Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London. His first article from his PhD, Of mountains, lakes and essences: John Teasdale and the transmission of mindfulness, appeared in December 2018, as part of the HHS special issue, ‘Psychotherapy in Europe,’ edited by Sarah Marks. Here Matthew talks to Steven Stanley – Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project, Beyond Personal Wellbeing: Mapping the Social Production of Mindfulness in England and Wales – about the article, and his wider research agenda on mindfulness in Britain and America.  

Steven Stanley (SS): This article is your first publication based on your PhD research project, which you recently completed. Congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about your PhD project?

Matthew Drage (MD): Thank you! So yes, my PhD project was a combined historical and ethnographic project which focused on the emergence of “mindfulness” as a healthcare intervention in Britain and America since the 1970s. My main question was: why was mindfulness seen by its proponents as such an important thing to do? Why did they seek to promote it so actively and vigorously? I focused on a key centre for the propagation of mindfulness-based healthcare approaches in the West: the Center for Mindfulness in Health, Care and Society at the University of Massachuestts Medical Center. I also looked at the transmission of mindfulness from Massachusetts to Britain in the 1990s – this is an episode I narrate in the article.

I had a real sense, when I did my fieldwork, archival research and oral history interviews, that for people who practice and teach it as their main livelihood, mindfulness was something like what the early 20^th century sociologist Max Weber called a vocation. I had a strong impression that this devotion to mindfulness as a way of relieving suffering was what helped mindfulness to find so much traction in popular culture. While my PhD thesis doesn’t offer empirical support for this instinct, it does focus very closely on why mindfulness seemed so important to the people who propagated it. I argued that this was because mindfulness combined some of the most powerful features of religion – offering institutionalised answers to deep existential questions about the nature of human suffering and the purpose of life – while at the same time successfully distancing itself from religious practice, and building strong alliances with established biomedical institutions and discourses.

Maybe the real discovery – which is something I only mention briefly in this article – is that religious or quasi-religious ideas, practices and institutions, especially Buddhist retreat centres – were crucial for making this separation possible. Mindfulness relied heavily on Buddhist groups and institutions (or, at least, groups and institutions heavily influenced by Buddhism) for training, institutional support and legitimacy, whilst at the same deploying a complex array of strategies for distancing itself from anything seen as as potentially identifiable (to themselves and to outsiders) as religious.

More specifically, most mindfulness professionals I met sought to distance themselves from the rituals, images, and cosmological ideas associated with the Buddhist tradition (for example chanting, Buddha statues or the doctrine of rebirth). But at the same time, many “secular” mindfulness practitioners shared some fundamental views with contemporaneous Buddhist movements. Many held the view that the ultimate goal of teaching mindfulness in secular contexts was to help people to entirely transcend the suffering caused by human greed, hatred and delusion: that is, reach Nirvana, or Enlightenment, the central goal of Buddhist practice. And the sharing of these views between Buddhist practitioners and secular mindfulness teachers was helped by the fact that the latter frequently attended retreats with local Buddhist groups – indeed, often helped lead those groups! In my project I try to show how blurry the lines were, and that this blurriness was really at the heart of what the secular mindfulness project – at least in its early stages – was about: trying to keep the transcendental goal of Buddhism intact whilst shedding aspects of it that were seen as mere cultural accretions, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. 

SS:How did this project come about?

MD: I came across secular mindfulness in 2011 through my own personal involvement with religious Buddhism. It was clearly on the rise, and while I wasn’t that interested in practising meditation in a secular context, I could see it was probably going to get big. Mindfulness seemed part of a more general cultural trend towards using science and technology to reshape the way the individual experiences and engages with the world around them. Technological developments like personal analytics for health (tracking your own fitness with wearable devices, say), and increasingly personalised user-experiences online, also seemed to exemplify. When I decided to do a PhD in 2013, I was interested in a very general way in questions of subjectivity and technology in contemporary Western culture, and I picked the one that seemed to fit best with my existing interests.

SS: Your article makes an important contribution to the historiography of recent developments in clinical psychology in Britain, especially the development of so-called ‘third-wave’ of psychotherapy (that is, approaches that include mindfulness and meditation). In particular you highlight the perhaps unexpected influence of alternative religious and spiritual ideas and practices on the emergence of British mindfulness in the form of Williams, Teasdale and Segal’s volume, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, in the 1990s. You have also unearthed some fascinating biographical details regarding living pioneers of British mindfulness. Did you know what you were looking for before doing your study? Were you surprised by what you found?

MD: The simple answer is sort of, and yes! I kind of found what I was looking for, and (yet) I was surprised by what I found. 

