Week 4: Borrowed and renamed

Almost every technique in this course came from somewhere else and arrived with the label changed. Where they actually come from, what the adaptations dropped, and how to spot invented tradition

15 March 2027

Open the slides

Where. Outdoors, venue posted by the Friday before. Opens with the ten-minute detox.

Three weeks in, this course has handed you a sitting practice from South Asia, a defusion technique from an American psychotherapy tradition, and an argument for holding class outdoors built on a Californian neuroimaging study. None of that is a problem. Not knowing it would be.

This lecture is about provenance. Where the techniques came from, what got lost on the way here, and how to tell a real tradition from something a blogger made up in 2014. The last one is not a digression. It is the same skill the rest of the course teaches, applied to the course itself.

What the ten minutes actually is#

The standard story is that Jon Kabat-Zinn took Theravāda Buddhist vipassanā practice, stripped the religion out, called it Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and handed it to medicine. Kabat-Zinn has written about the origins himself (2011, Contemporary Buddhism), and he does not hide the lineage.

But the tidy version is wrong in an interesting way. Husgafvel (2019, also in Contemporary Buddhism) went through the history and argues the “MBSR equals vipassanā” account is far too simple. Kabat-Zinn was shaped substantially by Mahāyāna and Zen teachers and by Tibetan Dzogchen, and MBSR’s philosophical footing diverges from Theravāda in ways that matter.

So the accurate sentence is the less quotable one. Adapted from Buddhist contemplative traditions, plural, and then renamed. Which is worth saying out loud, because “we do a secular ten minutes” quietly implies the ten minutes was always secular, and it wasn’t. Something was removed to get it here. An ethical framework, a community, a teacher, a purpose beyond feeling better. Whether that removal was a reasonable trade or a significant loss is a genuinely open question you are allowed to have a view on.

The pattern to watch for#

Now the failure mode, because there is a repeatable one and once you see it you will see it constantly.

Ikigai. You have met it as a four-circle Venn diagram. What you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for. It is presented as ancient Japanese wisdom. It is not. The diagram was made by a British blogger, Marc Winn, in 2014, by taking a 2011 Spanish “purpose” diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga and swapping one word for ikigai. The Japanese concept is real and much older. Mieko Kamiya’s On the Meaning of Life (1966) is a serious treatment, and the concept has essentially nothing to do with being paid. The neuroscientist 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 adaptation in the 1980s is the legitimate step in between.

Look at what those two have in common.

Step 4 is the one to notice. In both cases the practice was originally about your relations with other people, and the export turned it into a private self-improvement tool. That should be uncomfortable in a course that has so far treated overthinking as a thing happening inside one head.

A framework that disagrees with this course#

Which brings us to the most useful challenge on the syllabus.

Gee, Dudgeon, Schultz, Hart and Kelly (2014), writing in Working Together, set out an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing framework built on seven domains of connection. To body; to mind and emotions; to family and kinship; to community; to culture; to Country; and to spirituality and ancestors. Mind and emotions is one of seven.

Read that against this course’s structure and you will notice something awkward. Almost everything here sits in that single domain. Catch your loop, notice your layer, build your empty slot. The other six get treated as context at best. A framework in which wellbeing is constituted by connection to family, community, culture and Country is not offering a nicer vocabulary for the same idea. It is making a different claim about where a mind is located.

I am not going to resolve that today, and I am not going to pretend the course’s individual framing is neutral. It is a choice, it is the dominant one in the literature this course draws on, and it may be part of why the techniques help less than everyone hopes.

Where the rest came from#

For the record, since we are keeping one.

• The defusion stem, “I’m having the thought that…”, is from Steven Hayes’ acceptance and commitment therapy, American, and about forty years old.
• Going outside rests on Bratman and colleagues (2015), Stanford. The related Japanese practice, shinrin-yoku, has a precise and unromantic origin. The term was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, then head of Japan’s Forestry Agency. Its research base is real but weaker than Bratman’s. One review found 28 studies with methodological problems, and a recent meta-analysis rated every outcome “very low” certainty.
• Slow breathing, which someone always asks about, is the weakest of the lot. The famous six-breaths-a-minute figure rests on a narrative review rather than pooled trials; a pranayama meta-analysis found a small effect against passive control only, vanishing once high-risk-of-bias studies were excluded. And nobody has studied it on rumination. Adverse events cluster around the fast techniques, not the slow ones.
• Next week’s material, Morita therapy, is Japanese, from around 1920. It is the one tradition on this list whose core idea contradicts most of what you have been taught about managing feelings.

Discussion#

• The four-circle ikigai is more useful to more people than the real concept ever was. Does that matter? Argue both sides.
• If a practice’s community was part of the mechanism, then exporting the technique without it isn’t simplification. It is removing an active ingredient. How would you test that?
• Take the seven-domain framework seriously for ten minutes. Which crit in this course 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?