Interview with Vidyamala Burch

One of the most widely respected names in the field of mindfulness, Vidyamala Burch is founder and co-Director of Breathworks, an organisation offering mindfulness-based and compassion-based approaches to living well with chronic pain, illness and stress. This is based on her own experience of living with severe chronic back pain for most of her adult life following a spinal injury in her teens that resulted in partial paraplegia. She began meditating in 1985 and is now a highly respected meditation teacher who works internationally.

She is the author of Living Well With Pain & Illness and the co-author of the recently published Mindfulness For Health: A Practical Guide To Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress & Restoring Wellbeing.

EVERYDAY MINDFULNESS: Did you have an interest in meditation when you were growing up?

VIDYAMALA BURCH: Growing up in New Zealand, I was a very active child. In my teens I did a lot of hill walking and rock climbing and, whilst engaged in those pursuits, I had what might be called spiritual experiences where I felt at one with everything. I had a very particular experience at thirteen when I was on a walk and I stood to gaze at these amazingly beautiful mountains. It felt as thought I was merging with the mountain. Growing up I wouldn’t sit and meditate but I did have some sublime experiences that awoke the mystery of life for me in some ecstatic way.

EM: At sixteen you suffered your first major health setback. How did that occur?

VB: I had my first injury at sixteen. I was lifting somebody out of a swimming pool during life-saving practice and I felt pain in my back which got worse and worse as the days went by. It turned out that I had a condition called spondylolisthesis. Six months later I had major surgery to fuse that part of my spine. There were complications from the surgery which meant that I required further surgery.

That was the beginning of a life of chronic pain for me. I went from being a happy, sporty type to being more withdrawn. For the first time, I lost any sense that my body was a pleasant place to be.

EM: Then a few years later you were involved in a serious car accident…

VB: It was seven years later, a New Year’s day. I was hungover and a passenger in the car, being driven back from my parent’s house. The guy who was driving fell asleep at the wheel and we crashed into a telegraph pole. I had a smashed collarbone, concussion, very bad whiplash and awful back pain. Later, a surgeon looked at the x-rays from that time and identified another spinal fracture that I’d got from the accident. Since that time, my pain has been severe.

Around this period I started working as a film editor, working sixty hours a week. I was driven. I realise now that I was running away from myself, trying to escape my situation. I was attempting to push on through the pain, trying to live my life as normally as possible. I was in denial but something was telling me that I couldn’t run away from it forever.

Eventually I had a kind of physical breakdown and ended up in hospital for three weeks. I was given a treatment that involved cortisone injections in my spine. The injections went wrong due to abnormalities from my previous surgery and my bladder stopped working, though it did recover after some days. I also had some invasive tests and was told that I had to sit up straight for 24 hours which, given my condition, was almost impossible – I hadn’t sat up for months at that time. In the middle of the night, propped up on pillows, full of fear, I had a life-changing experience, one of the most extraordinary experiences of my entire life, a truly pivotal moment.

EM: How would you describe that experience?

VB: It was like I had two different voices in my head. The determined part of myself was insisting that I could get through this ordeal. The other part of me, maybe the more realistic side, was completely vulnerable and kept saying that I couldn’t cope and that there was no way I would get through to the morning. Then it was as though a third voice came through the darkness with a strong message that was telling me I didn’t have to get through to morning, all I needed to do was get through this next moment. Immediately I went from feeling contracted and desperate to feeling almost relaxed and even confident. Because I could see that it was possible to live this moment. It was extraordinary how my experience changed just by changing my perspective from agonising about future torment to resting in each present moment. Of course I did get through the night. I was left with many questions. What is the future? What is the past? What is this present moment? Above all else I knew that the person who was in bed that morning was a different person from the one who had gone to bed the night before. It was as though I had one life leading up to that moment and another life after it.

EM: Had anything in particular triggered that experience or led up to it?

VB: The remarkable thing about that experience was that it came out of nowhere. I hadn’t done any reading on Buddhism or anything like that. I had no interest in formal meditation. Nobody I knew was interested in meditation. Nobody was talking about meditation in the media. At that moment something broke into my consciousness and I had no idea where it came from.

EM: During that stay in hospital, you had a number of other life-changing experiences, right?

VB: There were three others. The second was when I realised that I needed to take responsibility for myself, having never really considered that as an option. I’d always assumed that doctors had all the answers, that the people in white coats could always make me better. It had never occurred to me that I could, indeed should, take responsibility for my own wellbeing. I understood that, if I was going to have a life worth living, then it was all up to me. That felt very humbling.

