Interview with Mark Ovland

Mark Ovland began his love affair with meditation in 2007. He soon after donned the robes of a Hindu monk, and lived as such for a year before returning to England to train as a mindfulness teacher. In the years since he has served as a volunteer coordinator at both The Barn Retreat and Gaia House. He is currently working to bring meditation more fully into prisons and is part of the team that runs Freely Given Retreats. He currently lives in a van.

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EVERYDAY MINDFULNESS: Growing up, were there any obvious signposts pointing the way towards a meditative life?

MARK OVLAND: None at all. I had no spiritual inclinations, actually I was a militant atheist. I remember being at school at the age of six. Everyone was bowing in prayer and I was sitting bolt upright, thinking how ridiculous it all was.

I’m fairly unusual in that I came to meditation even though there was no major suffering in my life. I grew up in a small town in Somerset, I was a happy kid. I had ME at school which left me incapacitated for a couple of years and bed-ridden for a good chunk of that time but I don’t look back on that as a time of suffering. It was more an opportunity to ask myself what was important in life. I suppose I always had a tendency to see the positive in anything, to see it all as a gift.

EM: Was there some big turning-point for you that led you to meditation practice?

MO: After getting my degree in E-Commerce, I went off to India. Something was stirring but I didn’t know what it was. For some time I’d been seeking something beyond what everyday life had to offer, I knew there was more to life than met the eye. My aunt had given me a copy of Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book Of Living & Dying. That made me start asking questions. I started to think a lot about Buddhism and the importance and beauty of living an ethical life.

So eight years ago, when I was 24, I went off to India. I knew nothing about the country. I knew nothing about the stereotype of people heading out there to find themselves. A friend suggested we go there for the winter. It sounded like a good laugh so off we went. For the first couple of months we had a lot of fun, travelling through the country. Then I started to get the feeling that there was something calling me so I headed off on my own. In the south of the country I found a little place in the mountains, just a room some tour guide was renting out, and there I had a profound mystical awakening.

EM: How did that awakening manifest itself?

MO: Since my childhood I’d had these fleeting experiences, lasting for a few seconds, where I’d felt that my body wasn’t really mine. But this experience in India was a lot more intense. For a week my body and my mind were experienced as being completely inseparable from the world around me. The world turned on its head. Any idea of ‘Mark’ being a separate ‘self’ was totally shattered. Time and space lost their seeming solidity, it seemed instead like everything was timelessly ‘one’. It felt incredibly sacred. It was intoxicating, like being on LSD for seven days, but I hadn’t touched drugs or alcohol. To some degree that feeling of intoxication lasted for the next three years.

Shortly after that experience I decided to give up everything and become a monk, though at the time  I didn’t even know which religion I’d follow. This experience had burst open my heart and let in all faiths. The idea was that I would head back to England to get rid of all my possessions before returning to India to live a holy life. My parents were amazingly non-obstructive, all things considered.

When I returned to India I had no money, no possessions, no friends…and I felt incredibly free. I had unwavering faith that the universe would take care of me, and that’s how it turned out.

EM: When did you develop a regular meditation practice?

MO: Shortly after that awakening experience. I attended a two-week yoga and meditation retreat and followed that up with a ten-day Goenka retreat in Bodh Gaya, where The Buddha is said to have become enlightened. That was the start of it.

EM: When did you start running meditation retreats?

MO: For a year I lived as a monk in the Ramakrishna Order. Then I returned to England and found myself pointed in the direction of Gaia House in Devon, a centre that offers silent meditation retreats in the Buddhist tradition. I saw that as an ideal place to continue my meditation practice. I went there for a three-month work retreat. Within a day of meeting my teacher Rob Burbea, I knew that I wouldn’t be returning to India any time soon. I felt I’d come home.

After sitting the retreat at Gaia House, I became a co-ordinator of the Barn Retreat at Sharpham. Whilst living there I was informally instructing people about meditation and mindfulness. After my time at the Barn I sat another three-month retreat then began two very happy years serving Gaia House as a reception co-ordinator.

When I eventually left Gaia, it was with a strong urge to teach mindfulness in prisons. A couple of times I went into Dartmoor with a Buddhist chaplain. That was a great thing to do but I realised that he wasn’t able to reach anyone who wasn’t a Buddhist. I realised that, in order to make it all-inclusive, I needed to offer secular mindfulness courses. That’s when I began various kinds of teacher training which led to me teaching in prisons and universities.

EM: When did the idea of leading free retreats come about?

MO: That was in 2013. I co-founded Freely Given Retreats with three friends. It was Simon Thompson’s idea. Each retreat draws an average of eighteen people though we’re looking to expand to a bigger venue occasionally that holds upwards of forty people.

