Steven Stanley

From discourse to awareness: Rhetoric, mindfulness, and a psychology without foundations

This paper argues for a shift in the grounding of psychology from discourse to a “groundless ground” rooted in an ethically sensitive, within-person, and moment-to-moment embodied awareness. It offers a critique of discursive and rhetorical psychology commensurate with “affective turn” studies and develops an approach based in the practice of mindfulness meditation. This orientation enables the participant-researcher to come into experiential contact with a domain of pre-subjectivity not often addressed by discursive approaches. It also considers parallels between discursive constructionism and Buddhist mindfulness and shows how mindfulness is relationally and rhetorically organized as a social practice.

‘Things said or done long ago are recalled and remembered’: The ethics of mindfulness in early Buddhism, psychotherapy and clinical psychology

I argue that current theoretical understandings of mindfulness as an attention regulation strategy for psychological stress reduction and enhanced adaptation to society may produce de-ethicised therapeutic applications. I show how understandings of mindfulness in early Buddhism, psychotherapy and clinical psychology have changed over time. Current understandings of mindfulness as a skill or technique of bringing non-judgmental awareness (or bare attention) to present moment experience are historically recent and differ from early Buddhist understandings in at least one crucial respect: definitions of mindfulness as attentional control or metacognitive awareness lack an emphasis on deep ethical reflection. As such, we need to re-ethicise our conceptual understanding of mindfulness by remembering early Buddhist texts, where mindfulness involves the cultivation of an ethically sensitive style of remembering, which has largely been lost in contemporary definitions.

Disciplined Improvisation: Characteristics of Inquiry in Mindfulness-Based Teaching

Evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is rapidly growing as interest in this field expands. By contrast, there are few empirical analyses of the pedagogy of MBSR and MBCT. Development of the evidence base concerning the teaching of MBCT or MBSR would support the integrity of the approach in the context of rapid expansion. This paper describes an applied conversation analysis (CA) of the characteristics of inquiry in the MBSR and MBCT teaching process. Audio-recordings of three 8-week MBCT and MBSR classes, with 24, 12, and 6 participants, were transcribed and systematically examined. The study focused on the teacher-led interactive inquiry which takes place in each session after a guided meditation practice. The study describes and analyzes three practices within the inquiry process that can be identified in sequences of talk: turn-taking talk involving questions and reformulations; the development of participant skills in a particular way of describing experience; and talk that constructs intersubjective connection and affiliation within the group. CA enables fine-grained analysis of the interactional work of mindfulness-based inquiry. Inquiry is a process of disciplined improvisation which is both highly specific to the conditions of the moment it took place in and uses repeated and recognizable patterns of interaction.

Swimming against the Stream?: Mindfulness as a Psychosocial Research Methodology

In this article, we extend psychosocial research methodology by integrating a breaching experiment, influenced by ethnomethodological sociology, with aspects of mindfulness practice, influenced by Buddhist traditions. We offer an empirical investigation of what happens when researcher-participants subtly “swim against the stream” of normative public social conduct in a capital city setting. Our qualitative analysis explores a single case from a corpus of 172 first-person retrospective accounts of standing still and doing nothing in a busy, public place. We investigate the qualitative aspects of how one researcher-participant arguably adopted a mindful, beginner’s mind orientation toward the flow of psychosocial consciousness. We empirically investigate this psychosocial orientation of mindfulness by integrating Wetherell’s concept of affective-discursive practice with James’ stream of consciousness. Mindfulness offers a specific, embodied reorientation toward psychosocial flows. We discuss the methodological implications and limitations of this reorientation for psychosocial research.

Sila and Sati: an exploration of ethics and mindfulness in Pali Buddhism and their implications for secular mindfulness-based applications

This chapter explores the ancient Buddhist roots of mindfulness, specifically the relation between mindfulness (sati) and ethics (sīla) in early Buddhism, and their implications for secular mindfulness-based applications. The ancient Pāli canon contains some of the earliest documented teachings of the historical Buddha including his dialogues with various interlocutors such as his students. It is therefore a crucial resource for scholars seeking to understand the ancient roots of mindfulness as a style of meditation, especially its ethical and moral dimensions. My basic argument is that we can learn from the ethical psychology of early Buddhism and this encounter may help us to develop our applications of secular mindfulness in ethically sensitive ways. I review the role of ethics, morality and virtue in early Buddhism and some of the functions of sati (mindfulness) in the Buddha’s teachings. By returning to the ancient sources of Buddhism, we can arguably engage more directly with the ethical and moral basis of the early psychology of mindfulness, and thereby better understand and evaluate the social and political meanings and functions of mindfulness-based applications in modern day society.

Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness

This chapter introduces the Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness and sets the scene by contextualizing the central theme of the volume within a broader historical context. We situate the ethical and moral dimensions of mindfulness against the background of the globalized mindfulness “movement” and the current debates about ethics within the field of mindfulness studies. The ethical foundations of mindfulness are generally considered to be (i) lost in translation; (ii) implicitly inherent; or (iii) constitutive of a wider milieu. We trace these current debates to the legacy of the Welsh Buddhologist Thomas William Rhys Davids (1843–1942). We then briefly summarize each of the 19 chapters comprising the four parts of the volume: (i) Buddhist Foundations of Ethics and Mindfulness; (ii) Education and Pedagogy; (iii) Business, Economics and Environment; and (iv) Religion, Secularity and Post-Secularity. We conclude by making suggestions for potential future avenues for research in the field.

Awakening Psychology: Investigating Everyday Life With Social Mindfulness

In this case study, we reflect upon our experiences of developing practices of social mindfulness, framed and applied as research tools. Social mindfulness involves bringing careful attention to everyday conduct, although we subtly disrupt the common sense, routine, and expected ways of living our lives. This case study aims to help students understand and practice social mindfulness, as a way to “wake up” to how everyday life is produced as being “normal” in various settings—at home, university, and in public places—by subtly “breaching” taken-for-granted ways of living. We frame this social style of mindfulness meditation as a “post-therapeutic” practice, against the backdrop of broader traditions of ethnomethodology, and participatory and contemplative forms of social inquiry in Psychology and Sociology. We show the reader how to put social mindfulness into practice in everyday life settings as a psychological investigation. To better understand social mindfulness, we encourage the reader to try out the practices for themselves, offering guidance on how to conduct several contemplative experiments.

Constructing the mindful subject: reformulating experience through affective-discursive practice in mindfulness-based stress reduction

This chapter presents a critical psychological approach to the study of mindfulness as a situated social, cultural and historical practice. We combine discourse and conversation analysis of language use within mindfulness courses with attention to how subjectivity is collaboratively reconstructed moment-by-moment. Applying the concept of affective–discursive practice to the analysis allows attention to be paid to embodied meaning-making in terms of power, pattern and context. In particular, we aim to illustrate practices of ‘inquiry’ through which mindfulness teachers initiate specific inter-subjective procedures, especially reformulations of participant accounts of what they ‘noticed’ during meditation, which function to practically produce mindful subjects who can monitor, govern and take care of themselves. Mindful subjectivity is produced through the application of liberal power and negotiation of ideological dilemma within inquiry sequences, functioning as technologies of the self.

Discourse analysis of naturally occurring data: the relational development of mindfulness

Discourse analysis allows qualitative researchers to investigate the ways people relationally construct realities through language use, especially through speaking and writing. To understand talk and text as relational practices, we pay close attention to the active dimensions of discourse: its construction, function and variation in specific social and historical contexts. The data used in this exemplar is provided by Dr Steven Stanley from Cardiff University and Dr Rebecca Crane from the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University and is taken from a project investigating the social construction of mindfulness within Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). The project received ethical clearance from the research ethics and governance committee of the School of Psychology at Bangor University and the North Wales Research Ethics Committee. The project contributes findings to developing traditions of mindfulness research, training of mindfulness teachers, and qualitative research on education, training, health, medicine and psychotherapy. The data comprises a transcription of institutional interaction between a MBCT teacher and her students. In this session there are just three participants present – the other three course members are absent due to illness. The course is held in an outpatient oncology unit. The students meet weekly for 2-hour sessions. MBCT is an eight-week psychoeducational course and our data is an extract taken from week two of a course for people with cancer. Six people are enrolled on the course and three female participants are present during this class. The exemplar will help you to analyse naturally occurring interaction, think about power dynamics and teacher dilemmas in pedagogy, and the possible functions of psychological terms in interaction such as ‘mind’.