PsychTalksMindfulness and meditation: the search for authenticity
Mindfulness and meditation are ancient practices that can now be accessed via your smart phone. Mindfulness is everywhere: there’s mindful learning, mindful parenting, mindful business leadership — even mindful soldiers. We’re told these practices reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure. And they're being sold for billions. If something sacred has been co-opted by capitalism, is it still ‘good’ for us? Learn more about how to navigate the complex world of mindfulness and meditation, and what to look for if you're considering giving these practices a try.
Hosted by Lynne Malcolm for the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. Featuring Associate Professor Nicholas Van Dam and Nerida Lennon, User Experience Researcher and Certified Meditation Teacher. Our production team is: Carly Godden (producer), Amy Bugeja and Mairead Murray (assistant producers), Arch Cuthburtson (sound engineer) and Chris Falk (music).
This podcast is made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woiwurrung and the Bununrong. We'd like to acknowledge and pay respects to their elders, both past and present, and emerging.
From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.
Hello there, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Welcome back to PsychTalks, where we explore what psychology research can tell us about modern life in Australia and the wider world.
For this episode, first, let me hand you over to Nerida.
Sitting in a comfortable and balanced posture, alert and upright, yet relaxed in your seat. I invite you just to gently close your eyes and if that feels comfortable, or you could lower your gaze to the tip of your nose.
And just notice that your body is breathing.
And see if you can focus your attention where you feel the sensation of your breath is the strongest.
Nerida Lennon is taking us through the opening stages of a loving kindness style meditation.
The exercise invites us to think about three people, someone you're close to and care about, a more neutral acquaintance, and someone you might find slightly difficult to deal with.
As you imagine these three people before you.
Just take a moment to notice how you feel about each one of them.
Then the exercise prompts you to potentially take on a new perspective.
You might like to consider that like you, these people simply want to be happy.
And they desire to be healthy.
And if it feels OK for you, you could send good wishes to these people for them to be happy and healthy.
Nerida has been practising meditation for over 13 years. She's now training to teach meditation to others and is also studying contemplative psychotherapy.
So the meditation that we just did was aimed at expanding our capacity to basically be more prosocial and show and feel more compassion to people that we interact with that might be close but also might be more neutral or difficult and
Hopefully, I guess the practise can become more habitual in our everyday interactions and lives.
The last 30 years has seen a boom in meditation and mindfulness practises in Western nations. Science has also taken a keen interest.
In terms of the science, the neurobiology shows that compassion is actually built into our human brains and nervous systems.
So this basically means that we have this innate capacity to see and treat others with compassion, and we also know that uh practising compassion is really good for strengthening our resilience and our psychological and physical health.
But there's still a lot more for researchers to discover about what these practises are actually doing to our minds and our bodies. Meanwhile, the growth of the mindfulness and meditation industry in the West has continued at a cracking pace.
To understand more, we turned to Dr Nicholas Van Dam, the inaugural director of the newly formed Contemplative Studies Centre at the University of Melbourne.
So one of the reasons and the goals for us setting this up is that it is very difficult for people to actually access information about authentic contemplative practises. The wellness industry has commodified many of these forms of practise and has tried to sell them.
Uh, and, and there are many sort of traditional teachers that have been around for a long time and they have long traditions in certain um faith context.
But that does not necessarily mean that what they are teaching people is evidence based or that necessarily works just because it has been around for a long time does not necessarily mean it works. So the Centre's real goal is to try to help the public, to help government, to help businesses, to help individuals and academics as well to get this information and also to produce this information so for us.
To really start having conversations about what are the different types of practises out there, how do you use them, when can they help you and when might they actually hurt you and to create much greater opportunities for people from those different faith traditions to get together and talk about these practises.
First, it is important to distinguish between mindfulness and meditation.
But many people use the term mindfulness and meditation interchangeably.
are not the same thing.
So meditation refers to any set of a number of practises that really is designed to focus the attention often on a particular object like the breath, but it could also be a mantra or an image. And so these meditation practises come from many different traditions and are used in many different ways from goals ranging to relaxing a bit to calming the mind.
Ultimately sort of towards things like developing connection to God or achieving things like enlightenment. So really the range can be quite broad. Mindfulness on the other hand is
A term that reflects a particular idea originating from within Buddhism and it typically focuses on the way in which one focuses their attention, integrating that with awareness.
It's a common belief that mindfulness involves developing a sense of awareness that's non-judgemental and what's called being present centred, sort of like being in the moment, but Nicholas thinks this isn't quite what's going on.
