The Science And Spirituality Of Addiction

 What drew me in was the collocation of science and spirituality in the title. I'm also a little interested in addiction through having played a small part in the pastoral support of people with addiction and not feeling that I had much of a handle on it to be of much help.

What I appreciate about this book is the breadth of interest and the humane approach of the author. I suspect I'm going to be re-reading the introduction to the neuroscience relating to addiction which was helpful and put into perspective things that I (like many others) had been somewhat aware of without knowing the context or further details. 

I also appreciated the cross-referencing from time to time with scriptural illustrations. This becomes more prominent when discussing matters to do with wealth where the dialogue between science and scripture becomes a bit more concentrated.

And that drawing in of wealth to consideration was also one of the things that drew me to read the book, and I wasn't disappointed. There is a chapter explicitly on the topic and then the discussion of it is followed up in subsequent pages. I think that this is a helpful thing when it comes to thinking about the current world situation where we have more wealth concentrating with fewer individuals and companies. Understanding the neuropsychology of individuals is a really helpful thing to consider.

What I also appreciated was the humane approach of the author and particularly the reprised invitation to self reflection on the main points raised in each chapter. I think the author does us, the readers, a favour with the quality of the self-reflection he offers through these pages. And it is helpful self reflection: it models what he invites us to do at the end of each chapter and it helps to bring together the objective accounts offered by the biology and chemistry he leads us through with a careful (mindful, I think would be fair) attention to inner subjective correlates of that bio-chemistry. I also appreciated this account because by it we are shown how individuals' biology and personal histories can mean that neurochemical effects can vary -there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to drug effects.

Some of what the exploration makes clear too is the social components of addiction: from the way that drug use can be a kind of attempt to repair social deficits as experienced by individuals to the way that treatment if pursued humanely can be successful if it can help repair connection and social wellbeing for those who get drawn into addiction.

I would say, based on my reading of this book so far, that it gives a really helpful resource to anyone who is seeking to support people in addiction and to understand our own addictive responses where they exist. I think that there are parts of this book that I will be returning to in future to help deepen and consolidate understanding that may help in pastoral support.

The blurb that drew me said the following, and I have found the book does live up to this.

Perfect for readers who: Recognize themselves in the compulsive scrolling, the overworking, the numbing — and want to understand why Are drawn to Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, or Johann Hari's work on addiction as disconnection Want neuroscience and Christian theology in genuine, non-forced dialogue Find Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, and integral approaches compelling Work in counseling, recovery coaching, chaplaincy, or pastoral care Are curious why Jesus had so much to say about money, power, and the dangers of wealth Believe that healing the self and healing the world are inseparable projects

In disclosure, I received an e-copy of this book for review purposes. I was asked to offer an honest review within a month but there was no pressure or suggestion that I should be favourable (or otherwise!). The opinions above are my own straightforward first responses to the book.

Link The Science and Spirituality of Addiction on Bookshop Stuart Morse’s Website

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Mindfulness for revolutionaries

For me, as someone who leads mindfulness sessions is a modern unviversity, this article The mindfulness conspiracy | Life and style | The Guardian is interesting, provocative and challenging. However, perhaps not in the way the author (Ronald Purser ) would expect because I actually agree with him in most respects but one. I think that perhaps the heart of his critique can be seen in this paragraph

It is a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologising and medicalisation of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment – in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive.

And the truth is that I agree that mindfulness can be used as a kind of shoring-up of individuals and distract attention from the arguably more insightful and humanly-beneficial work of analysing the structural reasons for distress and to reinforce the privatising and individualising of finding solutions to it that don't involve changing the 'system'. I don't think we should acquiesce in the idea that the real benefits of mindfulness should only be used by big business or its equivalents for their own own ends.

Well, I don't necessarily agree. I do agree that mindfulness can be and often is used as a kind of sticking plaster over a big wound that needs a more corporate treatment. So to be clear, I do believe that the kind of stress that university staff whom I host sessions for would be well served by changes in governmentally-driven regimes which marketise HE and starve it, in effect, of funding. In turn this means that staff are having to do more with less and face greater precarity in greater numbers than before. I'm not saying that there were not faults in the previous systems. Some reforms are helpful but those that are have been overwhelmed by those that are not.

So why do I continue to offer mindfulness within our university? Well, there are several reasons and I'll mention some here that address the critique that Ronald Purser helpfully offers in the article.

Probably the most pressing is that by doing so I think that I am helping people. The research and informal feedback indicate that doing this stuff genuinely does help people to cope. And while I do not think that mindfulness sessions are the ultimate or only thing that should be done, if it helps some people then its usefulness as a kind of first aid, let's say, justifies doing it. Where I would be remiss would be if I were colluding with the forces of market disciplinary ideology but in itself mindfulness is not this: I do point out to people in wider conversation that I believe the more important long-term work is to change the system to be more humane and not to dump its labour-related externalities on its own workers.

