“Inner transformation & social change need each other”. Come to our Zoom “Elephant” meet on mindfulness and agency, with Rosie Bell & Jamie Bristow, Sept 15th
Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell
After the summer break, our Zoom series The Elephant Meets…- featuring those who are building the next system we need - recommences.
At Tuesday 5.00 - 6.30pm, September 15th, we invite you to hear and talk with Rosie Bell and Jamie Bristow from the Mindfulness Initiative (free ticket, but please register here).
The Mindfulness Initiative (MI) is a powerful force for bringing the practice of mindfulness (drawn from a range of traditions and research) right into the heart of UK parliamentary politics, as well as to businesses and civic organisations.
The idea that meditation and mindful practice is a shield against, or escape from, the demands of the world is the very opposite of their approach. They want mindfulness to strengthen our capacity for intention and action - for agency - so that we can make better, more robust decisions, in the direction of justice and equity.
Under the ticket app below is an exclusive A/UK piece from Rosie and Jamie, which is a condensed version of a major paper the MI is bringing out (details at the end of the piece), on how mindfulness can improve our agency - this will be the theme of their Zoom/Elephant talk.
Please share this blog with friends and colleagues - we look forward to seeing you there!
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We need to reclaim our agency: mindfulness can help
The window is narrowing for meaningful action in the face of existential threats. A new account of mindfulness suggests one way to unlock change.
By Rosie Bell and Jamie Bristow
Humanity is so beset by disruption that naming it has become a cliché: “I could really go for some precedented times” as the popular meme has it.
A growing portion of the population has some sense of the multiple interconnected crises that we now face - and yet our collective capacity to respond appropriately has not kept pace.
Certainly, we are powerful. Our ability to harm our environment, ourselves and each other is accelerating. From the transgression of planetary boundaries to the threat of runaway technology, this kind of power places even the near future in jeopardy for billions of people.
But the capacity to dominate and to destroy is not the same as the capacity to act well, in our collective best interest.
If we want a chance of meeting our crises, this is the kind of action and intention we should be interested in – not least because it is both underdeveloped and increasingly under threat. The psychological capacities upon which it depends, however, can be consciously cultivated.
For six years, we’ve helped politicians around the world to make the trainable human capacity for mindfulness a serious consideration of public policy.
Mindfulness is relevant to a suspiciously diverse range of ailments – such that critics decry a panacea. Suffering from stress? Mindfulness can help. Struggling to give up smoking? Try a little mindfulness. While this application to discrete problems is supported by an increasingly robust body of evidence, it may have produced an instrumental and fragmented picture of mindfulness in popular understanding.
Turning our attention upstream, we began looking for a better meta-narrative for mindfulness - not as a topical cure, but as a foundational psychological capacity for producing good outcomes.
The common factor that emerged through our many re-formulations was its interaction with agency – by which we mean, broadly speaking, the capacity for intentional action, both individual and collective.
We arrived at a model of agency formed of three interdependent dimensions: perception, understanding and action. Thanks to an array of confounding forces within the human mind, body and cultural environment, all three dimensions are often impoverished and reduced.
Our upcoming discussion paper contains a narrative account of the deeper patterns and mechanics of committed mindfulness practice. We explore the ways this practice might help us to overcome both innate obstacles to agency and the external forces that can derail it.
Resisting the hijack of agency
A principal area of concern is attention – a foundational condition for perception and thus for agency.
We typically underestimate the many distractions that capture our attention. These can take the form of outdated adaptive drives, the legacy of evolution within us. But they increasingly come from the booming attention economy that manipulates and amplifies these drives, in ways that alienate and overwhelm us.
Researchers describe an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ between the promises of social media and real psycho-social needs. At the same time, former Google insiders turned whistle-blowers are lining up to warn us about the damaging effects of their heavily-incentivised capture of our digital attentions.
Mindfulness alone cannot protect us from the attractive power of artificial intelligence that knows us better than we know ourselves. However, it can strengthen the capacity to attend to what matters; training the ‘muscle’ of the mind to notice when it has strayed and to return to its chosen object.
Mindfulness has been shown to protect against proactively distracting stimuli and passive consumption of social media. More broadly, it enhances ‘executive control’, enabling us more readily to choose for ourselves the content of our minds and lives.
Besides reclaiming attention, mindfulness has implications for its ‘bandwidth’. Mindfulness training emphasises awareness that is open, allowing, curious and kind; it cultivates an ‘internal climate of friendliness’ towards experience. Practising these qualities, grounded in a deepening relationship with the body, can radically broaden receptivity – supplying more and better information with which to make sense of the world.
