“Mindfulness is not Buddhist,” Fernandez went on. His animated manner made it seem like he wanted to add a “Damn it!” but mindfully refrained. Then he backpedaled slightly. “Well, of course, I got to give credit where credit is due… a lot of these ideas and practices came from Buddhism. But what we are doing isn’t Buddhist.” And in case we still had doubts: “Look, you can find mindfulness in the Vedic, Taoist, Quaker and Christian traditions,” he said. “Buddhists don’t own mindfulness.”
This admonition is a popular talking point among mindfulness teachers. Most Buddhists that I know, myself included, have no issue with the adaptation of mindfulness for secular and clinical purposes. The issue isn’t one of intellectual property, but of truth in advertising. I have repeatedly observed mindfulness teachers tell corporate sponsors, especially when trying to sell programs, that what they offer is in no way Buddhist. But in other situations, such as these sorts of conferences, the same teachers wax poetic about how they are translating the whole of the dharma. This seems not only disingenuous, but also contrary to the honesty on which mindfulness traditionally depends.
In some ways, Fernandez is clear about intentions. “It’s all about branding and positioning,” he told the conference. “Yeah, we have to give credit where credit is due, but we are aiming for a more productive worker, not spiritual awakening.” He quickly switched tack, as if alarmed by the implications: “I mean, yeah, I can see how this could become sort of mercenary if the focus is all on product and performance, but this is how we have to position it — to get senior managers’ attention. And sometimes we do say that happier workers are more productive.”
Ever since I dipped my toe into corporate mindfulness, I have observed how its salesmen promise to add value to the bottom line. When pitching programs, consultants actually downplay the benefits to individual workers, focusing instead on “work-related outcomes,” such as better productivity, task performance, and decision-making. “Results-focused mindfulness training for your company,” is the tag line for Whil, a market-savvy online provider of “on demand” corporate mindfulness programs.4 Their website vows to “increase job satisfaction and productivity while decreasing stress.” Would it be possible for mindfulness to thrive in companies if the practice dented profits? There seems little danger of that if it is pitched as performance enhancement. Even if accompanied by some woolly implications about change scaling up to make companies mindful, the exclusion of structural critiques of corporate policies undermines this. Utopian rhetoric is rarely translated into meaningful action.
Meanwhile, back at the conference, Fernandez got tied up in knots trying to talk up his brand. “You got to have the right subject matter expert,” he told the audience. “We don’t even refer to our trainers as mindfulness teachers, but as ‘subject matter experts’ — that is much easier to hear,” he said. Then in the very same breath, he switched tack. “You know, a competent mindfulness teacher needs a lineage.” A few minutes ago, he seemed adamant that traditional lineages were irrelevant. Yet here he was trying to use Buddhist branding to sound more “competent.” At lunch, Fernandez even revealed that he had a well-known teacher: the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
Not that Ford would have found this impressive. To clinch that deal, Fernandez didn’t try to sell “Buddhism minus the Buddhism,” or even just “mindfulness training.” Remember, this is all a language game. So what did he call it? “Evidenced-based forms of mental conditioning for resilience, wellbeing and sustainable high performance,” he said. You what? I asked him to repeat it (the only time I spoke during the session). He obliged with an impish smile: “Evidenced-based forms of mental conditioning for resilience, wellbeing and sustainable high performance.” He paused. “See, this is how we perform a translation function. We know it’s the dharma, but they don’t.”
My hackles had risen as far as they could go. Inhale. Exhale. I tried to calm myself. I’d hidden my badge, but any sort of snide remark might have blown my cover. Fernandez continued: “We don’t ever lead with compassion or empathy up front — that would never sell. We sort of Trojan-horse that in and sneak that in later after we get some traction with the program,” he said. “And our whole thing is really how do we perform this translation function without losing the integrity of the dharma.” I was losing the will to be patient. But at this point his sidekick took over, so I gave him a chance.
Mark Higbie, the Vice President of Corporate Public Relations for Ford, held up his business card, telling the crowd: “My real job title is ‘Instigator’.” Nowhere near the chutzpah of Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, but perhaps at Ford that seemed rebellious. To me, Higbie looked the stereotypical Fortune 500 corporate mannequin — expensive suit, perfect hair, black shiny shoes.
So why did Ford buy mindfulness? “It was really fear and disengagement that sold it,” he said. “Managers were really stressed out.” Then he hit us with a corporate phrase I’d never heard before “You got to True Up!” Er, what? True up? “Well, look at the handout,” he said. “Do you see how you have to True Up?” This appeared to mean almost the opposite — change the language to match corporate discourse. Make it sound like mindfulness is exactly the thing they’ve been looking for. “Look,” Higbie said, “it’s about measurable results! You have to have ‘engagement scores’ and ‘metrics’.” My eyes glazed over. It went on, and on, and on. “We even have technology for biometrics. We have an online platform — that was really appealing to Ford. And another thing you got to pay attention to is budget cycles. You got to know the best time to pitch a program.”
