Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
AR 23:9 - Mistrusting "mindfulness"
In this issue:
MEDITATION - the mindfulness "wellness backlash" intensifies
+ mindfulness as "the new capitalist, secular religion"
Apologia Report 23:9 (1,375)
March 16, 2018
MEDITATION
"The Madness of Mindfulness" by Hattie Garlick, who reports that "Andy Puddicombe, founder of cult mindfulness app Headspace, describes the very point of these exercises as enabling a state of 'being present in the moment, with our full attention, undistracted and not being overwhelmed'. Mindfulness is just one element of the ever-expanding 'wellness' movement, which also embraces yoga pants, spirulina, spas and even 'search inside yourself' corporate training courses. Last year, The Global Wellness Institute <globalwellnessinstitute.org> valued the industry at $3.72tn."
Garlick notes that "in its historic context, mindfulness is part of a life-long journey of wider Buddhist practice. Nor would it be the first element of that practice to emerge distinctly altered from its journey to the west." Carl Cederström, co-author of The Wellness Syndrome [1] and Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement [2] was asked for his take after a month of evaluating mindfulness apps. He reports that "One of the things I found peculiar is they seem to contain a critique of our society - we now live in an environment encouraging us to be connected all the time, they suggest, and the only way to get your focus back is to use this app. But in promising to do so as quickly as possible, and offering to make you more productive, they blur the lines between life and work, productivity and rest.' ... [T]he fast-paced schedule of bringing apps to the market is at odds with the snail-shuffle of clinical trials. In 2015, research from the University of Liverpool, published in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health, <www.goo.gl/NcNsgD> indicated that a lot of mental health apps display a 'lack of scientific credibility and subsequent limited clinical effectiveness'. Some can even lead to over-reliance and anxiety. Then, of course, there is an innate contradiction in using your phone to detox from screen-induced stresses. ... When my apps advertised an 'inward journey' ... I realised that many apps wanted me to perform the counterintuitive feat of traveling outwards too, encouraging me to 'share' the journey with friends via social media along the way." Financial Times (UK), Feb 3 '17 (Yes, 2017), <www.goo.gl/E8nDh1>
More recently, in "'Mindfulness': Corporate America's Strange New Gospel," Kevin D. Williamson reports that now "'Mindfulness,' a meditation practice that is in essence Buddhism without Buddha, is everywhere in corporate America and celebrity culture. ... [A] study undertaken by the National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments found <www.goo.gl/nB3hb5> that one in five of the companies surveyed offered mindfulness training, with another 21 percent planning to do so - at a cost of up to ten grand per session. ...
"Scientifically, mindfulness is way down there with yoga, acupuncture, and homeopathy in terms of empirically observable results. The evidence for its effectiveness is largely subjective, e.g., self-reported improvements in mood, attitude, stress, or sleep. A recent paper <www.goo.gl/hNv4kg> published in Perspectives on Psychological Science - co-authored by 15 prominent psychological and cognitive-science researchers - gently derided the 'pervasive mindfulness hype' associated with research on the subject and concluded that there was very little evidence for its effectiveness on any metric. ... A review in American Psychologist [possibly in <www.goo.gl/ktnbtV> ] found that fewer than one in ten mindfulness studies had included a control group. 'A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials, collectively including over 3,500 participants, found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding sleep or controlling weight,' Scientific American <www.goo.gl/LFJ7u9> reports."
Ronald Purser, professor of management in the business school at San Francisco State University and an ordained teacher in the Zen Taego Buddhist tradition, reports <www.goo.gl/bWoVdm> that "At the Awakened Leadership Conference, a big mindfulness event, one of the consultants told me: "We know we're teaching Buddhism - but they don't. 'They' meaning the corporate sponsors. In order to sell, they've really had to go stealth, selling mindfulness as a scientifically proven method. And the conference was all about how to sell the program, how to sell this stuff in corporate-speak, how to get them to perceive it as a performance-enhancement technique. ...
