Martin Stepek

I WAS curious about what happened in history on this day, August 26. I looked up the date on Wikipedia and they had an enormous list of things that had happened. The list added to a question I had been thinking about for the last few years, and especially recently while I’ve been watching a fascinating history of Ireland on BBC 4. That is, are we all carrying the suffering and trauma of countless generations in our genes, our DNA, our minds?

Mindfulness and the Big Bad World

Some things we get from our parents via their genes. The image of your face, whether you are left or right-handed, maybe even your political tendencies.

We are programmed to think in terms of black and white.

I found myself inadvertently caught up in one of those emotionally charged social media threads the other day. I won’t even dignify the original perpetrator, nor the subject, for that would be to keep alive a flame of hatred that doesn’t deserve another moment’s publicity.

When I first discovered mindfulness back in the late 1990s my Tibetan Buddhist teacher at the time taught me a phrase which I have used ever since. Reality is a field of potential. At first it seemed just like one of those New Age, Eastern spiritual quotes that suggest a lot but actually don’t make sense when examined.

In the Western world we have had ideas of mental health and mental illness for millennia. In the past hundreds years or so, through William James, Freud and Jung various thoughts about who we are and why we behave as we do became popular and controversial. The emphasis was on treating people who acted and expressed thoughts and feelings well outside the realms of our everyday experience as a society. Moreover, as mental health issues such as shell shock (now PTSD) in warfare, depression, suicides, and anxiety became more commonly acknowledged most of the emphasis was on how to make unhappy or disturbed people less so.

What is Justice?

Mindfulness is structured around the fact that we are only alive in the present moment. The future isn’t here yet, so all we can do is imagine, hope, or worry about it. The past, meanwhile has already gone, so what we do with our mind is remember, reflect and often ruminate about what has already happened.

So it’s World Cup time, and as you read those words you will have a reaction to that tournament which may vary from enthusiasm to instant dislike. Around the world people from the 32 countries taking part will already have had moments of joy and woe, of thrills and fears, all centred around a couple of dozen men running around a field kicking a ball.