How corporates co-opted mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable (2015)

Yep, just how antidepressant manufactures co-opted research on social dominance to reverse some of the biochemical changes that happen when you are "ground down like a minion".

'The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.'

This seems completely back to front to me. Surely it's men that have greater societal expectations of stoicism, toughness etc. than women, and fewer options for social support. I'm sure we all know about higher rates of suicide in men. These are often linked to the types of pressures I mention.

Apart from that I generally agree that this trend is pretty insidious. One of their latest wheezes is 'resilience', which from my reading boiled down to 'hey there x, what's your major malfunction that you can't cope with the soul destroying drudgery and corporate psychopathy like y? Perhaps you should read our piece about resilience to learn how to become a good drone again. We wouldn't want to have to lose you would we?'.

One thing I've never quite understood - if you are teaching yourself to become more equanimous how do you avoid becoming less concerned about the things that really matter also?!

I think the teacher's point was that meditation should make you more aware of bad influences and create a desire to fix them.

Let's say you constantly do harmful things to other people or yourself. You can meditate and maybe get some benefit but the ultimate realization should be that you need to change your ways. That will be the only path to real happiness.

Same with the modern lifestyle. This lifestyle is ultimately unhealthy. You can build up some resilience with meditation but if you don't change the lifestyle you can't make real progress.

I would compare it people who eat too much junk food. They can switch to organic and gluten free junk food and will do a little better. But in the end real progress can be only made by removing the junk food.

Does this make sense? I don't want to pretend having deep insight. This is just my (limited) understanding.

If it can be sold and used as a tool for subjugation humans will quickly determine and optimize the ways in which to do so.

That's the beauty of capitalism--or possibly even economics in general--it acknowledges and respects nothing that falls outside of its own scope. No matter how ancient, sophisticated, sacred, or meaningful a practice may have been--no matter what reverence our ancestral betters may have applied to it, capitalism will find the most effective way to utilize it as a strictly economic material and convert it into profit. For the true capitalist there is no extra or supra-capitalism. Capitalism envelops the world. It swallows and defuses all meaning and translates it into the small subset of meanings it understands. All is reduced to pure economic terms--it is no longer a question of interfacing with the practices of your ancestors, respecting history or engaging in spiritual practice--the meditation is only understood and useful insofar as it has an assignable quantity related to productive increase or related directly to profit.

I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.