[32.0] From the archives: Sahanika Ratnayake

Why is mindfulness offered by the institutions that make us unwell?

Hi converts! Rather than do my monthly-ish thing and raise your cortisol levels through original writing about our troubled future, I thought I’d switch things up and raise your cortisol levels through recycled writing about our troubled future. What better way to do than than a 2021 interview I conducted for P.E. Moskowitz’s Mental Hellth? Happy reading/stressing 😌 –AW

Mindfulness has become mainstream: meditation apps proliferate on our phones; influencers encourage us to take five minutes to breathe and let go of our days. But to philosopher Sahanika Ratnayake, mindfulness is a silent epistemic threat. She confronted a creeping sense of estrangement from her emotions and sense of self after regularly practicing mindfulness in graduate school, and eventually re-applied to other PhD programs to make sense of her experiences.

Ratnayake’s findings led her to sit with the core assumptions of Buddhist thought. Mindfulness may label itself as unthreatening—largely thanks to secularizing evangelists like Jon Kabat-Zinn (above) as well as the runaway success of apps like Headspace and Calm—but the practice is invariably a product of its source code, namely the Buddhist doctrine of anattā, or “no-self.” The tenet denies the metaphysical category of the self or any notion of a soul, or spirit, or individual identity. 

“With the no-self doctrine, we relinquish not only more familiar understandings of the self, but also the idea that mental phenomena such as thoughts and feelings are our own,” Ratnayake explains in an essay for Aeon. “In doing so, we make it harder to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and to tell a broader story about ourselves and our lives.” This subtle divorce from wider contexts further feeds into the individualization of mental healthcare, which constrains our responses to societal fuckery. Through naming and letting go of emotions, foregrounding transience and detachment, practitioners of mindfulness may enhance their capacity to tolerate the stresses of capitalism—but only for so long.

Ratnayake's Aeon article went viral when it was published in 2019; a slew of hot-take responses followed. With those second-order pontifications in mind, and with some time and distance, Ratnayake returned to her arguments on mindfulness, centering the roles of Orientalism and capitalism in shaping milky defenses of “authentic” mindfulness. 

Adam Willems: I’m wondering how you’ve personally approached mindfulness since your Aeon piece. 

Sahanika Ratnayake: I’ve avoided it, really, not least because it would be the height of hypocrisy! Insofar as I’ve looked into meditative things, it’s not been mindfulness, and it’s been things like mild hypnosis where people talk to you as you’re falling asleep. 

AW: A central thesis to your Aeon piece is that mindfulness prevents practitioners from developing coherent narratives about themselves—but your essay, on a macroscopic level, is a very clear narrative about how you understand yourself. Was the process of writing the article an attempt to reclaim some of the erosion of identity that mindfulness had inflicted? Was your academic journey a therapeutic one?

SR: It's interesting—the Aeon piece actually came out a couple of years after my academic work on the same topic. By that point, I had not been working on mindfulness at all. It was only in the aftermath of the Aeon piece that I realized that what I'd essentially written was not straightforwardly a critique of mindfulness, but of the Buddhist theory of no-self. I actually hadn't thought of it that way at all. I found this quite peculiar because if there's a philosophical idea that I have a lot of love for it would be the study of no-self. I think it’s beautifully argued, I think it's compelling. There's something so right about it. 

It was only post hoc that I realized what I'd been doing all along. So it was this weird thing where I changed my mind, but it happened somewhere on a level I didn’t realize. It's not that I've changed my mind in terms of the idea of no-self, but I think it's more—as I say in the Aeon peace—the sort of work it does. Certainly not with regard to the sorts of things that I'm interested in, like the need for political change and social justice, and so on. 

Insofar as I've gone on this journey, I'm not sure I've changed my mind on the ontology of the thing, but certainly, as a result, I’ve just started doing things. I think we have this weird culture where we feel like we're doing stuff by virtue of holding the right opinions. In the last couple of years, I was like, Oh, that's probably not good! So I've been actually doing things, and what you find when you do things is you are too busy to think about yourself and what you think very much.

