Kate Bowler's Critique of Mindfulness
Mindfulness isn't a solution to the pain life brings. But it can help.
If you haven’t yet discovered Kate Bowler’s podcast, Everything Happens, I recommend giving it a listen. Kate teaches at Duke Divinity School and is the author of five books, including the NY Times bestseller Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.
Kate’s first book, Blessed, was published in 2013. Blessed is a history of the “prosperity gospel,” a movement within Christianity that sees the blessings of health and wealth as a sign of God’s approval. And then in 2015 at age 35, Kate was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Faced with the very real possibility of dying before her young son would be capable of remembering her, Kate refuses to accept any glib justifications for the suffering involved in loss.
Kate Bowler looks life’s pain in the face and responds with love. I perceive that love when I listen to her in conversation and when I read her writing. She’s a voice that deserves to be heard.
And so it was surprising for me to hear Kate, a smart, educated, compassionate, religious studies professor, offer an unsophisticated critique of mindfulness.
Kate was recently interviewed on another podcast I enjoy, We Can Do Hard Things. During the interview, Kate offered two critiques of mindfulness. I’ve tidied up the wording to make it suitable for print. Here, not quite verbatim, is Kate’s first critique:
I love tomorrow. I knew I couldn’t just live in today because today is sometimes shitty. It’s like blood work, and estate planning, or a PTA meeting. Things I truly hate. I think we just have to agree that all of the conventional wisdom about how you can solve the problem of pain by being in the present is a lie.
Mindfulness and being in the present aren’t meant to eliminate all pain and sadness. If Kate has heard teachers of mindfulness make this promise, she’s right to call them out. But she would also do well to pay attention to other teachers. They’re not hard to find.
We often make ourselves miserable with worries, anxieties, and negative stories that run through our minds. “Being in the present” is sometimes offered as a solution to the pain we cause ourselves through unnecessary and unhelpful negative thinking focused on the past or the future. It doesn’t eliminate pain and sadness, but I have found it to be a helpful solution for a lot of self-inflicted suffering.
Sometimes pain is so overwhelming that my system literally can’t manage it. At those times, the floodgates of grief open briefly and then close again so that I have a chance to regain strength before they re-open. I recognize this as a healthy protective process that allows me to experience grief in smaller doses.
But more frequently I avoid emotional pain because it’s unpleasant, not because it’s unbearable. This avoidance shows up when I try to distract myself from negative feelings. And it shows up when I follow my preference to avoid conflicts with those I care about.
I’ve come to recognize that this sort of avoidance makes my life worse, not better. Carl Jung correctly predicted my experience when he said, “Whatever you resist not only persists but grows in size.”
Mindfulness and being in the present are about living with life’s difficulties. They’re not about making these difficulties magically disappear. To suggest otherwise is to create a straw man—a caricature of mindfulness rather than a fair representation of it.
I think Kate gets it wrong when she says “I knew I couldn’t just live in today because today is sometimes shitty.” The mundane activities of everyday life, “blood work, estate planning, and PTA meetings,” don’t get any better if we are stuck in negative stories about the past or the future.
It’s true that mindfulness doesn’t “solve the problem of pain,” but neither does attempting to escape the present. As I’m sure Kate would agree, there is no solution to the problem of pain.
Kate’s second critique of mindfulness seems to arise from another misunderstanding. Again, not quite verbatim:
Mindfulness will not make us less human. Mindfulness will never make us less. I always think of hunger. Not like we’re going to starve to death but the sheer want of more. I think we will feel like that until we die. And I think it’s okay because it means we are alive, and we know what love is. There is never enough. All we want is more.
We all want more time with those we love. We want to rejoice with them in their successes and comfort them in their disappointments. And we want the simple enjoyments of a conversation or having a meal together. Kate seems to suggest that teachers of mindfulness hold out an ideal vision of being human that disconnects us from this hunger for more.
Mindfulness doesn’t imply detachment. I’ve never heard any teacher suggest that mindfulness was about caring less or loving less. My guess is that Kate is making an incorrect and unexamined inference based on teachings she’s heard about equanimity.
In Buddhism, equanimity is one of the “four immeasurables.” The other three are love, compassion, and sympathetic joy. Equanimity is the ability to retain a sense of balance even in the middle of a storm. Equanimity doesn’t mean pretending there is no storm.