Rather than non-judgmental, I like to think of it as discerning.
Uh, so this idea is sort of that it's differentiating between those things that help us from those things that don't. And rather than necessarily saying that it's presence centred, I like to think of it sort of as something that is helping us to facilitate equanimity or balance.
Meditation and mindfulness were first formally introduced to the West as far back as 1893 at an event called the Parliament of the World's First Religions held in Chicago in the United States, the conference was an attempt to start a dialogue between the world's major faiths.
Certain emissaries of Buddhism came to the Western world and sort of really tried to frame.
Buddhism as a religious tradition or spiritual tradition that was compatible with science. I would say and many others would say that that is not necessarily true. So that is a very specific view of Buddhism. It is a very sort of converted or contemporary sort of redefining of Buddhism, but that sort of really what kicked it off.
In the 60s and 70s, with the rise of the counterculture movement and people like the Beatles practising meditation.
The practises were picked up again in the west. Since the 2000s. Mindfulness in particular has become increasingly mainstream.
So John Kabat-Zinn is really the person I guess that we can all thank for kind of the way in which we understand and know mindfulness in the contemporary Western world. So what he did is he took meditation practises in the kind of traditional Buddhist form and really translated them or converted them in a way that made them very accessible to a secular Western audience.
So he combined a number of different ideas about Buddhism, but he also took ideas from different schools of Buddhism, but he also took ideas from Hindu practises and other contemplative traditions, and he created them or presented in a way that sort of he thought would be acceptable to a Western audience in the sense that he didn't use complex language, he didn't make reference or didn't make strong references to particular spiritual traditions.
And he really tried to promote things in a way that were linked with scientific individuals, with people of influence and with people that were sort of respected and credible.
Technology has been a big part of the recent uptake. Nerida, who is also a user experience designer and researcher, has investigated the world of mindfulness and meditation apps and digital platforms.
Last year, the Global Wellness Institute actually published a report on the global mental wellness market, and it showed that there was a meditation, I guess sub-sector of the market and that had absolutely boomed. So that includes things like mindfulness courses and apps and wearable technology and the industry apparently is worth around $2.9 billion at the moment, which is expected to actually go up to about $9 billion by 2027.
Take apps. There are thousands available for download. One of the biggest here in Australia is Smiling Minds. It's a not for profit based in Melbourne, and it's a completely free app.
They've had, I think, about 6 million downloads.
They offer guided training in mindfulness meditation for individuals as well as schools and the workplace.
Many apps are free but offer in-app purchases. Others are accessed via a subscription, while some act as a marketplace for connecting users with teachers.
Today, Buddhism in particular is one of the fastest growing religions in Australia. It's around 2% of the population that are identifying as Buddhists and
And I think people are turning to Buddhism specifically at the moment, in my mind because modern life is increasingly stressful, and at the same time, there's some more empirical research supporting the efficacy and benefits of mindfulness meditation for relieving things like stress, improving sleep and performance, as well as wellbeing. And I also see that younger generations are seeking something spiritual beyond organised religion, as well as, you know, the rights that they're adopting technology.
And the advances in technology such as apps are converging with these trends. Apps are often more accessible and more affordable as is YouTube, even more so than say meditation retreats or in-person classes. But also that mindfulness is being mass marketed, I guess as this you know panacea that can kind of help all of our issues in our lives.
The business of mindfulness has even penetrated our working lives and has been embraced by the corporate sector. Dr Nicholas Van Dam.
Jon Kavat-Zinn really tried to establish these practises as something that was touted by experts and individuals sort of at high institutions. So this sort of effort to kind of make it part of business, the way that business is done, the effort to make it part of healthcare, the way that healthcare is done, uh, to make it part of education, that's made this more accessible and so there's been kind of this competing interests. People are looking for something.
To help them make their lives more meaningful, to help make, you know, make their lives better, but there's also been this sort of interest in the business side of things of competing with sort of increasing pressures on the bottom line and sort of trying to help employees be more and more productive.
Bringing mindfulness into the business context to make employees more efficient is not necessarily something that many arguably many meditation and mindfulness practises were originally intended to do.
Traditionally, students of Buddhism would learn under the close guidance of a senior teacher and take up a monastic style of living.
That does not necessarily make sense for the average individual. Not everybody necessarily wants to go and live in, you know, the Himalayan foothills and you know own no possessions.
But the movement sort of I guess away from the kind of context of you have a specific teacher, you commit to a particular lifestyle, you have people around you who are also practising.
does mean that some of the expertise and knowledge has sort of been pulled further away so that the consumer is further away often from the individuals who have really developed many of these practises. The supports often are not necessarily there. People are not necessarily learning these practises around others who are also doing the same and so sometimes that means that they do not quite have the support networks when something does not work or even when they are just struggling.
