live.ethicalstl.org

Kathleen,

In response to your question on the Wednesday Night Mindfulness Meetings;

I have been attending the Mindfulness meetings for several months now. I was planning on giving it a six-month trial before I decide to go on or not. I have already decided that I will continue attending for the foreseeable future. The benefits I have received have been enough to convince me to stay with it for a year or two and see what happens. I can only give you my opinion on what the class is doing. You need to ask Randal what his objectives for the course are. From my perspective, the course has given me some additional tools to deal with every day events. The results I see are in two areas; increase health and greater relaxation. I am sure the two are related. The health aspect is simply a general statement about some improvements in some of my own conditions. Again, I suspect these are related to an improved ability to relax. The program has also helped me to deal with the various frustrating normal events that occur each day. I happen to be a Type-A personality, at least in many areas of my life, and the ability to relax and doing something besides count to 10 is very useful.

As for what we do, I am hesitant to describe that for two reasons. First Randal can give you a better idea. I am sure there are a lot of things he is trying to do that I haven’t caught onto yet. One of these is to include the concept of ethics into the program and create what he would describe as Ethical Mindfulness. I am very interested in finding out how he plans to do this.

The other reason is what I learned in a different program. I used to teach a smoking cessation program called Smokenders. I had used the program to go from a 2 to 3 plus pack a day smoker to a nonsmoker and was very impressed with it. It actually taught me how to stop smoking and even more important how to destroy the desire for tobacco. But I really started to understand the program after I started teaching it. When people knew I took the program they would often ask me what Smokenders was? Usually this was for two reasons; one was a natural desire to understand what the program was and second to look for ways to decide to not take the program. The latter logic occurs in most smokers when they consider stopping; or people addicted to other substances or people who are considering a program, but don’t want to change their habits. There is a part of them that does not want to do it for several reasons. By identifying the components of the program they would then jump on that particular activity and say, “I tried that and it didn’t work for me”. If you tell them something else in the program they will say, “That would never work for me, or some other excuse.” So if you describe some of the details of the program it ends up giving the person the belief that they understand the program and therefore it becomes easy to think of reasons the program will not work for them.

A program is not simply a collection of tricks, activities or rules to follow. Good programs that can actually provide the training the person needs to change their behavior are much more that just a collection of tricks. What a good program does is tell you what you need to do, the sequence in which to do the activities, what you should be thinking about your actions, what you should not do or be thinking, and perhaps more importantly it should be telling you how to put each thing you are learning into perspective, be prepared to tell you what to do if you make a mistake or don’t understand something and how to tailor the program to your specific needs and finally, be prepared to answer any questions you may have. I am sure I am leaving something out, but I think you get the idea. There is much more to a program than just a collection of tricks or tasks. So the question becomes are Randal’s Ethical Mindfulness sessions a program? Since we are just getting started it is hard to say, but I am confident that it will be.

So with that background in mind let me try to answer the question I think you are asking: what do we do each week? Well, the first hour we sit around and listen to Randal explain the basic concepts behind the techniques including such things as the psychology behind what we are doing and during the second hour we try to practice mindfulness meditation. Most of us sit in a regular chair, some of us lie down and some of us like the classic lotus position. It all depends on how we want to do it. The practices Randal teaches are pretty laid back and flexible and are designed to let you adapt them to your own needs. The activities themselves focus on our learning how to control our bodies through breathing and how to control our thoughts. They are simple enough for anyone to do. This is true for most programs. To be successful the activities need to be simple enough for the normal person to perform them. What turns them into a program are all the things I mentioned earlier, all the things that the teacher talks about, uses to fill in between the activities, etc.

It is difficult to know whether the Mindfulness meetings will meet your needs. That is something you should probably discuss with Randal. One of the problems you have to be careful of is trying to take out pieces of the program and coming up with a Reader’s Digest version. For serious programs that is usually not feasible. You can certainly borrow techniques and merge them into a different program. That is done all of the time. Most programs of this type borrow heavily from each other. It is what they add that makes them unique to a specific problem or different from each other. A smoking cessation program is going to be much better at stopping smoking than it is at getting people to stop drinking even if there are a lot of similarities. Or to use another example, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Ethical Culture all share a great deal in their beliefs, but the differences are just as important. Christianity is not going to get you 40 virgins and Ethical Culture probably will not get you into heaven.

I would also caution you about what Smokenders used to call “writing your own program”. It is very common for people to decide that there are certain pieces of a program that don’t like so they change them or just don’t do them or do them out of sequence or add new things. We use to warn people that when they do that they are writing their own program and while their program MAY work we were not responsible for their new program. If they failed, it was their program that failed and not Smokenders. Does this mean that you can’t change a program? No, you can change it, but you can’t change it without knowing what you are doing. When anyone is taking a program it is very risky to try to change it. Once you understand it, usually by taking it and teaching it for a while you can then think about changing it.

