Borrowed and renamed#
Week 4. Provenance, and how to tell a real tradition from something a blogger made up in 2014.
Three weeks in, this course has handed you#
- a sitting practice from South Asia
- a defusion technique from an American psychotherapy tradition
- an argument for going outside built on a Californian neuroimaging study
None of that is a problem. Not knowing it would be.
What the ten minutes actually is#
The standard story. Jon Kabat-Zinn took Theravāda Buddhist vipassanā, stripped the religion out, called it Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, handed it to medicine.
Kabat-Zinn (2011, Contemporary Buddhism) writes about the origins himself. He does not hide the lineage.
The tidy version is wrong in an interesting way#
Husgafvel (2019, also Contemporary Buddhism) went through the history and argues “MBSR equals vipassanā” is far too simple.
Kabat-Zinn was shaped substantially by Mahāyāna and Zen teachers and by Tibetan Dzogchen. MBSR’s philosophical footing diverges from Theravāda in ways that matter.
Adapted from Buddhist contemplative traditions, plural, and then renamed#
The less quotable sentence is the accurate one.
What “secular” hides#
“We do a secular ten minutes” quietly implies the ten minutes was always secular. It was not.
Something was removed to get it here. An ethical framework, a community, a teacher, a purpose beyond feeling better.
Whether that was a reasonable trade or a significant loss is genuinely open. You are allowed a view.
Ikigai#
You have met it as a four-circle diagram. What you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for. Sold as ancient Japanese wisdom.
It was made by a British blogger, Marc Winn, in 2014, by taking a 2011 Spanish purpose diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga and swapping one word.
The real concept#
Older, and real. Mieko Kamiya’s On the Meaning of Life (1966) is a serious treatment.
It has essentially nothing to do with being paid.
Ken Mogi, who writes on the concept, says plainly that the popular version is wrong.
Hoʻoponopono#
Widely sold as a four-phrase mantra. I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.
That version was popularised in the 2000s by Hew Len and Joe Vitale, propelled by an unverifiable story about a psychiatric ward.
Traditional hoʻoponopono is a communal family process for repairing relationships, led by a kahuna lapaʻau. Morrnah Simeona’s 1980s adaptation is the legitimate step in between.
The repeatable pattern#
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | A practice lives in a community, with a teacher and obligations |
| 2 | A Western populariser compresses it into a graphic or a mantra |
| 3 | It recirculates as ancient authenticity, stripped of the community |
| 4 | The locus moves from repairing something between people to optimising an individual |
Step 4 is the one to notice#
Both were about your relations with other people. The export turned each into a private self-improvement tool.
That should be uncomfortable in a course which has so far treated overthinking as a thing happening inside one head.
A framework that disagrees with this course#
Gee, Dudgeon, Schultz, Hart and Kelly (2014), in Working Together, set out an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing framework built on seven domains of connection.
Body. Mind and emotions. Family and kinship. Community. Culture. Country. Spirituality and ancestors.
Mind and emotions is one of seven#
Almost everything this course does sits in that single domain.
Which is a different claim, not a nicer vocabulary#
Catch your loop, notice your layer, build your empty slot. The other six domains get treated as context at best.
A framework in which wellbeing is constituted by connection to family, community, culture and Country is making a different claim about where a mind is located.
Not resolved today. It may be part of why the techniques help less than everyone hopes.
Where the rest came from#
- The defusion stem is Steven Hayes’ ACT. American, about forty years old.
- Going outside rests on Bratman and colleagues (2015). The related shinrin-yoku was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, then head of Japan’s Forestry Agency. One review found 28 studies with methodological problems, and a recent meta-analysis rated every outcome “very low” certainty.
- Slow breathing is the weakest here. The six-breaths-a-minute figure rests on a narrative review. A pranayama meta-analysis found a small effect against passive control only, vanishing once high-risk-of-bias studies came out. Nobody has studied it on rumination.
Argue with one of these#
- The four-circle ikigai is more useful to more people than the real concept ever was. Does that matter? Argue both sides.
- If the community was part of the mechanism, exporting the technique without it is not simplification. It is removing an active ingredient. How would you test that?
- Take the seven domains seriously for ten minutes. Which crit would you redesign, and how?
- This course opens every class with a borrowed practice and has now spent a lecture on the ethics of borrowing. Is that sufficient, or is it just well-documented borrowing?