Meditation as Therapy
Gerry Kopelow
For thousands of years meditation has been regarded as a religious, spiritual, and mystical practice leading ultimately to a deep and personal engagement with universal truth. In the last few decades, some of these meditation systems have moved from the Asia and India to North America, driven largely by an increased interest in non-Judeo-Christian spirituality. Meditation in the west is today in a position similar to what Yoga was perhaps thirty or so years ago….what was once regarded as weird, even dangerous, is becoming commonplace and accepted.
This acceptance has spread beyond the New-Agers and religious seekers into the professional classes. Many psychological and medical professionals are offering 'mindfulness' meditation as therapy to patients that are suffering from from a number of mental ailments.
About twenty-five years ago Jon Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues at the University Of Massachusetts Medical Center developed the 'Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction' program to treat chronically ill patients. The approach uses meditation, yoga and daily mindfulness activities to promote calm and a general feeling of well-being. The qualities of mindfulness deemed essential to mind-body health are acceptance, non-judgment, tolerance, and equanimity. A simplified version of Kabat-Zinn's system (minus the Yoga) is being implemented by the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in Manitoba.
This past summer a number of Winnipeg therapists received instruction in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) at a five-day program run at St. Benedict's Retreat Centre by the CMHA and the Manitoba Government. During an evening public talk given a few days later, the facilitator of the program, a sociologist from the University of Waterloo, adamantly disavowed any connection between the meditation techniques he teaches and religion, faith, mysticism, gurus, and cults of any kind. An ancient spiritual practice - actively developed over three millenia - has been transformed in only three decades into a safe, 'scientific' system.
Mindfulness Cognitive Therapy is becoming popular because it does indeed help people that would otherwise be trapped in various types of mental distress. Mental health is described by the World Health Organization as "a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community." Therapy, and its recently acquired meditative tools, functions as our society's repair service, helping folks who are under-performing from a sociological point of view. This is a long way from a 'deep and personal engagement with universal truth', but it is a beginning.
"In this fathom-long body, subject though it is to death and decay, I will show you the beginning and end of the universe." With these words the Buddha introduced "The Four Foundations of Mindfulness", a comprehensive method for the investigation of reality that has flourished for some three thousand years. All mindfulness meditations in use today were developed from these initial instructions. The goal of this work is to develop real-time awareness of physical sensations, emotional feelings, mental objects (thoughts/concepts), and mental states. Long-time practitioners attest that such scrupulous awareness, maintained through deep concentration over long periods of time lead to realizations about the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality that are unobtainable any other way.
The Buddha's methods have persisted over the centuries because they encourage and support an entirely natural unfoldment of the mental powers that are the birthright of all human beings. This unfoldment proceeds without the external, extraneous props of faith, belief or dogma. All that is required is sharp attention to the present moment. Everything else comes naturally.
The initial stage of this natural unfoldment is the establishment of calm and feelings of peace and safety. This is what Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy does, and it is certainly a very worthwhile goal. But long-time practitioners know this is simply the beginning.
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