There is no charge for the retreats. They are run on the basis of ‘dana’, an economy rooted in generosity and giving. The tradition of dana in Buddhism is an acknowledgement of our interconnectedness and interdependence.

How it works is that you are asked to send a £90 cheque when booking, simply as an indication of commitment to attend the retreat. This is just to ensure that you turn up. The cheque is then handed back to you on arrival. On the final day of each retreat, participants are invited to make donations. If you can’t afford anything, that’s fine.

So, essentially, it’s free. Which can be confusing for people. I heard about one couple who left a perfectly good fridge out in their front garden, advertising it as free. Nobody took it. They stuck a sign on it advertising it for £50 and it went straight away.

The way our courses are run seems to work. They’re all fully booked. Last year, we were a few pence out in terms of what the courses cost to run and what people donated.

EM: Money and mindfulness don’t always have the most comfortable relationship.

MO: That’s true. I’m not comfortable with the commercialization of mindfulness. Money has a way of changing the dynamic of a situation. When I started, like a lot of people who come from the Buddhist side, I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of teaching meditation for money. I love giving my time, my energy, my teachings, for free. I wish I could do everything for free. But at least I now have a balance where I get paid for some teaching and that allows me to give freely to other projects.

EM: Could you say a little about living out of a van?

MO: I lived in my first van for eighteen months but I had a problem with it in that it refused to reverse. Now I’m almost done converting a 30-year-old Mercedes van which as well as going backwards has a full kitchen, a wood-burner and a double bed. Van life offers a lot of freedom in that I can head off into the Welsh dales and still have my home with me so I’m able to carry on with whatever work I’m doing. I have the freedom to feed my soul whatever it needs at any particular time. I move on every day so I don’t get situations where I’m told to move on.

A lot of people I meet are intrigued about my choice of home, enamoured I think with the romantic idea of life on the road. So many have said they’d love to live the same way if it wasn’t for some circumstance or other.

EM: As a teacher, what are the common difficulties you see in terms of people coming to meditation for the first time?

MO: Over-identification with their thoughts and how they see themselves, especially on the negative side of the spectrum. The inner critic is endemic in our society, it’s so sad. The voice that’s constantly telling people they’re not good enough, they need to do better, be better. People believe it, and it’s paralysing. I absolutely love when the penny drops for people and they realise that thoughts are not facts, they’re just mental phenomena. They’re not ‘real’, they don’t have to be believed. I can see in someone’s eyes when that clicks, and it’s lovely. So liberating.

Whatever issues a person has there’s a point in a mindfulness course when you are invited to turn towards what is difficult in your life. What we’re inviting people to do is notice what is going on in front of them and ‘be with’ that. For most people, this approach is completely counter-intuitive. As a teacher, it’s my job to hold people as they journey into that and help them to realise that this is not something to approach in a gung-ho fashion. It needs to be approached with patience and a large amount of self-compassion. We don’t ask people to begin by turning towards their biggest difficulty. They are invited to start with something small and build from that. Also to prod holes in the labels they identify with, I am this sort of person or I am that sort of person. Realising it’s just not the case all the time. There’s space there.

EM: As mindfulness becomes more and more fashionable, is there a danger that bad teaching will become more prevalent and a risk that the practice will become diluted?

MO: Of course. On one of the teacher training courses I did, I was speaking to a clinical psychologist who was suggesting that Buddhists shouldn’t be teaching mindfulness and that it should be left to trained clinicians. On the other side, a lot of the ‘Buddhists’ would argue that it isn’t a Western psychological understanding but a deep personal meditation practice that best qualifies someone to teach. It’s an interesting debate.

In the Buddhist teachings mindfulness is presented as one of eight areas that a person is encouraged to work with in order to bring about real freedom in their lives. Some of what underpins this framework would struggle to cross over into a purely secular realm though, for instance this idea of the ‘emptiness’ of self, like I experienced so strongly in India. But without these understandings and complementary explorations mindfulness alone is rather flaccid. It is certainly limited in what it can open up for people. I do wonder whether it wouldn’t be simpler for the ‘Buddhists’ just to let go of mindfulness and let it become what it wants to become. An intervention maybe that clinicians teach in a secular, manualised, and consciously limited way to those who want just that.

There’s a very interesting conversation to be had about how we define “secular” and how we define “spiritual”. Generally speaking, people sign up for an eight-week mindfulness course because they have firm ideas of what it can give them and what they can get out of it. They might want to sleep better or feel less anxious. They might want to feel less depressed. Usually, they’re not looking for spiritual discovery and they may not be open to discovering anything more than what they came to the course for in the first place. I want to be there for people who do open up to the possibility that something deeply transformative is happening to them.

