McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality

It strikes me as odd to depict improving soldiers' performance as a distortion of mindfulness without mentioning the long history of meditation in the martial arts.

Hehe. This is what I basically wondered when someone told me that mindfullness was helping her cope with pressure of work life.

The new decolonization movement in India has been thinking quite deeply about this and other developments where Indian traditional knowledge is taken to the US and then copyrighted, patented and trademarked, and then sold around the world, incl. India. Amusingly, with American marketing being so brilliant, Indian knowledge has in recent history become far more popular once it was "U-turned" in this way. Lots of interesting work being done.

Interestingly, you can also see similar developments as those done to appropriate non-Western mathematical/scientific knowledge in the centuries prior within Europe. Yoga, and Mindfullness are en course to being de-rooted and turned into Western inventions, by rewriting histories or by silencing them. SOAS for instance has one guy who was anointed a Mahant, and he writes books with another guy who says Yoga is a cynical rebranding of Swedish exercises. It's all very very curious.

I suppose, if a foreigner flatters an Indian, he'll give you every bit of wealth he has (and then cry foul later). Hehe.

"The problem is that the way they brought these into institutions was very non-confrontational, very non-oppositional, in order to to get a foot in the door. And so they're working with these other elites in these institutions and over time they became co-opted in my opinion. So by not offering a challenge to these corporate interests, the radical revolutionary potential of these practices have been neutered."

Somehow I have a feeling that this desire for meditation practices to be "radical revolutionary" in terms of political economy is more Californian than traditional Buddhist...

Clinical psychologist who teaches and practices mindfulness here.

I often hear the argument that the current applications of mindfulness in corporate or otherwise commercial settings are a perversion of the original teachings. While to some extent it’s true that teachings have been adapted and the adaptations are sometimes (maybe often) problematic, the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me. Attention and acceptance training (the two fundamental aspects of mindfulness in my research supported but not definitive view) don’t belong to Buddhism or any other system or set of teachings. The underlying science of mind training can be applied wherever we see fit. There’s no “what mindfulness is about and what it’s not” in a corporate versus holistic sense. There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me. What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience. Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state. That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.

And to the extent that we have a large number of poorly trained teachers selling a poorly designed product AS mindfulness, THAT in my mind is the larger issue, rather than the context or clientele. I saw a teacher once tell a student that her overwhelming obsession with her physical pain WAS her being mindful. This and the reverse problem whereby mindfulness is equated with dullness, sleepiness, or numbness are the real dangers in my view.