Despoiling the Hipsters

Attempting a Balanced Catholic Perspective on Mindfulness

Mindfulness is generally met with a cold reception in the Catholic circles I’m familiar with. According to what seems like most of the Catholic media figures who have weighed in on the subject, mindfulness at best offers nothing that isn’t already present in the Christian spiritual tradition, and at worst, practicing mindfulness can mislead, and even expose one to psychological and spiritual danger.

Let’s examine the latter claim first. Is mindfulness misleading or dangerous, spiritually or otherwise? The more hardline critics of mindfulness claim that those who practice mindfulness meditation are unwittingly engaging in a non Christian spiritual exercise. They will point out that the standard practices of mindfulness (e.g. following the breath, observing thoughts without judgment, body scanning, etc) originated with Buddhism. Indeed, these practices were developed and promoted by Buddhists for the specific purpose of helping people recognize the truths of Buddhism (e.g. the emptiness of phenomena, the illusory nature of the self etc). And while many modern day promotors of meditation have presented themselves as secular, or at least non sectarian (e.g. John Kabat Zinn, S. N. Goenka), most, on closer inspection, clearly hold philosophical and spiritual assumptions that are incompatible with Christianity.

But this does not by itself prove that mindfulness is inherently Buddhist. The critic, on pain of committing the genetic, or guilt by association fallacy, needs to show not just that mindfulness began with, or is commonly associated with Buddhism, but that mindfulness cannot be practiced apart from Buddhist belief. In my opinion, this is a high bar to clear. What specifically about following your breath or scanning your body requires you to agree with Buddhist philosophy?

Some will try to make this connection by arguing that by suspending our judgment of thoughts, mindfulness meditation fails to follow St. Paul’s instruction to “take every thought captive” (2 Cor 10:5). We’re supposed to do combat with evil, not passively observe it. Mindfulness thus lowers our defenses against temptation, and opens us up to demonic influence.

I’m in full agreement that a genuine temptation should be positively resisted. Just as I would interrupt a meditation session to fix an overflowing sink, I would and have interrupted meditation sessions to pull myself away from sin. However I think this objection overlooks the fact that the mere presence of evil thoughts doesn’t imply that we consent to them. And that’s good news because in the case of violent, lingering, or intrusive temptations, it isn’t always within our power to get rid of them. Nor do we always have the psychological capacity to sustain an active conscious resistance to these thoughts. Worse, sometimes our thoughts act like quicksand: the more we struggle, the deeper we sink. In a letter to a religious sister suffering from intractable temptations, Fr. J.P. De Caussade wrote:

“To this end you have one thing to do: endure your soul’s painful state in peace and silence, with unswerving patience and utter resignation, even as you would endure a fever or other physical sickness.”¹

Accepting and observing the presence evil thoughts is not the same as endorsing or consenting to them. Sometimes temptations are fueled by our thinking, and sometimes engaging with thoughts gives them too much credit. Mindfulness in my experience helps greatly as a way to stop compulsively writhing in the quicksand. More often than not I emerge ready to chart a new course. Far from opening us up to demonic influence, mindfulness, by heightening our awareness and understanding of our inner life, can help us to expose and dismiss the deceptions of the enemy.

Others will say that mindfulness violates the scriptural command to pray unceasingly (1 Thess 5:17). It’s said that we should never seek after stillness of mind or presence in the moment for its own sake, only for the sake of greater union with God. In my opinion, many who make this objection are being selectively literal, or at least inconsistent. Even Carthusian monks will engage in activities which by their very nature absorb one’s full attention, and which are often pursued without explicit reference to or conscious awareness of God. I haven’t encountered a critic of mindfulness who I think would also categorically condemn wood carving, or sports, or music just because they can interfere with uninterrupted conscious prayer. On the contrary, in our age the Church has emphasized the universal call to holiness shared by all Christians in every life circumstance.² If the meaning of prayer can be stretched so broadly that we can say that Brother Lawrence could maintain a prayerful state in the hustle and bustle of his kitchen duties, what reason is left for saying that sense of prayer couldn’t encompass mindfulness meditation? If activities which absorb our attention are ok, why wouldn’t activities which free our attention be ok?

At this stage most will acknowledge that it’s possible to practice mindfulness in principle, but will still caution against them in practice for pragmatic reasons (I will discuss these below). But some double down. They attempt to demonstrate a direct causal link between mindfulness and Buddhism, (or least, it seems, to scare people away from mindfulness) by pointing to the alarming side effects some people experience while engaging in meditation. Google ‘meditation sickness’ or check out the work of scholars like Dr. Jared Lindahl and Dr. Willoughby Britton, and you’ll come across chilling tales of psychotic breaks, extreme bouts of anxiety, and lingering episodes of depersonalization triggered in the course of meditation practice.³ The last side effect is especially touted proof that mindfulness inevitably leads to a Buddhist outlook on life.

