In the Western world we have had ideas of mental health and mental illness for millennia. In the past hundreds years or so, through William James, Freud and Jung various thoughts about who we are and why we behave as we do became popular and controversial. The emphasis was on treating people who acted and expressed thoughts and feelings well outside the realms of our everyday experience as a society. Moreover, as mental health issues such as shell shock (now PTSD) in warfare, depression, suicides, and anxiety became more commonly acknowledged most of the emphasis was on how to make unhappy or disturbed people less so.

For most of us this was just a sideshow, something that a few strangers had to endure. We were well. We were stable, balanced, happy in our own way. And yet as the decades went by, despite the classic British stiff upper lip, the Scots attitude of grin and bear it, and the masculine approach of “man up” reports of people who felt mentally under par grew and grew.

I think this is because we are simply observing reality better. And it reflects something astonishing said by the Buddha two and a half thousand years ago.

While he was teaching in a village new to him, he turned his attention to a bustling nearby market close to where he and his followers sat. He said to those listening “Look at the people in the market. Almost all of them are physically well, and have been for years, maybe for decades. But I tell you there is not one single person there who is mentally well.”

He was raising the bar high, much higher than we do today. What he was referring to was our inability to control how we respond to unhealthy automatic thoughts, feelings and reactions that arise regularly in our mind. His view, as someone who looked carefully at the human condition in order to understand then end all human suffering, was that as long as we still have destructive or unpleasant emotions arising in our minds and can’t control what we do as a result of these, then we are not mentally well.

I guess it’s an impossible goal, though he claimed to have attained it and he doesn’t strike me as the type of person who would boast or exaggerate. Still, in my less grandiose vision, it would suffice if we all moved slowly but surely in the direction of greater self-management of our responses to these automatic creations of our mind.

This is the purpose of mindfulness, to help us move along a spectrum from wherever we are currently to greater mental health, happiness, self-management, and enjoyment of life. It’s a lifelong task and if we practice well and consistently then who know how far we may slide along that spectrum towards complete joy and acceptance of life.