Yet another idea marinates for a year
A few days ago, using the “On This Day” feature of my Day One journal, I discovered that a year ago I’d asked “What are the structural antecedents of mindfulness?” I might have said “prerequisites” or “conditions,” and said “wellness” instead of mindfulness. But the key word here is “structural.” A few days ago I had some similar thoughts about self–care.
The fine analysts over at Conspirituality have rightly questioned the appropriation of wellness practices, its availability outside of White, middle–class America, and its role in smoothing over the indignities of neoliberal capitalism. But I resist the necessity of this connection, and would point to other voices devoted to wellness. For instance, in September 2015 I attended a conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education at Howard University. The opening plenary session was a presentation by Ali Smith, Atman Smith, and Andres Gonzalez of the Holistic Life Foundation, now over twenty years old. It started in Baltimore, but since has expanded to Chicago, Denver, Richmond, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
The Holistic Life Foundation (HLF) is a Baltimore-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to nurturing the wellness of children and adults in underserved communities. HLF is run by BiPOC and demonstrates a deep commitment to learning, community, and stewardship of the environment.
Established through social entrepreneurship in response to the need for mental health services in underserved communities in Baltimore, HLF currently works with 5,000+ Baltimore City Public School students on a weekly basis. The organization’s goal is to improve social, community, educational, and emotional outcomes in low-income, underserved communities by providing multi-faceted programming that empowers youth, families, and adults through yoga, mindfulness, and human and environmental health.
About – Holistic Life Foundation
Beyond exemplars, how do we construe this on a theoretical basis? Quite unrelated to these years–old inquiries, I also thought today that an approach might lie in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
When I was first exposed to DBT by a yoga teacher, it was not yet mainstream. This therapeutic mode, pioneered by Dr. Marsha Linehan, was still not mainstream then, it has become more so now. DBT is an outgrowth of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), which uses the mind to moderate emotional dysregulation, focusing on behavior, rather than traditional psychotherapy’s focus on the origins or roots of maladaptive behavior. Because participants in CBT has complained of the focus on change, “Why can’t you accept that maladaptive coping was at least coping?” Linehan offered of the “central dialectic” of acceptance and change. Short of a worthy longer exploration of DBT, allow me for now to enumerate its four key components:
- Distress Tolerance
- Emotion Regulation
- Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Mindfulness
I choose this order because I think it reflects a progressively longer term of development. In other words, we begin with Distress Tolerance, the ability to chose coping strategies in a crisis, to Emotion Regulation, the development of a deeper recognition of the emotions which produce crises, Interpersonal Effectiveness, is assertive communication and boundary setting with others. Finally, Mindfulness incorporates body–mind practices which develop the capacity for all of the above.
When I ask, then, what are the structural antecedents of wellness, I’m asking what structures exist, or may be built, to support everything less immediate than Distress Tolerance. In my view, as a sociologist, once one gets beyond the momentary coping of that component, things get more social. How, in particular, do we not simply recommend the pablum of “self–care” to our dear ones in distress, when more is required? How do we ourselves offer help in ways that are interpersonally effective, which is to say “maintain boundaries to foster healthy relationships”? It’s clear from sociologist David Karp’s book The Burden of Sympathy that it is necessary to do so.
I think the snarky doom–and–gloom, postmodern analysis of “traps” is a seductive cop out, itself a trap. (I’m looking at you, Conspirituality.) It’s the difference between an “Olympian” and a “Utopian” analysis: one in which one is somehow “above” the fray or right down in the trenches. It’s not enough to decry the coöptation of otherwise liberatory practices. I hear wellness grifters speak mysteriously of a “bodily sovereignty.” We must engage a “constructive programme” toward Poorna Swaraj, a thoroughgoing and social autonomy.
Dance Like Fire 