International Conference on Mindfulness 2024

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Strand 5: Political, environmental, and global initiatives

political, environmental, and global initiatives

How can we turn mindfulness into action – personally, politically and socially?

Mindfulness has the potential to make a significant impact in our world at a time when we are facing multiple challenges. But for this to be realised, we all need to step up to meet the current issues of our time. We need to engage with policymakers, politicians, and influencers to establish sustainable and structured frameworks for mindfulness to thrive. As we draw the conference to a close, this strand will support us to reflect deeply about how each of us can make a difference and move forward with the work that is needed. We’ll consider our own unique contexts, life experience and skills that enable us to play a part in the bigger whole.   

The strand includes, but is not limited to:

  • Future Generations Act in Wales
  • Mindfulness and the interface with politics
  • Meditation practice and environmental/political attitudes and behaviour
  • Eco-anxiety
    Effects of climate change on individuals and society
  • Mindfulness and sustainability
  • Mindfulness and consumer behaviours?

Strand 5 begins with a Keynote from Jamie Bristow that incorporated a Panel and audience discussion. After this you can choose to attend either: a workshop, research symposium, or guided practice, which will be held across various spaces in Bangor University’s Pontio Centre. Strand 5’s closing Keynote is presented virtually with Jon Kabat-Zinn. 

keynote and panel

Agency and Connection in the Polycrisis: Mindfulness as a Foundational Capacity for Societal Transformation with Jamie Bristow

Society is experiencing profound, interrelated shocks from rapid cultural, technological and environmental change. These shocks exacerbate each other, creating a complex and challenging environment for individuals, communities and governments to navigate - a predicament increasingly described as ‘the polycrisis’. In this fraught context, our collective agency – our ability to make sense of the world, make decisions and act together in pursuit of common goals - becomes compromised. Meanwhile, the disconnection that has characterised Modernity - disconnection from ourselves, each other and nature - is further exacerbated, degrading resilience and collaboration. Reinforcing our collective agency and connectedness is a political challenge - how do we organise, find common purpose and build institutions fit for purpose? But it is also an inner challenge - a matter of our individual and collective capacities, our culture, and our fundamental relationship with the natural world. Mindfulness, as an innate capacity that’s amongst the most foundational and transformative for both our agency and ability to connect, has a key role to play.

Drawing on ground-breaking reports published by The Mindfulness Initiative, ‘Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out’ and ‘Mindfulness: Developing Agency in Urgent Times’, in this session Jamie Bristow will lay out a narrative framework and supportive evidence for how mindfulness practice can be understood as most profoundly a training in human agency and conscious connection, and why mindfulness should be considered a foundational capacity for the 21st Century.

Jamie’s keynote presentation will be followed by audience discussion and a panel of respondents who will bring different perspectives on its implications. Cathy-Mae Karelse (EDI Lead for The Mindfulness Initiative) will reflect on the implications for communities, activism and social justice, whilst Roy Ellis (Mindfulness Lead for the Welsh Government) will offer his view on the implications for the work of public servants, and Richard Edwards (Director of The Mindfulness Initiative) will offer comments on how innovation can include this thinking and help mindfulness approaches meet the challenges of our times.

Bristow, J., Bell, R., Wamsler, C. (2022). Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out.

Research and policy report.’ The Mindfulness Initiative and LUCSUS. www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/reconnection

Bristow, J., Bell, R., Nixon, D. (2020). Mindfulness: Developing Agency in Urgent Times. The Mindfulness Initiative. https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/agency-in-urgent-times/

Bristow, J. (Ed.). (2021). Responding to Mindfulness: Developing Agency in Urgent Times – A compilation of essays. The Mindfulness Initiative. https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/responding-to-mindfulness-developing-agency-in-urgent-times-a-compilation-of-essays

closing keynote

Closing Keynote with Jon Kabat-Zinn (Virtual Presentation)

