Ron Purser: Beyond McMindfulness

03/03/14 23:35

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March 3, 2014

Beyond McMindfulness
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Get Religion Newsletters: Enter email Subscribe 326 Email Suddenly mindfulness meditation has become mainstream, making its way into schools, corporations, prisons, and government 98 Comment agencies including the U.S. military. Millions of people are receiving tangible benets from their mindfulness practice: less stress, better concentration, perhaps a little more empathy. Needless to say, this is an important development to be welcomed - but it has a shadow. The mindfulness revolution appears to offer a universal panacea for resolving almost every area of daily concern. Recent books on the topic include: Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Politics, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, A Mindful Nation, Mindful Recovery, The Power of Mindful Learning, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Way through Depression, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. Almost daily, the media cite scientic studies that report the numerous health benets of mindfulness meditation and how such a simple practice can effect neurological changes in the brain. The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. Business savvy consultants pushing mindfulness training promise that it will improve work efciency, reduce absenteeism, and enhance the "soft skills" that are crucial to career success. Some even assert that mindfulness training can act as a "disruptive technology," reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. So far, however, no empirical studies have been published that support these claims. In their branding efforts, proponents of mindfulness training usually preface their programs as being "Buddhist-inspired." There is a certain cachet and hipness in telling neophytes that mindfulness is a legacy of Buddhism -- a tradition famous for its ancient and time-tested meditation methods. But, sometimes in the same breath, consultants often assure their corporate sponsors that their particular brand of mindfulness has relinquished all ties and afliations to its Buddhist origins. Uncoupling mindfulness from its ethical and religious Buddhist context is understandable as an expedient move to make such training a viable product on the open market. But the rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive. While a stripped-down, secularized technique -- what some critics are now calling "McMindfulness" -- may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots. Most scientic and popular accounts circulating in the media have portrayed mindfulness in terms of stress reduction and attention-enhancement. These human performance benets are heralded as the sine qua non of mindfulness and its major attraction for modern corporations. But mindfulness, as understood and practiced within the Buddhist tradition, is not merely an ethically-neutral technique for reducing stress and improving concentration. Rather, mindfulness is a distinct quality of attention that is dependent upon and inuenced by many other factors: the nature of our thoughts, speech and actions; our way of making a living; and our efforts to avoid unwholesome and unskillful behaviors, while developing those that are conducive to wise action, social harmony, and compassion. This is why Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati). The distinction is not moralistic: the issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterized by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human ourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself. According to the Pali Canon (the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha), even a person committing a premeditated and heinous crime can be exercising mindfulness, albeit wrong mindfulness. Clearly, the mindful attention and single-minded concentration of a terrorist, sniper assassin, or white-collar criminal is not the same quality of mindfulness that the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist adepts have developed. Right Mindfulness is guided by intentions and motivations based on self-restraint,

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wholesome mental states, and ethical behaviors -- goals that include but supersede stress reduction and improvements in concentration. Another common misconception is that mindfulness meditation is a private, internal affair. Mindfulness is often marketed as a method for personal self-fulllment, a reprieve from the trials and tribulations of cutthroat corporate life. Such an individualistic and consumer orientation to the practice of mindfulness may be effective for self-preservation and self-advancement, but is essentially impotent for mitigating the causes of collective and organizational distress. When mindfulness practice is compartmentalized in this way, the interconnectedness of personal motives is lost. There is a dissociation between one's own personal transformation and the kind of social and organizational transformation that takes into account the causes and conditions of suffering in the broader environment. Such a colonization of mindfulness also has an instrumentalizing effect, reorienting the practice to the needs of the market, rather than to a critical reection on the causes of our collective suffering, or social dukkha. The Buddha emphasized that his teaching was about understanding and ending dukkha ("suffering" in the broadest sense). So what about the dukkha caused by the ways institutions operate? Many corporate advocates argue that transformational change starts with oneself: if one's mind can become more focused and peaceful, then social and organizational transformation will naturally follow. The problem with this formulation is that today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights -- greed, ill will, and delusion -- are no longer conned to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control. Up to now, the mindfulness movement has avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in modern business institutions. Instead, corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efciently and calmly within toxic environments. Cloaked in an aura of care and humanity, mindfulness is refashioned into a safety valve, as a way to let off steam -- a technique for coping with and adapting to the stresses and strains of corporate life. The result is an atomized and highly privatized version of mindfulness practice, which is easily coopted and conned to what Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, in their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, describe as an "accommodationist" orientation. Mindfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on institutional goals. In many respects, corporate mindfulness training -- with its promise that calmer, less stressed employees will be more productive -- has a close family resemblance to now-discredited "human relations" and sensitivity-training movements that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s. These training programs were criticized for their manipulative use of counseling techniques, such as "active listening," deployed as a means for pacifying employees by making them feel that their concerns were heard while existing conditions in the workplace remained unchanged. These methods came to be referred to as "cow psychology," because contented and docile cows give more milk. Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken western Buddhist monk, has warned: "absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism." Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is now seen by many practitioners as a tangential concern, or as an unnecessary politicizing of one's personal journey of self-transformation. One hopes that the mindfulness movement will not follow the usual trajectory of most corporate fads -- unbridled enthusiasm, uncritical acceptance of the status quo, and eventual disillusionment. To become a genuine force for positive personal and social transformation, it must reclaim an ethical framework and aspire to more lofty purposes that take into account the wellbeing of all living beings. 60 people are discussing this article with 98 comments

