13. WHO AM I MEDITATING FOR? - A Brief Consideration of the Mindfulness Industrial Complex

I have been using the mindfulness meditation app, Headspace, for over three years now. I first began meditating in 2015, using a guided meditation CD that came free with a book on mindfulness I’d been recommended by a therapist to deal with the anxiety and grief I’d been experiencing since the death of my father, mother and grandmother in quick succession in the years before. The basic idea of mindfulness, and why it is so helpful for mental health issues such as anxiety or grief, is that you try to focus, in great detail, on the present moment, rather than all the flurry of thoughts in your head about a faraway future that doesn’t even exist, or dwelling on the worst bits of the past. You focus on your surroundings, the senses of sound, sight, taste, smell and touch, and you focus on your breathing. Always there, always steady. In, out, in, out. The anxious thoughts, the sad thoughts, they either lose your attention, or, if there, become part of an ever-undulating tapestry of the now - no more, or less, important than any other thought flickering in and out of your mind.

There are many variations, some iterations include visualisations to accompany the concentration on the present moment, but the essential gist is: concentrate on the now, the senses, and breathing in and breathing out.

I treated the suggestion that I try such a wish-washy sounding thing with a lot of incredulity at first, expecting to find myself sitting with my eyes closed, listening to the CD and giggling to myself about how ridiculous the whole thing was. Instead, after I managed to actually do it for ten minutes without just falling asleep, I found it genuinely helpful. When my mind was focused on my breathing, on the weight of my body in the chair, on the sounds of the room around me, I wasn’t thinking about death and mortality. And the more I learnt the techniques for noting the thoughts that came and went in my troubled head and became able to identify them as thoughts and not facts, the easier I found it to deal with anxiety and grief when I wasn’t meditating. I went from being a sceptic to a convert in a matter of weeks.

But at some point I got bored of hearing the same old CD. Especially as this was before all my music was stored on my phone and I had to carry a separate iPod with me to access the meditation tracks. I’d heard about Headspace during a podcast ad and the idea of an app on your phone which had a library of different, themed mindful meditations, a series of tools for mindfulness practice, and, most importantly, the facility to log your daily practice and keep a record of what you do, seemed far more motivating to me than having to remember to play a track on my iPod every day and have the discipline to just do it. Headspace had reminders, notifications throughout the day to focus on the present moment…it basically sounded like exactly what I was looking for to step up my mindfulness game, so I tried the free trial, loved it, and then subscribed for a year, and another year, and another.

Which brings us to now.

I started 2019 no longer meditating daily. The reason I had stopped, and stopped for six weeks or so, was as silly as it was simple: I had built up a “run streak” of daily ten minute meditations for over 180 days and then, around Christmas, 2018, during a particularly busy day, I forgot to meditate and my streak was ruined. Coming to my phone the next day and doing my ten minutes only to see the number that should have been nearing 200 move instead from 0 to 1 was like a kick in the chest. Just as it had been nearly two hundred days before, the last time I’d lost a long run streak and had to start again from scratch. That time, travelling around America, I took only a few weeks off before I could face Headspace again. This time it had been nearly two months. At some point though, I realised I was being a little edgy and not dealing so well with old issues of anxiety and grief. My wife asked me if I had been meditating and I told her I hadn’t. She suggested I start up again and she was right. Within a few days of daily practice, I was back to my old self again and far better at dealing with my thoughts.

But then came the summer.

I’d built up a nice little streak of over one hundred days. But then we went to the Lake District for a week and I took long walks and spent sleepy days reading books and writing in the shadow of mountains. Somewhere amongst the silent pondering of all this natural beauty, I realised I hadn’t meditated for a few days. I checked my Headspace app and I was right. The streak was back to zero.

But this time I wasn’t annoyed about losing the streak, I was annoyed about the existence of the streak itself. Here was this app telling me I hadn’t meditated mindfully the day before, when I, who actually live in and experience my mind, knew that in the days before, though at no point did I switch the Headspace app on, I had sat staring at Lake Windermere doing absolutely nothing for over ten minutes other than mindfully watching the scene in front of me. The geese that honked in the background, the sound of occasional sheep and cows. The slashing of the lake on the bank as boats of different types made passage across its water. The roar of a speedboat, the chug of a launchboat, The lapping of a rowboat. I smelt the country air, humid despite the breeze; manure in some breaths, grass and foliage in another; the brackish aroma of the lake informing them all. I felt the chair beneath me as I sat; one hand resting on the metal table in front of me, the other holding a book I was choosing to ignore. I stared at the mountains and noted the many different shades of green and brown; the lonely scattered houses laid out a lifetime from each other along the trails you could just about make out, etched into the landscape. I watched the clouds float by, neighbours to the peaks, sculptures ever-changing in an otherwise clear blue sky. I watched a rabbit in our garden. A robin landing, curious, on a drystone wall. I heard the trees tickle in the wind which caressed my exposed arms.

My phone was sat silently in my pocket, far from my thoughts. And as I stared at it the next day seeing that my Headspace spread had ended, I began to consider how “mindful” it was to be prodded by a smartphone everyday into being “in the present” in such a regimented way. I began to question whether I was doing it for the actual experience - living in the moment; being mentally healthy - or just to accrue points, like any other silly game I might play on my iPhone?

I thought of Buddhist monks I’d seen in Cambodia and Vietnam, whether sat in ancient temples or on busy traffic-heavy roadsides, truly being in the present as they mindfully watched the world go by, and I thought of how I’d began my own mindfulness journey, sat listening to my own breathing, alone in my study, and noticing things in my own house that had been hiding in plain sight.

I remembered sitting in the Bullring, in Birmingham. Sat at a Starbucks one day, early into my therapy, and finding ten minutes to just sit with the world around me. No guided meditation, just my breathing and my senses. I put headphones on to make it seem like I wasn’t just a crazy person staring blankly at the world but just someone zoning out and enjoying their music. But in reality I was hearing every piece of passing chatter, watching the faces, the clothes, the coffee cups, of every passing consumer. I was smelling the scents, both sweet and bitter, of the entire Starbucks menu, and enjoying the taste of my own vanilla latte, alive in my mouth for perhaps the first ever time. The feel of the cardboard cup in my hand warm and smooth, close to burning but not quite; the spindly back of the chair in which I sat less comfortable on my spine than I would like it to be; the weight of the Bose headphones around my ears and over my head feeling heavy like a hat, their silent acoustic pockets adding the wispy nothing-noise of seashells as muffled undertone to my soundtrack of the day.

That was true mindfulness.

Being able to lie in bed on a weekend morning and not sit up immediately, not grab my phone and start scrolling, but just lie there and listen to my breath, the breath of my wife next to me, my cat asleep on the floor, the sound of traffic outside my window, birds hooting their morning greetings, the boiler cranking into action, my neighbours rattling around through our shared wall in one side, the other neighbours’ kids on the other side bouncing basketballs in their garden. The gentle breeze from the open window dancing lightly across my face, the taste of dehydration unpleasant in my mouth.

What Headspace had done, obviously (for it is, I imagine, their entire business model) was commodify this practice and gameify it so that it was easier for people like me to get into the habit of doing it daily. But by doing so, had they, perhaps, made it too much about using the app? Relying on the app and being distracted and agitated by the app, instead of just being free to develop genuine mindful awareness of yourself and the world around you unfettered by profit-driven technology?

When my therapist had suggested the book and CD, he was quite clear that the disc was just a guidance until I could do it myself. Even on Headspace, for the last few months I had been mainly using their “unguided” sessions - a five, ten, or twenty minute timer essentially, marked at beginning and end by the chime of a bell. But the mindset of keeping my streak, accruing my minutes, meant that those ten minutes of mindful nothingness had to be logged on the app, clicking through to the “unguided” section and setting that timer, rather than being something natural, organic and truly in the present.

Like a classic story of zen master and student, I believe that apps such as Headspace should only be used enough to learn and internalise the basic routine of mindful meditation until you get to the point where you no longer need the app at all. Just as the real purpose of mindful meditation should be that you eventually get to the point where you are no longer sitting silently for ten minutes a day to pay attention to the present moment, but reaching a point of being mindful of the present moment all the time, with no separation between meditation and everyday life. Just constant awareness and mindful living.

Now, that latter goal is, I think, deeply problematic as a philosopher. As someone interested in critical thinking and intellectual analysis I have significant objections to the idea of a completely mindful life, and rather suspect the ascendency of mindfulness as a practice to cure all ailments in the modern day has a lot to do with its overall lack of threat to the status quo. While some writers might look at the growing rise in mental health issues like anxiety and depression and suggest this is a natural response to what Erich Fromm, among others, identified as a deeply un-sane society, advocating a radical change to that society in order to heal our damaged minds, mindfulness, instead, advocates bland acceptance of the present, in whatever form it takes, and the cultivation of a general attitude that nothing matters much at all besides concentrating on your breath. This comes from its origins in Buddhism, where the idea that all is suffering and suffering as an inevitable part of a life which, itself, is merely an ever-changing fluctuation of experiences (with even the notion of self an illusion) is a core teaching. However many times we may be told that the modern medical advocacy of mindfulness as a mental health cure is supposed to be secular and detached from any religious ideology, the Buddhist fatalism towards one’s circumstances has clearly not been fully extracted. Indeed, the deeper you go into mindfulness practice on apps like Headspace (or even NHS-approved courses), the more you see hidden Buddhist notions, such as anatta, smuggled into the supposedly secular self-help. It makes me suspect that this is because of the economic ideology at the heart of its promotion - that tackling mental health issues in a way which does not disturb the current social structure and economic order is more important than actually tackling the causes of those mental health issues if tackling those causes would disturb the current structures from which those in charge benefit (i.e. free market capitalism). Approaches such as mindful meditation and cognitive behavioural therapy give us a toolkit to manage our problems and get by in our current society - to go back to work, for the most part - without anything significant, external to the individual, having to change. And so such approaches are prioritised over approaches which might call into question the present order. But conspiracy theories about the mindfulness industrial complex aside, it remains true that having such a toolkit is helpful in a world which is not planning on radical transformation anytime soon. CBT and meditation really do allow us to change the way we interact with the world, and our thoughts of the world, and live more productive and less impeded lives. And while we live in a capitalist society, apps like Headspace, or publishers of the book my therapist told me to buy, will continue to find ways to profit out of those of us seeking to get well. The important thing to keep in mind (to be mindful of) as we do experiment with these different therapies, is the distinction between the product we are buying into, and the outcome we are actually seeking. I am, after all, meditating for me, and not for them. While Headspace the product may encourage me to build up a streak of consecutive days meditating and rely on its own proprietary catalogue of courses for meditation; the outcome for which I have purchased the app is the day-to-day ability to sit with my thoughts for at least ten minutes and ditch all the noise in my head to concentrate on this moment, and the next, in the present, as it happens. And if it has reached a point where the product no longer leads easily to the desired outcome, or even potentially gets in the way of that desired outcome, then the product simply becomes another part of the noise which needs to be ditched.

AUTHOR: D.MCKEE