Zinrainder

It has been suggested that Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills may fail to address social harms if they encourage people to tolerate mistreatment.[1]  This concern, that mindfulness based practices might make one passive, has been articulated more than once.[2]  Though common, these concerns are inaccurate: mindfulness is not “about” passivity.  In fact, awareness is not “about” anything but itself.  Mindfuless is the assertion of executive function for the purpose of growing capacity.  Discernment is a tool, just like a hammer or a saw.  A hammer can build a house or start a war.  I myself believe that a great deal of social harm shows up in contexts of unrestrained competition, and that awareness skills can increase cooperation. 

The word mindfulness means awareness or discernment.  The practice is about paying attention; being aware, on purpose.  Modern psychology recognizes that our sensori-neural system tends to produce two broad categories of response: fast and slow.[3]  The fast response is automatic and energetically “cheaper.” Fast responses often occur without conscious awareness (i.e. they can be “implicit”).  Slow responses, on the other hand, are deliberate, occur with conscious awareness, and are energetically “expensive.”  If you want to experience your fast response system, I recommend you watch YouTube videos that you can find under the search term “selective attention test.”  Mindfulness is about practicing your slow response system, on purpose.  Both fast and slow responses can be useful or not, appetitive or aversive, passive or active, depending on one’s history and the context.   

For example, if you are doing something routine that does not require a lot of attention you can safely turn it over to your fast mode.  Can you remember all the red lights you stopped at on the way to work?  Why not?  You WERE awake while you were driving, weren’t you?  🙂  Of course you were, but at this point in your life you did not need to waste energy deliberately figuring out how to stop at all the red lights.  Fast mode is also useful when escaping danger.  If a car is about to hit you, you don’t waste time calculating the momentum and path of the car, you jump out of the way!

Fast mode can also get us into trouble.  The so called “fight/flight/freeze/fawn” response probably shows up frequently in what we call “mental illness.”  Excessive anger, depression, isolation, aversion, impulsivity, anxiety, substance use, compulsions, etc., are functions mental health providers keep track of.[4]  These fast mode behaviors are often learned implicitly (without awareness) while coping with life’s challenges. 

To balance fast mode, we need…slow mode!…(sometimes also called “executive function,” the “president” or “CEO” of the system). But this requires intentional practice—the energetically expensive “working mind” can be rather “lazy!”  This can be difficult for people in the health care field to validate, just because many of us learned to activate our explicit working capacity very early on—we have been studiously high achievers for much of our lives. 

Another factor that works against mindfulness is that we often spend much of our lives in the human engineered world.  By this I mean that clever humans have found a way to allow us to spend much of our lives on “auto-pilot.”  We deliberately engineer things like cars, homes, phones, etc., to be “user -friendly,” to operate with a minimum of effort and/or expertise.  How popular would a phone be if you had to consult the user’s manual to figure out how to make a call?  In a world of social extremes, how many slow mode role models do have for skills like dialectical thinking, making compromises, building coalitions?  Not only do we automatically prefer the less expensive fast mode, but we also live in a world structured around fast mode.  I believe our winner-take-all-if-it’s-not perfect-just-trade-it-in-for-a-new-one-culture does not tend to support slow mode approaches to life’s challenges. 😦

Awareness practice (mindfulness) is about learning to activate your slow mode over and over and over again.  To make it as automatic as fast mode.  My meditation teacher told me a story about one of his colleagues who was approached on a dark street by an individual with a knife.  As the person with the knife demanded money, his colleague calmly asked –“are you sure this is a good idea?”  Another meditation teacher told me a story about how she accidently dropped her car keys in the San Francisco Bay and watched as they made an interesting “plop” sound in the water, never to be seen again.  Onlookers could not believe how “calm” she appeared.  One part of slow mode is a “letting go” function:  the ability to let go of habitual, fast, automatic, (often) aversive and harmful reactions…and produce slower, more considered, balanced responses.  To develop this capacity takes diligence, energy, effort, persistence, support.  The idea that some people do not have slow mode is delusion.  Everyone has awareness inside of them.  It is like a heartbeat.  You always have it, even if you are not always paying attention to it.[5]

Another part of mindfulness is creativity, which is daring to fail.  Here’s how my former teacher the philosopher Maria Lugones explained it: 

Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise….Rules may fail to explain what we are doing…. Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.[6]

You can start now if you wish.  Actually, the idea of “starting” an awareness practice is itself a type of delusion.  Because whenever you think you have “started,” you actually “started” long before.  At the moment before you “started” reading this page, you were already aware of your intent to read it, your interest in meditation and mindfulness practice, your commitment to learning.  Meditation actually “started” long ago.  Now you are just a little more aware of it. 

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[1] Doing the Best We Can and Doing Better: The Path to Antiracism in DBT, available online at https://isitdbt.net/anti-racism/, time 13:50.

[2] Goldstein, J. (2003). Insight meditation: A psychology of freedom. Shambhala Publications, p. 31; https://www.revivified.co/articles/meditation-does-not-make-you-passive.  

[3] Evans, J. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 255-278.;

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

[4] In DBT we call these forms of “emotion mind.”  Linehan, M. (2014). DBT Skills training manual. Guilford Publications.

[5] This is one of Marsha Linehan’s many metaphors for “wise mind.”  Linehan, M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford press.

[6] “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in: Maitra, K., & McWeeny, J. (Eds.). (2022). Feminist philosophy of mind. Oxford University Press, p. 105.