Mis-measuring MINDFULNESS

In 1996 with the ink on his degree in psychology still glistening, he moved to Bangkok, took a teaching position at Assumption University, and began trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life. Two years later he headed back to America with a young woman and an ancient way of life. The woman was a Thai artist named Varinthorn; the way of life was a philosophy called Buddhism. Both were to play key roles in his journey through grad school, a post-doc at Harvard, and a faculty position at Pacific University.

A few years into his training in clinical psychology he returned home one evening with a book on mindfulness, eager to tell his Buddhist wife all about it. It’s a class of psychotherapies, he explained, based on the mindfulness meditation practices of Buddhism that helps people manage their emotions by teaching them how to direct their attention to the things that are happening in and around them. 

“I’ll never forget it,” he says. “I handed her this book – Segal’s ‘Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy’ – and she kind of looked it over, read the back cover then just shook her head and said, ‘You white people just don’t get it.’”

“What? What don’t we get?” he asked.

“Mindfulness isn’t for making unhappiness go away. You’re missing the whole point.”

He argued with her for a bit then quickly realised that doing so was silly. 

“I saw that she was right,” he recalls. “I mean, as a psychologist I know what works but I could see that as someone who grew up in a Buddhist culture she would have a different understanding of these things.”

Marital harmony had been preserved, but questions remained. What is mindfulness? Is it what Western psychologists say it is or is it what Asian Buddhists say it is?

Thus a study was born; several of them, actually, including one funded by America’s National Institutes of Health, such is the importance of mindfulness these days in a land where Time magazine’s front page heralded the country’s “Mindfulness Revolution” in 2014.

The first, in 2008, generated more questions than answers. For it Christopher went to Thailand’s Pa Khao Yai Temple whose monks belong to the Forest Tradition, the form of Buddhism in which most of the American importers of mindfulness meditation trained during the ’60s and ’70s. He approached this rather stern crowd and whipped out several “mindfulness inventories” – questionnaires developed by Western psychologists to assess mindfulness.

The results were perplexing. “According to these measures,” says Christopher, “these monks were less mindful than your average college freshman in America that had no background in meditation, who didn’t even know what mindfulness was!”

To get a clearer picture of what was going on, he next rounded up some 800 college undergraduates – half of them American and the other half Thai – and gave them the same questionnaires. The results were neatly summed up in the title of his 2009 paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychology – “Mindfulness in Thailand and the United States: A Case of Apples versus Oranges?” 

Americans and Thais, he had discovered, have markedly different ways of understanding mindfulness, even though Thailand was the source of the mindfulness practices that America had imported and supposedly turned into a revolution. So, was there a problem with the questionnaires, or did mindfulness change when it came to be practised by Americans? As a clinician Christopher takes a pragmatic view that splits the difference.

“These inventories were designed to assess a more Western way of conceptualising mindfulness so if you’re going to use them on Americans I don’t think there’s a problem. But if you try to use them in Thailand I don’t think they will give you valid information.”

A handful of researchers in Thailand, including doctors Orawan and Chatchawan Silpakit of Srithanya and Ramathibodi hospitals, have taken note and in consultation with Thai Buddhist monks have begun hammering these questionnaires into things that can be used with Thais. Christopher thinks they’re on the right track. “They’re doing what I think needs to be done when developing these inventories for a Buddhist culture,” he says. “Speak to the experts.”

And this is exactly what he did on his final attempt to triangulate mindfulness and perhaps challenge Varinthorn’s original appraisal of how it was understood by Westerners. This time, though, the subjects were American Zen Buddhist monks at a monastery in Oregon called Great Vow and he followed up his questionnaires with in-depth personal interviews. 

Their comments were illuminating. One said that he thought attempting a scientific understanding of mindfulness was like trying to nail jello to a wall. Many others remarked to the effect that the mindfulness Christopher and his team were studying was just like the mindfulness the monks were practising ... only smaller.

So after all of this work, how does this psychologist see the difference between how Thais and Americans understand mindfulness?

“The biggest difference between the two is that in Thailand mindfulness is just one part of the much larger system of Buddhism whereas in America mindfulness is the system,” he says.

These days Professor Christopher spends his time studying more easily measured things – the benefits of mindfulness-based therapies themselves. And perhaps that is more in keeping with the true spirit of Buddhism, since for the Buddha it was results that mattered, not theory.

“One thing and one thing only do I teach,” he says in the Majjhima Nikaya. “Suffering and how to end suffering.”