UCLA research psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz adapts Buddhist concepts of mindfulness to the Western Christian tradition. One of the leading experts in neuroplasticity, he spoke on the topic at the Table Conference at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought in 2014. His talk, “Mind Your Heart,” is worth revisiting:

At the time, the practice of mindfulness, which is thousands of years old, had also become something of a fad, making the February 3, 2014 cover of Time Magazine. Since then, it continues to attract serious adherents from all philosophies and religions who want to learn to experience what really matters.

Some highlights of his talk:

● [2:29] Basically we are just now coming out of the era in which all belief is that the mind is created by the brain. It’s still very much the predominant belief, it’s still very much what you would call the regnant paradigm. But things are changing a little bit and this “mindfulness revolution”, I think has helped that process.

So by the word “mind”, I am specifically meaning, for scientific purposes, but again overlapping with Christian faith, I’m using the word “mind” to mean choices we make about how to focus and direct our attention. So, choices we make about how to focus and direct our attention can definitely rewire our brain, although a lot of the mundane worldly content of our consciousness is in fact coming from the brain.

The “Mind Your Heart” part of this is though also very important, and I don’t want that to get lost in the mix, especially if we remember that the word “heart” in the biblical sense means the seat of consciousness, the seat of our spirit. So our heart is working for our brain to bring in a lot of the explicit content but the heart is very much informing our mind about how to make choices, about what to do with that content

Note: Schwartz’s prediction at 2:29 is on target if we recall that just last year, a huge uproar engulfed consciousness research because the leading theory of consciousness, denounced in a public letter as “pseudoscience” is not strictly materialist. The field may indeed be moving away from materialism, however slowly and unwillingly.

● [11:04] So what is mindfulness? Okay, on the one hand, mindfulness is easy to describe as just a mental action. Basically what it is, is a third-person perspective on first-person experience. But we get both the inner experience, and the outer experience, and the perspective from both directions.

This is where, again, the Trinity empowers the concept of mindfulness, because definitely from a classical secular perspective — say, Adam Smith [1723–1790], the great Scottish philosopher and economist, the author of The Wealth of Nations very much used the concept, the impartial spectator, to ground his moral theory.

That’s saying okay, we’re trying to see ourselves as an impartial spectator would observe our inner life, transparently before God. We’re striving to be able to stand transparently before God. Not that we have to be transparent for God to know. Of course that’s not what that means. What that means is that we’re trying to become more transparent so that we can see
what God has as a purpose for us.

● [13:19] So, it’s definitely a state of mind, but it takes effort striving to get to it. It doesn’t just start out all that clear-minded. You just can’t be in a “mindfulness zone” without the striving, without the effort, without grace, without help, without prayer.

So all of these things have very, very mutually beneficial interactions with mindfulness. Prayer, observation, insight, all help us be mindful, and are aided by mindfulness … a presence of mind about what is happening right now, a focus, very important and forgotten too often in the secularization.

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Dr. Schwartz is the author, with Sharon Begley (1956–2021), of The Mind and the Brain (Harper Perennial, 2003) and with Sharon Gladding, MD, of You Are Not Your Brain. (Avery, 2012). He is a specialist in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

You may also wish to read: Study: Brain scans show that mindfulness reduces acute pain. The volunteers who meditated during a controlled pain experiment reported a 32% reduction in severity. The study shows that, while the perception of pain is subjective, the mind’s effort to limit pain’s influence can be detected in the brain’s signals.