Thought for the Week: Beyond mindfulness
Peggy Heeks reflects on mindfulness and beyond
Living in the present has long been a Quaker practice, but now the concept is intensified by mindfulness, which has become almost a cult movement. Like Christianity, the original emphasis has shifted. The Oxford Mindfulness Centre, for example, is part of the university’s Department of Psychiatry, where it is associated with relieving depression. It aims to prevent depression and enhance human potential by combining modern science with ancient wisdom. It has become ‘a treatment of choice for prevention of recurrent depression’.
I spent the intervals of one Yearly Meeting reading Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world by Danny Penman and Mark Williams. The subtitles of other recommended books give a similar picture of the links between mindfulness and depression, for example, The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness. The approach of more recent books is very different. A few months ago I bought Anna Black’s Living in the moment, a very accessible, reassuring book with plenty of pictures. There is great reliance on being aware of one’s breath and on Buddhist practice, but also many instances of Quaker disciplines – waiting, stillness, acceptance and listening.
I do celebrate the richness of the present moment. I have looked out, for example, on autumn mornings on college playing fields that run down to the River Thames, and watched the mist rising over the fields, the river glinting beyond, the sun breaking through, and I have rejoiced. Over the past months I have become more conscious of the movement of clouds. What an extraordinary dimension! No wonder that the sky was thought to be the home of gods.
Yet, I have reservations about the fashion for living in the moment, for it overlooks the continuities in our lives. Revisiting the past reveals patterns that affect our present and offer pointers to the future. Our present is given shape by memories of people, places and incidents. My visits to Dorset – my home county – are overlaid by memories of being there through childhood, teenage years and adulthood. I’m not living in the past, but integrating it with my life now. We have a testimony to integrity, which may include seeing our lives as a whole. T S Eliot helps us see: ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past’ (from ‘Burnt Norton’).
This means that life is not cut up in tidy segments. There are threads of interests, gifts, relationships that run through our lives, and they are a source of celebration. It is, indeed, sometimes hard to say what has gone, what remains. So many people of the past are still in my life today. Early memories of being tucked beside my mother while she read Peter Rabbit, or of being taught to swim by a brother-in-law, have turned into major life themes. We need to be aware of the dynamic of our life story, constantly changing within a central core.
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