McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality
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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.
Buddhism teaches that you should tackle the coarser causes of suffering first. If there is a thorn in your foot, no one is suggesting you should go do a good sit to deal with the pain. First you remove the thorn, then you sit.
In my opinion mindfulness at work (or anywhere) can be beneficial, but if we only use it to paper over the structural problems that make work life stressful for so many, we are losing the opportunity to eliminate the coarser causes of suffering.
Think of it as an 80/20 rule. Probably eighty percent of the suffering at work comes from twenty percent of the causes. We should be tackling those, and that requires political engagement. It may even require oppositional methods in some really bad cases.
From working with clients however, you might be surprised just how often people come in not realizing that they have what is essentially a giant thorn sticking out of their foot! Usually this looks more like chronic lack of sleep, a bad relationship with their spouse or even a toxic work environment, but shut inside their ball of stress and the narrow anxious attention that accompanies it, they miss the forest of causes for the more immediate trees of anxiety, tension and panic.
You might be surprised how often a person says “oh my god I’m tired and stressed because I haven’t gotten a good nights sleep in 10 years!” after a little awareness training.
In my opinion this is the most beneficial buddhist 'practise' for western society: "You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere."
If that were taken to heart, believed and practised, you would get rid of 80% of most people's suffering.
https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/you-yourself-as-much-as-anybody...
The point of it that some people don't start practise because they don't believe they deserve to be happy.
The quote from the canon: Searching in all directions With your awareness, you find no one dearer than yourself. In the same way, others are thickly dear to themselves. So you shouldn’t hurt others if you love yourself.
I heard that quote from a respected Zen master!
This is why I love HN. Thanks for the correction.
So what if mindfulness delays the overthrow of capitalism. So do exercise, sleep, diet, friends, etc. People telling you not to take care of yourself because your misery is useful to them are not necessarily the ones to follow.
Mindfulness doesn’t make your problems go away or destroy your will to be oppositional when necessary. It simply brings clarity and perspective. This is a genuine threat, however, to political movements looking to project their own explanations onto your general sense of unease.
I think what’s wrong is that they don’t realize that the environment that’s causing stress is very damaging and they should change that environment instead of putting a bandaid in the form of mindfulness on it. Even worse is that they keep pushing that stress down the hierarchy causing harm to their employees.
Now, a LOT of mindfulness programs and teachers ARE essentially selling relaxation practices as mindful attention training, and I would agree that THAT is a problem. But the problem there in my view is not that the practice is being taught without morality or moral principle, but without actual awareness training. It’s relaxation sold as mindfulness. And I think that’s a shame, but I still wouldn’t deny anyone tools to relax. I just wish they wouldn’t call it mindfulness.
Yes, sell it as relaxation exercise or breathing practice. But don’t make people believe this has anything to do with Buddhism. We already watered down and distorted what people think yoga is. Let’s not do this to Buddhism.
I practice mindfulness, but I would never consider myself a buddhist - it took a "secularised" text to get me to pick it up (Mindfulness in Plain English; it's written by a buddhist monk, but makes clear from the beginning that it's a practical guide rather than a guide to the Buddhist spiritual background for mindfulness).
Corporate executives are people too, and somd of them (certainly not all) are good-hearted and honestly looking for a way to change their mild to severely toxic culture. And mindfulness training can help if done well, which it often isn’t.
Mindfulness cannot fix the underlying problems that lead to mindfulness being useful to capital in the first place. Personally I’d rather my CEO make work less miserable and sleep that way (say, hire people for fewer hours and raise wages) than sleep well because they paid for someone to soothe them through the arduous travails of being a high paid executive.
That said, anyone who didn’t see capital swallowing this is dense. Anything that can be commodified will be. Arguing over it is pointless.
That’s my primary point, that attention training isn’t a salve, it’s awareness building. The problem with a lot of mindfulness “training” is that it’s really just group relaxation without training the kind of awareness that should be useful in any context.
Read Brian Daizen Victoria's Zen At War. OK, Zen, but the principle's the same. Effective mind training techniques sans ethical critique can create cooler killers & greed mongers. Mindfulness' popularity amongst the ethical hellscape of contemporary SV culture is surely also at least a tad suggestive?
The military issue is a great example. The author is trying to impose his own opinions about morality on the rest of humanity. This is misguided, there are other credible views that differ from his.
For example, in ancient Japan, there was no conflict between the martial arts and Buddhism. Instead there was a synthesis. For example, there a 17th century Buddhist monk wrote a book about applying mindfulness to sword fighting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfettered_Mind).
I had a therapist who basically told me that mindfulness means accepting harmful and immoral actions (of others). On the one hand this does make it easier to go through the day without getting caught up in q
The author has been practicing Buddhism for 4 decades.
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
But the author never makes this assertion. His point is that mindfulness training is hypocritical and inauthentic when used in a corporate environment.