As we draw towards the end of the conference this talk and guided inquiry will support participants in the conference to reflect on their learning and its implications. The session will support deep inquiry into the ways in which the work of teaching or researching mindfulness enables us to contribute to our world in ways that matter. We will reflect on how our mindfulness work engages with challenges at the level of the individual, the community, and the wider social and ecological system within which we are embedded. The session will support inquiry on a very personal level. What is my place in this interconnected global endeavour? What are the unique qualities, skills, contexts, and understandings that I bring? How do these personal elements enable me to develop my work in ways that contribute to the bigger whole.

workshop

Mindfulness for Life: Being the Change You’d Like to See in the World with Willem Kuyken

Hiking in the Lake District of England, I stopped for lunch in a cemetery. There was a headstone with a name and this simple inscription: “A Life Well Lived.” What does a life well lived look like? It’s a question that we’ve all asked in one form or another. It’s a question that has been asked for millennia by artists, from musicians to painters, dancers, sculptors, poets, and rappers, as well as philosophers and contemplatives…. And what does a life lived well look like for you?

Opening from Mindfulness for Life, by Willem Kuyken


The COVID-19 pandemic has made us all reflect on this question. As we emerge from the pandemic, the question of living well in the contemporary world has become a more pressing question. It is the same question that has been a driving force for the development of mindfulness-based programs.

Hundreds of millions of people have been introduced to mindfulness through apps (e.g., Insight Timer, Headspace and Calm), books (e.g., Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World) and tens of thousands through face-to-face mindfulness-based interventions (such as Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy). This workshop will step back to take an overview of the demands of our contemporary world. It will explore the growing field of mindfulness and its applications. What have we learned from research, from developing and teaching mindfulness programs, and from our own mindfulness practice? How can we unlock all that we have learned to create a world without the devastating effects of depression, where people enjoy mental health and well-being and are resourced to meet the challenges of the next 50 years.
 
Whether we are aware of it or not, the world’s most pressing issues affect us directly and indirectly–climate change, an explosion of information, new technology that is driving many societal trends, the prevailing culture. This resonance may be urgent and loud, like someone living in an area where crops are failing because of water shortages, or persistent and pervasive, such as the algorithms feeding us information via our digital devices, or subtle but constant, as in the background pollution of a busy city.
 
Many of the pressing issues in our world will need to be solved by human minds and hearts. This is true for smaller, local issues in our lives, and the larger issues facing not only our generation but also future generations. There are reasons to be hopeful. Throughout history well-trained minds working individually and together have addressed major health problems like smallpox, HIV-AIDS, and most recently COVID-19. Our forebears learned to farm so people could rely on food being available year around. More and more people around the world are living in economic conditions that create financial and material security. Nations and international bodies have created treaties and structures for preventing wars and maintaining security.
 
Being the change you’d like to see in the world is keeping yourself, other people, and our planet in mind, with the compass of your values, a map, and a route map. With curiosity, open-heartedness, and courage to keep learning as you move through different transitions in your life. Imagine an education that helps us develop the wisdom to see how things are, the imagination to see how we’d like them to be, and the creativity and courage to create the world we’d like to live in.
 
The workshop sets out an approach to teaching mindfulness as a transformative, lifelong practice. It will provide a map and route plan for anyone learning or teaching mindfulness. It draws on the mutuality and dialogue between ancient contemplative traditions and modern psychology to provide a road map, compass and a set of foundational skills for life. More than this, it considers how these skills can help us to flourish in the midst of the challenges of the contemporary world. This synthesis of ancient and modern can clarify intentionality, offer an ethical framework and provide a novel perspective on what it means to be “the change we’d like to see in the world.”
 
The workshop is based on Willem Kuyken’s research program at the University of Oxford, the 2019 book, co-authored with Christina Feldman Mindfulness. Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Psychology and two forthcoming books on Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for life. Jon Kabat-Zinn has described these ideas as: “A tour de force that elaborates in exquisite detail – yet with utter accessibility and clarity – what mindfulness is and where it comes from, as well as its profound ethical foundation, clinical applications, growing evidence base, and potential for healing.” A large body of research is attests to mindfulness-based cognitive-therapy’s effectiveness in preventing depression, promoting mental health and in the latest randomized controlled trial, enabling flourishing.
 