To my knowledge, Buddhism is one of the first coherent psychologies in the world, and it really is working to refine our mind's natural capacity for insight and wisdom and behaviour change or ethics. So I feel as though from what I experienced and what I've seen the insight and wisdom and ethics are really important components and you'll only get so far on this kind of self-healing or well-being journey if you're not starting to also implement them into your practise.
Some believe that mindfulness has become so divorced from its origins that we are experiencing a wave of what's been dubbed as 'McMindfulness'.
This idea of McMindfulness really is the traditions or the ideas from the traditions, particularly Buddhism have kind of been stripped of their meaning.
A good example of this kind of disconnect is mindfulness being used by the military.
In the traditional Buddhist context, if you are really committed to
mindfulness and meditation-based practises, you are often deeply committed to kind of ethical principles, and those ethical principles are often doing no harm, really often to in its sort of most extreme form to any other sentient being.
We train individuals in the military on how to be more quote unquote emotionally balanced or relaxed and it sounds really great. It sounds like we are helping people to potentially not develop post-traumatic stress disorder, which is arguably a great thing, but I guess the tricky part there is, but what is the end goal? Um from the military's perspective, the end goal may be to create someone who is
More willing to pull the trigger, um, to do it quicker, faster and more effectively or from the company perspective, the end goal might be to create a scenario in which employees are more OK with unreasonable working conditions because they are sort of often they feel as if the company is trying to look after them. So that is this idea of mindfulness is that you stripped
The practise of kind of the ethical imperative, you stripped it of its context and it's just being utilised for a very kind of specific purpose. Often I guess the McMindfulness thing is often argued that it is used to pacify people.
While critics of McMindfulness warn us that it may contribute to an unhealthy and unjust society, many also say that this doesn't mean we should entirely give up on secular forms of mindfulness. Nerida Lennon.
I've benefited personally immensely from mindfulness-based interventions like mindfulness based stress reduction, um, which was created by Jon Kabat-Zinn that we've mentioned previously. So, I also have benefited from more traditional, say, Buddhist type practises and retreat settings. So I think that it's not one or the other necessarily.
It is not as if people don't reinvent or adapt or allow for traditions or practises to evolve such that they better suit.
The current or contemporary population, and many people have argued that
the historic Buddha was quite pragmatic and at the end of the day, sort of the things that he prescribed were not necessarily dogmatic or were not necessarily about revering a particular teacher or school of thought or instructor but were about figuring out a way to live a healthy life and it's a real challenge to figure out where the where the balances of sort of adapting things so that they work for a contemporary audience but still being true to some of the original ideas and principles.
For those interested in pursuing mindfulness or meditation, there are certain things to look out for, starting with apps.
I like to think of 3 or 4 different things when considering a meditation app. The first is credibility of a teacher or perhaps it's more of a meditation framework or path. So, traditionally, say in Buddhism, you'll have a teacher that will tailor your meditation journey if you if you're lucky enough. And then the second thing to keep in mind is the efficacy of the empirical research. So does it do what it claims to do? Is there research to back that up?
And then we're looking at the engagement, which is more to do with the user experience design, so the functionality, the aesthetics, and really importantly, habit formation. So if you're meditating, you want to form a habit. So you want to see if the app has hopefully some progress tracking system or something like that that might assist in creating and maintaining a meditation routine. So.
We're looking at things like maybe nudges or notifications to maybe help you to remember to meditate, um, maybe some rewards, maybe it's tracking your mood, hours or types of meditation that you're doing and hopefully it can be personalised. Maybe at the beginning there's an onboarding process.
That can allow you to put in some selections of things you're looking for. Maybe you want to reduce your stress or sleep better, or just have more equanimity and calmness in your life.
Nicholas says that the value of an app is very much dependent on what someone hopes to get out of it.
I think the market or sort of what people are looking for varies dramatically and you know there's an argument that many people who
Pick up apps may end up doing these kind of deeper practises or committing more to regular meditation. I do not know that there is any evidence for that that people that sort of start with a simple app often go on to or regularly commit to a kind of daily meditation practise. My perspective is that in contrast I guess to the argument that um meditation is just like going to the gym, you know, that it is actually quite a bit more complicated than that. It is not just as simple as sort of doing, you know, your daily exercise.
