Another Way of Living

This paper is about a Case Study and the Manifestation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vision of the Five Mindfulness Trainings. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, peace activist, writer, poet, and scholar, is a champion of mindfulness. His work is said to have carried mindfulness practices into the mainstream culture. His wisdom and practice of mindfulness have provided guidance and a practical approach, which benefits individuals, families and organizations. Thich Nhat Hanh (2007) emphasized, “With mindfulness, we are aware of what is going on in our bodies, our feelings, our minds, and the world, and we avoid doing harm to ourselves and others” (p. 2). Additionally, he continued, “Mindfulness protects us, our families, and our society, and ensures a safe and happy present and a safe and happy future. Precepts are the most concrete expression of the practice of mindfulness” (p. 2).

This article explores the experience of the volunteer Buddhist chaplains in the B Yard of a California maximum-security state prison. The narrative study provides the personal and practical knowledge and wisdom on bringing the Buddhist meditation, mindfulness and compassion to the California Prison system. The article offers insights, experience and dilemmas that were experienced or shared by the inmates. Through this narrative study, we hope to develop a better understanding of lived-experience of volunteer Buddhist chaplains in the California prison system and to promote the needs of volunteers to bring the message of compassion, mindfulness and wisdom to the California Prison System. California activated its state prison system in 1851 (Bookspan, 1991). The California Department of Justice pointed out that the state prison started with a 268-ton wooden ship named “The Waban” in the San Francisco Bay that housed the first 30 inmatesand ultimately in 1952 it opened San Quentin State Prison, where it housed approximately 68 inmates (Reed, 2001). Currently, California has thirty-three prisons and Folsom State Prison (FSP) is a one of them. It is located in the city of Folsom, California, about 20 miles northeast of Sacramento, the state capitol of California. After San Quentin, FSP is second-oldest state prison, opening in 1892. Petersilia (2008) pointed out that using “academic skills [such as training in mediation and ethics] are uniquely suited and ultimately necessary to create a justice system that does less harm”. We believed just that; we are volunteer Buddhist Chaplains for the Buddhist Pathways Prison Project where its mission is to bring meditation and the teaching of the Buddha into the California State prisons. We are using the narrative approach because it is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing and interpreting the meaning of experience (Lieblich & Josselson, 1997)

The lack of a spiritual dimension (moral and ethical) in leadership, which frames the development of moral value—from business and politics to family and education—has become a key factor contributing to negative consequences caused by unethical leaders. Both Eastern and Western society also lack an in-depth understanding of how the spiritual leadership practices of Vietnamese Buddhist monks might/may be models of moral and ethical leadership for others in the larger society. This qualitative research study utilizes a phenomenological approach to learn how to apply the leadership lessons derived from the lived experience of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in contemporary America. The study is composed of historical and contemporary literature, empirical research on relevant leadership theories, on Buddhist values (especially those of mindfulness and compassion as part of their daily routine). In order to have a peaceful way of life, to help and lead others, Vietnamese monks learn from their masters, practice their learned core values and utilize Zen practices. The researcher interviewed 14 Buddhist monks across United States of America by snowball effect sampling and the three main themes emerging from the research are as follows: (a) Vietnamese Buddhist monks in America and their lived-experiences are dynamic, unique and contributing to the society within their spiritual leadership roles and obligations; (b) Their leadership style is characterized as authentically leading by example by basing decisions upon the core values of mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom; and (c) Through their practices, their presence, and their contributions to the welfare of others, they bring about peace of mind and happiness for themselves and for others in society. The findings were extracted from participants, resulting in the five principles of a mindful leadership. The five leadership strategies discussed include: Leading from the Inside Out, the Notion of Daily Practice, Leading-by-Example, Congruence, and the Notion of Completeness. Eleven recommendations emerged from this phenomenological study with eight being the techniques and strategies to achieve mindfulness, peace, compassion, and happiness and the remaining three being dedicated for further studies. Keywords: Buddhism, Buddhist, Buddhist values, compassion, Dharma, leadership practices, leadership styles, leadership theories, meditation, mindful leadership, mindfulness, phenomenological study, phenomenology, spiritual leadership, Vietnamese Buddhism, Vietnamese Buddhist monks, wisdom, Zen practices, Zen.