Second, no one is “changing its meaning to suit your needs”. Mindfulness in Buddhism is a way of attending with full and non-judgmental awareness. It is typically taught alongside teachings on morality and philosophy and so forth, but I believe that it is a confusion to claim that these things are “part of” mindfulness. Instead mindfulness is part of a larger system of teachings from which it has been removed in the more secular West. The author of the linked piece believes this is a problem but also inevitable. I personally believe as many others do that Buddhism does not own mindfulness, because mindfulness is a way of training and relating to attention. You might argue that it is unskillful or even harmful to practice or train mindfulness without some or all of the other pieces that Buddhism offers, but that is very different from saying that you’ve redefined mindfulness.
Of course many people and groups also distort the definition and training in mindfulness and at that point you’re right and I agree that one would be “taking the namd and changing the meaning” though in my experience this is virtually always out of ignorance (perhaps willful) rather than intentional profiteering and disregard for truth.
Mindfulness as a concept and discipline is actually incredibly deep and challenging and most people who think they understand actually don’t or don’t to the extent they think they do.
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
Technically, the author didn't say this, but rather pointed out some criticisms (holistic shortcomings) of the manner in which it has been deployed in corporations, specifically:
>> For example, corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work. So there's certainly a problem. There's no doubt that people are suffering from anxiety and stress and depression. No one no one is going to argue that that's not the case.
>> The problem is: what is the remedy? The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions [rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.]
To my reading (interpretation) of the article, that last portion is the main point the author is trying to make.
> 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.
All (mostly) of this is true, but it misses the point the author was trying to make, and I think the author would take exception with your closing: "there’s nothing wrong with that", his assertion seemingly being ~"actually, there is something ~"wrong" (less than perfect) with that".
> The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me.
Fair criticism, but the degree to which such things are actually true is unknowable, with any sort of accuracy.
> What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience.
Different people teach different things, and different combinations of things. This is one of them.
> Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state.
Here I will respectfully disagree. Indeed, the physical practice is "simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state", but "mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch" seems to be (based on my personal experience and reading of anecdotal experience) an incorrect assertion. Rather, it often (but not always) seems to be described as just that, some sort of a "magical" way to lower stress and raise consciousness, without explicitly (consciously) setting those two outcomes as goals.
> 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.
Again, I don't think this is what the author is saying. Rather, he seems to be saying that if you teach only the mindfulness portion of these traditional practices, they can be used to the benefit of "improper" greater causes, like individual/corporate greed. Whereas, if some of the additional teachings that have historically accompanied mindfulness are included in the package, this exploitative approach would be less successful.
> 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.
Maybe. But maybe not. It is certainly "an" issue, but imagine a parallel universe where mindfulness along with some of the other traditional practices was adopted to the same degree that only-mindfulness has been adopted in this universe. Which scenario would have the greatest difference in positive outcome? Again, this is one of those things we have no way of knowing, but perhaps the simple act of thinking about things in this manner might yield positive results. Who knows, but it's fun to think about.
I happen to believe well intentioned mindfulness advocates like Sam Harris are also overlooking the potentially important truths contained in the authors words. I'd be interested to know whether he disagrees with this sentiment, but my perception is that it currently isn't even on his radar, due to his aversion (ironic, if you think about it) to religion.
>> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
> Technically, the author didn't say this, but rather pointed out some criticisms (holistic shortcomings) of the manner in which it has been deployed in corporations, specifically:
I concede that the author did not say this directly but did seem to imply that this wasn't a good use of mindfulness training or that it acted as an unhelpful smokescreen for the real problems, and I don't fully agree with that. Instead, I believe that most mindfulness programs are shallow and taught be people who aren't deeply trained and so don't convey the principles of mindfulness well. My read of the author was that the problem was that other core pieces of Buddhist practices and/or thought are missing. In my view it's that the programs themselves don't convey even the core mindfulness principles well or deeply. I think this covers your next point about whether "there's nothing wrong with that". I think I do agree with the author that these programs are often not particularly useful, but I view it as a lack of depth rather than a lack of context or ancillary teachings.
>> What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience.
> Different people teach different things, and different combinations of things. This is one of them.
Here I think you've mischaracterized my argument or I've been unclear. I'm saying that mindfulness training is teaching awareness/acceptance. I recognize that people are teaching other things and calling them mindfulness, and I agree that that is a problem. Of course there's also a split between mindful meditation and "everyday mindfulness" which is often not explained or taught well.
>> Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state.
> Here I will respectfully disagree. Indeed, the physical practice is "simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state", but "mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch" seems to be (based on my personal experience and reading of anecdotal experience) an incorrect assertion. Rather, it often (but not always) seems to be described as just that, some sort of a "magical" way to lower stress and raise consciousness, without explicitly (consciously) setting those two outcomes as goals.
I'm describing (a perspective on) what mindfulness is rather than how it's portrayed or described. Mindfulness is not a magical stress switch, it's an attention technique that often has the effect of lowering stress. Your follow up that it often described as such does not disagree with my assertion of what it actually is. It seems that we are agreed that a lot of what is being described and sold as mindfulness really isn't or isn't mindfulness taught well.
I suspect as you've alluded that I agree far more with the author than we disagree.