The third experience was when I woke up one morning and felt that I could easily slip away, that I could let go of life if I wanted to. I felt I really had a choice, and I decided to choose life. From then on I have felt I am choosing life again and again, rather than just existing.

The fourth episode was when they sent the hospital chaplain to see me. Now, I was not a religious girl at all. I’d been brought up as Church of England, or Anglican as it was in New Zealand. But I’d lost all connection with that.

I really thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel by sending this guy into my room. But he was such a kind and beautiful man. He sat by my bed, held my hand and got me to take my mind to a memory of a place where I’d been happy and a time when I’d been happy. So I took my mind back to my teenage years when I’d been rock-climbing and trekking in the southern Alps of New Zealand when I’d been so very, very happy. I stayed with that memory for about ten minutes, then the chaplain brought me back to the present. I was still the same woman in the same hospital bed but I felt so different. I found it astonishing that I could feel so different simply because I’d done something with my mind. It was at that point that I woke up to the fact that I could influence my subjective experience through my mind, and that I might actually be able to choose what I did with my mind.

EM: Where did that realisation lead you to?

VB: After being discharged from hospital, I still felt physically weak but I had a hunger to explore some of the questions that had arisen. I was visited by a social worker and I told her that I wanted to learn some relaxation techniques and learn a bit more about how the mind works. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of meditation at that point but I sensed I could get some benefit from guided practices. So she got me some tapes and books from the local library and I started to work it out for myself.

Because of the extremity of my situation, I had the luxury of time. I spent months just lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what I was going to do with my life. Increasingly, I used that time to cultivate my mind. I would lie in bed, teaching myself to direct my thoughts and training myself to think right to the very end of a train of thought. Looking back I was practicing a very basic form of meditation but I wasn’t thinking in those terms at that point.

EM: At what stage did your meditation become more formalised?

VB: A friend of mine mentioned he was going on a yoga weekend and invited me along. That was pretty intense, not least having to get up at 5am. At this retreat they taught formal meditation and that whetted my appetite. I started meditating regularly after that.

In 1987 the same friend said he was going on a Buddhist retreat and I joined him on that. By that point I was on a definite journey to find ways to manage my pain with my mind. But I was still struggling to manage myself.

At the retreat it wasn’t the teaching or the specific meditations that hooked me in. It was the fact that I was meeting people who were comfortable in their own skins, alive, present, funny, light-hearted and emotionally available. Basically, all the things I wasn’t. I found myself thinking, “I so want to be like these people when I finally grow up.” I was a lost young woman and these people seemed completely real, very ordinary, without any pretence. That’s when I began following the Buddhist path. It was Buddhism that brought me from New Zealand to the UK in 1990. I came over to live at a women’s retreat centre in Shropshire.

EM: Would it be fair to say that most people come to meditation out of a state of crisis in their lives?

VB: I think that’s true. There are rare individuals who come to meditation without life having knocked them for six. But, for most of us, if our lives are going swimmingly, why would we bother? Meditation is not an easy thing to get into. It’s demanding. It takes effort and discipline so we need motivation to engage with meditation. For most people, it’s something they are drawn to because they’re finding it hard to cope with depression, panic attacks, chronic pain, or whatever. Or, for many, it may be a search for deeper meaning.

EM: How did you come to start practicing mindfulness?

VB: As a Buddhist I began alternating the mindfulness of breathing with the metta bhavana, which is a meditation practice based on the cultivation of universal friendliness. These are excellent forms of meditation. But what I came to realise over time is that I was distorting the practices and using them to try to escape from myself rather than to come closer to myself.

I was just desperate to have a different experience from the one I was having. So I became very adept at using meditation as a way of escaping. I think that’s quite common. When your subjective experience is so painful and you don’t have access to the right kind of teaching – in my case how to meditate in a painful body – maybe it’s inevitable that people will use meditation to escape. There wasn’t much information out there in the eighties and early nineties specifically about meditating with pain. I was one of many people who were trying to figure it out as I went along.

I meditated with this escapist attitude, at least to some extent, for about ten years whilst I continued to push myself really hard in everything. Then I had another big crisis when my back got much worse and my bladder and bowel became permanently paralysed. My walking deteriorated to the point where I have to use a wheelchair a lot of the time. Around that time I had a few dark nights of the soul. It felt like I’d come all this way, meditating for ten years, and now I was back to square one. Although, of course, this wasn’t entirely true as I had developed a lot of awareness and kindness skills too. But I felt very humbled by my body at that time.

I started to carefully examine what was going on and I started to realise that there was a missing link in my meditation practice and spiritual life. What was missing was mindfulness in daily life. Typically I’d meditate for twenty or thirty minutes a day and then, for the remainder of the day I was a disaster zone of pushing and striving. So I started reading about how to bring some kind of balance into my life, particularly using Cognitive Behavioural approaches to pain management called pacing. I’d also read a book called Who Dies? by Steven Levine which included a chapter about turning towards difficult thoughts and feelings. That was a bolt of lightning as I realised I wasn’t doing that. I’d been trying to cultivate positive states of mind by turning away from the difficult. Without realising it, I’d been discarding a huge part of my experience and I’d been locked into a mindset that was saying that I could make my pain go away if only I tried hard enough.

EM: Was there an actual turning point when you realised the way forward?

VB:Discovering Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books was a big turning-point. Particularly Full Catastrophe Living which directly addresses how to work with physical pain using mindfulness, how to live with a body which is not working. I found it captivating. Kabat-Zinn’s teachings were very accessible to me and helped me turn more and more towards my own experience and begin to unravel all the layers of fighting and resistance. From that time on I was able to bring more of that attitude into the different forms of meditation I was continuing to practice – particularly mindfulness and kindness practices.

EM: How did you come to devise your own mindfulness programme?

VB: In the late nineties I’d been largely housebound for a few years due to my disability and pain, and I knew intuitively that I needed to get out more. I could see that doing something for other people would be an extremely good thing for me. Also I’d had to give up my film career at 25 and had never found another form of employment that I could manage. Not for want of trying I should add!

I’d tried so many different jobs and come unstuck every time because I couldn’t cope with the physical demands. So it occurred to me that maybe I could teach mindful approaches to pain and difficulty to other people – they would benefit and so would I in that I’d be developing a mindful way of working for myself. I also knew that I’d have to up my game if I was teaching others – I’d have to be practicing what I taught as fully and wholeheartedly as possible. I wanted that level of motivation and discipline.

At this point there was nothing similar out there, certainly not in the UK. If I’d had the money and my back had been OK I’d have gone to the US and done a Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) internship at Kabat-Zinn’s clinic in Massachusetts. But that was completely out of the question.

So I was left to try and devise something for myself, drawing on my fifteen years of meditation experience and 25 years of pain. I also felt that I had something to offer that was a little more precise in terms of working with pain and ill-health than the more generic work of Kabat-Zinn. I admired his work hugely but I knew that the practice needed to be refined if it was to work for people with chronic pain.

My intention was to take what Kabat-Zinn had done and try to figure out how to refine it into my own eight-week programme, one that would ideally suit people with physical health problems, people like myself. I’d been down so many blind alleys myself but that was a good thing. It meant that I could help other people avoid the kind of wrong turns I’d taken.

EM: How did you manage to get Breathworks off the ground?

VB: In 2001 I received an £8000 grant from the Millennium Commission aimed at disabled people who wanted to contribute to the community. That enabled me to do a pilot scheme and also go on a five-day training event that Kabat-Zinn was leading at Bangor University, the first time he’d come to the UK. If anyone had told me at that point that Breathworks would go on to be an international concern with branches in fifteen countries and that literally thousands of people would go through our courses, I’d have thought they were bonkers. At that point I thought I’d be lucky to pull off one class a week. I had no idea really. I didn’t know how to advertise, what to teach. I put an ad in the Manchester Evening News. The course was free at that point. To my amazement I was inundated with enquiries. I suddenly realised that there were so many people out there with physical health problems, with no idea where to turn.

The Breathworks course wasn’t fully-formed for ages. It’s been a very organic process. I always say that it’s developed from the inside out. Everything we teach has been forged in the fires of my own experience and the theoretical basis has emerged from that.

EM: Did you ever lapse in your meditation practice?

VB: I’ve occasionally missed the odd day but I’ve never lapsed in terms of losing the plot altogether. From the start I had a sense that it was going to be hugely significant. After a few months of meditating I got to the point where I missed it if I stopped for a day or two, so it has always been relatively easy to get back to it. This isn’t to say that it has been easy or pleasant – often it’s been demanding to meditate when I’m in pain. But the sense of being awake and alive that comes from meditating is such a gift.

EM: Were you still in a lot of physical pain when Breathworks was up and running?

VB: I was in a lot of pain. My back was really bad. I was quite drugged and I found it difficult to think clearly. In 2002 I had more major surgery where a lot of metalwork was put into my lower spine and a lot of reconstruction took place, so that put me out for a year. During that period a guy called Gary Hennessey (AKA Ratnaguna) from our Buddhist order, who’d been through some dark nights of the soul himself, said he’d like to be involved with Breathworks. And my partner Sona Fricker decided he’d like to join me. They are both highly experienced meditators and teachers, having been practicing since the early seventies. That’s when it really started to take off. We knew that it worked but we needed to be more strategic and that the process had to be a lot more rigorous. To reach more people we decided the best approach would be to train other people to deliver our programme.

We ran our first training retreat in 2004.

EM: How would you define mindfulness for someone who was a complete stranger to it?

VB:That’s a difficult question because I think you really have to experience it in some way to get an idea of what it is. There’s an increasing number of words talking about mindfulness as it comes more and more into the mainstream. But the experience is in many respects very simple. Loosely, it’s about being present in the moment, feeling the physical sensations in the body and noticing what you’re thinking and feeling emotionally. This means you can make choices about how you respond to experience rather than being driven by automatic reactions. Also, the more we become aware of our bodily sensations in each moment, the less we are thinking. We can’t experience the body directly and be lost in worrying about the future in exactly the same moment. We just can’t do that. Our brains aren’t wired for that. The more we are in touch with sensations directly, the less we are lost in thinking/worrying about the sensations – of pain, for example. Not that there’s anything wrong with thinking per se – clearly we need to think in order to function effectively. But so many of us are compulsive thinkers and we are victims of a lot of negative thoughts. Mindfulness can cut through this every time we bring our awareness back to sensations in the body as an anchor for the wandering mind.

Mindfulness is about asking, “What is actually happening to me now?” and dropping into that experience. By resting attention on the physical, mental and emotional processes, we start to notice how everything is fluid – it’s changing all the time, with little spaces in between. If we keep practicing all this, we discover an inner spaciousness that is really wonderful.

By turning towards the difficult, things seem to get easier. That sounds like a paradox. But, if you don’t do that, it comes at a great price. By allowing thoughts and sensations to rise and fall, without running away from them or pushing them away, you will feel more grounded, more stable, more awake to whatever is going on. If you’re busy running away from unpleasant thoughts or physical discomfort, you’re going to be in a kind of hectic state and this will mean you also miss out on all the wonderful things that are happening to you and happening around you. Mindfulness opens you up to everything so life becomes richer and more vivid and you feel more and more in control.

EM: Do many people sign up to your eight-week courses and then drop off after a few weeks? If so, why?

VB: Generally people complete our courses and they are very motivated. They are ready to engage with a mindfulness programme. People have often tried many other things and they may have very severe health problems of one sort or another. This means that there is a lot at stake when they do the course. Life just isn’t working out very well with their usual mode of being. So they really want to make changes and are generally open to meditation and working with the mind. This makes the courses very rewarding to teach. People are usually very engaged and committed. We see astonishing changes in eight weeks. I finished leading a course this week and the things people said at the end were deeply moving – things like how their sleep had dramatically improved, how they were learning to bring awareness into the everyday, and so on.

EM: One of the first lessons we learn in mindfulness is “you are not your thoughts”. Some people find this concept difficult to grasp.

VB: Again, it’s very subtle. This is nothing to do with the power of positive thinking. It’s simply saying that thoughts aren’t facts. If you think an unpleasant or insecure thought, you don’t need to act on it. You can just observe it for what it is. Some thoughts are useful. Some aren’t. It’s worth remembering that we don’t need to be dictated to by our thoughts.

EM: What are the main challenges thrown up for someone who is suffering from physical pain?

VB: We’re asking someone to fully experience a body that is painful. That person will have a host of avoidance strategies and they might suffer from reactive anxiety or depression. Getting those people to be in their bodies is hard but the way we do it at Breathworks is very gentle. We put a lot of attention on caring for people.

EM: In your new book, Mindfulness For Health, you talk about primary and secondary suffering…

VB: It’s the idea that suffering occurs on two levels. There’s the actual unpleasant sensations felt in the body – the primary suffering. Then there’s the secondary suffering which is made up of all the thoughts, feelings and memories associated with the pain – based on resistance – which often leads to depression, anxiety and tension. Of course, the global sense that “I hurt” in any given moment is a kind of soup of both kinds of suffering. But with mindfulness we can learn to tease apart the two kinds of suffering, meaning we can learn to accept the primary sensations and greatly reduce the secondary suffering which has a way of dissolving when it’s seen with a compassionate eye. But our instinct is to struggle against and resist pain with all our might. Mindfulness teaches us the acceptance of things as they are in this moment. When the struggle ceases, a sense of peace takes its place. When you see that happening it seems glaringly obvious. “Why didn’t I see this before?” But it’s almost as if it’s so obvious that we miss it. And sitting with resistance is not always easy.

