Tag: philosophy

The Role of Refuge in Mindfulness Practice

Refuge – A Buddhist concept missed by meditation scientists

Why the Absence of Refuge Undermines Western Mindfulness

Western psychology has embraced mindfulness as a panacea, an intervention linked to reduced stress, treating clinical depression, and even improving cognitive function. However, despite its popularity, the lack of robust evidence for its clinical benefits has led many practitioners and scientists to speculate on why the presumed effects of traditional meditation have not been translated into clinical practice.

One of the key elements of traditional meditation, often missing from Western mindfulness, is the concept of Refuge. Refuge is a foundational concept in many meditation traditions, orienting the practitioner’s mind within a broader spiritual and relational framework. In Buddhist meditation, mindfulness is not a standalone technique; it arises within the context of the Refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the Buddha’s teachings), and the Sangha (the community of practitioners). Taking Refuge in these three elements provides an existential grounding and generates confidence in the meditation practice.

The precise nature of Refuge can vary according to the practitioner’s experience and Buddhist school within which the meditation is practised. However, in almost every case, it provides a mindset that serves as a stable base for meditation. Without Refuge, the act of mindfulness risks becoming an attentional exercise, uncoupled from many of the mental processes present in Buddhist meditation. There is growing unrest among some practitioner-scientists about the decontextualisation of mindfulness from traditional forms of meditation; that is, in Westernising and commodifying meditation, the benefits of traditional practice may have been lost.

Segall (2001) argues that when stripped of its Buddhist theoretical frameworks, Western mindfulness loses its transformative potential, becoming susceptible to institutional agendas and materialist objectives.1 Khong (2012) also highlights the limitations of detaching mindfulness from its Buddhist theoretical frameworks.2

Refuge in mindfulness practice
Refuge – The foundation of mindfulness practice

The absence of Refuge is likely to impact cognitive processes and mechanisms able to mediate wellbeing in several ways:

Firstly, a lack of existential orientation: Refuge provides a holistic and spiritual telos, enabling a sense of direction towards awakening and compassion. Without these processes, Western mindfulness tends to privilege mundane, dualistic awareness, overlooking its transcendent and ethical purposes.

Isolation and individualism: The concept of Sangha offers a broader sense of community and collective purpose. The tendency of mindfulness to focus on individual, solitary needs disrupts the balance between self and other, which is central to most nondual Buddhist meditation.

Cognitive reductionism: Buddhist Refuge engages the whole person in context, emotionally, ethically and spiritually. Western clinical meditation methods typically privilege the extrinsic brain network, overlooking mental processes rooted solely in the intrinsic system.

Commodification: The absence of Refuge enables the reconfiguring of mindfulness as a health product, enabling the technique to be co-opted by corporations and institutions, including the military. This shift reshapes the mental processes used in meditation, reinforcing systemic stressors rather than challenging them.

Refuge and the commidification of meditation
The commodification of meditation may have limited its health benefits

The commodification of meditation may have limited its health benefits compared to both traditional practices and scientifically validated interventions. Taking the bigger picture into account, these concerns are the tip of an iceberg.

There is growing disquiet about the cost of the ‘mindfulness experiment’. Estimates of the global bill for the scientific investigation of mindfulness from the 1970s to date range between £1 bn and £5 bn. Several billion more represent the cost of the proliferation of the technique and the investment in training teachers and providing wider support materials. Most scientists working in this field would agree, practising mindfulness brings a degree of relaxation equivalent to and sometimes slightly greater than hundreds of other mundane human behaviours, like art or gardening.

Refuge is a concept rooted in a dual/nondual tension. An issue that is ignored by almost all meditation scientists. The psychological sciences generally present consciousness as a dualistic enterprise. For psychologists, even a preliminary understanding of Buddhism’s theoretical foundations requires a reimagining of mindfulness to access the health benefits of traditional meditation methods. On the balance of evidence, Western versions of traditional meditation are oversimplified and entirely uncoupled from the original curative network that so attracted Western academics from the 1930s onward.

The results of 90 years of meditation research have demonstrated that focusing solely on technique has been a significant error. Integrating elements of Refuge, even from a secular perspective, is likely to restore depth and direction to meditation methods. For example, a starting point for the reintroduction of Refuge could include: The use of transdisciplinary research to establish the cognitive components present in traditional Refuge and to develop the relevant theoretical framework. Encouraging practitioners to understand the concept of Refuge and apply the theoretical framework to their own conditions. Framing mindfulness within a broader narrative of healing, ethical living and growth. Developing secular practices that can cultivate interdependence, compassion and shared community.

Khong has convincingly argued that the maturation of Western mindfulness requires a return to its roots, not to replicate religious forms, but to realign the Westernised practice with the original mental processes that may hold robust potential rather than the marginal benefits that most reliable, optimistic studies present.

The concept of Refuge reminds us that dualist presence alone is not transformative, not on the spiritual nor the clinical levels.  Its absence from Western practices, even in a secular form, evidences the current limitations in how psychology understands and engages with mindtraining originating in non-scientific domains.

References:

Khong, B. S. L. (2021). Revisiting and Re-Envisoning Mindfulness: Buddhist and Contemporary Perspectives. The Humanistic Psychologist, 49(1), 3 -18.  

Segall, S. Z. (2021). Mindfulness In and Out of Context of Western Buddhist Modernism. The Humanistic Psychologist, 49(1), 40-55.

Can Medicalised Mindfulness Evolve?

Could Mindtraining for Life be the long-awaited new dawn for contemplative science?

Most meditation scientists agree that significant progress is needed if contemplative practices are to meet the claims made for their benefits over the last 70 years. Medicalised mindfulness has established a role as a practice that can reduce stress, anxiety, and, in some instances, cognitive dysfunctions. While its clinical applications, especially in protocols like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), have gained some traction, a growing body of critique highlights its limitations: conceptual vagueness, inconsistent outcomes, and detachment from its philosophical roots.

Robust correlations between regular spiritual meditation practice and improved happiness and wellbeing continue to be observed in peer-reviewed literature and society more generally. Psychology has been attempting to harness the curative power of spiritual meditation for over 70 years.1 It seems that whenever meditation and mindfulness are converted to mechanistic practices, and subject to empirical evaluation, most of the health and wellbeing benefits simply dissolve. In experiments, we frequently see modest changes used as ‘evidence’ that medicalised meditation and mindfulness work (an estimated 97% of mindfulness experiments lack adequate controls).

What will medicalised mindfulness evovle into
Religion and science remain ontologically incompatible

It’s probably not possible or desirable to prescribe religious practices as health interventions; that’s not how the spiritual path works. However, there is evidence that secular forms of meditation could still play a significant role in tackling the mental health crisis unfolding across many advanced economies. Medicalised meditation has consistently failed to establish the active cognitive components present in traditional meditation training. In my own private practice, Mindtraining for Life (MfL), we use rationales consistent with nondual Buddhism and psychology, and the benefits to clients’ happiness, wellbeing and success are clear.

Of course, MfL is one of several emerging frameworks that appear to offer a more structured, cognitively rigorous alternative to medicalised meditation. Its unique element is its integration of profound nondual knowledge outside of an explicitly Buddhist context.

If the mindfulness project has failed, what will replace it?
Science has failed to understand the relationship between meditation and consciousness.

At its core, MfL reframes mental resilience not as a passive state of “non-reactivity,” but as an active, trainable skillset grounded in attentional control, cognitive flexibility, and strategic self-regulation. Unlike medicalised mindfulness, which often relies on Westernised dualistic meditation, materialistic concepts of self and other, and ambiguous notions of “present moment awareness,” MfL emphasises goal-directed mental rehearsal, cognitive reframing, emotional regulation, and a basic training in nondual compassion. These techniques are not only more objectively measurable than current medicalised equivalents but also more compatible with neuropsychological models of executive function and emotional regulation.