>> 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.
> Again, I don't think this is what the author is saying. Rather, he seems to be saying that if you teach only the mindfulness portion of these traditional practices, they can be used to the benefit of "improper" greater causes, like individual/corporate greed. Whereas, if some of the additional teachings that have historically accompanied mindfulness are included in the package, this exploitative approach would be less successful.
Right, this statement was meant to be my answer to that assertion by the author that the problem is that mindfulness is taught out of context. At this moment, and I may be wrong, I don't believe that the problem is the lack of training in morality or other Buddhist-style principles as the author asserts. Instead, I think that mindfulness itself is taught without proper nuance or depth. In my own work the ability to attend intensely while also accepting deeply is a profound practice the brings one into contact with the full import of one's experience. And I agree, and I suspect the author would as well, that this depth is rarely taught. I think the author and I may draw the line differently both at what is mindfulness and what is context and also what context is necessary. The author has a stronger affiliation with Buddhism than I do, though I do have an affiliation there.
>> 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.
> Maybe. But maybe not. It is certainly "an" issue, but imagine a parallel universe where mindfulness along with some of the other traditional practices was adopted to the same degree that only-mindfulness has been adopted in this universe. Which scenario would have the greatest difference in positive outcome?
I would love to see it taught in different ways. I actually appreciate the steps that have been taken to pull mindfulness OUT of Buddhism. At the same time, I would love to see it in a variety of contexts so we can assess the differences. Within the Buddhist tradition, I see a lot of depth and value but also an awful lot of what I would view as baggage. And I say this as a self-professed Buddhist. I see a lot of what I would view as clinging to the packaging, and I think it's important to strip that packaging away to see which parts of it are as important as people might claim.
And I say that as someone who's personally trying to learn it both inside and outside of it's original context myself. As a clinician rather than a Buddhist teacher, I want to be competent to help my clients as directly and efficiently as I can without sacrificing what's most important.
> Here I think you've mischaracterized my argument or I've been unclear.
I will excerpt the part that where I think you and he differ:
>> Q: I'm interested in something you've written about the larger issue. Your suggestion is that mindfulness has been cut loose from its moral moorings and that without some kind of principled anchor, it becomes this renegade technology that helps people rationalize unethical conduct. I'd like to hear more about that moral underpinning. What are some of the principles that have to accompany mindfulness training?
>> A: If we go back to how mindfulness was situated within a religious tradition, namely Buddhism, there was a classic differentiation between what they called "right mindfulness" and "wrong mindfulness." There was actually a very clear distinction between those two. So there was a cognitive dimension of mindfulness involving discernment. This whole focus on ethics and morality is missing from a lot of modern forms of mindfulness. That's what's turned it into a technique and not a way of life. Mindfulness has been seen as a means to an end. When you separate that out, you've made a Faustian bargain. Yes you can turn it into a nice therapeutic technique that can develop a sense of quiet and calm. But then it could be used for nefarious purposes.
Now, you don't have to agree with him that mindfulness practitioners or teachers should/must bring the traditional ethics/morality part of it along for the ride, but I believe a fair argument can be made that if you detach the two, it becomes plausibly possible to use mindfulness for nefarious means, whereas inclusion of the ethics part would tend to make that more difficult, as well as facilitate a number of other beneficial outcomes in the world, so the theory goes whether one believes that sort of thing or not - I happen to, but it's a matter of opinion of course.
> I'm describing (a perspective on) what mindfulness is rather than how it's portrayed or described. Mindfulness is not a magical stress switch, it's an attention technique that often has the effect of lowering stress. Your follow up that it often described as such does not disagree with my assertion of what it actually is. It seems that we are agreed that a lot of what is being described and sold as mindfulness really isn't or isn't mindfulness taught well.
I don't think we really disagree. If one "effectively" practices mindfulness, it generally has the side effect of lowering stress throughout the day, which while beneficial, one could also argue addressing the root cause should be given some attention as well.
> Right, this statement was meant to be my answer to that assertion by the author that the problem is that mindfulness is taught out of context. At this moment, and I may be wrong, I don't believe that the problem is the lack of training in morality or other Buddhist-style principles as the author asserts. Instead, I think that mindfulness itself is taught without proper nuance or depth.
These are two distinct problems, both of which are valid. I think that's the source of confusion here?
I very much agree with your finishing points.....it's complex.
Thanks for the enjoyable conversation!
>I did hear recently [someone saying] that Buddhism doesn't own mindfulness, giving a simile, that just because Newton discovered the law of gravity, it doesn't mean that it's English. [..] not a very clever simile. Yes, Isaac Newton was English, but he was a scientist. So the law of gravity is science, in the same way that mindfulness is Buddhist.
If you want attention and acceptance training then call it that. If you want mindfulness then see it in the proper perspective, which is not ripped out of its context to serve consumerist/capitalistic goals.
The same happened with yoga. We picked a very small part of the tradition as in asana and removed most of the spiritual aspects. Almost nobody teaches pranayama or meditation in any meaningful way. It’s basically a different form of aerobics or calisthenics.