When I began my research I was convinced that mindfulness was just another form of Buddhism, slightly reshaped and repackaged to make it more palatable. My supervisor, the late historian of psychoanalysis Professor John Forrester, warned me about taking this approach. I remember him telling me, “If you keep pulling the Buddhism thread, the whole garment will unravel!” And unravel it did. After about three years, I realised that the most central metaphysical commitments of the mindfulness movement were not especially Buddhist, but owed as much, if not more, to Western esotericist traditions. By this I mean the 19^th century tradition that includes the spiritualist theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, the American Transcendentalists (e.g. David Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson) and, in the 20^th century, people like the countercultural novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley. These thinkers shared, amongst other things, the idea that there is a perennial, universal truth at the heart of all the major religions. The influence of this view was often, I found, invisible to mindfulness practitioners themselves. Indeed, it was invisible to me for a long time. They, like me, had often encountered Buddhism through the lens of these very Western, esotericist religious or spiritual ideas, so they just appeared as if they’d come from the Buddhist tradition. So while I wasn’t surprised by the influence of spiritual ideas on mindfulness, I was surprised by their source.

I was also surprised by the conclusions I reached about its relationship with late 20^th century “neoliberal” capitalism. I’m not quite ready to go public with these conclusions yet, but watch this space. I’ll have a lot to say about it in the book I’m working on about the mindfulness movement.

SS: As you say in your article, mindfulness has become a very popular global phenomenon, which in simple terms is about being more aware of the present moment. When we think of mindfulness, we tend to think of ‘being here now’. What was it like studying mindfulness as a topic of historical scholarship? And, vice versa, mindfulness is sometimes understood as referring to, as you say, a ‘realm beyond historical time’. What lessons are there for historians from the world of mindfulness?

MD: A really great question. There is a fundamental conflict between my training as an historian and the views I was encountering amidst mindfulness practitioners. They tended to use history in very specific ways to legitimise their views. Mindfulness was taken as both about a universal human capacity (and thus beyond any specific historical or cultural contingency) and primordially ancient, a kind of composite of the extremely old and the timeless. If mindfulness had a history at all, so the story within the mindfulness movement tended to go, it was coextensive with the history of human consciousness. 

I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the history of this view of the history of mindfulness. This was challenging because it often left me feeling as though I was being somehow disloyal to my interlocutors within the mindfulness movement; as though I was – in a way that was very hard to explain to them – undermining a key but implicit pretext for their work. In the end I tried to present a view of mindfulness which takes seriously its claims to universality by examining the historicity of those claims. I do not want to assume that there are no universals available to human knowledge; and if there are, then – as feminist science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway argues in her incredible 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges,” universals are always situated, emerging under very specific historical conditions. My main theoretical concern came to be understanding and describing the conditions for the emergence of universalising claims about humans.

To answer the other part of your question: I think mindfulness teaches historians that time is itself a movable feast; that we should take seriously the possibility of a history of alternative or non-standard ways of thinking about time. Mindfulness practitioners often talk a lot about remaining in the “present moment,” a practice which you could think of in this way: it takes the practitioner out of the usual orientation to time, to past and future, and creates quite a different sense of the way time passes. I found that institutionalised forms of mindfulness practice, to some extent, organised to support this change in one’s approach to time. I suspect this is also linked to an idea that I talk about in my article, the idea that mindfulness is somehow “perennial” or “universal.” There is a sense in which by practising mindfulness, and especially by practising on retreat, one is removing oneself from the usual run of historical time.  I think that it would be extremely interesting to think about how to do a history of this phenomenon; a history of the way people, especially within contemplative traditions, have sought to exit historical time.

SS: Many researchers of mindfulness also practice mindfulness themselves. Did you practice mindfulness as you were studying it? If you did, how did this work in relation to your fieldwork?

MD: Yes, I did. I was reluctant to do so initially, mainly because I had my own Buddhist meditation practice, and didn’t want to add another 40 minutes to my morning meditation routine. However, when I started meeting people in the mindfulness movement, they were very insistent that mindfulness could not really be understood without being experienced. While carrying out my PhD research I went to a lot of different teacher training retreats, workshops and events, and even taught an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course to students at Cambridge. I think that this was an indispensable part of my research, to experience first hand what people were talking about when they spoke about mindfulness. Participating in a shared sense of vocation that I encountered amongst many mindfulness professionals showed me just how emotionally compelling  mindfulness was.

SS: Mindfulness is often presented as a secular therapeutic technique which has a scientific evidence based – and that it has completely moved away from its religious roots. Does your work challenge this idea and if so, how? And, related to this, what do you mean in your article by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’?