Likewise, aspects of practice such as acceptance and turning towards difficulty can help maintain openness to novel information, including uncomfortable truths from which we might otherwise recoil.
For example, cognitive dissonance commonly prevents us from recognizing the many ways in which our lifestyle is untenable. It closes us down to problematic aspects of our culture and leads to what researchers call ‘system justification’.
Receptivity then is critical to effective agency. To respond to something, we must first be open to perceiving it - preferably with some accuracy.
Do we always want to notice more data? In the age of information overload, shutting down is an understandable form of self-defence. But for this narrowing of focus to be helpful, it must be discerning.
The volume of information we face in our rapidly changing, hyper-connected world overwhelms not only our attention, but also our control of it: we are increasingly unable to choose what is good for us.
The resulting poor digital and media diet, as James Williams warns, can create a new dimension of social inequality where those unable to discern well-enough become disenfranchised.
Here the benefits of mindfulness – helping us to regulate our attention, and build our cognitive resilience, demonstrated by a growing number of studies – could be central to resisting the hijack of agency.
Being at home with complexity
Our second dimension of agency concerns understanding; roughly, the capacity to form and operate knowledge. At a moment when an increasingly complex and sensitive world demands quantum leaps in understanding, we find that it is being undermined.
The factors include information overload; declining trust in media and public institutions; and the related deterioration in our ‘information ecology’ (the public commons wherein ideas are exchanged and truth is agreed upon).
Meanwhile, intensified by social media, cultural polarisation both radically oversimplifies complex issues and entrenches a politics of antagonism. This is disastrous for our collective problem-solving.
Mindfulness training is relevant to understanding in a number of interesting ways. First, it can integrate a more primary ‘holistic-intuitive’ mode of mental processing with the ‘verbal-conceptual’ mode dominant in the Western mind. In this way, mindfulness practitioners can bring online a worldview more supportive of effective agency amid dynamic complexity.
Entrenched emphasis on rational structures (as identified by thinkers such as Iain McGilchrist) has contributed to an impasse in societal agency - where goals are pursued in mutually inconsiderate siloes, to increasingly catastrophic effect.
(The world is currently receiving a crash course in these effects courtesy of the COVID19 pandemic, discovering at pace that health, social trust, economics and the environment cannot usefully be treated as if they were separate.)
By contrast, integrating rationality within holistic-intuitive processing cultivates a container for considering the whole – and its limits.
Consideration of the whole is not equivalent to a fixed or single worldview. The kind of understanding that underpins collective agency at the scale humanity now requires must be at home with radical plurality.
Here, too, evidence demonstrates the favourable effects of mindfulness training upon perspective-taking and cognitive flexibility. It helps practitioners to loosen identity with ideas (“I am not my thoughts”) and understand points of view as plural and partial (“thoughts aren’t facts”).
Inner transformation and social change need each other
A third dimension of agency must prevail for us to act, intentionally and effectively. Despite a common misconception of mindfulness as somehow passive, practice can in fact help restore intention as a driver of individual action. Reduction in automatic behaviour and harmful reactivity is central to the efficacy of mindfulness training.
We know that mindfulness practice helps individuals to act consciously and creatively more of the time. In the context of human survival on a planetary scale however, effective action will be collective: we will meet our many crises together, or not at all.
It won’t surprise you at this stage to learn that the field of mindfulness research also has much to say regarding better togetherness.
Whether by amplifying innate prosocial qualities such as kindness, empathy and compassion, by reducing reactivity, enhancing perspective-taking, deepening access to intrinsic values or increasing our availability to each other—capacity-building contemplative practices such as mindfulness have much to offer the social fabric. Both in terms of agency and for its own sake.
Finally, and irreducible to any one dimension of agency, the reduction of anxiety and stress is among the most consistent findings in four decades of mindfulness research.
This application is popularly associated with the busy workplace. Critics commonly perceive a displacement of responsibility for suffering from organisation to employee. But acquiring tools for mitigating distress does not stop you from addressing its structural causes. Stress is neurologically harmful, an insidious burden on all dimensions of agency, in all areas of life - not least activism and other civic engagement. Relieving it can only strengthen our cognitive foundation for effective and sustainable action.
Here we return to a central theme in our work. While the mindfulness field attracts criticism that its offering is palliative, and therefore actively prohibitive of change, we will repeat this as many times as necessary: inner transformation and social change are not only compatible but require one other. Exposition of related social philosophies is beyond the waistline of this article, but receives more attention in the full version, available soon.
Are you convinced yet? Hopefully not – we’d hate to have researched and written 40 pages when three would suffice. But if your curiosity is piqued by this brief introduction, do please sign up here to receive the full publication when we launch it on 14th September.
