and identity? I mention that in mindfulness practice, the past is always a part of the unfolding present. When we have a memory, it is really a part of an unfolding awareness, and for lack of a better word, we refer to that moment as now. But having a mindfulness aspect is to see it fully and in an integrated way. There is a place for memory in awareness. But as Bill asks this question, I wonder if the term ‘being present’ may lead people into thinking that mindfulness denies history or the past, in particular autobiography. I am reminded of the importance of contextualizing mindfulness itself as an unfolding time. And I think that maybe there needs to be a more adequate way of conveying the process instead of ‘being present’, because that term might almost discourage people from using mindfulness to look deeply into historical contexts. I start to wonder:  what would auto-biographical narrative look like using mindfulness?

Bill’s other question to me related to my sharing about the way that meditation practice can create a non-verbal, shared space that could help bridge different cultures in a learning space. Bill wondered where the confidence arises that people could non-verbally understand each other. I mentioned that for me, the silent space of mindfulness is the starting point where potential dialogues could occur. Even though it may not guarantee an understanding of people, there is a curiosity that seems to arise when people are not relying on words to be together, and it comes from not being so attached to one’s own views or thoughts. I have to admit that this answer didn’t feel satisfying to me, because it doesn’t show what I am describing. And I felt that many of the questions were related to the process of mindfulness itself, which would probably require a more extensive exposure to what mindfulness and meditation could do.  Part of Bill’s question also makes me wonder, can we speak of ‘mindfulness’ in terms of causally influencing certain outcomes? Because research today tends to be biased toward outcomes,  it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that mindfulness is a cure-all for all conflict. I see mindfulness as the space where wisdom can naturally arise to deal with conflicts. But framing it in this way felt problematic in an academic space. It seems to suggest that mindfulness is  a magical kind of practice that automatically invites wisdom…and wisdom remains undefined throughout.

                Another participant in the session voiced his concerns about the way mindfulness is being used in modern Western culture, particularly as a ‘mindfulness of…’ experience.  By emphasizing having an object of mindfulness such as the breath, the participant suggested that this approach might repress the unconscious, or be a way of denying specific problems. This important question also makes me realize the difficulties of presenting mindfulness as a simple experience such as watching our breath. When mindfulness is relegated to a single technique, it becomes difficult for people to understand how it applies to complex and multilayered experiences such as being a citizen. Though I explained to the participant that the breath is a way to ground the awareness and acts as a starting point for exploring the psyche, I wonder, again: how do we as mindfulness teachers show this? Showing how mindfulness creates space for complexity, while honoring simplicity, is a very difficult undertaking. And I have to admit that I wasn’t able to quite capture it as I was presenting on behalf of Yishin and myself.

                A last question related to citizenship. One participant had commented that she felt the edges of citizenship might be worn down if we frame mindfulness as a ‘peaceful’ practice. The participant suggested that advances in citizenship often come about through the forces of passion and anger. She wondered if the mindfulness movement is suppressing the passions that are needed to make changes to the world. How would we describe the difference between being passionate about citizenship engagement and being mindfully passionate, when mindfulness is often implying a certain detachment from passions? This question is perhaps most difficult to field, and it seemed that I had run out of time to answer. But it was afterward that a participant in the audience had commented that passions don’t need to be blunted in mindfulness practices. I agreed, suggesting that mindfulness practitioners are able to be more aware of the consequences of passions and thus able to choose how they want to exercise those passions. Passion is one condition and we need not identify the self with passions. Because mindfulness practitioners are less attached to the passions, they may make better use of those passions to make constructive changes.

                After I finish my presentation, Bill and James launch into their talk about hermeneutic circle and the revisionist education movement. I sit down and realize that I had forgotten my breath again.

                As the session wraps up, James mentions to me that he enjoyed the presentation. He tells me that it sounds like we will be doing more research into the topic, but he tells me that it will be very hard to defend. Somewhat with trepidation, I agree with him, and hope that a few more exposures to academic conferences might get me up to par with fielding the kinds of questions I received. I am also reminded that presenting at a conference reflects a work in progress. And is there ever a point where it finally finishes?