"Mindfulness has had an overwhelmingly positive popular reception because the idea that our well-being is totally within our personal control - that we are masters of our own destiny and that practicing mindfulness will make us more healthy and more wise....
"Corporate mindfulness is, in [Purser's] view, just a way to gussy up an old-fashioned management program with a bit of Eastern exoticism - but not too much.
"'It's just another self-help program,' he says, one that shifts responsibility from institutions, especially businesses and government, to the individual.
"The mindfulness debate is part of a larger religious - some would object to the word - convulsion: American Buddhism is having a Protestant moment, with longstanding institutions and centers of power coming into conflict with reformers mindful of corruption and skeptical of authority. Buddhism, from its more orthodox varieties to more vaguely defined notions of Eastern spirituality, has for a certain subset of Americans come to fill the social and moral purpose once served by what is sneeringly called 'organized religion,' meaning mainly churchgoing Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. But it got organized very quickly and, in some of its more colorful expressions, resembles nothing so much as a New Age reimagining of Catholicism emphasizing the ceremonial and ritualistic elements of Buddhism.... Stephen Batchelor [is] a self-described Buddhist atheist and author of Buddhism without Beliefs [3]. His worries about 'elevating the guru to the same status as the teachings themselves' are recognizably Lutheran: sola scriptura, in effect.
"In the 1960s, Christian religious brothers and sisters were coming out of the cloisters and into the streets, and American Buddhists began moving, intellectually if not physically, in the opposite direction, with an emphasis on monasticism, formalism, and hierarchy, albeit a very democratic and consumerist one, and one ensnared by all the familiar concerns of American identity politics."
Purser is "cagey about the question of whether he would describe himself as 'religious,' but he is skeptical of trying to reduce meditation to a mere technique deracinated from its cultural context and Buddhist tradition. 'People are skeptical. Institutional religion has lost its luster, but people still desire something to fill the void.' Mindfulness? 'It's the new capitalist, secular religion. But calling something 'secular' doesn't make it secular.' The promises made by mindfulness gurus aren't materially different from those made by earlier generations of faith healers. ...
"[T]he limits of secularism are very much on the minds of American Buddhists such as David Loy, a popular writer who is skeptical of 'McMindfulness.' 'For the Protestant reformers,' Loy writes, 'secular life was a preparation for our ultimate destiny: this world is a means to a higher end. However, as the sacred pole - God, the guarantor that life is meaningful and salvation possible - faded away, the original religious reason for that distinction (eternal life in heaven) was lost. The evaporation of the sacred left us with only the secular pole. As the mode of life became increasingly separated from any religious perspective or moral supervision, modern consciousness grew bereft of the spiritual orientation the Reformation had originally promoted. . . . That final Darwinian stroke left the modern West stranded, for better or worse, in a mechanistic and desacralized world, without any binding moral code to regulate how people were to relate to each other.'
"Attempts to harmonize the demands of secularism with the need for shared ethics have been not entirely successful. Google famously described its ethical position as 'Don't be evil,' but it has of necessity found itself making accommodations for some pretty substantial evil, including the government of the People's Republic of China, which does not have a great record when it comes to meditation-based health-and-wellness movements such as Falun Gong <www.goo.gl/xyMniZ>
"The embrace of mindfulness need not be understood quite so cynically as Purser and other critics do. It may in fact indicate that among reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy, peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing." National Review, Jan 1 '18, <www.goo.gl/RstcHg>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Wellness Syndrome, by Carl Cederström (Polity, 2015, paperback, 200 pages) <www.goo.gl/iKYrKP>
2 - Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement, by Carl Cederström (OR, 2017, paperback, 368 pages) <www.goo.gl/Zz7Gzr>
3 - Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, by Stephen Batchelor (Riverhead, 1998, paperback, 144 pages) <www.goo.gl/hDK8y7>
------
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse