The word was even on the front page of the newspaper shortly after I blogged about it, but the concept has been around longer than last year. After a late career layoff, a friend of mine decided to call it retirement. When I asked what he was doing, he said he was pursuing mindfulness.
This week I came across an interesting Aeon article that dredged up some of my own thoughts about the Mindfulness movement of recent years. The piece by Sahanika Ratnayake is titled The Problem of Mindfulness.
I liked the title because it immediately begs the question, “What could be wrong with Mindfulness?"
The author, raised as a Buddhist in New Zealand and Sri Lanka, is a grad student in philosophy at Cambridge working on her Ph.D, studying the history of philosophy and contemporary psychotherapy.
A premise of her article is that mindfulness, as practiced in Eastern philosophy, is at odds with Western cognitive therapies and self-understanding. She writes, “To understand why mindfulness is uniquely unsuited for the project of real self-understanding, we need to probe the suppressed assumptions about the self that are embedded in its foundations.”
The article is a deeper dive than you will find here, so I’ll link to it at the end. Here are a few items of note as regards Eastern and Western ideas.
In Western philosophy, Self-Understanding is a virtue.
In Buddhist thought, there is no Self to understand.
In Western philosophy we take responsibility for our choices and feelings.
After a certain point, in Buddhist thought, “mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyze your feelings.”
Having spent a lot of time reflecting on these things since the Seventies, I condensed this into the following contrasting statements:
In Judeo-Christian meditation, the mind reflects upon the Word, engages the meanings of the sacred texts and their application to the broader world and our relationship to that world.
In Eastern meditation, the mind is the enemy standing in the way of non-thinking, as we lose ourselves in the process of our breathing and “being.”
In Judeo-Christian philosophy, the world is broken and we have a responsibility to engage its suffering and injustice.
* * * *
The author opens with my precise sentiments:
“McMindfulness.” I wish I had coined the term. It would be nice to be able to make a claim to originality. But coming across the term is almost good enough.
He starts with the all-important defining of terms.
Mindfulness practice is a meditative discipline, originating in Buddhism, that involves the cultivation of a type of present centered, nonjudgmental awareness of the ongoing flow of one’s emerging experience. While mindfulness enjoyed some popularity in the 1960’s as a countercultural phenomenon, in recent years it has surged into mainstream prominence to be embraced with gushing enthusiasm by both popular culture and mainstream psychology.
The reference to the Sixties (which carried over into the early 70’s) brings to mind authors like Alan Watts, and the popular Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass, Dr. Timothy Leary’s co-host (formerly Dr. Richard Alpert*) from Harvard in introducing the LSD movement to mass culture.
Next, Dr. Safran defines the newly coined word, McMindfulness.
So what is McMindfulness? It’s the marketing of mindfulness practice as a commodity that is sold like any other commodity in our brand culture. “Mindfulness really works.” It reduces stress, cures depression and anxiety, and manages pain. We know so because research proves it.
The research is more pseudoscience than real, though. But the reason it’s so popular, is that it "satisfies spiritual yearnings without being a religion. It’s backed by brain scientists at Harvard and MIT. It’s magic without being magic. It even transforms corporate culture and increases market share!”
McDonald’s coined the phrase “Lovin’ It!” to create an association between the slogan and its Golden Arches. The McMindfulness marketers offer us a new drug from Dr. Feelgood’s bag of tricks, and it’s natural. What’s not too like?
Here’s Sahanika Ratnayake’s response:
“With its promises of assisting everyone with anything and everything, the mistake of the mindfulness movement is to present its impersonal mode of awareness as a superior or universally useful one. Its roots in the Buddhist doctrine of anattā mean that it sidelines a certain kind of deep, deliberative reflection that’s required for unpicking which of our thoughts and emotions are reflective of ourselves, which are responses to the environment, and – the most difficult question of all – what we should be doing about it.”
* * * *
I don’t doubt living mindfully is a good thing as long as we can find the Golden Mean with regards to our responsibilities toward the broken world outside us and around us.
Here are links to the two article:
The Problem of Mindfulness
McMindfulness
*I met Dr. Alpert’s nephew when I was at Ohio University. He described his uncle as “the black sheep of the family.”
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