AW: That’s really interesting. 

SR: You can see this trend as far back as Freud; insofar as there was a big transformation, it's that, when you start doing things, you realize that so much of this stuff is not actually about what's going wrong in your head. It's about stuff that's quite deeper. Like, I didn't feel embedded in my community, for instance. And that was never going to be something I could give myself by looking at the contents of my head: I had to go off and do some volunteering. So there's definitely the worry that you take part in these individualistic rituals that can never get you what you want.

AW: You saying that makes me think of this latest ghoulish iteration of mindfulness in Amazon warehouses, the AmaZen booths. What is that if not just a bandaid? I'm wondering what thoughts you have on that trajectory or iteration.

SR: What I think about mindfulness is that it is just a symptom of this thing that's been going on in mental healthcare and psychotherapy for so long: this tendency towards individualizing problems, towards offering these very quick, easy solutions to things that look structural. Something really interestingly creepy about mindfulness is that it seems to be offered constantly by the wrong people. I'm sure this was always a thing, but it's extra palatable in mindfulness: Your employer is offering it to you. 

Constant university emails: It's exam week, why not do a mindfulness workshop? I don’t know, Why not make assessments less awful for my students? Somewhere in here is a tendency that we should be pleased about: that at least institutions recognize the need for doing something about these problems. But the solution deployed avoids the root cause of the problem, right? It's like, Let's give you a mindfulness workshop! instead of fixing working conditions. The tidy package of mindfulness incentivizes that.

AW: With that in mind, I wonder what you make of people who are like, Oh, well, this isn't true mindfulness! and who don’t claim these corporatized forms as “authentic?”

SR: It's very weird, isn't it? The fight has moved to a different place: First it was about whether it was authentically Buddhist or not and what that would mean, and now it's about whether it's authentically mindfulness or not. That's quite big and very peculiar. I think mindfulness was so ill-formed to begin with that I can't fathom what they think was the “original” one. It's something to do with that mode of awareness, even in the original Kabat-Zinn work. There's just a cluster of different kinds of exercises. It’s always been so vague that it's not clear how you would put your flag down. By the time you have a thing that can encompass everything from eating raisins to breathing exercises, where exactly are you going to fight this fight? I don't know. It's very odd.

AW: It seems like the resistance is people not wanting to be implicated. 

SR: The various mindfulness institutions have been quite ambitious behind the scenes about protecting the brand. Do you know Jamie Bristow? He's one of the Mindfulness Initiative guys. He actually wrote a response to my piece. Partially, at the time, I didn’t realize how widely read my piece had been. But they're continuing to do that—this kind of “protecting the brand” thing. It's in the interests for mindfulness not to be associated with, like, Amazon, with its terrible working practices.

AW: I wonder if you could comment on whether Jon Kabat-Zinn’s strategies, broadly this stripping of epistemic contexts within mindfulness, come from a kind of Orientalism, or almost—

SR: I love that you say that. The big O word is missing, like, this is straight up Orientalism. There’s the more localized question: How did Buddhism enter psychotherapy? But then there's the broader question: How and why did Buddhism and all these other Eastern traditions enter the West, and how are they treated? 

Of course it's Orientalism. It's so obviously so, in a very disappointing way; it's a little bit tedious. I'm amazed that that word doesn't get brought up. People will point out the cultural appropriation angle, but not necessarily that it is Orientalist—this idea that, you know, there is this mystic secret from somewhere else that was brought to you. 

AW: I may be dipping into a lone genius mythos, but the way I've read histories of Kabat-Zinn, there’s talk about how he's almost refined Buddhism so that it's “functional,” and I feel like underneath that is the implication that it's no longer “threatening”—

SR: Yeah—

AW: As in white people can use it. And there's this Yellow Peril undertone to it also, as in Oh, it won't threaten you. Like, Look, I'm doing it! But maybe that's an extrapolation. 