EM: There seems to be a fair bit of McMindfulness about at the moment, most noticeably a number of mindfulness books that do away with meditation altogether.

MO: The danger with that is people might be led to assume that mindfulness is just another form of self help or another form of relaxation therapy. Of course, it’s neither of those things. As a teacher, there’s a balance to be struck between letting students know that they’re doing their best and that’s OK, and letting them know that actually this requires a certain amount of commitment and work. With mindfulness both formal and informal practice are important. What seems to be happening is that some people are latching on to the informal, the everyday mindfulness, and making the formal practice something of a side issue. But without the formal practice, it’s unlikely to become deep-rooted; it’s unlikely to find its way into the cells, to become embodied. If someone is not sitting regularly, I think it’s unlikely that mindfulness is going to be transformative in their lives, certainly at the beginning of their journey.

Regular practice is important but, counter-intuitively, I think it can also be helpful to occasionally have a break from sitting, along with anything else one does habitually or ritually. See what happens when you snap out of that routine for a day for two. When you return to your practice you might rediscover the aliveness in it, some new avenues of discovery. Otherwise there is a risk that meditation can become a little stagnant or turn into a chore.

EM: What makes a good mindfulness teacher?

MO: Personal practice is all-important, knowing firsthand where this path leads and the obstacles and openings that can come along the way. Knowledge of psychological processes is I believe incredibly helpful and supportive but, if that’s all there is in the teaching, then a hugely important element is missing. So much of mindfulness teaching is about embodying one’s own practice and holding a group in a mindful way. I’ve led courses with young offenders in prisons. If I didn’t have my own meditation practice, I very much doubt I’d have been able to hold that group and really demonstrate what mindfulness was. I guess someone without a practice might have been able to teach them techniques but mindfulness can’t be reduced to techniques. It’s a way of being and relating to the world. I gave a short address in a school chapel service recently and one of the pupils approached me afterwards. He told me that more than what I’d said, it was simply how I’d walked slowly and unselfconsciously to the lectern that made his and others heads turn. He thought “this guy’s different, I wonder what’s going on.”

EM: Has your meditation practice remained fairly regular over the past six or so years?

MO: Not the formal practice, no. I’ve been through phases. Sometimes practice has been centred more on service, and on being in relationship with others and the world. I think I had enough in the tank at these times to see me through, I soon knew when it was time to get on the cushion again.

EM: What difference would you say mindfulness has made to your life?

MO: Maybe it’s a cliché but discovering mindfulness, or rather the world of experience and practice that mindfulness opens up, has been like waking up from a dream for me. It’s more than transformed my life, it’s made my life. I can see that I came to mindfulness at an unusually early age, though it’s fantastic to see more and more younger people coming on retreat. I guess it’s generally been an older demographic because it’s often struggling in life with various pains and hurts that catalyses a person’s turning away from habitual ways of being in the world. People then look to try another way.

In the media, mindfulness is often portrayed as a fix – for anxiety, depression, whatever. When I teach I try to highlight the fact that mindfulness is not just about ending suffering. There’s so much more it opens up, not least an appreciation of all life and a deep care for the planet. A few years ago a group of us founded DANCE, the Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement, as a way for people to express and engage with their love of the world in the face of such devastating environmental crises. Far from detaching oneself from the world, as the media sometimes likes to suggest, mindfulness can help facilitate a real engagement with all that surrounds us. It takes one on an amazingly deep journey where every part of one’s life is brought alive. When we are present in our lives, life becomes so interesting. It’s important to remember that mindfulness isn’t just about being with difficulties. It’s also very much about discovering wonderful new ways of being. So it adds to your life, even when you’re feeling great.

EM: What’s next for you?

MO: We’ll see. I’m never too concerned with the ‘what next’. Right now my teacher is unwell and my priority is to support him, so I haven’t been taking on much teaching work for this year. I do plan to come up with a new prison course to maybe trial in the autumn, longer and more involved than what I’ve done before.

More generally, I’m planning on taking a step back from the secular mindfulness world. My heart is really in the dharma, the Buddhist teachings, and I’ve come to feel that teaching in a purely secular fashion can be hugely beneficial for people but it isn’t authentic for me. I want to be teaching from my experience and how I have learned to see the world.

What feeds my heart is going deeper than simply helping to alleviate someone’s anxiety. To find my own voice and to be as useful as I can to my fellow beings, I need to be teaching outside of the limited secular framework not least because I think people are crying out for it. This journey can be infinite and I don’t see why the teaching shouldn’t reflect that. So I’m moving away from a linear path with a definite end goal. I want to help people stretch and expand their notions of what the world is, and how to be in it. And to continue exploring it all myself.

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LINKS:

www.freelygivenretreats.org

www.thedancewebsite.org).