How Mindfulness Can Help us Talk About the Things That Divide Us

Stephanie Domet: Barry, when you were a kid you no doubt received the message that you should never talk to anyone about their religion, their income, or their politics. So what made you want to write about politics in your Point of View column? 

Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce: Well, for many years we have received messages from people saying that mindfulness is not political, it shouldn’t be political, and please keep politics out of Mindful magazine and mindful.org. Generally these are common responses to things we might do in our Mindful or Mindless column, where we might ridicule, or be critical of somebody who was overpulloting, or seemed to celebrate contraception being made more available to college students for example. Or which trod into the area of abortion, one of the third rails of politics, particularly in the United States. When we’ve dabbled in climate change, we’ve had people bring that up. So I’ve been thinking for some time, I want to present the understanding that we’ve generally had at Mindful over the years about where politics fits in mindfulness and where it doesn’t. You know in what way is mindfulness apolitical? And in what way is it inevitably political, unavoidably political? 

Stephanie Domet: It seems like it would be easy enough to leave aside the “big-p politics,” so party politics, particular platform ideas or politician’s points of views. But it’s the “small-p politics” that I think you’re talking about. And those are different. And you write in your column, “As Aristotle indicated, human beings are political animals, by which he meant that each human being lives within a community, if not many communities and within those communities we seek to work together to make a good life for all concerned. We aspire to make the world a better place.” Why is that kind of politics inevitable in the practice of mindfulness?

Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce: Well, what I was talking about there is starting with the etymology of the word political, which comes from polis, a polis is a polity and is simply a community. So we live together. We share resources and food and we have to work together in communities families, extended families. So that is an inevitable part of our lives. And why is it that small-p politics comes in, in terms of mindfulness? When we start practicing mindfulness, we tend to be paying attention to ourselves, to our own anxiety, to the difficulty we may be having with our inner critic, to the feeling that we’re not able to pay attention. We get lost in thought too easily. So as we work on our relaxed focus, on attention to what’s immediately at hand, starting with our own body and breath and the immediate surroundings, ultimately we begin to focus or notice and work with the next layer out from there, is that we are connected to other people. that for example for working with our emotions, emotions have a great deal to do with other people. I mean if you were the only person on earth one wonders what kind of emotions you would have. 

So when you look at your connections to other people, it automatically gets you into realms that end up being political. How do we share resources, for example? Which gets you into issues of equality and equity. Are people treated the same? Did they have the same opportunity? Are they discriminated against in various ways? Do they get the same level of attention to their health, to their education? Or are we just spoiling the planet, the environment that provides our shared resources? You can’t help but stumble into this kind of arena. 

Stephanie Domet: Is that true, is it inevitable? Can you practice true mindfulness, and not take other people and their welfare into consideration?

Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce: I like to think of mindfulness as involving a mindfulness practice. We always make the distinction between mindfulness, the basic human capability, and mindful this practice which cultivates that capability. So I like to think of it as having a range of possibilities in terms of how deeply you engage it. So somebody might just take a minute here or there to focus on their breath and pay attention to what they’re doing. And if that helps lessen their anxiety, and perhaps also makes them a little easier on themselves, a little kinder to others around them, let’s say maybe they don’t scream at their child as a result of that, then fine. That’s what mindfulness ends up being for that person, and that’s fabulous. That’s good for that person and good for all of us. If you take it a little further and you begin to investigate with the power of your focused attention and your awareness, mindfulness I do believe will inevitably take you into these rooms that I’ve been talking about. So is there a mindfulness without the small-p politics? Yes, there probably is. But if you stick with it with some vigour and curiosity, you’ll run into those other things.

Is there a mindfulness without the small-p politics? Yes, there probably is. But if you stick with it with some vigour and curiosity, you’ll run into those other things.

Stephanie Domet: So what kinds of ideas would you say fall into that small-p politics arena from Mindful magazine and mindful.org?

Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce: Well I think I’ve mentioned some of them already. I think you need