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DARON_LARSON
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Publishing trends aside, I think there is room for a lot of challenging clarication about how to support people staying awake to their humanity and feeling at home in their lives regardless of their belief systems. Buddhism doesn't own contemplation, even if other religious traditions have tended to lose contact with their contemplative practices in favor of an emphasis on literalism and legalism. I think these fears actually nudge the Buddhists into demonstrating that they aren't immune from the same impulses.

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Is physical tness in danger of being exploited by the greedy who make huge prots selling the promise of quick xes? Obviously. Are contemplative practices from every religious tradition at risk for being stripped of their cultural associations? Absolutely. Will more people consider giving mindfulness strategies a chance to work if they are not associated with a religion? I really think so. This is really a conversation about human maturity and the cultivation of wisdom regardless of a specic doctrine. It's an exploration of benecial WAYS of navigating thoughts and feelings instead promoting THE WAY. It extends beyond the realm of religion to also include psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, and literature. Fast-food sells in our culture, so we all need to share the responsibility of promoting the benets of giving something more nutritionally substantial a try -- especially when what's at stake will never have a robust marketing budget: reection, contemplation, wisdom, and compassion. Daron Larson, Freelance Contemplative Attentional Fitness Training http://www.attentional-tness.com/daron
1 JUL 2013 10:49 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

Chuck Brotton (CMB1969)

SUPER USER 117 Fans raging moderate

I know that about a year and half ago, I had to sit through a sta! meeting in which one of the least serene, most un-mindful executives I have ever met was lecturing us about meditation and spiritual fulllment. I kept a blank expression on my face through the rest of the meeting--didn't want to show any actual knowledge about spirituality and get either: A. tagged as a "troublemaker" or B. assigned to be a facilitator.
2 JUL 2013 2:30 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

jesssicasss
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This is lovely investigation into what can happen when the Buddha's teachings are divorced from the practice of meditation. Absent spiritual friends (kalyanamitta), a grounding in the precepts, and practice based on generosity, virtue and spiritual cultivation, mindfulness practice can be like a rudderless boat -- it will surely sail, but to what end?
2 JUL 2013 12:12 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

David_Hykes
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A very important article which sums up what many of us traditionally-oriented practitioners and teachers have been feeling for a while now. I'm afraid however that the same reservations apply often to a more complex and subtle area-- that of "traditionally-trained" western author-teachers whose every new book title or blurb may not contain the buzz words "mindfulness," "compassion" or "lovingkindness," yet which for me at least evoke the question of the relationship between book/tape/seminars/retreat sales, and authentic Dharma practice and dissemination.
2 JUL 2013 8:04 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

bodhibabe
1,036 Fans *living art* empath-healer, meditator, counselor,

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hear, hear!
3 JUL 2013 2:14 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

Mirek (Miro_Cansky)
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Thanks to the authors for this article which will certainly generate a lot of discussion. It all depends on the person delivering the training and on their ethical principles. The mindfulness-based stress reduction programme developed back in the 80s, from which all subsequent mindfulness-based approaches arose, was certainly not a method of subduing the workforce and manipulating people into corporate obedience. The principles of any mindfulness training stemming from the tradition of Jon Kabat-Zinn are rmly rooted in wakefulness, kindness, bravery to face di"culties, compassion, and the recognition of wholesome and unwholesome actions. The fact that some trainers or organisations attempt to turn mindfulness into a commodity, is an inevitable fact reecting the state of our society, and the same happened with yoga and some forms of psychotherapy. We cannot throw all 'corporate mindfulness' into the same bag. It all depends on the motivation and intention of each individual trainer.
3 JUL 2013 12:14 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