Mindfulness is a meditation technique that involves attending to the present moment, without reference to past or future, and without judgment. In the “radical acceptance” of the present it prescribes, mindfulness is a practice concerning one’s relation to time that is promoted as a health boon in times of turmoil and tension appropriate for those short on time. A self-help practice legitimized by appeal to Buddhist cultural references and public figures, mindfulness promises do-it-yourself stress relief, performance enhancement, and happiness to the belabored North American petit bourgeois enduring increasingly stressful and diminished working and living arrangements. While scholars have investigated mindfulness as a religious phenomenon, few studies have considered its generalization and use in everyday life as a cultural formation in the context of its historical milieu. The generalization of mindfulness coincides with that of stress as a pathology, and the production of a pressured, volatile, and competitive social environment by the economic liberalizations of the 1980s to the present. This dissertation offers a discursive history of mindfulness as an artifact of this historical juncture, and probes the social problems and possibilities that are encoded in its applications for spiritual growth and professional development. Here, mindfulness comes into focus as a paradoxical formation: As stress management and as a disciplined elision of history in the present, mindfulness reproduces and retrenches the class relations that generate the stress of this juncture, even as the appeal of mindfulness is grounded in an Enlightenment ethos of freedom by practiced self-knowledge and the explicit anti-capitalist sentiment and desirable social alternatives to the present figured in the Buddhist sources it appropriates, frustrating its realization by generalizing its own opposite.

This chapter considers the role that mindfulness and compassion can play in helping people who come from difficult and traumatic backgrounds. These individuals often have a highly elevated sense of threat – both from the outside (what others might do to them) and from the inside (feeling overwhelmed by aversive feelings or memories; or their own selfdislike/ contempt for themselves). The basic view is that traumatic backgrounds sensitise people to become overly reliant on processing from their threat systems.

Secular descriptions and practices of therapeutic mindfulness in the West have claimed positive physical benefits and improved mental wellbeing. Alongside these developments, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan is addressing unprecedented social problems through emerging counselling and psychotherapeutic services. Approaches seek to align with Bhutanese values, ethics and cultural mores, integrating mindful awareness training from the country’s Buddhist heritage. The present research project took a critical approach to deconstruct the place of mindfulness in the personal lives and professional practices of counsellors and psychotherapists in Australia and Bhutan. An interpretive and collaborative narrative research methodology was adopted to encourage reflexive, relational and dialogical understandings of participants’ views on mindfulness. The design comprised three sites of enquiry. First, as it is widely accepted that Buddhist traditions offer precise concepts and skills for mindfulness and given that Bhutan is founded upon the Kagyu and Nyingma schools of Buddhism, individual interviews were held with senior monastic and lay Buddha Dharma teachers from both the Mahayana and Theravada traditions to provide an historical context. Second, senior organisational managers who have promoted mindfulness, directly or indirectly, in their social service organisations were consulted individually. Third, in keeping with the principal aims of this project, six counsellors and psychotherapists in Perth, Western Australia and five counsellors in Bhutan were interviewed deploying a four-part cooperative group inquiry. To enhance reflexivity, these primary research partners were witnesses to each other’s interviews in their own countries, bringing forth their values, beliefs, and commitments in their professional and personal lives with regard to mindfulness. They were interviewed twice with impressions of the interviews being shared between the two countries to produce a conversational reciprocity. Throughout I situated myself as an active interpreter and co-author of the emerging discourses and practices while making transparent my research intentions. Storying noteworthy events and turning points in the lives of the counsellors and psychotherapists and revealing the significance of relationships with secular and spiritual teachers highlighted how meanings about mindfulness were shaped by diverse cultural conditions and personal circumstances. Everyday embodied storied lives and the broader discourses of cultural meaning-making generated similarities, uniqueness and novelty. The recognition of relational and contextual influences provided a foundation for reconsidering the descriptions, purposes and applications of mindfulness in personal life and professional settings.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics and sources of a peaceful and happy life. The research uses the sequential exploratory design from the mixed research designs. The grounded theory design has been used in the qualitative part of the study. In-depth interviews were performed in the qualitative section with 26 participants between the ages of 21 and 82. The structural equation model has been used in the quantitative section of the study. A total of 900 participants (548 women) between the ages of 18 and 75 (M = 30.46, SD = 12.94) form the sample of the study. According to the findings from the qualitative stage of the research, peaceful and happy living means having comfort and positive feelings and not having negative feelings. In spite of peace and happiness being related to each other and intertwined, peace is understood to be more permanent, prioritized, and significant compared to happiness. Sufficiency in relationships and trust, personal virtues, social virtues, acceptance, spirituality, developmental strength of problems, optimism, nature, health and economics, as well as activities and superficial solutions constitute the sources of peace and happiness. The quantitative stage of the research has found peace and happiness to positively correlate with the characteristics of tolerance, helpfulness, beliefs and spirituality, responsibility, purposefulness, worthiness, trust, and reliability. Relationships among the variables have been tested using different structural equation models. The research results are considered to contribute to the literature on positive psychology and its applications.