Mindfulness at risk of being 'turned into a free market commo...

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/28/mindfu...

Mindfulness at risk of being 'turned into a

free market commodity'
Warnings delivered at lack of regulations within an increasingly professionalised
domain
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
Wednesday 28 October 2015 19.30GMT

The mindfulness movement is in danger of being turned into a commodity, a

product to be bought and sold on the free market, a Buddhist Society conference
was told.
People are becoming professionally mindful, Steven Stanley, a social psychologist at
Cardi University, told an audience of Buddhists and secular mindfulness
practitioners on Wednesday.
It was possible to make a living from mindfulness, with growing opportunities for
research, teaching and speaking, he said, adding that it is becoming an increasingly
professionalised domain with a tendency towards standardised instruction.
The conference, Mindfulness: Secular, Religious, Both or Neither?, heard that more
than 500 scientic papers on mindfulness were being published every year, and that
more than two dozen UK universities now oer mindfulness courses. Global
corporations such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and American Express have
introduced mindfulness training for their sta.
However, amid the extraordinary growth of the secular mindfulness movement, there
was rising concern about lack of regulation of the training of meditation teachers, the
conference heard.
Anyone can pop up and say theyre a mindfulness teacher, so there is a lot of anxiety
within the mindfulness community, said Madeleine Bunting, an adviser to the
all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness and a former Guardian journalist.
By way of comparison, Bunting cited the growth of psychotherapy and the challenges
of regulating its practitioners. British universities working to develop best practice on
mindfulness teacher training had grave concerns, she said. We have a wild west
at the moment.
But, she added: Whatever our anxieties and there are plenty of legitimate ones
this is responding to a real need, and is relieving human suering.

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An all-party group of MPs last week urged the government to fund the training of
1,200 new mindfulness teachers over the next ve years to meet sharply rising
demand for the technique in both the public and private sectors. This number of
teachers would cover 15% of the 580,000 adults at risk of recurrent depression every
year, said their report, Mindful Nation UK.
The training of teachers is critical, it added. There is considerable and justiable
concern about the quality of teachers and how to ensure integrity.
An estimated 2,200 mindfulness teachers have been trained to minimum standards
over the past 10 years, but only about 700 were both active and had professional
clinical training that qualied them to teach mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to
people with depression, said the report.
Some mindfulness teaching gave cause for concern. For example, some practitioners
are delivering mindfulness courses without adequate personal or professional
preparation; training in workplace settings has erred towards goal-oriented,
institutionally-favoured ends, rather than addressing the causes of individual and
collective distress, outlined the report.
Mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism, whose adherents have practiced meditation
for 2,400 years. But in recent decades, a secular movement has exploded with
hundreds of courses oered around the country and scores of books published.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is now widely used in the UK to treat mental
illness, and mindfulness training has been introduced into schools, prisons and
workplaces. In the US, it is being introduced into the military.
Mindfulness was seen by some as a secular-religious movement, said Stanley,
proselytised with evangelical fervour. But, he added, it was essential to
acknowledge the debt to Buddhist scholars.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University
of Massachusetts medical school, warned last week that some people feared a sort of
supercial McMindfulness is taking over, which ignores the ethical foundations of
the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and
divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential.
More news

Topics
Mindfulness
Religion
Meditation
Health & wellbeing
Mental health
Buddhism

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