Scholarship From the Self: A Reason Among Many that Meditation Can Benefit Graduate Students
(This article was originally published in the 2014 Graduate Edition of Focus)
Graduate student life is generally awesome, but it’s a whirlwind. There are ideas to develop, papers to edit, students to assist, milestones to celebrate, CVs to build, money to make, and futures to think about. Tangled up in all of this, it can seem impossible or even irresponsible to stop, breathe, and reflect on what we are doing and why. Gradually, though, I have been letting myself believe that for either aspiring or actual scholars, it can be a bit reckless not to take reflective pauses. Below I offer my thoughts on a fairly recently popularized method of pausing called mindfulness meditation, and its potential impact for graduate students in our scholarly pursuits.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a philosophical concept and technique taught by The Buddha more than 2000 years ago. It is the practice of purposeful, nonjudgmental consciousness – a pure awareness of your thoughts, sensations, and emotions, in the here and now. It is common for meditators to start off by learning to pull their awareness to their own breathing. Sometimes, the technique involves learning to notice thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, but without getting caught up in them.
Sooner or later, the practitioner learns to watch the mind and notice how transient its thoughts are, and it becomes easier to detach from the mind’s ego. In turn, that eases the suffering that comes with getting over-taken by our emotions. A propensity for dispassionately observing the mind arms the mindfulness practitioner with the tools to gain a better understanding of his or her true Self. And as self-awareness deepens, the person progresses towards absolute Awareness, which some people term ‘enlightenment.’ [1]
What does it have to do with Graduate Studies?
I learned about mindfulness very recently, when I came across discussions among law professors that mindfulness techniques should be taught in law schools. I found myself agreeing with them because I could imagine how learning mindfulness could have been helpful during law school and my years of law practice. Many of the benefits that are canvassed by proponents of teaching mindfulness in law school are universal; such as increased concentration, better ability to cope with anxiety, or an improved capacity for solving problems with awareness rather than through emotive reaction. These side effects of mindfulness meditation are obviously constructive skills for graduate students, as they would be for any professional. My reflection, though, is on how the loftier goal of gaining deeper self-understanding is significant for graduate students as aspiring scholars hoping to make meaningful contributions to their fields.
It’s difficult to make a blanket statement about what constitutes great scholarship, but it is probably universal that the best scholarship will contain the most compelling ideas. Such ideas are the product of engaging questions and passionate inquiries. They are appealing because they are fresh, exciting and original – challenging assumptions and habitual forms of thinking. In my mind, the richest actualization of the goal of offering captivating ideas is facilitated by, if not contingent on, self-awareness.
Presenting exciting ideas requires the scholar’s own genuine engagement; and it takes honest self-awareness to know what actually engages us, what really strikes our passion. The pressures of building an academic career can easily distract a person from maintaining an awareness of his or her own true passions. We can and will undertake many projects for a variety of reasons other than genuine engagement and interest. For instance we take on a certain project because of the prospect of a publication, to improve our job or funding prospects, or that someone important has requested that we do it. Of course, my point is not that those reasons for doing things are invalid, or that true engagement is necessarily incompatible with doing things for those reasons. Most people do things for various reasons, and such work might even be pretty interesting. However my point is that when we do work that is not really engaging us, it is naturally less likely to have the most exciting outcome. Furthermore whatever the outcome, it will not be actualizing our self-potential because it does not originate in the self at all.
Self-awareness can be fostered by the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness techniques can help us courageously detach from the whirlwind of graduate school pressures and observe when we are authentically engaged. This may enable us to reconnect with our own genuine passions. In doing this, I think we open the door to ensuring that at least some, or better yet, most of what we do is sincerely engaging to us. That sets the stage for contributing our best ideas – those that truly originate from our passion.
Once engaged in a topic, proficiency in mindfulness can help prepare a scholar to make exciting academic contributions. Through mindfulness techniques, a practitioner learns to come to the core of their own thoughts and emotions by peeling away habitual reactions and uncovering layers of conventions that tend to drive thought patterns. In parallel, the engaged, meditative scholar becomes able, with detached passion, to unwrap the layers of conventional thinking, revealing the deepest underlying assumptions that tend to dictate the thinking in a particular field. Thereby, the scholar paves the road for posing new beginnings or novel endorsements of the old.
The concept of mindfulness captured my attention because of its potential benefits to my scholarship. But perhaps the most important lesson I have learned so far is that being open to experiencing the indwelling Self and allowing its expression is the privilege and pleasure of scholarship. Despite some of its pressures, graduate school probably provides the best space to undertake the exercise of observing one’s own passions, and pursuing them to the extent that is practicable, doing so can build the foundations for a largely passion-driven career.
So, I close by offering the thought that while deeper self-understanding can make us better scholars, the experience of graduate school and the process of scholarship itself can also enliven our self-understanding by giving us space to uncover what engages us, what ignites our passion, and why.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This description is derived from my review of Leonard L. Riskin, “The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Contributions of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers and their Clients” (2002) Harvard Negotiation Law Review 1; Richard Reuben, “Bringing Mindfulness into the Classroom: A Personal Journey” (2012) Journal of Legal Education 674; and Scot Rogers and Jan Jacobowitz, Mindfulness and Professional Responsibility: A Guide for Integrating Mindfulness into Law School Curriculum, (2012, Mindful Living Press: Miami Beach, Florida).