Meditation, disability, and identity

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 23-45

  Squier, Susan ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR; ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE; ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; DAILY LIFE ACTIVITY; DISABLED PERSON; HUMAN; HUMAN RELATION; LIFESTYLE; MEDITATION; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REVIEW; SELF CONCEPT; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING; ADAPTATION, PSYCHOLOGICAL; ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; DISABLED PERSONS; HUMANS; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; LIFE STYLE; MEDITATION; MIND-BODY RELATIONS (METAPHYSICS); SELF CONCEPT; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION;

EID: 4143110563     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2004.0012     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. According to Zen Master Dogen, when one learns the "essential art of zazen" then the "body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear." Zen Master Dogen, "Recommending Zazen to All People," in Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 32-3
2. In her discussion of the issue of surgical modification of the faces of children with Down's syndrome, Janet Lyon has identified another site where a conversation between Buddhism and disability would be illuminating. There is important tension between the Zen model of seeing one's original face and the "long historical effort on the part of normative culture to avoid ethical contact with the face of disability, with the face of the other ... with the face of 'irrevocable difference.'" Janet Lyon, "About Faces and Down Syndrome," paper, "Ethics and Disability Lecture Series," Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State University, University Park, PA, March 24, 2003
3. Lorenzo Wilson Milam, CripZen: A Manual for Survival (San Diego, CA: MHO and MHO WORKS, 1993). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
4. Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life (New York: Bell Tower, 1992). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
5. Philip Martin, The Zen Path through Depression (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
6. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (New York: Delta, 1990)
7. and Zindel V. Segal, J. Mark G. Williams, and John D. Teasdale, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse (New York: Guildford Press, 2002)
8. An issue that requires an essay to itself is the role meditation plays in negotiating the identities of disability and race. One might compare to these three narratives by white disabled meditators a recent surge in meditation narratives by African American authors, most notably Alice Walker and bell hooks. Walker began studying TM (Transcendental Meditation) when she was living in New York City after a divorce. She went on to study tonglen (the Tibetan Buddhist practice of meditation) with teacher Pema Chodron, with whom she has engaged in many public dialogues, including the audiotape Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation: On the Meaning of Suffering and the Mystery of Joy. hooks, whose All About Love: New Visions came out in 2000 and Salvation: Black People and Love in 2002, has been a practicing Buddhist since she was an eighteen-year-old Stanford undergraduate. In a recent interview with Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, hooks articulated a concept of identity with remarkable resonances to the argument I am making here: "If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn't start with race; I wouldn't start with blackness; I wouldn't start with gender; I wouldn't start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I'm a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love." Helen Tworkov, "Agents of Change: An Interview with bell hooks," Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 2, no. 1 (1992): 48-57. For the disabled meditators I discuss in this essay, as for hooks, this is a love that extends not only to others but to the self in its embodied and experienced specificity
9. Lennard Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1
10. Eva Kittay, "Caring for the Vulnerable by Caring for the Caregiver: The Case of Mental Retardation," (paper, Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State, University Park, PA, March 15, 2002)
11. James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4
12. As Wendy Brown's work would suggest, precisely the attempt to redress marginalization reinstantiates the process producing it, in the act of making the claim. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7
13. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 111
14. Lorenzo Wilson Milam, The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues (San Diego CA: MHO and MHO WORKS, 1984)
15. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8
16. Harriet McBryde Johnson, "Unspeakable Conversations, Or How I Spent One Day as a Token Cripple at Princeton University," New York Times Magazine, February 16, 2003, Section 6: 50-5, 74, 78-9, 79
17. James Overboe, posting on the DS-HUM listserv, 12:30 pm, February 16, 2003, http://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0302&L=ds-hum&P=R2496 (accessed March 18, 2004)
18. James Overboe, "'Difference in Itself: Validating Disabled People's Lived Experience," Body and Society 5, no. 4 (1999): 17-29, 27
19. Evan Thompson, "Human Consciousness: From Intersubjectivity to Interbeing," http://www.philosophy.ucf.edu/pcsfetz1.html (accessed March 18, 2004)
20. See also Thich Nhat Hahn, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, CA.: Parallax Press, 1987)
21. Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2001), 131. I agree with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in preferring Stephen Batchelor's reformulation of these as "active and performatively differentiated injunctions (to 'understanding anguish, letting go of its origins, realizing its cessation, and cultivating the path')
22. " Sedgwick, "Pedagogy of Buddhism," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 170 (Sedgwick's italics)
23. Ram Dass, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying, ed. Mark Matousek and Marlene Roeder, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000)
24. Tobin Siebers, "Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body," American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 737-54, 742
25. Hall, "Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?" New York Times Magazine, September 14, 2003, 46-9, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/ 14BUDDHISM.html (accessed on September 18, 2003)
26. I am borrowing the term "boundary object" from Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr, who use it to refer to "objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them ... [are] plastic enough to adapt to local needs ... yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites." Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 297
27. Of course, attention to cultural differences has also provided a rich reservoir of alternative healthcare practices. See Lynn Payer, Medicine and Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1988). Moreover, while so-called "New Age" approaches to medicine can at times be reductive, culturally sensitive approaches to medicine can affirm the complex identities and practices of non-Western medical traditions
28. For a discussion of the need for such new approaches to medical care, see Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1997)
29. and for a discussion of the reductionism of a specific New Age treatment, see Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (London: Routledge, 1997)
30. Jon Kabat-Zinn, foreword to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, by Segal et al., vii
31. Davis, 32. For an example of how socially engaged Buddhism can take on the intersecting experiences of disability and the history of oppression based on race and gender, see Michelle T. Clinton, "Breathing Through History: A Dark Reflection on Zen," Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism, Summer 2003: 34-6
32. For the most powerful recent intervention in this area, see the "Take Back Your Time" movement, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University, http://www.simpleliving.net/ timeday (accessed on December 5, 2003)
33. Elizabeth J. Donaldson, "The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness," NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 99-119, 111
34. In focusing on psychological disability I am not addressing the related, but distinctly different, issues posed by cognitive disablement. See Kate Lindemann, "Persons with Adult-Onset Head Injury: A Crucial Resource for Feminist Philosophers," Hypatia 16, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 105-23. I also do not consider the difficulty of being closeted with a mental disability, whether it is depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Although morphologically invisible impairments, such illnesses produce significant - and thus often socially perceptible - distortions of one's ability to function well in community. However, that is for another essay
35. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
36. Beth Haller, "False Positive," Ragged Edge Magazine Online, January/ February 2000, http://www.towson.edu/bhalle/rag-article.html (accessed on September 18, 2003)
37. Steven H. Miles, "A Challenge to Licensing Boards: The Stigma of Mental Illness," JAMA 280, no. 10 (1998): 865