MD: As I say above, I do mean to complicate this idea that mindfulness is a straight-up medical intervention, moving ever-further from its religious roots. I think perhaps the development of mindfulness as a mass-cultural phenomenon roughly follows this trajectory. But this trajectory is also in itself complex: the parts of the mindfulness movement that I studied were also an attempt at making society more sacred, using the secular biomedical discourse, institutionality and rationality as a means of doing so – although most people wouldn’t have talked about it in this way. Secular biomedicine, at least for the earliest proponents of mindfulness, was seen as a route through which a what we might think of (though they didn’t think of it like this) a special kind of spiritual force (a force which, in my view, has very much to do with what we normally call religion), could be transmitted.

I mean by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’ to refer to something fairly loose – the constellation of communities, institutions, texts and practices which are strongly influenced by the Buddhist tradition, but which do not – or do not always – self-identify as Buddhist. It’s a coinage inspired by sociologist of religion Colin Campbell’s idea of a “cultic milieu,” a term he used to describe the emergent New Age movement in the 1970s. For Campbell, the cultic milieu is a community of spiritual practitioners characterised by individualism, loose structure, low levels of demand on members, tolerance, inclusivity, transience, and ephemerality. When I talk about a Buddhistic milieu here, I mean something like this, but with Buddhism (very broadly construed) as a focus. Some traditions, such as the Insight meditation tradition, which did much to give rise to the secular mindfulness movement, especially encourage this type of relationship to Buddhist practice, emphasising their own secularity, and insisting on its openness to practitioners from any faith tradition.

SS: You suggest that the transmission of mindfulness follows a ‘patrilineal’ lineage which is captured by terms like dissemination, essence, seminal and birth. Your focus is very much on the male ‘founding fathers’ of Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) rather than the women pioneers of the movement. Given that such stories of male founders have been troubled by feminist and revisionist historians of science and psychology since the 1980s especially, can you tell us more about the gender politics of the mindfulness movement and give us a sense of the role female leaders have played in the movement?

MD: An excellent but difficult line of questioning! When I first wrote this paper – and when I started my PhD – I took a much more explicitly feminist perspective. But as I started to write, I was confronted by how incredibly sensitive a topic this is, and I’m still not quite ready to say anything very definite. Mindfulness was not, nor do I think we should expect it to have been, impervious to the tendency towards patriarchal domination that permeates society in general. And, as you suggest here, we might fruitfully read some of the key symbols of male power I identify in my article as a sign of this tendency. I can’t say much more for now by way of analysis, but I’m aiming to tackle this issue more directly in the book.

I can give a couple of cases, though, which I plan e to explore in more detail in the future. The first is the role of meditator and palliative care worker called Peggie Gillespie who worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn in the very earliest days of his Clinic in Worcester, Massachusetts (where he first developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction). Gillespie joined Kabat-Zinn as co-teacher in 1979, either in the very first mindfulness course he taught to patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical, or not long afterwards. She then acted as his second-in-command for the first couple of years of the Stress Reduction Clinic’s existence. She was certainly involved in developing MBSR (which was called SP&RP – the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program, for the first decade of its life), and even wrote the first ever book about MBSR, her 1986 work Less Stress in Thirty Days. To my knowledge, however, Gillespie only gets a single mention in any writing anywhere about the history of MBSR – in the foreword to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. The second example is the relative neglect of Christina Feldman. It wasn’t until the very end of my research period that I realised just how influential a figure Feldman has been – she had led the retreat on which Kabat-Zinn had his idea for MBSR, and went on to be the primary meditation teacher of one of the main early proponents of British mindfulness, cognitive psychologist John Teasdale. Although again she’s rarely mentioned, in a sense she oversaw the birth of secular mindfulness both in Britain and in America. I’m hoping that she’ll grant me an interview, so that I can write her into the book!

SS: If a teacher or practitioner of mindfulness is interested in your research, and wants to know more about the history of mindfulness, what texts would be in your History of Mindfulness 101?

So, when it comes to straightforward history, I’d go for Jeff Wilson’s (2014) Mindful America, Anne Harrington’s (2008) Cure Within, Mark Jackson’s (2013) The Age of Stress, and David McMahan’s (2018) The Making of Buddhist Modernism. These books all do important work in both narrating episodes the history of mindfulness since the 1970s, and in situating those episodes amidst broader currents in the history of science, medicine, and religion. Finally, Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s forthcoming book Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine, was published a couple of weeks ago in March 2019. I haven’t read it yet, but I know something of her doctoral research into the history of MBSR, and suspect it will provide a much more in-depth and focused exploration than has yet been seen.

Matthew Drage is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London.

Steven Stanley is Senior Lecturer atthe School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.