I’d had my fill and left stage right.
Mindfulness as Corporate Propaganda
If I thought I’d escaped, I was wrong. Fernandez and Higbie accompanied lunch. Higbie led their second session. “Why Ford?” he asked rhetorically, plunging into a story about Bill Ford, Jr, the heir to the empire. Apparently, “it was all about his values.” How many times had I heard this stuff? The corporate hierophant who tries to save the world? I braced myself. “For Bill Ford, the Ford Motor Company is about valuing the depth of humanity,” Higbie said, making sure people grasped how close he was to Bill, the great grandson of good old Henry, who invented the assembly line. “The purpose of every company, Henry Ford believed, was to make peoples’ lives better,” Higbie said. Henry Ford believed other things too, including that America was being taken over by a vast “Jewish conspiracy” — he bought his local newspaper and ran an anti-Semitic series of articles, later compiled as a four-volume book, The International Jew.
“This training is all about creating new emotional sensibilities,” Higbie continued. To illustrate his point, he played us a sentimental corporate video. An all-smiles Ford employee comforted a customer whose mother had cancer. Another empathic colleague listened intently to someone else whose father had died. This almost seemed worthy of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, considered the father of public relations. In 1928, Bernays published Propaganda, which argued for “the engineering of consent,” by providing the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”5 He made his name by persuading women to take up smoking, rebranding cigarettes as feminist “Torches of Freedom.”
Saving his best shot for last, Fernandez was eager to tell one more story. “When I was still working at Google,” he said, dropping one of the names that made him rich, “I wrote a letter to my teacher.” Up flashed a slide of Thich Nhat Hanh. There were sounds of impressed recognition in the audience. “And I invited him to come to Silicon Valley to talk to all the prominent CEOs who were interested in mindfulness. And, to my surprise, he came! And here you can see him holding hands with me at the meeting, and he even let me ring his bell!”
I can’t but help think of this whole charade as a form of what Sean Feit calls “saffron-washing.”6 Just as “green- washing” masks environmentally harmful policies with token eco-friendly gestures, saffron-washing helps hip postmodern corporat
ions to present a gentler, kinder, wiser public image.
Ford Motor has plenty to hide. It spent nearly $40 million on scientific research to help it fight asbestos lawsuits from mechanics with mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer virtually always linked to asbestos exposure.7 Ford is also being sued for cheating on diesel emission tests for half a million heavy trucks.8 If those allegations are found to be true, Ford could be liable for billions of dollars. Meanwhile, there is no sign that Ford will stop making vehicles that burn fossil fuels, regardless of the impact on the climate.
Higbie had other things on his mind. “This mindfulness program was for all the top dealers and managers in Ford Canada,” he explained. They were to be enrolled in a twelve-month course. The only question was who would provide it. “We looked at two vendors: Google’s SIYLI and Rich at Wisdom Labs. What we liked about Rich’s pitch is he focused on the neuroscience, the business case and the practice. Plus, his program was metrics driven.” As Higbie’s canned talk put it:
Ford has an evolving business model and we see mindfulness training as helping managers with this transformation. Ford no longer sees itself as merely an automobile company but as a mobility services company. That is the new business model. In the future Ford may never make a car in the US. This is a cultural transformation. This is a great place for mindfulness to step in.
I’ve heard such things many times over, but I couldn’t help but wonder what role mindfulness might play in this situation. If Ford moved all US manufacturing offshore, that would be the end of the United Auto Workers union, plunging Detroit, Michigan further into the black hole of poverty. And social dimensions of suffering are not on the radar of corporate mindfulness. At Ford, like most other companies, managers just see it as a way of reducing stress and improving focus, all in the service of profit-making and increasing shareholder value. And if that requires a massive loss of jobs, then so be it.
“It’s all about the consumer experience,” Higbie elaborated. “In fact, we see what we are doing as part of the consumer experience movement.” I felt glad to have skipped the eating part of lunch. I might have had indigestion. “We see mindfulness as helping Ford create a more empathic organization,” he insisted. “Yeah, through mindfulness and compassion training, this is how we address the consumerist piece.” Fernandez chimed in: “You know, some people are concerned that mindfulness is becoming entangled with business.” Cue ripples of laughter from the audience. “Well, I hope so!”
His advocacy for entangling mindfulness with a corporate quest for profits is not an anomaly. The whole movement is pervaded with this sort of spiritual libertarianism, providing a humanistic rationale for exploitation. Individuals are supposedly empowered, so the fact that corporations do better off the back of them is OK. Besides, it’s all in the name of consumer service — the ultimate justification for corporate greed.
Consultants like Fernandez sincerely believe in “conscious capitalism.” Their sincerity makes them mindful missionaries for corporate power. As its servants, they perform an important ideological function: to mystify and uphold capitalist hierarchies with crypto-Buddhist libertarianism (known as “mindfulness”). Addressing greed and corruption would not only be less lucrative, it would undermine their mission: spreading mindfulness, one individual at a time, to unleash a corporate transformation. So far, the main thing they’ve changed is the meaning of mindfulness, which is now neoliberal.