Are these side effects the smoking gun critics claim they are? I don’t think so, first and foremost because the Church teaches otherwise. Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger writing as prefect for the Congregation for the doctrine of the faith, did warn that Eastern meditation could “lead to psychic disturbances and, at times moral deviations.” But immediately after this warning he writes:

That does not mean that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented, cannot constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures.⁴

In my opinion this should close the matter for faithful Catholics. If someone wants to say that mindfulness practices cannot be integrated into a Christian life, even in principle, they’re entitled to their opinion. But they aren’t entitled to present themselves as defenders of orthodox Catholic teaching while contradicting clear magisterial teaching on the matter. In addition to the CDF’s allowance, I have three additional thoughts on the meditation sickness concern:

First, it seems to me that more often than not these side effects occur in intensive and metaphysically loaded practices. I’d personally be very surprised to find these side effects occurring in a 15-20 minutes a day practice (e.g. with the Headspace app) with someone who was otherwise totally healthy (please post in the comments if you know of something contrary that I’ve missed in the literature).

Second, these side effects are not unique to Buddhism. I have meditated hundreds of times, but the only time I have experienced anything resembling meditation sickness was on an eight day Ignatian (i.e. Catholic) silent retreat. It turns out that Christianity has its own form of meditation sickness. Google ‘dark night of the soul,’ and read the letters of Mother Theresa which she wrote during her dark night, and you’ll come across stories that are just as harrowing as those of meditation sickness.⁵ And yet we would never think of discouraging people from an ordinary life of prayer because of these, even though Ratzinger wrote that "these trials are not spared anyone who takes prayer seriously."⁶ Yes, it is possible that someone could be plunged into the depths of spiritual agony from simply praying for twenty minutes a day. But this is extremely uncommon, not necessarily a bad thing according to the spiritual doctors of the Church, and it is far more likely that a person will reap abundant benefits from prayer.

Thus, Catholics who seek to discourage meditation because of its bad side effects are throwing stones from a glass house, or at least engaging in special pleading. You can’t ask people to have a nuanced and mystical understanding of the dark night of the soul while fear mongering about meditation sickness. You can’t tell people to not meditate because it’s not safe, while acting as if serious prayer doesn’t also catapult one into a psychological and spiritual war zone. The bottom line is that the unsettling side effects of meditation are an unavoidable hazard of any intensive practice that dramatically reduces stimuli and human interaction. Anyone brave or foolish enough to leave themselves alone with their thoughts must expect to be taken into deep and sometimes dark waters, and they should not do so without the guidance of an experienced teacher. For those experiencing meditation related distress, Dr. Britton runs a non profit called Cheetah House, which offers resources, support, and professional consultations.

Finally, I think this objection doesn’t give enough credit to our rational nature. I think it scapegoats mindfulness for the broader shortcomings in catechesis and formation in the Church. Perhaps meditation does sometimes give impressions which help people understand why Buddhists see the world as they do. But as rational creatures equipped with intellect and will, we are capable of examining, discerning, and integrating our impressions. Mother Teresa experienced for years on end an overwhelming impression that God had abandoned her, and even that he was not real. And yet she was able to recognize that these impressions were false, and maintain her faith. Similarly, a husband can fall suddenly and deeply in love with another woman without concluding that this means he should leave his wife. In my opinion, someone with a strong spiritual life and a robust understanding of the Christian worldview need not fear getting accidentally brainwashed; this is contrary to how God made us.

What I’ve written thus far may have won over some Catholics, but I’m aware that others will find everything I’ve written utterly unimpressive, even if they agree with all of it. To these people I imagine that I’m coming off similarly as the husband I mentioned above might if he started nitpicking the reasons why he shouldn’t go to singles bars. Yes, it’s possible in principle to practice mindfulness meditation, but why wade through all the murky new age waters? Why expose yourself to problematic influences at all when you have harmless alternatives? To reference a familiar analogy often deployed to discourage people from watching movies with racy scenes: would you eat a brownie if a pinch of dog poop had been mixed into the batch (come on, it’s only a little bit of dog poop!)? There seem to be two schools of thought among people who ask these questions:

1) Practicing mindfulness has no unique or overriding benefits; Christianity has its own equivalent tradition of meditation that is just as good

2) There are benefits, but we should only use explicitly Catholic meditation programs

Are there perfectly good Catholic alternatives to mindfulness? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read a Catholic tell others to go read Self Abandonment to Divine Providence, or Practicing the Presence of God, or to pray the Jesus Prayer. Admittedly, I’m not an expert in mindfulness or Catholic spirituality, nor am I a scholar of comparative religion. But after several attempts to integrate these practices with my mindfulness meditation (or vice versa), the Catholic alternatives seem at best mindfulness adjacent. Whenever I’ve tried to do a ‘mindful prayer’ session which incorporates the content and techniques of mindfulness, I’ve always come away feeling like what I did wasn’t quite prayer, and wasn’t quite mindfulness.