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.
I’m assuming you mean James Mallinson. I met him briefly in Jaipur and had been wondering who the white guy with dreadlocks was that I kept seeing around (here in the US it’s considered racist by people of color to wear dreads if you’re not black). To make a long story short, he doesn’t practice yoga, is largely a rich guy that likes the “sadhu lifestyle” (he’s a Baron in the UK), and studies ancient texts in the way a typical white academic would. But I will say for all my skepticism going into it, I read his “Roots of Yoga” and it was great.
It’s clear that the practice of yoga is syncretic and means many different things to many different people. We definitely should criticize all the white girls in the west that are using Yoga as a brand for their calisthenics, teaching without knowing anything about pranayama or dhyana. Their style of practice is so far from any Hatha practice I’ve done you can’t even consider it the same thing. Most of those standing postures they do I’ve never encountered from my Hatha teachers. What these white western women are doing is for the most part awful and pretty racist.
However, we should be equally skeptical of Hindutva making claims about what Yoga is while ignoring the long, syncretic history and how it grew and exchanged practices with Buddhists, Sufis, Jains, and all sorts of other sects and groups through thousands of years.
Please open your mind.
Thank you, A fellow hatha yoga practitioner.
Of course the modern practice of asana in the west isn’t inherently racist, and you don’t need to only be doing postures that were written down in old books. But wearing an Aum shirt and never understanding the deeper cultural contexts of what it is you’re wearing and practicing is racist. I’ve had conversations with people that have practiced yoga for years and literally have asked me “what’s asana?” and had never heard of pranayama. Were they racist? No, probably not, but it does speak volumes to how yoga is sold in the USA.
Non sequitur - this has never been a point of contention in India. I know this is typical of the press in the English-speaking world (and thus the peoples of these places as a whole), but its hilarious to see "Hindutva" being projected as a "Hinduism is supreme, and everything else must be suppressed" (and now all the propaganda with Nazis/Hitler ... my oh my). Criticisms of "Hindutva" from these sources are so insipid and stupid that they are not even worth acknowledging.
(Note - I'd place a large portion of the Indian elite within the English speaking world.)
Mainly I was originally saying I agree with you, that we need to be careful of who writes and rewrites history, because it typically is done by those in power and is often done without acknowledging the actual nuances of things. Yoga is certainly not Swedish gymnastics, but it’s also not some old Vedic thing with sole claim as Hindu.
Since you're hopelessly caught within the webs of orientalist spiders, suffice it here to say - what you see of India is not India; it is but a description of what you see in terms of what you already know. Your description is neither India, and nor is it a reasonably accurate model of it.
Sigh. Ambedkar's works are full of protestant rhetoric and very little "facts", and the tragedy of politicization of "caste" today is that saying something obvious like this out in India will almost instantly lead you to jail along with a non-returnable fine of $500-1000 (or worse).
Ambedkar in AoC, says that while "endogamy" is the only real tenet of "varna system", and while widely prevalent the world over, was unique in India because it was religiously sanctioned by the "vedic religion". Yet, after 200 years of Sanskrit study, those who swear by this theory can't produce a single verse that supports this - all you get are Indology's "free-hand" translations which change temporally to support Europe's social theory de jour. Ambedkar himself in this work calls the "varna system" a useless system of endogamy, which produced racial mongrels, and was against the appreciable goal of eugenics.
The stories just don't add up. Despite "caste system" being a "core" part of "vedic religion", it was somehow widely prevalent in Muslims and Christians (whose zealous violence in India is well documented). Despite the pyramidal "rigid" structure, "Brahmins" were often poor, and not only were there "Shudra" kings in Bharata, but many great men like AryaBhata were Shudras themselves. Indeed, when the British took over Madras, they found that most village schools were filled mostly with non-Brahmins [1]. The British even found that the schooling in Indian villages were much better than those in Britain themselves [1}.
Modern works on this monstrous "caste system" show how hollow this field of study is - in fact, as many like Nicholas Dirks (U Berkeley) and S Balagangadhara (U Ghent) have shown, there is no such meaningful entity. There are communities and tribes like the world over, but there is no "ministry of caste deviations", nor was there ever such a thing manned by "Brahmin priests" denying people "salvation from hell". Such a "ministry of caste" was only formed during British times, because their form of jurisprudence could not comprehend the "evil pagan" Indian society, and they still insisted that all transactions pass through them (while they sucked India dry).
It's a story sold by colonized idiots to their masters, in order to receive more funding and power. Indeed, since these powerful lobbies have secured nearly 50-90% of all positions in education, bureaucracy and soon private corporations, it's routine in India today to protest for "backwardness" status for one's community.
It's a repeat of the discrimination of the Jewry in Europe - instead of explicit laws you just squeeze them out of the system. No wonder too, since Indology through its glorious history simultaneously demonized both the Jews while they appropriated India's literature, and the Brahmins, while they helped the Empire secure its roots.
