Warnings delivered at lack of regulations within an ‘increasingly professionalised domain
The mindfulness movement is in danger of being turned into a
commodity, “a product to be bought and sold on the free market”, a
Buddhist Society conference was told.
“People are becoming professionally mindful,” Steven Stanley, a
social psychologist at Cardiff University, told an audience of Buddhists
and secular mindfulness practitioners on Wednesday.
It was possible to make a living from mindfulness, with growing
opportunities for research, teaching and speaking, he said, adding that
it is becoming an “increasingly professionalised domain” with a tendency
towards standardised instruction.
The conference, Mindfulness: Secular, Religious, Both or Neither?,
heard that more than 500 scientific papers on mindfulness were being
published every year, and that more than two dozen UK universities now
offer mindfulness courses. Global corporations such as Goldman Sachs, JP
Morgan and American Express have introduced mindfulness training for
their staff.
However, amid the extraordinary growth of the secular mindfulness
movement, there was rising concern about lack of regulation of the
training of meditation teachers, the conference heard.
“Anyone can pop up and say they’re a mindfulness teacher, so there is
a lot of anxiety within the mindfulness community,” said Madeleine
Bunting, an adviser to the all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness
and a former Guardian journalist.
By
way of comparison, Bunting cited the growth of psychotherapy and the
challenges of regulating its practitioners. British universities working
to develop best practice on mindfulness teacher training had “grave
concerns”, she said. “We have a ‘wild west’ at the moment.”
But, she added: “Whatever our anxieties – and there are plenty of
legitimate ones – this is responding to a real need, and is relieving
human suffering.”
An all-party group of MPs last week urged the government to fund the
training of 1,200 new mindfulness teachers over the next five years to
meet sharply rising demand for the technique in both the public and
private sectors. This number of teachers would cover 15% of the 580,000
adults at risk of recurrent depression every year, said their report,
“The training of teachers is critical,” it added. “There is
considerable and justifiable concern about the quality of teachers and
how to ensure integrity.”
An estimated 2,200 mindfulness teachers have been trained to minimum
standards over the past 10 years, but only about 700 were both active
and had professional clinical training that qualified them to teach
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to people with depression, said the
report.
Some mindfulness teaching gave cause for concern. “For example, some
practitioners are delivering mindfulness courses without adequate
personal or professional preparation; training in workplace settings has
erred towards goal-oriented, institutionally-favoured ends, rather than
addressing the causes of individual and collective distress,” outlined
the report.
Mindfulness
has its roots in Buddhism, whose adherents have practiced meditation
for 2,400 years. But in recent decades, a secular movement has exploded
with hundreds of courses offered around the country and scores of books
published.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is now widely used in the UK to
treat mental illness, and mindfulness training has been introduced into
schools, prisons and workplaces. In the US, it is being introduced into
the military.
Mindfulness was seen by some as a “secular-religious movement”, said
Stanley, proselytised with “evangelical fervour”. But, he added, it was
essential “to acknowledge the debt to Buddhist scholars”.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts medical school, warned last week
that some people feared a “sort of superficial ‘McMindfulness’ is
taking over, which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative
practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and
divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential”.