The difference I see between prayer and mindfulness meditation is similar to the difference I see between mindfulness meditation and spending time with a friend. On my better days, there’s a lot of overlap. I focus my attention on my friend, and when I notice that my mind has wandered off, I bring it back to them. And sometimes we can even just sit in each other’s presence without having to say, do, or think about anything. But engaging with another person very often requires talking, listening and thinking (among other things). These activities are sometimes incompatible with the single minded focus required by an exercise like following the breath. So I think mindfulness can only be done while praying in the sense and way that we do any other activity which requires our attention.

The closest Christian spiritual practices seem to get to mindfulness comes in their instructions and exhortations to foster recollection. This is important for any healthy relationship. When we set aside time to rest in God’s presence, we ought to be fully present with him, listening with our undivided attention and speaking with our whole heart. We should not check our phones, or let our minds wander to what we will have for lunch later in the day. All well and good, and one of many reasons I made my way through Practicing the Presence of God four times in under a year. I couldn’t get enough. Nevertheless, whenever I read it with my antenna raised for practical advice on how to foster recollection, I came away disappointed. No luck so far with other spiritual works either. As others have noted, Christian spiritual writing is long on content, but short on technique. How do you deal with distraction? Turn your mind back to God. How do you get rich on the stock market? Buy low, sell high! Explaining how recollection can be actively cultivated beyond encouraging perseverence doesn’t seem to be on the radar of the spiritual authors I’ve read. They have the Nike approach to recollection: Just do it!

And in some ways this makes sense. Isn’t the best way to get better at a skill to practice it over and over again? To a point, but this isn’t the full story. Back when I rode the bench on my high school freshman football team, it became abundantly clear that if wanted to get better at football, I’d have to become a serious weight lifter. Cardio training and calisthenics weren’t going to cut it, (as coaches used to think they would in the early days of the sport).⁷ Nor would simply studying my playbook or drilling techniques, or playing more football. The ceiling for my development as a player was firmly set by a ‘football adjacent’ activity.

I think mindfulness meditation has a similar distinct-but complimentary relationship to prayer. Mindfulness meditation is not prayer or a prayer substitute, but I think it has incredible potential to raise the ceiling of prayer, along with many other benefits. Yes, our ‘proficiency’ at prayer boils down to grace, it’s also true that grace builds on nature. I think mindfulness equips us with a nature that can more easily and quickly recognize that the mind has wandered off, and return to focusing on God. For me, I’ve been spared untold amounts of wheel spinning, and time spent carried away by rumination. In addition to the ways mindfulness meditation has enhanced and deepened my ability to pray, it has come with a whole host of mental and emotional benefits. Although not a cure-all, lowered stress, greater patience and compassion, an increased ability to tolerate boredom, a calmer mind, greater self understanding are just some of benefits I’ve experienced. Yes, these benefits can and are obtained through prayer alone just as physical healing can happen through prayer without going to a doctor (I’ve seen this with my own eyes). That doesn’t mean it’s a knock on God’s power to visit the doctor when you’re sick, and neither, I think, is meditating for its intellectual and emotional benefits. I’ve never encountered an opponent of meditation saying “don’t meditate, just pray” who I think would also say “don’t go to the doctor, just pray.”

I’m more sympathetic to the second school of thought, that we should only use specifically Catholic meditation programs. All things being equal, it’s probably better to engage with a person or program who shares your values. That’s why when I go to the doctor I drive a little further to a Catholic medical practice. It’s why I unashamedly use whether a politician is Catholic as a tiebreaker when deciding who to vote for,⁸ and why I’ve invested some of my modest savings in a Catholic run mutual fund. But I recognize that here all things are not always equal. I don’t stick with Catholic meditation content for the same reason that I don’t google ‘Catholic jogging’ when I’m trying to get better at running. And while I’m blessed to have a Catholic physician who is also an excellent doctor, I understand that limiting yourself to Catholic doctors might not be possible or wise for everyone. If a loved one had a heart attack, would you rather have the best heart surgeon, or a mediocre surgeon who happens to be Catholic?

