Why we will come to see mindfulness as mandatory

This increasingly popular tool for calming the mind, once seen as a New  Age fad, could play a role in hospitals and schools Madeleine Bunting The Guardian 6 May 2014 Mindfulness is selling millions of books and apps, it appears on the front  cover of Time magazine, pops up in the Financial Times and is used by all  kinds of people from corporate executives and nurses to sportsmen and  primary school children. Once a poorly understood New Age fad, it has  moved from the margins to the mainstream. Nothing demonstrates that  better than the launch of an all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness  on Wednesday. At this point I will come clean. I am one of a group of people working with  three universities (Oxford, Exeter and Bangor) to support the all-party  group. What interests us – academics, journalists, mindfulness teachers –  is the potential for public policy. What role could mindfulness play in  schools, in the NHS or in the criminal justice system? But let's start with definitions, which are notoriously difficult with this phenomenon. What exactly is mindfulness? Because it has precious little  to do with the pretty women sitting on beaches with their eyes closed  who are usually used to illustrate articles on the subject. The only way to explain is to suggest you try. Right now. Close your eyes and bring your attention into your body, to the sensation of your feet on the ground; the movements of your breath, the expansion of your rib cage. Stay with  these tiny physical sensations. Patiently. Without getting cross with  yourself for getting distracted. Try it for two minutes. Unfamiliar? It is, because our minds spin with thought, and we are absent  to much of our physical experience. But bringing the attention back to the  most basic and essential part of living – the breath – we can slowly bring  an awareness of the obsessive thought patterns and the instant reactions  which on reflection we so often realise were unhelpful or even destructive. Mindfulness is both astonishingly simple and, for most of us who live in our heads, very difficult. It is also immensely rewarding, as plenty of people are discovering. I would argue that it is probably the most important life skill I  am learning (after 15 years of practice, I am acutely aware that there is  always more to learn). It is up there with reading, and probably in my old  age with eyesight gone, it will prove more valuable to me than books. The interesting thing about mindfulness is that it would probably have  stayed on the margins – a passion for only a few – if it hadn't been taken  up by scientists as a subject for research 40 years ago. It started with an American scientist, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who began to research its value in dealing with chronic pain. It is now widely used in hospitals all over the  world. An international team, including Mark Williams, a psychologist at the  University of Oxford, then led research trials into mindfulness as a  treatment for recurrent depression. Their success led to the National  Institute of Clinical Excellence recommending it as a treatment. There are  now passionate advocates within the NHS running projects around the  country. But increasingly, academics such as Willem Kuyken, a psychologist at  Exeter University, are asking whether, if mindfulness can work for  depression and pain, anyone else might benefit? What role could it play  in schools, and could it helpour national epidemic of mental ill health in adolescents? The analogy that Kabat-Zinn uses is with jogging. In the 1960s when he  started running, people thought him a bit odd. Now on a Sunday morning  parks and streets are full of people pounding away. The take-up rate for mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn says, is much sharper than for jogging. In another decade, one can imagine that it will be widely accepted and  understood as a valuable way to look after your mental health. Just as  physical exercise is vital to a desk-bound workforce, so mindfulness will  come to be seen as vital for dealing with the complexity of our information -rich lives. What mindfulness slowly brings to our understanding is how much our experience is shaped by our minds. To have that insight as a personal experience rather than something one reads in the growing body of scientific literature on the subject is transformational. It loosens that reactivity which  can trap us in a limiting loop, and allows for very different responses which  can manifest in all kinds of ways – greater creativity, more empathy, more patience, less judgment. Some call this a mindfulness revolution but, like Jonathan Rowson at the  Royal Society of Arts in a recent thoughtful blog, I think the jury is still  out. Mindfulness is derived from Buddhist meditation, which at its heart is revolutionary in its emphasis on compassion and non-harm. It is profoundly counter-cultural in its asceticism. But this derivative has been meticulously framed as secular by a generation of scientists. They identified that the Buddha's insights into the behaviour of the human mind was resonating with breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience. Delinked from Buddhist ethics, mindfulness could become a form of  performance enhancement – some of the enthusiasm coming from the  corporate sectors and military leads it dangerously in this direction. That is  a real risk. As is the danger of a sort of wild west of unregulated teachers,  which any cursory web search reveals is well under way. Another risk is that it becomes the privilege of the stressed middle classes  who can afford the courses. Some of the most inspiring work is being done  by people like Gary Heads in County Durham who is working with unemployed people. Or the project in Cardiff which taught the single mum who recently stood in front of a gathering of Welsh Assembly members to describe movingly how mindfulness had helped her to be a better parent, as well as to find the confidence for public speaking. The point is that, diligently practised, it very quietly and slowly revolutionises lives in multiple ways – sometimes small, sometimes big. And when you start noticing that process of change – both in yourself and in others – it is quite simply astonishing.