Can mindfulness enhance overt questioning?
by Susantha Hewa
Mindfulness is explained as the “basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” According to the practitioners and experts, mindfulness has many benefits for the individual although some are unenthusiastic about it. However, it is said to have benefitted those who have a natural liking for practicing meditation for religious, spiritual or other more earthly purposes. For example, many people practice it to tackle stress. Students who are continually swamped with work and pressured to keep up with deadlines, top-level executives for whom tension is a regular visitor, and anybody who is caught up in the rat race are advised to do mindfulness exercises.
According to practitioners and experts, any form of meditation is beneficial for many, as it is supposed to help temporarily break the unrelenting pace of life. In her article titled, “‘Mystery’ behind mindfulness: you become what you think”, which appeared in The Island of May 6, Jeevani Senevirathne (JS) enumerates and explains many benefits of practicing mindfulness including, the boosting of memory power, resilience, moment to moment awareness, concentrated attention, capacity for looking at problems in new ways, and, last but not least, allowing relief from stress.
Avoiding or taking the edge off the continuous stress in life is one of the most useful competencies in these troubled times. Today, stress is a constant companion in life not only of adults but also of the young. All individuals – from labourers to top executives, from students to undergrads and professors, from the penniless to the filthy rich and people from every station in life have to regularly cope with anxiety, disaffection and stress. As such any technique or activity, including mindfulness, may go a long way in helping live a comparatively stress-free life. As psychologists and health experts would agree, equally effective are- hobbies such as music, painting, dancing, reading, socializing, travelling, and physical exercise, which are widely accepted as excellent methods of coping with stress, which is only one of the many benefits.
Among the day-to-day situations that make you feel keyed up are- transport problems, traffic jams, meeting deadlines, office politics, rude behaviour, harassment, exams and interviews, sickness, litigation, etc. There are also more fundamental issues like, poverty with all its associated evils, lack of employment, constant competition, social insecurity, unfair treatment based on race, ethnicity, religion, level of education, income level, social status, etc. There is no doubt that coping mechanisms, including hobbies, socializing, meditation and mindfulness would be helpful in mitigating those stresses resulting from the above problems.
It’s a fact that using any or several of the above as relief from stress can make you feel better. However, mindfulness is said to be of special value in relieving you from tension and stress. As JS states, “mindfulness provides students with tools to mitigate stress by cultivating present-moment awareness and developing a non-judgmental attitude towards their experiences”. She goes on to say that mindfulness training will help tackle discontents graciously, “with greater resilience and bounce back from difficulties more effectively to cater for the demands of their lives.” In other words, mindfulness is in a class of its own when it comes to boosting “resilience” which would enable you to quickly get over your hang-ups and face up to the constant challenges of life.
However, one may be tempted to ask whether this ‘resilience’, creditable and useful for almost everybody continuously fighting stress, is likely, to instill in you, unwittingly, a mindset of indolence – an inclination to doggedly endure and accept any pressure being exerted by the status quo, which will perhaps make you, so to speak, a ‘proud’ victim of your own resilience. There is no doubt that people with vested interests would love and applaud you for your buoyancy, which would be a great advantage to them. Can there be other techniques you may use to empower yourself to counter the relentless and, often, unreasonable demands on your resilience? Are you going to be forever dependent more and more on mindfulness or any other coping mechanism, for that matter, to keep yourself from sinking?
Though bracing yourself up for increasing challenges in your area of work is welcome, one may be wary of being too fixated about adapting yourself to whatever worsening condition, taking pride in the fact that you can be tough enough to accept anything and everything. Such an attitude would let yourself be easily exploited by others who wield power over you. It’s well and good, if mindfulness helps in any way to think out of the box, to question and look for alternative methods while enhancing your resilience. If not, it would be important, or, even absolutely necessary, to cultivate the habits of questioning, critical thinking and demanding the required and more constructive changes.
Just take a few examples. True, mindfulness may help you keep calm in many instances. In a traffic jam, a person who regularly practices mindfulness may tolerate the frustrating immovability more easily than the average person. However, in addition to using your better developed endurance to more easily reconcile with the situation, if you can think of the reasons for such traffic jams and put your mental energies to explore ways and means of averting such holdups would be an entirely different exercise that will be monitored by another part of your brain. A person who is doggedly bent on practicing stress reduction may continue to bear the stress with less vexation, but would he be equally keen on pressuring the authorities for finding solutions? It may be possible that asking nonconformist questions belongs to a realm which is different from the one focusing on what’s happening from moment to moment. What prompts social progress is the process of thinking out of the box, which involves looking for answers to those somewhat ‘troubling’ questions. Enhancing resilience alone, without turning your mind outwards to observe and understand the world of lived reality, may perhaps make you too reclusive and complacent about the status quo.
A person who is narrowly focused inwards, is less likely to invite change than a person who is full of curiosity about the active world out there with its constant changes. Critical thinking cannot occur in the absence of information to be had from outside. As a general rule, those whose minds are focused inwards are likely to be followers who would toe the line rather than deviate.
Rulers, who tend to be repressive, would adore any programme which would train people to endure and accept how things stand without questioning or saying enough is enough. That is, they want people to be compliant and keep tightening their belts eternally. That’s why they will applaud any scheme that would keep people endlessly adapting to and accepting any ruling without demur. How many of those who had joined the mass protests in 2022- surely, having exhausted their resilience- could have got their spirit of defiance from practicing speculative techniques including mindfulness? It’s worth a survey.