It's not surprising that those who speak about "caste" and "evils of Indian culture" are often the same people who will not touch the economic destruction, and consequent loss of status of the manufacturing/artisan communities of India, and often see the British as "angels descending onto India, with Christianity and God's language - English"
I'd echo parent's comments - do read Ambedkar's work for yourself. The man is known for making insane theories - like "Shudras are Buddhists survivors of Hindu violence (who somehow had Hindu practices}" - and this rabble-rousing pamphlet is no different. Little wonder that he was supported by the British, much as they did the Dravidian movt. and the Muslim league on the eve of "Independence".
[1.] The Beautiful Tree - Dharampal.
https://archive.org/details/DharampalCollectedWritingsIn5Vol...
(The original British surveys on Indian education from the 18th century are on archive.org somewhere; you should be able to source it}
Well, I surely will never be able to have the same context as those that grew up in South Asia, like a bunch of my family, but I certainly hope I’m not hopeless! I’m open to any suggested reading you may have that I’m missing.
Edit: I wanted to add that I’m very much aware that many of these divisions were made by the British, and even the Mughals before them, as a way to divide and dominate.
You see the same shit in healthcare with a ton of supposed innovations that don’t go to the core of why the system is broken.
well, i guess that’s why it’s done: fixing the core of things is hard and requires concentrated energy to fix, which would you choose if you were ‘just another component’ in the system? and those at the top are the beneficiaries, so they have even less incentive to fix core issues (until they become life/wellbeing threatening that is, and then even, it’s probably too late...)
The problem is that the number of teachers who have knowledge of these aspects is very small. Close to zero from my observations.
Asana is only one specific part of the entire practice. It’s a good beginning point. But it’s also very clear from texts like Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Vasistha Samhita, Patanjali Yoga Sutras, Vajrayana Buddhist yoga texts, and others that yoga definitely isn’t a Scandinavian invention.
Of course, modern Hatha Yoga might have some new poses. But the practice of Yoga itself is quite old, and has been prevalent in India for a long time. (I am not commenting on place of origin, since I am not an expert.)
It's not saying there aren't physical aspects to traditional yoga either, just that the physical practices of traditional yoga didn't fit the needs of the people who pushed the "new" poses.
> Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week - very stressful.
Is this true? I worked a hard 35 hours a week when I was at Google. Granted, I was a junior engineer, but the fact that I could get away with that and have it not affect my career unduly always makes me surprised to hear descriptions of Google as a sweatshop.
Can any Googlers say whether this has changed in the few years since I left? I know they're a massive company so generalizing can be hard, but this is so far from my experience that if be surprised if it was true of enough of the company to make anything approaching a blanket statement. I've always thought that it would be nice to go back to Google to retire in a few years.
My experience was like yours - 35 hours per week ( plus summer fridays and tons of personal days and vacation days ). The only exception was the one startup I worked at where we did put in a lot of work in the hopes of a huge payoff. But even there, we put in 70+ hours a week or two before a major milestone/deliverable/etc.
Where I would caution practitioners is to be very wary of religious invitations to ego death and loss of control over chakras (Never "open" your chakras - which are a physiological metaphor for very important aspects of your Self. These aspects should be disciplined and controlled, never "opened.")
Everything below your heart represents your base passions and failure to discipline these most of all turns you into an easily manipulated slave.
Plato's model in the Republic, when read as a manual for elites wishing to control society on every level, is revealing in how people are enslaved through their own lack of discipline.
This clicked, for me, with the physiological metaphor in my previous comment when I realized that self-discipline often follows a path upward from control over sexual desires, to control over hunger, to control over one's emotions (the heart) and on up as you master each lower level.
Conversely, failure to exercise discipline over the upper levels, over time, slides you down into the basest level, like an infant, where you lack control even over your own biological functions. Apply the microcosm of your own self to the macrocosm of society and the same principles are in effect.
I took transmission of the precepts twice and the 2nd time was with Thich Nhat Hanh who called them the “Mindfulness Trainings” instead of the “Precepts”. That’s how I came to know mindfulness. It is intertwined with refuge, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s a faith in the precepts. It’s not a practice one can do on their own nor a practice that’s separate from meditation.
If you relate corporate mindfulness with Buddhism, it is a perversion. It’s a different practice and it’s dishonest to promote it otherwise. Call the practice whatever you want, call it mindfulness, call it prayer, call it feel-goodness, but it’s deceptive to call it a Buddhist practice if you ignore its underpinnings.
Gil Fronsdal in his "Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation" jokingly talk about how organizations holding courses in "Mindfulness based stress deduction" carefully avoid the "B-word", and then go on to give a pratical introduction that barely mentions Buddhism.
Quite a bit of mindfulness meditation material has been published by Buddhist monks and teachers that have taken care to stress their utility as methods separated from the Buddhist tradition. Fronsdal's courses is one example. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English is another popular example that takes great care to explain its position in Buddhist practice and then promptly point out that his book is a practical guide to the meditation practice, not a guide to the spiritual aspects, and mostly ignores Buddhism from then on.
