Mindful Manifesto Is the Catalyst to a Tranquil Self

In 2010 two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, published a study in which more than two thousand people, using a phone application, reported at random moments what they were doing, what they were thinking and how they felt. They found that people's minds were wandering about forty seven per cent of the time, and that people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were attending to the task at hand, whatever the task was. A wandering mind, the authors concluded, is an unhappy mind. The finding supports the topic's suggestion that a deliberate commitment to mindful living can lead to a tranquil self.

The practice has deep roots. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, composed some two thousand years ago, define yoga as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. The Buddha taught the foundations of mindfulness, the satipatthana, as a method of observing the body, feelings, thoughts and mental states without clinging to them. Many traditions advise a person to resolve in advance how he wishes to live. Gandhi observed a weekly day of silence from 1921, and used it to rest his mind and to reflect on his conduct.

In the modern West the practice was secularised by Jon Kabat Zinn, a molecular biologist who began a programme of mindfulness based stress reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Patients with chronic pain and stress were taught to pay attention to the present moment, deliberately and without judgement. The eight week course spread to hospitals, schools and corporations. A large body of research has since examined its effects, and there is moderate evidence that mindfulness training reduces anxiety, depression and pain, with effects comparable to those of other established treatments. Retreat centres, school curricula and the national promotion of yoga have carried the vocabulary of attention to millions who would never have opened the old texts, and the International Day of Yoga, observed since 2015 after a United Nations resolution, shows how widely the idea has travelled.

The word manifesto in the topic adds something. A manifesto is a public declaration of intention, and applied to the self it suggests a deliberate statement of what one values and how one proposes to live. Research on implementation intentions by Peter Gollwitzer has shown that people who state in advance what they will do in a specific situation are much more likely to follow through. A person who writes that he will not respond to anger for ten breaths, or that he will spend the first ten minutes of the morning in silence, has given his future self a script. The manifesto is the catalyst because it turns a vague hope into a rule.

The manifesto is the catalyst because it turns a vague hope into a rule.

How does mindfulness produce tranquility? It works partly by loosening the hold of thoughts. Rumination, the repetitive replaying of worries, is a major source of distress, and attention training teaches a person to notice that a thought is a thought and not a fact. It also works by interrupting automatic reactions. A person who has learnt to feel anger as a sensation in the chest, and to wait, can choose how to respond. Brain imaging studies suggest changes in regions associated with attention and emotional regulation after sustained practice, though many of these studies are small and their interpretation is debated.

However, the case has been overstated. In 2018 a group of psychologists and cognitive scientists published a paper titled Mind the Hype, warning that popular claims about mindfulness had run ahead of the evidence, that studies were often poorly designed and that the risks were underreported. Some meditators experience increased anxiety or distressing memories. The practice is not a panacea for depression, poverty or a toxic workplace. Telling an overworked employee to be mindful about stress while leaving the cause of the stress in place places the burden on the individual.

Ron Purser has criticised what he calls McMindfulness, the packaging of meditation by companies as a way of making workers more productive and less likely to complain. In this form the practice is stripped of its ethical setting. In the Buddhist tradition mindfulness was one part of a path that included right speech, right action and right livelihood, so that tranquility was linked to a life of compassion. A mindfulness that serves a firm's profit while ignoring the suffering that the firm causes would not have been recognised as the same thing.

A subtler difficulty is that seeking tranquility can itself disturb it. A person who sits to meditate and then monitors whether he is calm yet may find himself more agitated than before, because the wish for peace is a form of striving. Teachers of Zen speak of the paradox of trying not to try. The manifesto is a plan, and a plan is an act of the will, whereas mindfulness is a letting go of the will. If the declaration of intent is held too tightly, it can become another source of self reproach on the days when the practice fails.

The remedy is to treat the manifesto as an orientation and not a performance target. Its content should include more than calm. It might state commitments to honesty, to kindness and to attention in daily work, and promise to return gently when one has strayed. A person who is tranquil because he has settled his conduct will be more stable than one who is tranquil because he has learnt to stop noticing. Peace that is purchased by turning away from the world does not last when the world knocks.

The topic leaves a curious circle. A tranquil self is supposed to arise from a mindful manifesto, yet the manifesto is written by a self that is not yet tranquil, in the very agitation it hopes to cure. The ancient teachers answered that one begins where one is, with whatever restlessness one has, and that the practice, repeated over years, does its work. Whether the quiet at the end belongs to the person who wrote the first line is a question the practice itself seems to dissolve.