I recently completed a remarkably well-conceived, 10-session online pilot course on Mindfulness-Based Ethical Living (MBEL) and I want to share with SBN readers some reflections on my experience. I am entirely a secular practitioner in that I haven't expressed faith in the Buddhist religion by "taking refuge" (especially not refuge in the monastic sangha), and I respect the difference between taking and not taking these vows. Having left Catholicism in my teens during the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and second-wave feminist movements, I've never since been drawn to organized religion, and I do not now identify as a Buddhist. However, I have been drawn to independently explore the ethics of care in Buddhism and its relation to the feminist ethics of care.^[i]

The basic notion of MBEL is that mindfulness needs to be integrally connected to an ethic of care. In this sense, mindfulness is not just about being present and aware of our experiences in a non-judgmental way but connecting that awareness to words and actions that promote care and compassion for ourselves and others.

Two facilitators, Ayda Duroux and Carmel Shalev, guided the MBEL Zoom meetings, and their skillful and cooperative facilitation reflected the ethos of MBEL. Unlike many online dharma courses I've taken, the process of the MBEL meetings interweaves concise dharma teachings, guided meditations, and group discussions in which the participants are encouraged to address one another in dialogue. There are useful suggestions for home practice between the weekly online meetings, such as prompts for end-of-day journaling, recordings of guided meditations, and beautifully written, succinct readings. My experience was that the usually private act of meditation became more relational among the participants in the meetings, and I felt that an extraordinarily close interconnectedness formed among us and the two facilitators. This intimate feeling has the paradoxical character of uncovering something objective. Close interconnectedness is simply a fact of the way things are.

The ethos and content of the course is closely related to the writing and teaching of Stephen Batchelor, whom l've followed since a Buddhist friend sent me After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015). In 2022, I participated in Batchelor's online workshop, "Mindfulness-Based Human Flourishing: The Ethics and Philosophy of Mindful Living", after which a group of people formed a team to develop a course on Mindfulness Based Ethical Living.^[ii] During this workshop and other courses led by Batchelor that I've attended, he presented his evolving "Cartography of Care," a diagrammatic chart mapping dimensions of care, based in early Buddhist teachings and in response to his core question: What does it mean to practice the dharma of the Buddha in the context of modernity? Following Batchelor's reimagining of the eightfold path, the first half of the MBEL course focuses on contemplative life and the second half on the socially engaged practices of "vita activa." Having frequently used the distilled, one-page "Cartography" as a prompt for meditation, I was surprised and deeply moved to recognize that the MBEL course embodies the spirit of his Cartography of Care.

As noted earlier, the course enabled me to draw together two streams of long-standing interest—the feminist ethics of care and the Buddhist ethics of care. It’s not that MBEL emphasizes, as I do, the relationship between feminist and Buddhist care ethics. However, in MBEL’s Session 8 on Living Ethically, the reading on “Caring and Responsibility” points out that the ethic of care came out of feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan’s pioneering work In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982). Decades later, Gilligan would write that her book “recast the conversation about self and morality as a conversation about voice and relationships.”^[iii] It strikes me that this is highly congruent with Batchelor’s reimagining of Right Speech as Voice.^[iv] Both Gilligan and Batchelor emphasize the ethical dimensions of “finding one’s own voice.”^[v] Among the most compelling features of Gilligan’s thinking is her clarity that feminism is resistance to patriarchy and not to men. Feminism resists the gendered hierarchy of patriarchy and its denial of our profound interconnectedness that was central to the early Buddhist conception of self.

I have closely followed the growing literature of feminist care ethics alongside exploration of Buddhist care ethics. That is, having first learned to practice secular mindfulness through Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living (1990), I gradually delved more deeply into the ethics of care in Buddhism. Batchelor has noted this trajectory in several courses I've taken with him, i.e., that many practitioners of secular mindfulness go on to seek an ethics that makes it possible to live a flourishing life and become the persons we want to be amidst the uncertainty and impermanence of our world and lives.   

I am among practitioners of secular mindfulness who went on to learn about Buddhism within a secular perspective, largely through self-directed study. I attended hybrid courses (widely available online since COVID) with dharma teachers from a variety of lineages; and by participating in online forums, retreats, reading and discussion groups offered through various organizations, including the Secular Buddhist Network, Tricycle, Bodhi College, Gaia House, New York Insight Meditation Center (NYIMC), Insight Meditation Center (IMC) of Redwood City CA, Insight Meditation Society (IMS) of Barre MA, the Sati Center, and Tuwhiri, a secular Buddhist publishing imprint.

It is important to me that the MBEL course is deeply oriented as a secular iteration of the dharma. For the example of the MBEL facilitators' caring cooperation and their fostering of interconnectedness among course participants, I am grateful to the MBEL Development Team for enabling this experience. My key takeaway from the MBEL course is that it’s possible to learn much more deeply and skillfully how to practice the ethics of care which I find to be at the heart of secular dharma.

^[i] Tina Sideris, "A mindfulness based feminist ethics of care: weaving the feminist ethics of care and secular Buddhist concepts." https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/a-mindfulness-based-feminist-ethics-of-care-weaving-the-feminist-ethics-of-care-and-secular-buddhist-concepts/

^[ii] An article in the Secular Buddhist Network website provided an update on the development of the course: "Since November 2022, eighteen people from twelve countries have been developing a new online course, Mindfulness Based Ethical Living (MBEL). The course will offer an ethical and philosophical framework for a flourishing life, based on a secular interpretation of the Buddhist foundation of mindfulness." https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/mindfulness-based-ethical-living-mbel-an-update/

^[iii] In a Human Voice, “The Ethic of Care,” (Polity Press, 2023: 106). See also “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences.” Journal of Social Psychology vol 45/1, Spring 2014: 89-106; and “Moral Injury” Chapter 4 of In a Human Voice.(2023: 73-93)

^[iv] Tricycle Fall 2021, “Finding the Voice, Performing the Self,” Interview with Stephen Batchelor and Ruth Ozeki by James Shaheen. See also Tricycle Spring 2010, “Starting from Scratch: A Talk with Stephen Batchelor,” Interview with Stephen Batchelor by Tricycle.

^[v] Tom Cummings discusses how Stephen Batchelor understands the ethical dimension of voice in his “Stephen Batchelor’s New Book: Buddha, Socrates, and Us,” https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/stephen-batchelor-on-his-new-book-buddha-socrates-and-us/ . Since publishing In a Different Voice in 1982, Carol Gilligan has continued to research and write on care ethics along with an international cohort of feminist scholars. Her recent book In a Human Voice was published when she was 87.