Vidyamala Burch is something of a friend of Able Magazine’s, having contributed to our first ‘pain’ edition a couple of years ago. We wanted to find out what’s been happening since we last spoke.

How are you?

Well, my health is better than it has been for ages.

Presumably that’s as a result of having the discipline to meditate using the mindfulness technique. Do you think disabled people have a responsibility to ‘help themselves’?

Definitely; I suppose I think that if people can make a shift from expecting other people to do it for them – it’s a difficult thing to say of course, without sounding like you’re blaming them. I got to a point where I said to myself: “Well I can be disabled and miserable or I can be disabled and try to have the best quality of life possible”. I thought well, that’s a bit of a no-brainer. I suppose that’s partly acceptance.

When you accept, you’re more able to look at options but when you’re still thinking there’s a miracle out there that someone else is going to do for you, then you’re passive.

How has Mindfulness developed over the last couple of years?

There have been a lot of developments. Mindfulness itself is becoming much more recognised. I think there’s a growing segment of the population which includes healthcare professionals amongst others – and Members of Parliament, interestingly – I’m part of an all-party Parliamentary group, where I’m going to be attending some meetings looking at mindfulness and looking at how mindfulness can be used in society with children and care, patients on the NHS but also for staff wellbeing in the NHS because a lot of staff suffer from tremendous stress.

So mindfulness is now definitely on the map in a way that it wasn’t probably even two years ago.

Medicine still has a reputation of being nasty, but with a payoff. That’s not how mindfulness seems to work…

Mindfulness is not easy. You do have to do the work; you have to meditate every day, so from that point of view it’s got a ‘no pain, no gain’ element to it.

Yes, of course there’s scepticism. It’s something new so we don’t like these things but there was a meeting last year; all the top people in the health service meet about once a month and they had a meeting about mindfulness and got leading academics to come and speak to them. One of the ways of approaching it is to see it as a public health initiative – so 50 years ago we didn’t have gyms so the whole idea of physical health was just not on the map. Things like eating five portions of fruit and vegetables weren’t on the map 50 years ago either. So going to the gym and eating five portions of fruit and vegetables have been very successful public health initiatives, so what we’re now saying is with mindfulness – we can see it as like going to the gym for the mind. So it could be about taking responsibility for mental and emotional wellbeing. I think that’s really clever of them. It’s not flakey, whacky sort of hippie stuff, it’s built on the success of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and things like that.

The cultural timing feels right for mindfulness…

I happen to be at the point in my own life where I’ve been meditating since the mid 80s and abut the mid 2000s I felt ready to try to teach other people to try to use it to relieve physical pain, taking it out of the religious context. That was just the time, coincidentally, when mindfulness was beginning to be a bit more accepted. If I had tried that 10 years before then it wouldn’t have worked. If I tried to do it 10 years later somebody else would have got their fist so that was just a complete and utter coincidence and I find that amazing.