Mindfulness and AD/HD

An interesting story about the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and their work on Mindfulness and AD/HD. The gist of the story is the use of Mindfulness practice as a way to help those with AD/HD enhance their ability to pay attention and monitor their emotional states. Key to the medical understanding is the need to practice throughout your everyday life:

The meditation sessions are important practice, but the key is to use mindfulness throughout your daily life, always being aware of where your attention is focused while you are engaged in routine activities. For example, you might notice while you drive that your attention wanders to an errand you must run later that day. Lots of people practice mindfulness while eating. Once you get used to checking in with yourself and your body, you can apply the technique anytime you start to feel overwhelmed.

Yes, indeed everyday practice, and making it integral to every part of our life is critical. However, I'm a bit concerned about two things: 1) the "technocratization" of practice; and 2) paying attention to attention. In the hands of these researchers a mindfulness practice is rendered into a "technique," a tool. You "apply it" whenever you feel the onset of distress. To be fair, those of us who practice mindfulness speak of it that way also. In fact, we speak to others precisely of mindfulness as something we deploy whenever stressed, and so forth. But it seems to me that differences remain, and those are not related to mindfulness being part of a spiritual path for so many folks.

One of the differences for me is that a mindfulness practice is not just, and most likely not primarily about, feeling good. Mindfulness is sustained attention, but not necessarily with the purpose of feeling good about what we attend to or observe. Mindfulness practice in Zen is not about feeling peachy-keen after the practice, and those who believe that such practice is about sitting and entering samadhi for contentment only, I think misrecognize a philosophical point with one about experience. Let me provide an anecdote.

Quite some time ago, in a sangha far far away... I knew a person who always meditated with a big smile on his face. He sat down to meditate and immediately looked content and happy. He arose from meditation the happiest person on Earth. No worries. He'd sit again with the biggest smile. This man was not faking the smile. He truly felt happy and content to be meditating (at least he said so). Furthermore, his meditation had deep calming effects for him, and provided a respite from the agitations of everyday life. The man saw his meditation practice as relaxation and decompressing, thus his contentedness. This is fine as far as it goes, but to the extent that this man's meditation practice was about mindfulness -- he would have to at some point in his practice encounter seeds, roots, causes, and manifestations of suffering. In other words, sustained attention is deep attention to what is going on within. We don't have to sit and practice constantly by examining the deepest pain in our lives, but from time to time as our practice deepens, we do face what causes discomfort, ill-being, disssatisfaction, suffering. Those wouldn't have to be horrible and mind warping, but sustained attention to the causes of our suffering is also not the most natural of tasks for humans and therefore not necessarily joy producing. The point being that mindfulness practice is not solely about feeling good, but about looking deeply, and safely increasing our attention to not just joyful states of mind, but those other states of mind that challenge our peace and stability. Furthermore, if it happens to be a Zen practice, that mindful attention, far more than just relaxation, is also deep reflection on impermanence, and the illusions of permanent selfhood. That joy can come from practice does not mean that joy is the purpose of practice, even if Zen Masters assure us that through a deep practice, and letting go of notions of permanent selfhood, etc., we can indeed experience more contentedness in our lives.

The philosophical point being that yes indeed, through practice and facing our suffering, we can end up far more contented as peace enters. We can even smile in the face of our suffering, and consider that deep reflection a good thing to do even when confronting ill-being. We might even smile every time we "sit" to face ourselves deeply. But the practical side of mindfulness, the practice, is not all about us feeling smiley without the deep encounter with the transformation of suffering.

I'm glad these folks are using mindfulness as a way to bring peace to those with AD/HD. The idea of using mindfulness practice to help them be aware of how their attention wanders is a fine notion. Moreover, these folks don't have to buy into Zen or Buddhist philosophy in order to practice mindfulness. Still, in my estimation, reducing mindfulness to a technique, and one devoted solely to recognizing when our attention wanders, is but only the first step to a deeply nourishing and healthy practice.

Comments

[Huw Richardson]

Thanks for posting this! I'm sending it off to my coworkers: we deal with a lot of clients w/ ADHD and I think a 42-day programme might be a good place to explore such ideas.