When talking about mindfulness in a secularised form, we are usually talking specifically about mindfulness based meditation, not the other aspects, or at least to a lesser extent other aspects. To me that was what made it palatable, as I'd had a casual interest for a long time, but found spiritually focused descriptions very off-putting.
So it’s not surprising that some are shocked to find a core part of their identity is used as a tool to improve those parts of humanity they despise the most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#Narrative
If this is not a traditional example, then what?
“Successful branding stories are often characterized by disruption, which turns an established industry or experience upside down. The MBSR brand is one such disruptive force, with Kabat-Zinn’s talking points including pithy quips such as: “The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist,” or Buddhists “don’t own mindfulness” because it is “an innate, universal human capacity.” Potential customers are thereby assured that MBSR is a non-religious product, yet still offers the best bits of what the Buddha taught. In Kabat-Zinn’s words, his version of mindfulness is “a place-holder for the entire dharma.”
The Western world has co-opted an aspect of Buddhism, which works to improve productivity, and discarded the part that doesn't fit its worldview; the other pillars of Buddhism. This enables it to be sold as non-religious.
An important exception is that some Christian fundamentalists regard any form of magic or mysticism other than God's miracles as being inherently Satanic. This can even extend to fictional systems of magic (as in fantasy novels or RPGs), which may be regarded as an obfuscated form of the real thing.
Ref: "McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga: Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom" (2011)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8e29ffcd39c3de866b5...
Mindfulness is only one aspect that is part of a system that is the 'eightfold noble path' which have to be taken wholesome:
right view, right motivation, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right endeavour, right mindfulness, right collectedness / stillness
They're of equal importance, if not higher: particularly #1, #2 and in the context of the discussion: #4: right action.
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...
I am not interested in the religious aspect, as much as I respect the fact that the practice as we know it evolved through the ages thanks to Buddhist and Hindu monks. I don’t see a problem with it: one doesn’t have to be Christian to appreciate Latin calligraphy, or to be Muslim to appreciate algebra.
This said, the critique against corporate entities coopting the practice is predictable and inevitable. If any human technique or technology can be put to good use in order to make money, it will be. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. A pen can be used to write a novel or a prison sentence, it doesn’t mean the pen itself is bad or that we are somehow “betraying” the intentions of the original inventors of pens.
(Edit: i also don’t think I could ever really meditate with other people... I bet most of these corporate congregations actually achieve very little and are just another social occasion for the people involved).
IMHO Daoist philosophy got it right and is the secret to removing stress and anxiety from almost everything. Daoist teachings have been adopted into traditional cognitive behavior therapy now called “dialectic behavioral therapy”
I learned this when I was in my 20s in college during huge bouts of depression and social anxiety and haven’t been depressed in 20 years.
My son who was recently suffering from social anxiety disorder was practically cured by it.
Strip down these mindfulness systems their simplest, and discard all the supernatural mumbo jumbo, incense burning, and ritual chanting. It’s easier to digest and remember.
If you just try to imagine that the past and future don’t really exist, that categories and divisions of reality are wholly created models of it by our mind, and that we can relinquish and let go and let negative thoughts or events wash over us like water, you can get a long way to ignoring most of the stress inducing phenomena in your life unless they are really salient.
At least that’s what’s worked form me. Should some starstuff on the pale blue dot really get worked up by wholly changeable and artificial deadlines? You can view them as important and plan for them yes, but don’t let your cortisol levels flare when things don’t go according to plans. Plans are changeable, life and health is more important.
People are more alienated now than ever before in the course of history, so it follows that the machinations of capital come to a pseudo-religion in order to pacify dissent. It's staggering, and should give everybody on Hacker News pause.
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be. If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie? Can you get angry about social injustice? We need a range of emotions. Really we should want to manage them better, not just always try to be happy, as if that's the state we should always be in.
Also, thinking about the past and the future is useful, as long as you have a practical purpose for it. Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house! And the past is a great teacher to learn from. Dwelling in a negative way is bad for us, but that can apply to the present, too. Really we should just not be absent-mindedly preoccupied with negativity, regardless of time.
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be.
Dr David Burns, psychiatrist frames it to patients that people can expect 5 days of happiness and 2 crappy days in a given week, and if you don't have 5 happy days you should adjust something, but if you don't have 2 crappy days, then you're bordering on manic and should adjust something the other way. But then he considers a few minutes of feeling bad enough to count as time to take note and adjust for it.
My take on this is that "you should be happy all the time" is the wrong way to look at it, more "you shouldn't be unhappy against your will, because of negative thoughts circulating in your head which you are ignoring and hardly aware of". Being aware of your thoughts so you understand why you are unhappy and then you are informed enough to take action if you choose to; but since a lot of the reasons for unhappiness are fixations on the past and the future, on the incorrect idea of permanence of the ego or disconnection of ego from rest of world, or sadness at being imperfect, then becoming deeply aware of these thoughts implicitly involves them dissipating away as you understand how ridiculous they are; and with the sad, depressing, distorted thoughts fading away, there's room for plenty of happiness in mindful pursuit of ordinary activities. Thich Nhat Hahn uses examples like brushing your teeth or washing your food bowl - these shouldn't be hurried through so you can get to the rest of your life, these activities are your life and you should be aware of your desire to hurry through them and be elsewhere which is making these activities feel worse than they are. You need to do them, you don't need to wish-you-weren't-doing-them-and-feel-sad. They need doing, you are doing them, you may as well pay full attention to them and enjoy doing them. Alan Watts says "Zen spirituality isn't thinking about God while peeling potatoes, Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes", and "mindfulness isn't an activity to do while sitting, mindfulness is just the way a Buddha sits (and the way a Budda does everything)".