But what about all the New Age wackiness and Eastern spiritual teaching disguised as secular teaching? I admit that’s a risk, and one perhaps someone new or unstable in their faith shouldn’t take. And there’s no shame in fleeing from the world. Many of our greatest saints were desert hermits. I’m not saying that everyone has to go do mindfulness meditation or even that it would be good for everyone. I’m saying that for some the benefits outweigh the risks.

I think there’s really strong precedent for that claim. Back in the third century, Christians lived in a culture steeped in Greek philosophy. My Church Fathers professor Daniel Keating once explained to us that in today’s world, where Greek philosophy has been relegated to the status of niche academic curiosity, we can easily lose sight of the cultural dominance it had, and the extent to which it was a mortal enemy of Christianity. Like modern day opponents of meditation, Tertullian believed Christians had nothing to gain and everything to lose by reading and engaging with philosophy. At best, it offered nothing not already better presented in Christianity, and none of its second rate insights were worth the danger of its misleading ideas and negative influences. We should stick to simple, untainted Christianity. Tertullian famously wrote:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from "the porch of Solomon," who had himself taught that "the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart." Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.⁹

By contrast, Augustine, and later doctors of the Church like Thomas Aquinas wholeheartedly embraced the project of integrating the insights of philosophy into Catholic theology. Augustine pointed out that even though the Israelites were a nation wholly set apart from outsiders, they nevertheless appropriated pagan valuables for use in temple worship. Augustine favorably compared the despoiling of the Egyptians with the pursuit of secular learning :

For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, […]in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, […] but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them.¹⁰

I think any argument against Christians engaging in mindfulness can be made even more strongly against Christians reading Greek philosophy. It’s worth reflecting on how the latter debate played out in the history of the Church: Tertullian became a heretic, while St Augustine became one of the greatest Church fathers, and Thomas’ teaching became the crown jewel of the Church’s intellectual tradition in the west; often as close to the mind of the Church as you can get without being official Church teaching. Far from compromising or diluting theology, the Church’s serious engagement with these ‘pagan’ sources elevated it to heights it would never have reached had we circled the wagons and closed ourselves off from the world.

What explains this? How can non Christian people and ideas enhance Christianity? In trying to make sense of this, the fathers developed the idea of the ‘logos spermatikos’ or ‘seeds of the word.’ Drawing from Paul’s affirmation of the pagans who “unknowingly worship” God (see Acts 17:22-28) , and that all have the law of God written on their hearts (see Romans 2:15), the fathers recognized that God has given all peoples the ability to see truth. Although Christians have the crucial advantage of divine revelation, they don’t have a monopoly on the ability to see and speak rightly of truth. This is why Justin Martyr (admitedly going further than I suspect the magisterium would) could write:

…those who lived before Christ and did not live by the Logos were ungracious enemies of Christ, and murderers of those who lived by the Logos. But those who lived by the Logos, and those who so live now, are Christians, fearless and unperturbed.¹¹

And just as many protestants have far outstripped many Catholics in biblical literacy, I think buddhists and secular meditation teachers have outstripped many Catholics in the ability to recognize and escape rumination (among other things). And as the Church has reaped abundant riches from protestant converts like Scott Hahn, I think we similarly stand to gain abundant riches from the likes of Dr. Gregory Bottaro, who has done a masterful job showing how mindfulness can complement and enhance our spiritual life in his book The Mindful Catholic. Being faithful and traditional simply does not mean sticking only to Catholic sources. I encourage all Catholics, especially those who love tradition, to embrace the Church’s traditional practice of fearlessly engaging and profiting from goodness and truth wherever they are found.

1. Fr. JP De Caussade, S.J., Self Abandonment to Divine Providence, Tan Books, 330.

2. See Lumen Gentium https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

3. See: Jared R. Lindahl and Willoughby B. Britton, ‘I Have This Feeling of Not Really Being Here’ Buddhist Meditation and Changes in Sense of Self’

4. Joseph Ratzinger, CDF: Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, Paragraph 28 https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html

5. For more information on the dark night of the soul check out this article: Mother Teresas Long Dark Night

6. Ratzinger Letter to Bishops, Paragraph 30

7. Here’s an interesting article on the history of strength training in college football: Programs Decades in the Making

8. I said tie breaker! Meaning I wouldn’t vote for a worse candidate just because they are Catholic - don’t yell at me!

9. Tertullian Prescription Against Heretics Ch 7 https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/344tert.html

10. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, Ch. 40 https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/mel/auggoldegypt.html

11. Justin Martyr First Apology https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm