Five years ago, Chulalongkorn Medical School graduates heard the news that one of their former psychiatric faculty members, Sermsak Lolak, had been recruited to join the prestigious faculty of Stanford University Medical School. They must have assumed that Dr Sermsak would excel in the technical practice of matching pills to mental ills.
Mindfulness has become popular in the West as an effective tool to address health, education and work issues. Somkid Chaijitvanit
If so, they were wrong.
Once at Stanford, Dr Sermsak challenged fundamental assumptions in his profession.
"It is time to return medical education to its origins in compassion and mindfulness," he wrote in Academic Psychiatry. On the medical conference circuit, he lectured to his peers about how mindfulness could prevent physician burn out and then he actually instructed his audiences to meditate on the spot.
Mindfulness? You could imagine how perplexed his colleagues back in Thailand were when they first heard of Dr Sermsak's focus. Some might have consulted their Thai/English dictionaries to learn that mindfulness combines two ideas central to the practice they had learned long ago as Thai monks — "samadhi" (meditation) and "sati" "contemplation". These notions from the ancient language of Pali had been absent from their professional education.
Not any more, nowadays medical professionals — indeed professionals in every field — are engulfed in a Mindfulness Revolution, as it was labelled in a recent Time cover story.
Led by a scientific breakthrough in neuroscience that revealed the beneficial brain-states of minds that had been trained in mindfulness, more than 100 mindfulness institutes have emerged in top US universities. Not restricted to health care, each of these "applications" of mindfulness in fields as varied as education, the arts, architecture and librarianship. Corporate management got involved, too. This year at Davos, prime ministers and CEOs huddled to discuss mindfulness as if it were the latest formula for GDP.
According to media expert Ariana Huffington, mindfulness reached an inflection point in 2014 as the year's top trend encompassing all sectors of society. In 2015 that role may shift to Asia. Singapore and Japan have already announced mindfulness conferences with the aim of bridging East and West on this topic next year. But the most likely hub for Mindfulness in Asia is Thailand.
To that end, Dr Sermsak recently joined the advisory board of Mindfulness 2016 (M2016), a summit meeting of world leaders organised by Chulalongkorn University's faculty of arts, which for decades has been the steward of the Royal Family's ethical traditions.
In preparation for a summit in 2016, several faculties of Chulalongkorn University are collaborating to build a model that they call "mindful learning". Kicking off the programme, Dr Sermsak will confer with leaders of the M2016 in a seminar which is open to the public at the faculty of arts on Tuesday.
The aim of this group is not merely to extend the American or scientific approach to mindfulness but to pre-empt the harmful impacts as broadband technologies overwhelm Thailand's traditions.
"Our aim is to build a model of 'mindful learning' applicable to all sectors of society and which draws upon the distinct cultural traditions and needs of Asian themselves, says Prof Soraj Hongladarom, director of the Center of Ethics of Science and Technology, which is organising the effort.
In fact, a number of prescient Thai leaders have been preparing for this moment for a long time. Given the surge of interest in mindfulness in the West, they hope to gain the leverage they need to bring mindfulness into the core concepts being conceived centre stage by the National Reform Council, which aims to restructure Thailand to fit the demands of the 21st century.
Among these leaders is Paron Israsena, whose ideas are at the centre of the Mindfulness 2016 initiative. An octogenarian who was human resource executive of Thailand's largest company (Siam Cement Group), he is a tireless education reformer.
After spending decades battling the rote learning method in Thailand, he founded his own alternative school 16 years ago. His Darunsikkhalai School for Innovative Learning nowadays is recognised as a beacon for mindful learning in all fields in Thailand.
Embracing the views of an MIT Media Lab education guru named Seymore Papert, the school replaces the one-way teacher-to-student pedagogy by turning the teacher into a coach for students to take charge of their own learning.
To begin the day, each student gains clarity and focus by beginning the day with a half hour of mindful meditation.
Rather than scold kids who rely on technology, students learn computer coding starting in the second grade and they soon learn to take control of devices and software on their own terms.
"Khun Paron has a brilliant model for overcoming the addictive power and commercial lure of technology," says Chairat Phongphanphanee, of the Chula engineering faculty who believes a similar approach to learning could be applied to his own faculty.
Though only 100 kids attend Mr Paron's school, many more can benefit by his approach to mindful learning. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has appointed Mr Paron to oversee the educational committee of the NRC, whose recommendations may remake K-12 education.
The organisers of Mindfulness 2016, seek to apply the same approach Mr Paron uses for K-12 education to higher education and to the professions.
"In many fields, the 'expert' must become redefined as a coach, who helps users gain mental focus and mastery over the use of technology," says Mr Chairat.
While the initial focus of the effort is to introduce mindful learning into the pedagogy and human resource development programmes that shape students and professionals in Asia, the final outcome of the mindfulness initiative, say organisers, is to produce meaningful interface between the virtual and physical world.
To that end, they hope to collaborate with technology labs in universities and corporations which are eager to formulate and test apps, devices and other products and services that bring mindfulness into the new digital economy.
Craig Warren Smith, PhD, who founded M2016, is a visiting professor at the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University. He is a former professor of Science and Technology at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Singapore's Lew Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He introduced the theme of 'spiritual computing' to the laboratories at the headquarters of Google, Yahoo!, IBM, Microsoft, and many universities.