In fact, I think that mindfulness can help in this more 'revolutionary' work. The flip side of the critique of mindfulness as co-optable into marketisation prop is that it can assist those working to change things. If mindfulness can help develop resilience for profit, then it can help develop resilience for change-making. If mindfulness can help people to work more efficiently for someone else to profit, it can help people work more efficiently for change. If it helps greater clarity of thought and reaction for profit, it can do so for analysing root causes of distress and help conscientisation.

If we took the message to be, 'mindfulness is being used as a tool to pacify workers in inhumane working conditions, therefore we should stop people learning mindfulness techniques' then I would say we are missing the possibility that mindfulness could be part of wider strategies to change things. It can be part of a message which says, 'use your greater clarity and ability to gain space to not simply react to consider how to make the conditions better and not to need to work so hard to adjust yourselves to unreasonable and inhumane conditions: notice you are not at fault, but the system you are in is. Direct the anger you find to changing the conditions'.

So, I suppose that I am disagreeing with the very next bit of what Ronald Purser writes:

Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practising “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.

Let's look at it a bit more closely. 'Do not permit critique' -I'd agree if it was 'in the usual format on offer by the mindfulness industry'. However, I would say that it is perfectly possible for a mindfulness group leader to have conversations about this and to have conversations about how mindfulness permits us to gain insights which can inform critique and can help us to gain a degree of resilience to take action on those insights. After all, if the problem is that people are being overworked, in effect, then asking them to take more action to resist or overturn things is going to require from them more than they may feel they can do: mindfulness techniques can be something that helps with that.

'Accept things as they are' -yes this can be co-opted into social anaesthesia. But only if it is tied to a conservative no-change vision of the way things are. This may be implicitly what wider society and media do but it is not inherent to mindfulness. Mindfulness can support those engaging in social, political and economic change and is not inherently conservative. In fact, by helping us to be more aware of our own reactions we can begin to be clearer about what is, in fact, our own baggage and our own capability and what needs wider and collective action. Ironically, many businesses want workers to be more creative and to think more widely -but then they may have to work to try to keep that within the bounds of their own enterprise. Creativity could cut both ways and come up with ways for working people to subvert the system. 

'Non judgmental present moment awareness' can lead/help us to be aware that actually it's not us, it really is 'them', that the 'promise/hope' of better life or conditions if we just endure this, work a bit harder etc is not serving us in the present and maybe never will; it can strip off those ideological illusions that keep us being well-oiled cogs in the profit-machine. The task is to provide alternative voices to assist the potential conscientisation that mindfulness can be the midwife for. Don't let the business leaders have all the best techniques for helping us to live a little better -let's harness them to socially transformative work.

Activists can burn out too. If these techniques can help those working for change, let's not write them off by only thinking about them as they work within the exploitative frame of mind. We can imagine differently: we can imagine groups of people better able to challenge injustice because they can identify and channel their rightful anger more effectively and learn to have space to properly care for each other by attending to the present experience of hearing the person in front of them and being present to them.

One things this article has done for me is to consider how best to redesign my support leaflets for mindfulness sessions to highlight the importance of not just individualising our responses to workplace stress. And perhaps I will open up conversations with the union activists in our place around this.

Learning involves shared attention -spiritually too

At the moment, I seem to be making connections between stuff I happen across and things to do with mindfulness. Now this is a bit peripheral to what the linked article is focussing on but nevertheless it caught my... well, attention. In the context of connections to mindfulness, this sentence got me thinking:

"Shared attention is the starting point of conscious human learning"

What is intriguing me about this, I think, is that I'm coming to the theological conclusion that mindfulness is shared attention with God. Mindfulness in the sense of giving attention to something and maintaining/returning attention to it is implicated in the picture from Genesis 1 of God giving attention to what was made and what was teeming or doing its (God-given) thing and seeing that it was good. A Christian mindfulness shares God's attentiveness to what is (made), joins God in being mindful of what God has made. So the quote about shared attention in a way characterises a Christian mindfulness by potentially including God. Of course, a point to take from Genesis and systematic theology is that God is the initiator of sharing; God is inviting us to see "that it is good" one piece of the world at a time.

But let's take that further with what that quote goes on to say about conscious human learning. When I hear or read 'learning', I tend to relate that to 'formation', that is to spiritual development and growth. I see the formation as a partially overlapping semantic field with learning. When we grow spiritually it is learning that takes place. When we learn, as Christians, we are to align our learning with our spiritual outlook and experience.
And I can't help but relate that to Genesis 2 and the naming of the creatures. In the bit of the story I'm thinking of, God brings the animals to Adam to name and Adam's names stand -"that was its name". I have written elsewhere of what is implied by naming. Briefly, naming implies noticing and learning about similarities and differences. It involves, to some degree at least, classifying and deciding what is 'in' or 'out' in the application of a label /name; "Yes that is also a squirrel but it's red, while that one was grey", for example. In this story we note how attention is shared, in fact how God engineers a shared focus to which Adam responds by noticing, learning and consolidating learning by naming. It's worth noticing too that from this perspective the 'naming' which is art or science is essentially the same: focus, notice similarities and differences and render them into another medium in order to think about and share learning. So, in this story shared attention really is the starting point of conscious human learning.