SR: I mean, I’ve always diagnosed that more in terms of having the need to incorporate it into the medical system. You want to tap into the legitimacy of medical institutions, right? You want to propagate your thinking through mindfulness, but you also want research funding—you want the legitimacy that being ensconced in a medical institution gives you. What you can't do in most countries is bring religion into those spaces. So I always thought that was a strategic choice primarily with that motivation. In the early days of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Kabat-Zinn was very careful to keep those things separate; there are various ambiguities, but I think he did a very good job of cleaning it up for that purpose. So I always thought of it in that way.

And I don't even know how much of it is an Orientalist cleaning up but rather not being very transparent, actually, about what the end goal is—something fairly distressing and not compatible with the target population.

AW: Right.

SR: One of the things I find very interesting about Kabat-Zinn is—and I think you sort of touched on this about the changing boundaries of Buddhism—I've always wondered, which version is Orientalist? Because there's the one where it's like, there's this stable system of thought that you inherited, and then you can't alter it because of cultural appropriation, or is it more respectful to feel like a thought tradition changes over time and can go in different directions? 

Some of this debate should be about that. There's a kind of Orientalism in resisting changes to a belief system and how it mutates as it hits different places, especially for what's essentially a religious thing. We don't find it weird as religions move into different places that they become different. So there's an interesting live question there about whether even the need to argue about its authenticity is weirdly Orientalist—that you feel like it needs to be carefully preserved. It makes sense that things change. I don't like the deceptiveness of what Kabat-Zinn did. But that things change and mutate and people try to adopt them into their cultures is a pretty normal thing. I've always wondered about the flip side of that, and within the hostility towards that is also a weird kind of Orientalism.

AW: An urge to preserve it so that it belongs to the past. 

SR: Yes. Buddhism as it moved to different countries, out of India to China, and then again to Japan, did in fact change in really substantive ways. Why is this different? Why don't we see it that way? And, sure, some of it is like the deliberate processing and the deliberate evasiveness about what it is exactly. But yeah, I've always wondered about how much of that kind of Orientalism was boundary policing from the Western Buddhist side.

AW: I definitely agree with that, in that there's a strange policing of the boundary. It accomplishes a goal for a particular group of people who can claim superiority and authority by saying, I'm doing it the real way, I'm “doing the work” in this very atomized way. I think that actually answers part of the question of what has rendered Buddhist practices so prone to corporatization as compared to other things. 

SR: So a friend who is Muslim said this very interesting thing. She thinks Buddhism spread so successfully because of its lack of profession of faith, and its theoretical account is kind of minimal. The bar for entry is not as high as with other religions. No one is asking you to start off with a profession of faith. It's asking you to go read some stuff. And eventually you're supposed to think about whether life is about suffering or about the self, but there are things that are transplantable. So she thinks there's something about the theoretical commitment to Buddhism itself that makes it very easily spreadable. 

I suppose it comes back to the distinction between the religion and the philosophy, because she is just talking about the philosophy; it's not clear that the richer religious practice can spread that easily. Various rituals that I found growing up in Sri Lanka—you can't pick those up as a block and move them as readily. But can you shift the small individual bits? Probably, yeah.

AW: What are you working on now? 

SR: I spent the PhD looking very closely at cognitive behavioral therapy. In the UK, if you go to the NHS, you basically get CBT for depression and anxiety, and to be honest, for practically everything. For the PhD, it seemed unlikely to me that people who are depressed and anxious just had a series of issues with their thoughts. People in general, like, we don't think very well; bad reasoning can’t possibly be the basis of mental illness, especially with something like depression. 

I want to look at eventually broader questions about therapy as a whole. I'm interested in the story that therapy tells about what it means to live well. So not just treating mental illness, but this broader project of like, what does it mean to have a good life? Because it seems like we now tend to therapists to do that work, which is quite an interesting cultural shift that has been a long time coming. We don't think enough about whether it's a good source of that story.

Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.