This Is The Hour: A Call for Reflection and Introspection in the Field of Mindfulness

I have become aware of an odd but familiar feeling arising in me recently. A feeling I am not proud of, even though at times I experience fleeting gratification alongside it. For nearly 16 years, I have been engaged in practicing mindfulness in my own life and also teaching it to others. I have the great privilege and honor of working with some incredibly talented and deeply wise professionals in our field and to play some role in the training of many more teachers over the years, as well as simply having the pleasure of forming connections and building friendships with some amazing mindfulness and compassion professionals across the globe. It has taken me awhile to name the uneasy feeling, or even recognize it as problematic, but now that I see it more clearly I am feeling alarmed. Alarmed for the surreptitious way it crept into my passion for this work, and particularly alarmed for the field as a whole as I begin to recognize this trend wherever I go as I do this work. What is this creeping scourge of the mindfulness community? What could possibly be infecting such a wholesome and heartfelt movement toward health, compassion, and well-being? It is actually an ancient tendency that has innocent enough roots: a tribal mentality. What do I mean by a Btribal mentality^? I mean that feeling of Bus^ as a counterpoint to Bthem.^ Of course we might refer to this as the Bmyth of the separate self^ or even just Bselfing.^ In our work it arises as it does in nearly all human endeavors, as a seemingly innocuous attitude toward a colleague who appears to be doing something not quite right, or a group that seems different in some way. But it is a slippery slope when noticing difference leads to subtle or not-so-subtle exclusion, or even aggression. Let us say you are serving on a submission review committee for a mindfulness conference (as I have done on a few occasions), and although it is an anonymous submission, you recognize the work of a colleague in reading the abstract. You have found yourself doubting the Bdepth of personal practice^ of that particular colleague (a sly way we mindfulness people have of differentiating ourselves from others and appearing to be entirely above reproach in commenting negatively upon one another). You find yourself reading the submission a bit more critically or insteadmentally dismissing or discounting it regardless of the content. Might this simple act of Bjudgment^ actually be what some call a Bmicro-aggression^ with ultimately macro consequences? And these small acts and attitudes begin to leak into other professional activities such that we begin to perceive patterns among certain other people, groups, or programs that just do not sit well with us. We smile and shake hands with these perceived transgressors (the other tribe) when we run into them at retreats or workshops, but we fail to copy them on invitations to collaborate or to invite them to our professional meetings. It is only a short trip from this exclusionary behavior to the somewhat shocking feuds between professional mindfulness groups (sometimes within the same country or community) that are currently well known and consistently maintained over time. This is not to suggest that one should tolerate unskillful actions or attitudes when we encounter them in our colleagues. Instead we should be willing to Blean in^ to the discomfort of gently inquiring when we encounter these potential * Steven D. Hickman shickman@ucsd.edu