Bert_Lee
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You caught it, as have others - a peremptory bias is against whatever is less than pure. Even some modicum of mindfulness in corporate America, half-heartedly given lip service, pro!ers of future where mindfulness is increasingly part of the popular vernacular. Well here's news: The Buddhist Big Tent is far from pure to begin with. Riven with Buddhalotry, shamanism, with heaping helpings of metaphysics, mythic & establishmentarian baloney -- much in contravention or superposition of the core Tipitaka. But *this*, this is the dawning of the dharmacalypse ... of Rinzai for the Samurai ... a slippery slope sure to yield the Barbarians at the Gateless Gate. Oh. My. God.
3 JUL 2013 5:59 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

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ThisIsFalse
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continued... Also, ever since I heard Zizek's criticism of Western Buddhism on the basis that it was collaborating with capitalism, I've been puzzled by the assumption that Buddhism was or ought to be anti-capitalist. Where does this assumption come from? The Buddha didn't preach revolution or even very much in the way of social reform. He harmonised his movement within the monarchistic, caste-based society in which he lived. And those societies where Buddhism has traditionally thrived have tended to be monarchies, communist dictatorships or inegalitarian theocracies, surely involving, if anything, more su!ering for the ordinary person than modern Western 'capitalist'

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democracies. What wonderful replacement for capitalism is being proposed? And where in Das Kapital did the Buddha dene it? People might be moved to engage with society by reforming it, but views as to what this reform will be is going to vary with attitude. Nor does anything I learned about Buddhism imply that it is anti-individualistic and pro-collectivist. The individual and the group are both aspects of human life.
3 JUL 2013 2:49 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

CBella
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I won't bother writing what I wanted to say... I will just agree with you. Thank you.
3 JUL 2013 3:59 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

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brooklynamerican49
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This is a terric, timely and much needed piece, thank you both. Yes, we need to question the faddish, unmindful practice of mindfulness that is devoid of a deeper wisdom and a universal moral basis, and to see it as inseparable from challenging institutional greed, ill-will, and delusion fostered by corporate and self-serving elements. Some other recommended readings: "Can Mindfulness Change a Corporation?" (David Loy), "Frozen Yoga and McMindfulness" (Miles Neale), "Occupy Mindfulness" (David Forbes).
1 JUL 2013 7:35 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

kmknox
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A timely and much-needed article - thank you! There's much more to say, but in my view the key points are these: (1) mindfulness as part of the Eightfold Path, meaning preceded by right view/wise intention and a committment to ethics and non-harming, is very di!erent from what is being hawked in the marketplace; and (2) the most popular purveyors of "mindfulness" have no idea what it actually means. I've commented on this at some length in this blog post: http://ca!einatedcalm.blogspot.mx/2013/01/mindfulness-without-morality.html
1 JUL 2013 11:38 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

hu!tree
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Initially indignant about the mining of Buddhism for technology to be packaged and sold but have relaxed about it. McMindfulness appeals particularly to people put o! by Tibetan liturgies or Zen enigmas or belief in reincarnation or the rigidity of religious hierarchy - many of whom would otherwise not approach meditation in the rst place and opens the door to a deeper exploration of Buddhism for those inclined. In any case, starting decades ago, many of us took what interested us and left what didn't appeal, no? We didn't accept traditional Buddhist norms of gender inequality or sexual prohibitions against gay relationships, etc. which were included in Buddhism apparently back to the beginning. We were part of the process of abstraction and translation of Buddhism to a new culture which has now led to the 'new' mindfulness. It is uncomfortable to watch corporate consultants selling an a diminished version of
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what our teachers gave for free and in more depth, but it beats the higher costs of antidepressants and anxiolytics for those ground down in the capitalist machinery. McMindfulness is a dilution of something much more profound, but if it's alleviating su!ering and initiating - for some - a deeper engagement with Buddhism, then it's more positive than negative.
3 JUL 2013 12:06 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

Mirek (Miro_Cansky)
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As both a Buddhist and a mindfulness trainer I have been aware that some Buddhist practitioners feel insulted and threatened, and possibly envious when they see so many non-Buddhists teaching meditation. Perhaps they feel that it's not fair and that one must 'deserve' the privilege of teaching others. I think that we need to continually ask ourselves the questions this article raises and scrutinise our values and principles, to avoid degeneration of the mindfulness approaches. But ultimately, mindfulness does not belong to Buddhism any more than to any other domain of humanity. As a Buddhist, I have to say that greed and egotism was something I encountered in the Buddhist world and not just in the 'evil' corporate world.
3 JUL 2013 10:17 PM FAVE SHARE MORE

ThisIsFalse
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Well said.
4 JUL 2013 11:32 AM FAVE SHARE MORE

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