If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie?
If you're sad about not driving a Lamborghini and your startup customers leaving and your partner being angry at you, and depressed about ageing and your joints hurting, are any of those things helping you experience the emotion of a really tragic movie? Yes I say a person who is generally happy and content with life including all its problems can still experience the emotions of a movie. (But would they want to? Can a person who is happy and content really feel angry at treading in dog poop? Maybe they can, but would they want to feel angry about such a thing?).
Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house!
Which is fine in a measured way - but do be mindful that this happiness is a fantasy about a future which has not happened, and might not happen, and almost certainly won't happen perfectly in every way. To be excited for the future is one thing, to base your happiness on being able to buy that house is to invite suffering when you hit an unexpected bill and the house seller pulls out of the market or someone else pays more, etc. Mindfulness as "be aware of your thoughts, don't let them push you around" rather than "get rid of your thoughts"
Since the main objection in the article was the military coopting the practice - The basic tenants of mindfulness, as I understand them, are not anybody's property - no matter how compelling the publisher's advances are.
And let's be honest with ourselves - the stationary and toilet paper the military buy have the implicit eventual aim of making them better at making things dead. I'm not convinced mindfulness training for troops is the problem here.
Sure, there are rogue teachers, but that has applied to everything from spurious gurus through to homebrew religions. At trial of sounding callous, caveat emptor surely?
Nothing Mindfulness (as a brand) teaches is a super-secret arcane mystery fercryinoutloud! If nothing else, the government spending time and money on it can only do wonders to validate it and cement it in the public conscious.
This sounds like when he got to having to tackle actual issues, he didn't have the political tools necessary to effect real change. Of course if the establishment was all on board to guarantee worker happiness, you wouldn't even need mindfulness in the first place, but the problem right now is that you can't replace the establishment and the establishment doesn't care about you. He might want to look into working with unions and how to structure their demands and policies in a way that will reduce people's stress. You don't enact democracy by telling the current tyrant how cool it would be if all his serfs revolted and took his head off.
The reason it seems like a bastardization of Buddhism is because it's not really Buddhism at all, just a spurious justification of why the people who are making the most money are making the most money, namely their more perfectly ordered minds (rather than their connections and luck.)
My mother used to be a nurse, and they brought in some people who were apparently actual Bhuddhists of some sort. She found the whole thing offensive for religious reasons.
On the more practical front, they were encouraging medical staff to all put their hands in bowls of beads as an everyday activity. Not exactly the greatest idea given that they want to keep everyone's hands sterile, and no one washed the things.
It is just unfortunate that what humans have created within this inherent existence is a reliance on money and laws protecting ownership.
If you read the Heart Sutra it will help you understand a little bit of the struggle of absoloute reality and inherent reality.
Om Mani Padme Hum
AH ha ha. Military intelligence.
Oh well. I'd guess that Buddhism has wandered about as far from Buddha's original teachings.
There is nothing in the core practice itself that leads to pacifism (or belligerence). It might even make easier to ignore that discomfort, like any other, if you have mental tools.
[0] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/mindfulness-no...
It's very much like acupuncture. Fake, but because it's steeped in tradition, people will fall for it. Many Westerners have really uninformed views about East Asian / Asian culture, which is why I believe that's the reason meditation has the sway with people who would never convert to something like Islam.
I comment about this all the time. Not once have I ever gotten a single good reply challenging my claims and providing any good evidence that mindfulness meditation is "real".
bonus: "Specifically, the moderation results showed that a significant increase in compassion only occurred if the intervention teacher was a co-author in the published study"
[0] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/transcendental...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/lifestyle-changes...
https://theconversation.com/mindfulness-meditation-ten-minut...
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/cultural-psychiatry/be-here...
https://theconversation.com/mindfulness-can-help-phd-student...
https://thriveglobal.com/stories/meditation-3-reasons-why-yo...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/being-while-doing/20...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/mindfulness-in-frant...
Alsaraireh, et al. (2017). Mindfulness Meditation Versus Physical Exercise in the Management of Depression Among Nursing Students. Journal of Nursing Education, 56(10), 599-604.
Cherkin, et al. (2016). Effect of mindfulness-based stress reduction vs cognitive behavioral therapy or usual care on back pain and functional limitations in adults with chronic low back pain: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 315(12), 1240-1249.
Costa, A., 2016. Turning towards or turning away: a comparison of mindfulness meditation and guided imagery relaxation in patients with acute depression. Behav. Cogn. Psychother. 44, 410–419.