Learning and teaching methods
 
The workshop will include teaching, opportunities for discussion, small group work and mindfulness practice. Extensive resources will be provided.
 
Learning outcomes
 
The masterclass will provide answers to these questions:
 

  • What is mindfulness?

  • How can ancient wisdom and modern psychology together help us understand how distress and suffering are created and recreated? How can they help us understand how joy and well-being are created and sustained?

  • How does mindfulness support the path from suffering to flourishing? Is mindfulness a technique or a way of being in the world – or both? How does it enable transformation?

  • What would it take to reconceptualize secular mindfulness training as a transformative lifetime practice that helps people to live in the contemporary world – and more than this to shape the contemporary world in positive ways?

  • What are the important questions around ethics and integrity for mindfulness practitioners, teachers and the wider field? What supports this inquiry?

  • What does it mean to be the change we’d like to see in the world?
 
Who is it for?
 
The workshop is primarily for anyone teaching mindfulness-based programs. However, it will also be of interest to those who are learning mindfulness who wish to deepen their understanding.

Online workshop

Mindfulness Practices in Government: A case study from Wales with Diana Reynolds and Pegs Bailey.

Wales was the first country in the world to embed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into legislation in the Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015). In order to achieve these goals, the Welsh Government has been attempting to embed mindfulness and other aspects of the Inner Development Goals into its ways of working for many years. Diana leads the culture change service that supports this work and has received support and insights from many academics. Most notably and successfully, Rachel Lilley from Birmingham University ran a series of courses that engaged senior civil servants in experiencing, reflecting upon and using Mindfulness Based Behavioural Insights. Pegs is leading small research project to discover more about the lessons that might be drawn from the Welsh experience of implementing mindfulness training and tools. Diana and Pegs will present their latest findings, fresh and tentative, from this work and invite you to discuss them by trying out some of the micro-practices with which civil servants and others in Wales are beginning to experiment.

Research Symposium and Presentations

Abstracts under review

guided practice

A Meditation on Embodied Interdependence: Calling nature toward us and inviting her in to teach us with Margaret Fletcher.

Many students of traditional meditation have heard the instructions on meditating internally, externally and both internally and externally. Still, with all that we have to contend with in our complicated lives, these instructions can be difficult to accomplish. Attending to the whole of life, leave aside caretaking the same, sounds like a lot and is so often overshadowed by immediate demands. What happens when we attune in an embodied, self-inclusive way to the subtle arisings around, in and amongst the whole of awareness? In this practice, we will begin in awareness within our own body-mind (local awareness) then carefully, simultaneously, broadening into the widened body of our inter-being, inter-acting and inter-creating with life itself. Using sensory, attentive and creative means, we’ll experiment with calling in Nature herself to teach us. Such inclusive intimacy with the subtle and the natural leads to clear seeing, compassion, and equanimity. In attuning to the self-regulating intelligence of the planet reaching out to us, we can experience the importance of balancing mindfulness meditation with meditation on interdependence, for the sake of our own life and the one common life of planet Earth. By listening at all levels, our hearts can be liberated into action in response to what is heard, felt and known. Please note: side effects may include the release of anxiety, fear and the sense of an isolated, burdened self!

Teachers of MBIs can adopt meditation on interdependence as an easeful support for themselves and as a means for encouraging embodied awareness of interdependence to come through their teaching. The ripple effects for our students toward loosening the grip of self-isolation and inviting the Earth into our continuous, embodied knowing would be a great gift to life itself.

Learning aims:

  • Examine the potential of embodied interdependence as a formal practice

  • Engage in a guided meditation on embodied interdependence

  • Assess and consider future applications for your personal practice and your life in community

ICM:2024 Mindfulness in a changing world

conference sessions centred around five key strands
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