And part of it has to do with with those different goals. So I think that you know if your goal is just to feel a little bit less stressed, then something like an app or really anything, I think you know it could be exercise, it could be puzzles, it could be something else may work quite well for that and that's all that some people are really seeking. Other people are looking for something more like equanimity or emotional balance where
As other people are looking for something more like enlightenment or sort of transcendence and those forms or kinds of practises probably you know as we get more lofty in our goals, the types of practises you likely need to commit to are likely much more complex and likely require very different forms of commitment and support for that.
Users should also know that apps may not be entirely risk free.
Popularity or high ratings of apps just doesn't necessarily equal credibility or efficiency or safety, so it's important to have, you know, awareness when we are choosing apps.
Meditation is increasingly promoted as a kind of alternative mental health approach. There is evidence that suggests that if you have a mental health issue,
Meditation probably is not the best first line treatment. Now that is to say if you are seeking to use meditation for management of mental illness, you should consult the clinician and decide with that clinician whether or not it is the appropriate thing to do.
Meditation and mindfulness practises have been known to cause what's called unexpected or adverse events.
We start to talk about
unexpected experiences. There is a whole range of things that can happen, you know, um, people having weird tingling sensations, kind of numbness in parts of their body or soreness, you know, as we start to think about adverse events, it can also move into mild things like people just feeling a bit more anxious or feeling a bit of pain. As it gets more severe as we are really moving into that adverse events category, people will report things like traumatic re-experiencing, so they are envisioning past events that they do not really want to.
Some people will report things like hallucinations or feeling sort of strong distortions of their sense of self or their sense of time or feeling like they are not real or really strong senses of sadness on the order of depression or feeling incredibly irritable. There are sort of also noted somatic changes so that is bodily sensation so people can have weird changes to their appetite, they can feel suddenly very warm, hot, cold.
Generally speaking, the data suggests that most of kind of the adverse events with unexpected experiences are in the more intensive practises. However, there is some evidence emerging that even with fairly minimal practise, even with fairly light practises like apps, there may be risks. But these things also do happen to some extent in practises like psychotherapy. So I do not necessarily know that we are experiencing or
We are seeing adverse events more commonly in meditation than we would in other programmes of mental training or intervention, but it is worth noting that these are not harmless practises that for some individuals they do cause harm and the percentage of individuals for whom they do so is not exactly known. We can estimate it sort of at around 8%, but we don't exactly know yet because we haven't done enough research into the area.
Severe adverse reactions are rare, but for anyone serious about doing mindfulness or meditation, the journey can be tough in other ways.
It's really a common misperception that mindfulness meditation should always be a pleasant experience, whether that's with an app or without an app, but I guess the reality is that it's often hard work and sometimes meditation can initially increase our stress due to becoming aware of the stress that we are feeling or anxiety or low mood.
If we are bringing attention to these feelings, we are going to notice that they might increase, at least initially, but hopefully overall, like we have a good experience and positive results.
Those learning either of these practises also appear to benefit from more structured or face to face support.
Most people who download an app within a month are no longer using it and the numbers are like 90 to 95% of people who download apps do not continue using them a month on.
Increasingly we're finding out or we're getting more data to show that some of these apps particular seem to work best when they're used in conjunction with supporting features. So coaches or group-based practises or things like that.
If people are really wanting to do this, if people kind of are further along in their journey, they've tried some things out and they really are ready to commit, that's probably the point at which you really want to seek out a teacher or a facilitator or an instructor. So once you have moved beyond the point of kind of dabbling and trying things out.
It is worth sort of seeking out someone who really kind of can support you and help you kind of develop a habit and help you to overcome problems. It is important to think about as you approach your practise, what are your expectations for it? How do you think it's going to go and be realistic about it. Our minds are busy things, busy places and they are not just, you know, if we sort of have someone who tends to be hard on ourselves or we tend to be someone who kind of overthinks things, that's not just going to go away because we decided to sit on a cushion in a lotus position.
So there is nothing magical about that. Uh, so I guess it's important to kind of have realistic expectations as you engage in these practises as well.
And that's all from us. I'd like to thank our PsychTalks guests for today, Nerida Lennon and Dr Nicholas Van Dam. And if you'd like to hear Nerida's meditation exercise in full, we've added it as a bonus episode you can download. Our producer for today was Carly Godden, and our assistant producers were Amy Bugeja and Mairead
Murray. Arch Cuthbertson was our sound engineer, and music was composed by Chris Falk. And of course, all this was made possible by support from the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences. You can listen to more episodes of PsychTalks with me, Lynne Malcolm, by subscribing to our show, wherever you get your podcasts from.