EM: What was your thinking behind the Mindfulness For Health book in terms of its potential audience?

VB:Simply, I wanted to write an easily accessible book that would help as wide an audience as possible as so many people struggle with pain and ill-health. Also, the general idea was to write a book that would be a kind of companion to Finding Peace In A Frantic World, which is more stress-related. Both books have been co-written with Danny Penman who has a gift for writing in a very accessible and immediate way, but without diluting the message of mindfulness.

EM: Jon Kabat-Zinn has been careful to present mindfulness as a purely secular practice. Where do you stand on that?

VB: Well, Vidyamala is my Buddhist name and it’s a kind of accident of history that I use it at Breathworks, which is a secular course. When I started teaching at my local Buddhist centre, that was the name I used and that’s the name I became most associated with. So, by the time Breathworks was expanding, I already had a reputation as “Vidyamala” and it would have been confusing to use my secular name.

The issue of mindfulness and Buddhism is a hot one and remains unresolved. Although it’s true that Kabat-Zinn has been careful to present mindfulness as a purely secular practice, when he came to Chester to speak in 2013 I was quite taken by how many Buddhist references he made. And it’s pretty standard for people training mindfulness teachers to talk about Buddhism and the roots of mindfulness. His teaching was far more overtly Buddhist than we are at Breathworks. The founders of Breathworks are all ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order – an Order that values adapting Buddhism for the modern world – and we make no secret of that, but we don’t use much explicitly Buddhist language in our Breathworks work and we’re not out to convert anyone. Though of course many people do go on to explore Buddhism, and that’s great.

Kabat-Zinn talks about the Dharma (the Buddhist path and teachings) quite a lot. In 2011 he co-edited a volume on contemporary Buddhism which is one of the things he says he’s most proud of. My sense is that he is a great pragmatist, and I strongly relate to that. He’s gone through a fascinating process of making mindfulness entirely secular in the beginning – perhaps in part to make it acceptable in hospitals in the late seventies – and then coming back to talk in more conventional Buddhist language more recently. Thirty-odd years down the line he doesn’t mind admitting that he’s involved in holy work.

EM: How optimistic are you about mindfulness moving further from the fringes and becoming a more mainstream practice?

VB:There are times when it feels like a slow process and other times it feels like an avalanche. Some things become very popular very suddenly, like Transcendental Meditation in the seventies, then they fade away. Other things keep growing in popularity, like yoga. I suspect that mindfulness will be a bit of both. There’ll be a fashion element in that some people will realise that it’s not another quick-fix panacea and move on to the next thing. But I feel confident that mindfulness is here to stay. There’s an evolution in society now where we seem to be moving away from the idea that having a house and a car will bring us lasting happiness. The evidence of neuroscience to support the effectiveness of mindfulness is not about to go away. The books and the TV documentaries continue to happen. I often say that the fashion for mindfulness may pass, but mindfulness itself will last. After all, it’s lasted several thousand years already in many different cultures!

EM: Is there are danger of mindfulness being diluted and a danger of people teaching it for the wrong reasons?

VB: I’m sure those are inevitable dangers. We talk about those dangers at Breathworks quite a bit. The attitude we’ve taken is that you can never really stop that happening in life. There’ll always be people looking to make a quick buck. Although very few mindfulness teachers actually make much money! We’ve always felt that, instead of putting our energies into putting up fences, we’d sooner concentrate on making what we do so attractive, compelling and full of integrity that we maintain something beautiful in the world. The bottom line is that you can’t succeed as a mindfulness teacher or mindfulness organisation if you don’t embody the practice. And you need to be going deeper and deeper all the time in your own practice. After all, it’s not easy work, guiding people into their own minds and helping them deal with suffering!

EM: What is it about mindfulness that continues to drive you?

VB: The motivation behind all my work is remembering myself as a young woman of 25, in hospital, with my career and body in crisis, wanting so much to explore my mind but not knowing where to turn. I had to figure it all out by myself. Now I can offer a helping hand to people who find themselves in a similar situation. Hopefully they won’t have to go through the terribly lonely journey that I was on for so many years. Mindfulness completely transformed my life. These days, I experience a deep sense of contentment most of the time. A big part of that contentment comes from knowing that I’ve done something with my life which has really helped people.

When I was young, before my injuries, my greatest love was mountain climbing. I had to give that up of course, but I often tell people I have become a mountaineer of the inner world. Mindfulness and kindness guide me deeper and deeper into the mystery of consciousness and life. That journey can never end. It’s wonderful!