Each of these four immeasurables has a “near enemy.” A near enemy is the negative quality you might slip into when cultivating a positive quality. The near enemy of equanimity is indifference. Kate’s critique of mindfulness appears to mistake equanimity for its near enemy of indifference.
A person who stares mortality in the face and manages to retain a sense of balance might sometimes appear to be unaffected by the fact that life comes to an end. But that would be a mistaken perception. A person balancing on a surfboard still experiences the ocean’s waves.
It’s not hard to imagine well-meaning people suggesting to Kate that mindfulness and being in the present would be helpful to her. And it’s easy to imagine Kate rejecting the idea that there is some practice or approach to life that would make the prospect of dying young make sense. I love that Kate rejects the easy answers.
There’s no need for Kate to practice mindfulness if she’s not drawn to it. But not being drawn to it doesn’t excuse misrepresenting a practice she hasn’t thoroughly investigated.
It’s easy, perhaps even natural, to be dismissive of spiritual approaches that are foreign to us. I’ve done it many times. But we should demand more of ourselves and of our best spiritual teachers, teachers like Kate Bowler.
It’s hard to understand our own culture and religion let alone the cultures and religions of others. I have found that the effort is frequently worthwhile.
Having critiqued Kate Bowler, I want to share with you why her voice is important. If Kate Bowler is new to you, here’s an episode of her podcast I recommend. The episode features two devoted Christians in conversation about living with devastating loss. I’m not Christian, and the vocabulary they use is sometimes foreign to me. But there’s a humanity in the conversation that transcends these differences. Regardless of whether you are an atheist, agnostic, Christian, or belong to another religion, I believe you will benefit from the conversation.
Hello Dan Ehrenkrantz,
You bring up some interesting topics, but I am more interested in your view, and not some author that you refer to. If I was on her site, I would speak with her. I am assuming that Bowler disavows the "prosperity gospel"? It is a devastating notion that slavery, and then apartheid are God's plan for mankind, at least in the US Deep South. (And many other world-wide atrocities.)
I think the kindest way to look at this "Ms. Kate" is that she is not really peeved by estate planning or PTA meetings, as she jokingly calls them the bane of her existence, but that she is using them as "click bait" for the assumed level of her readership.
This is a lady that has no idea of how feelings are created (or uncreated), and chooses to escape into her future fantasy world for relief. Of course realizing that fantasy, only happens when that future dream turns into the present reality. Which apparently, she will jump out of, back into her endless future postponement. Really, she the one who needs help, and has nothing to offer except her existing disorders.
There are many meanings of mindfulness, so first we ought to define it. The epitome of mindfulness might be in realms like "non-duality", where after striving with meditation, thoughts might stop long enough that you notice the entity called "ME" has disappeared. OH MY GOD, the "I" must be an illusion. So everything else is an illusion also. (Suffering does stop). Let's call that one mindlessness, (or no-mind).
Other people tell you what mindfulness is too, like sitting there and counting your breaths. (Except the laundry has to be done.)
But let's say that there is a door, or a valve to reality. The closed position is that "I already know that", done that, been there. So mindfulness could be to leave a crack in that closed door, even in the middle of a PTA meeting. Something just might seep in and become "mindful". You could start concrete steps toward that reassuring future dream-world right now.
You said it, that all suffering is from painful stories that run through your mind. Carl Jung said “Whatever you resist not only persists but grows in size.” OR, MAYBE IT DISAPPEARS, because it was just your stupid fabrication, that you stopped creating.
In one section you say "we all yearn for more". I do think we want a more perfect understanding. But that can't be a dogma, like "in God's perfect world, everything happens for a reason". The search for more understanding can also lead to detachment, because humans seek most of all agreement and verification. So eating dinner-with, or meeting-with someone who doesn't seek a new understanding, but only the verification of what they already know, will eventually be avoided. Love is not a fixed declaration, but it's a daily discovery. When friends and relatives no longer support your growth, you move apart.
I am not a Buddhist, but I am interested in considering the "near-enemies" of the four immeasurables. Immeasurable means to me, that it is a daily discovery, not possible as a definition. Ever deepening.
For me, love, compassion, and sympathetic joy conflate. What would really be 4 separate immeasurables?
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