‘A Gift to Yourself’: HDS Professor Monica Sanford on Finding Ways to Be Mindful
In a recent Q&A, Monica Sanford explores the historical roots of mindfulness and what it looks like in practice.
With National Self-Care Week and World Meditation Day coming up, there’s no time like now to begin a mindfulness practice. But what does this mean, and what does it look like? According to Harvard Divinity School (HDS) Lecturer in Ministry Studies and assistant dean for multireligious ministry Monica Sanford, it could be as simple as doing the dishes or taking a walk.
One of the first full-trained Buddhist practical theologians in the U.S. and an ordained Buddhist lay minister in the Chan lineage, Sanford teaches and writes on Buddhist chaplaincy and spiritual care in interfaith settings. The HDS Office of Communications spoke with her to explore the history of mindfulness, how the concept came to the West, and how everyday people can become more mindful in their lives.
The concept of “mindfulness” is expansive. Within the Buddhist tradition, what does mindfulness mean? What does it look like in practice?
In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness (“sati” in Pali) is very specific. It’s one of the parts of the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the path to liberation from suffering through enlightenment or awakening. “Sati” plays a prominent role, and it’s a feature of nearly all Buddhist contemplative techniques, whether that’s sitting meditation, breathing meditation, or walking meditation, or art forms such as ikebana or calligraphy. Even in Zen monasteries, monks and other practitioners are supposed to clean and cook and sweep in mindful ways. It’s a cornerstone of the tradition.
Within this tradition, there is a difference between “right mindfulness” and “wrong mindfulness.” The former is when one recollects where they are, what they are doing, and for what ultimate purpose: liberation from suffering. Mindlessness—being distracted or unaware—would be the opposite of this, as would recollecting things that are not healthy, such as ruminating on anxious or distressing thoughts. Even attempting to be mindful so that one can be better at a skill that’s ultimately harmful—this would not be right mindfulness.
Mindfulness is something that Buddhism has offered to the secular world in a much broader context. Buddhists do not care if you’re Buddhist; they’ll teach anyone mindfulness. That said, in the Buddhist path, it’s not a value-neutral good; it’s for a particular purpose: to find liberation from suffering.
There is increasing curiosity about and interest in mindfulness within American society. For those who may not know, could you share with us the historical roots of mindfulness? How might this historical perspective inform contemporary understandings of the concept?
“Sati” is roughly 2,500 years old. One important historical aspect is that, within this ancient Buddhist context, “sati” is embedded within a system of philosophy, practice, community, and ethics. To be mindful is to be ethical.
What brought mindfulness to the attention of Western society, by and large, was the work of Western scholars who went to Asia in the mid-twentieth century and studied Buddhist meditation techniques and Asian teachers who wanted to make mindfulness more accessible. When they returned, they adapted these techniques specifically for the purpose of making them more accessible to secular audiences. One example is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has lectured here at Harvard. After he returned from Southeast Asia, where he learned Buddhist meditation techniques, he got a medical degree and created mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which is now a standard curriculum within mental healthcare.
Now there is a whole host of mindfulness-based interventions that are used broadly in psychology, therapy, social work, and medicine. Mindful compassion training, dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy—these are just a few examples. All these emerged from the study of Buddhist mindfulness practices. Now, researchers are putting advanced mindfulness practitioners in Functional MRI (fMRI) machines to analyze their brain scans during meditation. What has always interested me in these studies is the degree to which meditative techniques—particularly breath meditation—can reactivate the parasympathetic nervous system, particularly during moments of extreme stress, when the sympathetic nervous system is activated. It’s a good reminder that stress must first be met in the body.
Mindfulness isn’t ultimately for the sake of being mindful; we practice mindfulness so that we can direct our minds to what we want to pay attention to without getting distracted, discouraged, or overwhelmed."
Someone comes to your office and says they want to incorporate mindfulness in their life but do not know where to begin. What would you recommend?
I’d begin by asking them about their life. What are they doing already in terms of mindfulness? Where are they struggling? What are the conditions in which they’re finding themselves unable to be mindful yet wishing they were?
Generally, when someone wants to become more mindful, I recommend exercise. It’s the same with physical health—if someone wants to be more physically fit, exercise will be part of that process. In order to become more mindful, one must exercise the mind and learn to control their mental diet. Are they mentally imbibing content that makes them restless or anxious, things that disturb their calm?
Breath meditation is a good place to start. There are many apps that can help facilitate, but maybe they’d like to work with someone who can guide them in their practice; maybe they’d like to join a community—some people benefit from meditating in a group. And maybe breath meditation isn’t for them. I’d suggest loving kindness meditation or walking meditation or meditating while doing the dishes—it’s all adaptable.
Finally, I’d remind them that mindfulness isn’t ultimately for the sake of being mindful; we practice mindfulness so that we can direct our minds to what we want to pay attention to without getting distracted, discouraged, or overwhelmed.
In an article for the Harvard Gazette published late last year, you reflected on paying attention—both the difficulties in doing so in our digital age and the ways you personally put it into practice. Can you talk about how we can practice paying attention amid so much noise and distraction?
One way I put this into practice is, when I’m walking somewhere, I don’t listen to anything. There is some connection between walking—that motion of your body—and the functioning of the brain. When we listen to something while walking, we short-circuit that. So, I walk, and I try to pay attention to my surroundings, my sense perceptions: what I’m seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling. I try not to think about what I need to get done—just being in the present moment, not in the past or future.
When I’m at conferences, I knit. I used to do this with some colleagues in my PhD cohort: we knit our way through every class. It helps me listen better. So, in order to practice paying attention, I’d suggest attending to the things you like doing intrinsically. It could be folding laundry or pulling weeds in the garden. Find an activity like that, something you love doing, and build it into your day or week and give it your full attention. You may find it becomes a gift to yourself.
In January, HDS is hosting a new Professional and Lifelong Learning (PLL) offering, Insight into Compassion, a follow-up initiative to the Insight into Mindfulness PLL. What will be the focus of this two-day session?
Insight into Mindfulness was created in order to bring the teaching of mindfulness back into the broader ecosystem in which it functions. It’s for mental health professionals who want to use mindfulness modalities in their work, as well as better understand the Buddhist context it comes from and the larger philosophical system in which it is embedded.
Insight into Compassion is an extension of that, because in the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is for compassion. Compassion is the alleviation of suffering—“karuna” is the Buddhist word for this. It’s an exploration of compassion from the Buddhist perspective.
In the literature of the helping professions, many discuss the trio of “compassion fatigue,” “secondary trauma,” and “burnout.” These stem from what is called “emotional contagion”: suffering induced by the suffering of another. Whereas the English word “compassion” means literally “to suffer with,” the Buddhist karuna does not connote this. I do not need to suffer with someone to want to alleviate their suffering.
Insight into Compassion will help mental health professionals build resiliency through the experience of “compassion satisfaction”: when a person derives satisfaction from helping another suffer less. This helps reframe the work, making it more energizing, a source of joy. This is critical for caregiving professionals, because they need to find joy in helping traumatized people. Buddhists are pessimistic—we believe that all life is suffering. There is no end to the amount of suffering for which we need to have compassion. So, in that work it’s important to build a bridge between mindfulness and compassion.
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