Fissler, M., et al., 2016. An investigation of the effects of brief mindfulness training on self-reported interoceptive awareness, the ability to decenter, and their role in the reduction of depressive symptoms. Mindfulness 7, 1170–1181.
Kuyken, W., et al. (2016). Efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in prevention of depressive relapse: an individual patient data meta-analysis from randomized trials. JAMA psychiatry, 73(6), 565-574.
Edit:
"CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:
"Among adults with chronic low back pain, treatment with MBSR or CBT, compared with usual care, resulted in greater improvement in back pain and functional limitations at 26 weeks, with no significant differences in outcomes between MBSR and CBT."
I don't consider this evidence in favor of mindfulness. The claim I make is that mindfulness is merely meditation. The benefits ascribed to it are, I claim, that of relaxation.
One other study compares physical exercise to mindfulness, but this isn't a comparison with non-mindfulness relaxation. Also not great evidence. Same with another. There's also one my IP can't access.
Also, I am aware that transcendental meditation isn't the same.
What would convince me mindfulness meditation may indeed have some unique positive property: Study or even better metaanalysis with good quality and reasonable sample size demonstrating that mindfulness meditation performs significantly better than other forms of relaxation. Costa's comes closest to this but the sample size is not very large. I do suspect there may be a placebo effect at play.
Also, do you know what mindfulness is? It goes way beyond simple relaxation – it is also about getting to know your mind and developing self-knowledge, etc. If you had a look at the links I posted in a different comment here, you might get a better idea about what mindfulness is, etc., and you will also see that the brain also changes (in positive ways) with mindfulness practices. Anyway, below are some meta-analyses:
Blanck, P., et al. (2018). Effects of mindfulness exercises as stand-alone intervention on symptoms of anxiety and depression: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Behaviour research and therapy, 102, 25-35.
Scott-Sheldon, L. A., et al. (2019). Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Adults with Cardiovascular Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Wang, Y. Y., et al. (2018). Mindfulness-based interventions for insomnia: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Behavioral sleep medicine, 1-9.
Zou, L., et al. (2018). A systematic review with meta-analysis of mindful exercises on rehabilitative outcomes among poststroke patients. Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation, 99(11), 2355-2364.
Goldberg, S. B., et al. (2018). Mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical psychology review, 59, 52-60.
Carsley, D., Khoury, B., & Heath, N. L. (2018). Effectiveness of mindfulness interventions for mental health in schools: A comprehensive meta-analysis. Mindfulness, 9(3), 693-707.
Carrière, K., et al. (2018). Mindfulness‐based interventions for weight loss: a systematic review and meta‐analysis. Obesity Reviews, 19(2), 164-177.
Dunning, D. L., et al. (2019). Research Review: The effects of mindfulness‐based interventions on cognition and mental health in children and adolescents–a meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60(3), 244-258.
Borquist-Conlon, D. S., et al. (2019). Mindfulness-based interventions for youth with anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Research on Social Work Practice, 29(2), 195-205.
Van Driel, C. M., et al. (2019). Mindfulness, cognitive behavioural and behaviour‐based therapy for natural and treatment‐induced menopausal symptoms: a systematic review and meta‐analysis. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 126(3), 330-339.
Simpson, R., et al. (2019). Mindfulness-based interventions for mental well-being among people with multiple sclerosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(9), 1051-1058.
DiRenzo, D., et al. (2018). Systematic review and meta-analysis: mindfulness-based interventions for rheumatoid arthritis. Current rheumatology reports, 20(12), 75.
Rusch, H. L., et al. (2018). The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality: a systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Li, J., et al. (2018). Mindful exercise versus non-mindful exercise for schizophrenia: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Complementary therapies in clinical practice, 32, 17-24.
Khoo, E. L., et al. (2019). Comparative evaluation of group-based mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment and management of chronic pain: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Evidence-based mental health, 22(1), 26-35.
If you do the technique then you will get results.
Your reason for doing it, your philosophy of what and why. That matters not so much.
It's like a marijuana joint in this way. Call it a spliff, reefer or doobie. What you call it ain't gonna make a speck of difference to the high it delivers.
So I say let the capitalists hijack it. Let them wrap it in whatever narrative they like. As long as they do it.
Because it WILL make you smarter.
The same thing seems to be happening with Buddhism. I'm not Buddhist but a pretty central teaching seems to be to let go of the self and to end desire, whereas among the new caste of CEOs it seems to have been repurposed into a tool to pursue ones mundane goals more effectively, and as a sort of social signal among rich people who have so much wealth that buying a sports car doesn't even convey any meaning any more. So now in addition to being rich which is a precondition, you also need to reject all your wealth and meditate in some bizarre ritual of one-upmanship.
In many ways I wish we could just go back to the olden days when those people would do coke and throw lavish parties because at least that's honest rather than Jack Dorsey meditating in a private retreat while minorities are being chased down on the street by a mob organised on twitter.
2 Cor 11:14-15
Is capitalist mindfulness doing that? I'm not sure. If you don't like capitalist mindfulness, do something about it.