From a scientific standpoint, this shift matters. Medicalised mindfulness has struggled with reproducibility, standardisation, effect size variability across populations and the concept of nonduality. Meta-analyses reveal modest benefits despite the creation of hundreds of mindfulness variants. Moreover, reliance on fragmented understandings of introspective phenomenology makes mindfulness impossible to standardise across clinical trials and other experiments. MfL’s protocols can be broken down into discrete cognitive tasks, such as attentional switching, scenario visualisation, nondual progression, and resilience scripting; these are likely more amenable to both behavioural and neuroimaging studies. By focusing on individual client needs as a starting point, MfL has retained the holistic and curative value of traditional nondual practices, complemented by reliable neuropsychology. From this platform, a degree of standardisation and operationalisation is likely. Another way to think about this, is in terms of a bottom-up model for contemplative science. After more than a decade of research in this field, I’m certain medicalised meditation needs a more reliable theoretical framework. By creating successful secular equivalents of nondual practices on a one-to-one basis, then scaling them up, we may be seeing the science of meditation turned on its head.

Another advantage of MfL lies in its philosophical neutrality. Medicalised mindfulness often inherits Western interpretation of Buddhist metaphysics (e.g., non-self, impermanence) without critical examination. It then seeks to place these concepts within psychology’s dualistic framework, leading to ontological confusion. Mindtraining sidesteps this by focusing on cognitive processes rather than spiritual insight. This makes it more accessible to diverse populations and more adaptable to transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

Time to try a new approach to contemplative science

Importantly, mindtraining also addresses a key critique of mindfulness: its tendency to individualise systemic stress. By equipping individuals with tools to observe first and then strategically engage with psychological suffering, thus mind training fosters agency and contextual awareness. This aligns with contemporary models of psychological resilience, which emphasise dynamic interaction between person and environment.

In summary, while mindfulness meditation has opened the door to contemplative science, its medicalised form may have reached a conceptual plateau. Mindtraining, as exemplified by the WfL model, offers a promising evolution, one that is cognitively precise, empirically tractable, and philosophically grounded. For scientists and clinicians seeking robust and scalable interventions to work with, it may be time to shift their focus from passive awareness to active mental agility.

1 Morris, Stephen Gene (2024) The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent,. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/

Dr Stephen Gene Morris is a Consultant in Applied Neuropsychology and the founder of Mind Training for Life.

Why Everything You Know Might Be Wrong: Duality, Nonduality and Integration

An Introduction: Part 1 is here

Perhaps the biggest question in science is: What is the nature of human consciousness? This blog post doesn’t seek to resolve this issue but rather discusses known limitations in our models of consciousness and highlights the threats and opportunities of not knowing what consciousness is. Using the Scientific History of Mindfulness as a case study, this short article (and the subsequent series of postings) will illuminate a number of weaknesses in how the psychological sciences make sense of the world. In particular, the failure of psychology to recognise common mental processes essential to consciousness, such as nonduality. Not understanding how the mind works with duality/nonduality has been an extremely costly mistake in psychological research and practice. Limitations in current models of consciousness signpost potential problems in much of what we know about ourselves and those around us.

Put simply, consciousness is how you make sense of everything: awareness of yourself and the world around you. It’s what lets you think, feel, remember, and perceive. It includes your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences. Each of us holds a different way of seeing the world. Think of consciousness as a self-generated prism through which we engage with everything. We share some perspectives with others around us, but each of us essentially has a unique view. If our view of the world is fundamentally distorted, it is because the prism through which we see the world is distorted. To many people, distortions can appear as truth, as objective reality, even when they are subjective. As individuals are also responsible for creating knowledge systems, such as psychology or physics, distortions in consciousness can bleed into ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ thinking.

The belief in science
The unseen relationship between science and belief

In common with all academic disciplines, psychology is based on a series of beliefs about the world that are relative and partial; we call these beliefs ontology. As such, psychology can only offer ‘truths’ based on the rules of psychology rather than actual lived experience (although the two can often coincide). Knowledge that might fall outside empirical psychology, such as beliefs, emotional reasoning, subconscious mental processes or direct human experience, is often inaccessible to experimental psychology. Therefore, if we take the rules of science as ‘truth’, anything that does not conform to scientific norms has to be ignored, devalued or translated into scientific terms.