Let me add one other comment about programs in general and what they do. It is often difficult to get people to sign up for a “program” that tries to change their behavior and or thinking. One of the most common ideas is that they are going to “do it themselves” and “they don’t need any help”. This is especially a problem for men in our culture. We believe that we are somehow less manly or inferior if we can’t do it ourselves. We are often told that we should just exercise our will power and if we did, we could do it ourselves. What people don’t understand is that regardless of what program they may or may not use, they are always doing it themselves. No one can change your behavior or your thoughts for you. If a person was successful, they did it themselves. It doesn’t matter whether they used a program or hypnosis or medicine or anything else, they are the ones who did it. (When I say medicine I am thinking of such things as the patch and not drugs that are designed to attack a specific psychological need.) I can’t stop another person from smoking, only that person can stop them self. What a program does is give you new tools to accomplish the task. The individual must use the tools and if they do, then they are the person who accomplished it. My experience has been that when a person tells you they used their will power to do something, they really can’t tell you in any detail exactly what they did. All they really are saying is that they were able to solve the problem with the tools they had. Two people both exercising their will power to solve a problem, may have done two entirely different things; both of which worked, but neither of them can tell you want they did. Or they could both exert their willpower and one try much harder than the other and the person who tried the hardest may be the person who failed, while the person who didn’t try very hard succeeded. So you don’t want to let people look at programs as something people do if they fail and are unable to do it themselves. Instead look at a program as a process where you get additional skills to help you solve problems, knowing full well that you are the person who will have to solve the problem.

You mentioned that you were interested in the issue of happiness. It is something that Mindfulness does deal with. One of the things I have learned is that I really didn’t understand what it means to be happy. I knew I was not unhappy. By my standards I am very successful. I am not rich, but I am not in debt and will hopefully have enough to retire in the future. I have my health and a very loving family with kids who have turned out as well as I have a right to ask. But that just means that I am not unhappy. However, not being unhappy is not the same thing as being happy. Type A personalities don’t take out time to be happy because we are too busy trying to get things done. These are the kinds of things we do discuss and I find them valuable. They are the things that are related to the breathing exercises, but it is difficult to explain exactly how it is done. You really need to take the program to learn that.

Again, I would urge you to talk to Randal and get his opinion as to what things you can get from mindfulness that might help you. I really don’t know enough to help you there.

I do know that I have found things in Randal’s program that I think are useful to me and I intend to continue to learn and practice them. I don’t expect the program to make me happy, but I do believe it will give me some tools that I can use that will let me make myself happier. How long will this take? I have no idea. I suspect quite a while. As long as I keep making progress I will keep at it. Will this program solve all of my problems? Probably not, I have been successful enough at generating problems, that I doubt one program could solve all of them. But I suspect that is the nature of life.

As an aside, our society has been undergoing tremendous change in the last 50 to 100 years. But we usually think about it in terms of material objects such as planes, trains, radio, television, satellites, computers, cell phones, new medicines, etc. But I think we have undergone just as radical change in our inter personal or community relationships. For example, things such divorce being impossible to its acceptance, and the number of and kind of people we know and live with in our lifetime. People used to live in small towns with one-room schoolhouses. Now we go to schools with 2000 kids. We meet people from other cultures on a regular basis; we live and work with people who we previously barely acknowledged existing such as other races, homosexuals, and all the people we call challenged. We watch our friends and family die long often painful and disagreeable deaths, maintained by machines and people who are trying to help but whose motives and competencies are often unclear. Many of us have children who grow up and leave us, often forever. I suspect that the changes in our relationships are wrecking more havoc than the changes in our technologies. The fact that we can hold our society together in the face of all of this change is amazing. So any tool I can learn to use to help deal with these changes and help others deal with them is something I am quite willing to look for.

If I have any complaints about Mindfulness it is that it is not a quick program like Smokenders was. I have already spent twice as much time at it than I did with Smokenders. Like most Americans, I would like a quick fix. Give me a book or a few rules, let me memorize them and then get on with my life. But I know I will spend months or years or perhaps a lifetime trying to perfect my skills. Mindfulness is out of the Buddhist tradition and Buddhists seem to be willing to take a long-term perspective of problems. That aspect frustrates me, but continuing to have the problems without the tools to deal with them frustrates me more.

I am betting that a philosophy/religion or whatever it is that has supported people successfully for over 2000 years probably has some ideas and techniques that might benefit me.

I hope this gives you some insight into my views on the mindfulness program and whether you can use it in the program you are trying to create.

Gene Lauver