The sharing bit is important too.

before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”

Is that not also present in the Genesis 2 story? God's giving being and the sense of belonging engendered by the induction into a status in the garden. It's important too because language is a shared endeavour. Language is never a solo operation. Shared attention requires trust and mutual respect: we won't share attention if we sense that in doing so we are being co-opted to our detriment. There's probably a theology of advertising lurking there ...

How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete | News | The Guardian: ' via Blog this'

Mind Your Life -a review

There are things that warmed me to this book before I even read it: I was pleased that the author, Meg Salter, had learned to 'do mindfulness' in everyday life -some of it rather busy and ordinary- rather than by going away on retreats. I was interested too by Meg's coaching background in relation to this, intuitively feeling that this could potentially form a helpful alliance with mindfulness in the everyday; not least because there is a feeling of kinship between that and some of the spiritual direction work I do.

The book reads very calmly and seems likely to suit real novices in the mindfulness 'game'. It doesn't take much for granted and explains fairly carefully what is involved and -importantly in my view- why. There's a good explanation of what mindfulness exercises are intended to do and this is cross-referenced implicitly by including some helpfully selected first-person pieces from a variety of ordinary practitioners. There is also a well-distilled and presented case made for the potential benefits which doesn't overpromise but rather simply presents the evidence.

For myself, as someone who leads mindfulness meditation sessions, I found different takes on familiar things and some potentially helpful exercises or ways to do them which may benefit me and those I regularly give examples to by leading them through exercises.

What I really appreciate about this book is the careful descriptions of exercises from the point of view of experience and what it may be like. It is well observed, at least it seems so from my subjectivity, and helpful in the detail at each point even though a number of exercises are the same basic thing simply run through different sensory modalities, yet the differences are captured and enable the 'translations' to be better calibrated, so to say.

There's also an interesting set of exercises on noticing the endings of things that we have in our sensorium and this is used as a further set of exercises towards transcendence. This is really intriguing and worth pursuing.

All in all, I'd say that this book is likely to be useful to people starting out in meditation and mindfulness as well as having enriching things to offer to those, like me, with some experience. It's the kind of book to be kept around as a kind of workbook and reference book, perhaps alongside a journal.

Mind Your Life on Amazon
Meg Salter’s Website
Meg Salter on Facebook
Meg Salter on Twitter

#MindYourLife

Mind Your Life: How Mindfulness Can Build Resilience & Reveal Your Extraordinary:

Just so you know: I received this book free from the author and publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I am not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

'via Blog this'

Mindfulness and men and spirituality -or culturally masculine at least

I've been leading mindfulness and more general meditation for a while now; quite typically two or three times a week in the university I work with. Sometimes further afield. One of the things I had realised recently was that the groups' gender composition reminds me a bit of the churches I work with; more women than men. There are some men who come along but typically there are women only or only one or two men in the groups. And it turns out that in research on mindfulness, there are gendered differences which may be related to cultural gender constructions.

... stereotypically, women ruminate and men distract," Britton said. "So for people that tend to be willing to confront or expose themselves or turn toward the difficult, mindfulness is made for [improving] that. For people who have been largely turning their attention away from the difficult, to suddenly bring all their attention to their difficulties can be somewhat counterproductive. While facing one's difficulties and feeling one's emotions may seem to be universally beneficial, it does not take into account that there may be different cultural expectations for men and women around emotionality."

I'm interested in the further research and thoughts about how to identify the composing elements of mindfulness and to package them in a way that might be more accessible to men who actually do fit to some degree the cultural stereotypes of masculinity.

Obviously, I'm wondering whether there may be factors in common with the churches' experience of gender engagement in worship and other activities. In my mind too arises another set of images: Muslim prayers where the situation is pretty much reversed; men pray in our quiet rooms, not so many women do. And I have got to wondering whether the 'forcible' engagement of men in prayer by tradition and scriptural interpretation actually acts as a kind of cultural bulwark to encourage men to be religious. I guess in asking that it seem obvious that the answer must be 'yes' (though there are nuances and caveats to be recognised). I'm also reflecting on my time as one of the conveners of an alternative worship group which was very much weighted towards men participating. Not deliberately, it was just something we noticed after a while. We wondered whether in that set up it was something about using technology and deploying hands-on activity as part of the liturgy which some was enabling of men in the cultured-masculinity of our society.

All of which has me interested to see how the further research works in terms of finding ways to engage men. It's a health and wellbeing issue for that research but I wonder whether there may be insights to be gained for the churches too.