The idea that experimental processes are limited or flawed would present major problems for industrialised societies. So perhaps it’s not surprising that many traditional knowledge systems and religious concepts are disregarded by Western science, not because they don’t work but because science cannot evaluate them. Techniques from Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as acupuncture, are sometimes adopted by Western clinicians because they are effective. However, the technology is given low status because science cannot understand their underlying theoretical frameworks. In this way, vast swathes of human knowledge and techniques are dismissed because science just doesn’t have the tools to evaluate them.

What happens when two knowledge systems collide?

When you look at the scientific history of mindfulness from a transdisciplinary perspective, several problematic issues are visible in the way scientists treat religious knowledge in general and Buddhist knowledge in particular. By transdisciplinary, I am referring to an academic approach whereby we use all relevant knowledge to better understand what’s actually going on around us. Sometimes, a contrast in how different knowledge systems treat a behaviour, such as meditation, reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the respective systems. In the West, there is a convention that Buddhism is a belief system and, by contrast, the psychological sciences are a form of objective knowledge. Psychology is based on a belief (ontology), as is Buddhism. Science tests its hypotheses through a rational evaluation process, as does Buddhism. However, psychology is a dualistic system that creates dichotomies and artificial divisions that facilitate simplistic ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ conclusions, even to complex questions. Buddhist ontology, particularly in the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, is nondual, meaning it resists simple dichotomisation in favour of more inclusive understandings of mind and matter. The use of mindfulness in Buddhism is rooted in a sense of cause and effect. Ironically, in psychology, mindfulness experiments often rely on correlations rather than causality to explain the benefits of the practice.

The Buddhist concepts underpinning mindfulness are typically ignored or rejected by scientists, in part because psychological sciences are embedded in dualistic ways of knowing, whereas Buddhism tends to the nondual. A major problem for psychology is that human consciousness engages with dual and nondual awareness as well as the integration of both. A challenge in investigating consciousness is that we have to use consciousness to evaluate itself. If the ontologies used as the basis for the psychological sciences are nondual the product of experiments can only produce nondual insights, offering only partial understanding into the human condition. Scientists and clinicians began using religious knowledge and methods in the 1950s because of the healing potential of nondual insights. Over time, Western forms of meditation and mindfulness have removed these nondual elements because they cannot be seen or evaluated by empirical investigation. Science has failed to recognise that something profound (although abstract to dualistic investigation) is likely present in religious forms of meditation.

Experimental methods need to be fit for purpose

A crisis in Western mindfulness research identified a lack of scientific progress, despite 50 years of experiments costing billions of dollars. Yet almost no credible research has been undertaken to try to understand why the project has been relatively unsuccessful. However, because of the status of psychology in Western materialist societies, the transformed (nondual) nature of mindfulness is accepted as ‘truth’; even though the ontology of the psychological sciences reflects neither Buddhist knowledge nor the human condition. Without accepting limitations in the theoretical framework of psychology, we can expect the problems seen in the mindfulness project to be repeated. There is also little hope that dualistic approaches will ever be able to make sense of a human consciousness, which is, in part, nondual.

This is introduction to a series of posts which discuss, using mindfulness as a case study, the role of dual and nondual awareness in understanding the world around us. For Part 1 in the series click here.

How Psychology Misunderstood Mindfulness and What We Do Now

Part 2: Evolution, not Revolution

This is part 2; part 1 can be found here.

Part 1 describes the processes through which mindfulness has been converted from a religious to a scientifically validated practice. On this page, I outline the implications of treating religious and scientific knowledge as congruent. This ‘congruence’ is an ‘imaginary’, an illusion created where scientific communities abandon rational thinking in favour of other motivations. Once the imagined form of mindfulness is created, it can be absorbed into psychology. The evidence suggests that the psychological sciences may need to reevaluate their underlying theoretical frameworks and reconsider how non-scientific knowledge is treated, particularly concepts and techniques originating in religious traditions.

If science and religion, in general, have incompatible theoretical frameworks, how was Buddhist mindfulness ‘transformed’ into a Western medicalised practice? The reality is that a few scientists and clinicians simply claimed that religious meditation and psychology were complementary. They provided no evidence or scientific explanation to support this position. They also appeared to lack the knowledge and experience necessary to make reliable generalisations about religious thought and practice. By focusing on meditation methods, not the underlying cognitive processes, psychologists could not evaluate the innate value of the traditional approaches for health benefits. In this way, psychology appropriated and relocated meditation techniques they never understood.

