Understanding Selfhood to Elucidate the Phenomenology of Mindfulness

Joe Higgins

doi:10.1007/s11406-022-00481-4

Abstract

The health benefits of practising mindfulness are well documented, yet the phenomenological mechanisms of such practice remain under-theorised from both ontogenetic and social perspectives. By leveraging an enactive perspective on selfhood, these lacunae can be addressed: firstly, it is argued that proper understanding of mindfulness – and the health benefits that mindfulness practices seek – relies on recognising the socio-embodied nature of the self; consequently, occasions in which the therapeutic need for mindfulness are most pressing will be shown to be inextricably tied to socio-embodied fluctuations across different stages of life. What emerges is a phenomenological understanding of mindfulness as allowing one to dwell in the sensuous density of the present and, through this, remain connected to the social world of open possibilities.

Highlights

There is a wide and deep range of evidence for the general health benefits of practising mindfulness, encompassing coping with stress (Cahn and Polich, 2006), preventing depressive relapse (Godfrin and van Heeringen, 2010), relationship satisfaction (Wachs and Cordova, 2007), improved wellbeing (Carmody & Baer, 2008), and enhanced immune system responsiveness (Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004)
If one turns from this essentialist philosophy and towards phenomenology, we find that one’s existence is not set by the model of predetermined nature; instead, each individual continually generates their own goals through interactions with others and the environment
In its purest form, mindfulness is a practice of meditation wherein one focuses on (a) certain bodily action(s), such as one’s breathing, so as to encourage one’s attention towards “a sense of absolute stillness” (Williams & Penman, 2011, 4)

Summary

Introduction

There is a wide and deep range of evidence for the general health benefits of practising mindfulness, encompassing coping with stress (Cahn and Polich, 2006), preventing depressive relapse (Godfrin and van Heeringen, 2010), relationship satisfaction (Wachs and Cordova, 2007), improved wellbeing (Carmody & Baer, 2008), and enhanced immune system responsiveness (Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004). From an epistemological perspective, selfhood need not arise with conscious relations to one’s own cognitive representations; rather, it emerges primordially from an agent’s meaningful prereflective relations with the surrounding world In modern philosophy, such phenomenological views have a kindred spirit in the ‘4E turn’ within cognitive science, with the paradigm of enactivism perhaps providing closest theoretical affinity (Gallagher, 2018). Drawing on the aforementioned contentiousness, the suggestion is that enactivists’ consideration of our ‘worldedness’ needs to more resolutely put the socialised (or, perhaps more accurately, ensocialled (Higgins, 2017)) body at its centre: that is, the cognitive processes that constitute meaningful human existence are not embodied as a matter of fact or contingency, but as a matter of necessity; crucially, these embodied processes are not ensocialled as a matter of contingency, but as a matter of necessity The former part of this claim maintains harmony with enactivism but breaks with traditional views that we are (i). The human ‘body’ and human ‘sociality’ belong to an ontological chiasm: the processes of one belong to, and cannot be separated from, the other without rupturing the very fabric that holds together humanness

The Socio‐embodied Self and Wellness Throughout Life

Socio‐Embodied Wellness During Infancy

Teenage Angst

Old Age

Conclusion