Western psychologists avoided meaningful, rational investigation of traditional meditation, preferring to ‘imagine ‘ what the techniques were from Western dualistic perspectives.

Why is this important? Science can measure the physiological effects of meditation, such as how it affects heart rate and blood pressure. However, because of the uncertainty regarding the boundaries between belief and science, early meditation and mindfulness experiments rarely progressed beyond a preliminary stage. Further, some psychologists overreached themselves by claiming they understood the essence of Buddhist meditation. These errors were compounded because the wider scientific community accepted unevidenced claims about the congruence between belief and science. These problems mean that much of the £5bn invested in researching meditation and mindfulness added little meaningful scientific value. Secondly, the actual curative potential of traditional meditation has been ignored. Primarily because researchers focused on meditation methods rather than the underlying mental processes engaged with by traditional meditators.

Before 2000, many scientists believed that they ‘instinctively’ understood traditional meditation without needing any meaningful training or research. Perhaps being part of elite academic institutions allowed them to feel they had the right or ability to subordinate religious thought and practice to dualistic scientific understanding. In relocating mindfulness, they stripped it of its most important cognitive components. Still today, many Western forms of meditation lack mental processes such as compassion, intention, and other concepts central to traditional meditations. Even where scientists attempted to ‘evolve’ mindfulness into a more compassionate or focused practice, the meditation nearly always remained dualistic and, therefore, distant from its original form.

Compassion for oneself and others is central to most Buddhist practices.

The fate of Western mindfulness, to have become a stripped-down dualistic version of a traditional practice, is not unusual. We have seen such approaches in relocating acupuncture, yoga and other traditional healing technologies. A subtle but observable pattern is documented in the History of Science of scientists reconfiguring nondual knowledge to sit within dualistic frameworks. As with mindfulness, this approach can lead to the original technique being misunderstood, mistranslated or distorted.

The problems evidenced in the ‘mindfulness revolution’ have complex causes, not least of which are decades of low-quality and often unreplicated research. However, the failure of scientists to recognise the presence of nondual thought and practice is also a significant concern. As a case study, mindfulness reveals a profound limitation in the psychological sciences and our understanding of the human mind. We experience life through a number of different mental states, including dual and nondual awareness. Science tends to privilege duality, which is adequate for most scientific disciplines but fails to fully explain human consciousness and experience. Duality became the default theoretical model for descriptions of human mental states, the ‘lingua franca’ of the psychological sciences. As such, non-dual concepts and practices are abstract to most psychologists and often considered superstitious or childlike. This worldview relies on evaluating nondual phenomena with dualistic instruments.

The presumption that dualistic approaches deliver ‘truth’ while nondual insights are irrelevant or inferior is possibly a continuation of the colonial mindset. Western ways of knowing are frequently assumed to be the ‘gold standard’ against which non-scientific thought and practice can be measured. There is little evidence that scientists thought Buddhist meditation methods were worth studying in their own right. Analysis indicates that the psychological sciences reduced Buddhist meditation to the terms they understood and could measure. In this way, the opportunity for scientists to identify different forms of consciousness, mental processes and health treatments in meditation was lost.

I’m sure many meditation scientists acted in good faith, but their inability to realise they were encountering different rather than inferior knowledge systems has been a costly mistake. This limitation was only possible because of a phenomenon called incommensurability. Incommensurability is the belief that one’s perspective of the world is an objective reality. The scientists first encountering Buddhist meditation may have been entirely unaware of nonduality. Presuming that their dualistic outsider view of Eastern religious practices was complete and informed. This is not simply an issue rooted in cultural misunderstandings; incommensurability likely limits encounters between science and Western spiritual practices. For example, the value of early esoteric Christian teachings was judged against the dualistic values of science and evaluated accordingly. Today, dualistic science is held to be the dominant knowledge system, and many alternative ways of understanding and experiencing the world have been subordinated without any systematic study or rational evaluation. There are almost no signs that the scientific community are aware of the potential value of non-scientific knowledge being lost.

This is part two of a six-part series. The Introduction is here.