Mindful Rallies
Using mindfulness to shore up class power requires a great deal of media hype and mass enthusiasm. Jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon gave its early adopters a sense of being part of a change of historic proportions — something big, revolutionary, and exciting. Fernandez is full of such irrational exuberance. Towards the end of his conference keynote, he recalled his enlistment in the “movement.” The Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff apparently invited him “to curate” events for Dreamforce III, a global meeting of employees in San Francisco. “I designed a whole day on mindfulness,” Fernandez said. “We had such people as Eckhart Tolle and Arianna Huffington. And then, the following year, he invited me back… and I asked him, well last year we did a whole day on mindfulness… what are we going to do this year?” He paused for a beat. “Yeah, you guessed it, a whole day on compassion. This is two hundred thousand employees listening and doing training in compassion! IT’S HAPPENING folks!”
Sure, it’s happening, but so are rallies by American neo-Nazis. Hula-hoops were once happening too. Fernandez’s euphoria resembles a sports fan convinced of the power of optimistic frenzy to drive his team forward. Combine this with the marketing savvy of Marc Benioff, and the hoopla of mindfulness helps make dollars. It’s unsurprising that a capitalist stooge such as Fernandez turns a blind eye to the aims of the stunts in which he enlists. Salesforce has been staging them for years. It once tried to pull one with the Dalai Lama, producing a poster of the Buddhist leader meditating under the slogan: “There is no software on the path to enlightenment.”9
Salesforce was forced to apologize. And of course that made headlines.
The Irony of Mindfulness Apps
I was in New York the day after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, riding the subway up Manhattan. The somber gloominess was palpable. As I gazed up, careful not to look anyone in the eye, I saw an advertising banner for Headspace, the most popular mindfulness app. The ad featured the tagline “I meditate to go full salsa,” above an image of a young Latino dancer, holding his hoodie wide open. To his right, the ad continued: “Paul uses Headspace to make his moves even sharper. Download the Headspace app to find out what guided meditation can do for you.” Spending over $2 million on this New York campaign alone, Headspace seems to be everywhere.10
Founded in 2010 by Andy Puddicombe, a British college dropout who was once a novice Buddhist monk, Headspace says it has thirty-six million users in over 190 countries.11
The idea took shape in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Puddicombe had been teaching private and group meditation in London, where he met Rich Pierson, an anxious young advertising executive, who was impressed with Puddicombe’s clear instructions. The two teamed up, borrowing $50,000 from Pierson’s father to start their business.
Headspace has since raised over $80 million from investors, including a number of flashy celebrities. Richard Branson of Virgin, the basketball star LeBron James, the Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow, and the LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner are among its fans. Even the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks use the app. Forbes estimates Headspace’s valuation at $250 million, with annual revenues of over $50 million.12 Located in glitzy Santa Monica, California, Headspace has expanded to nearly two hundred employees. It recently opened another office in San Francisco.
Unlike many other apps, Headspace has succeeded in selling subscriptions. It costs $12.99 for a month, or $95.88 for a year. The app itself is free with a few guided meditations, but subscribers can access “packs” of many more. Alongside the basics, like coping with stress and falling asleep, there is a “Work and Performance” area with multi-session packs for Prioritization, Focus, Creativity, Balance and Productivity. Others have titles like Brave, with meditations for dealing with anger, regret, change and restlessness. Of course, there is also a Happiness pack, as well as Students and Sports. There is even Headspace for Kids, targeting children under five. Headspace sells bulk subscriptions to companies such as Google, Genentech and LinkedIn. Seven airlines, including Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, and United, are now brand partners, offering exclusive in-flight channels for weary passengers.
Headspace isn’t alone in attracting venture capital: Happify Health has raised $25 million, Grokker $22 million. Numerous other meditation apps, such as Calm, Shine, and Thrive Global (Arianna Huffington’s latest venture), have also received seed and early stage funding.13 This “relaxation industry” is fiercely competitive. Headspace currently hovers around ninth or tenth place in the US download charts for Health and Fitness apps.
/> Headspace used to brand itself as “a gym membership for the brain” (it recently switched to the tagline “meditation made simple”). The app is full of cute animations — a brain lifting weights, a peanut figure meditating with headphones, and other cartoonish creations smiling and playing. The free version offers one-minute teaser meditations for cooking, eating and running. But it’s not just fun and games, because of the science. The website is peppered with inflated claims (of the “research shows…” variety), most of which cite studies on long-term meditators, not its one-minute app users. It also adds a disclaimer: “Headspace is not intended to manage, treat, or cure any medical condition.”
A recent study in the peer-reviewed journal Evidence-Based Mental Health found that most mediation apps suffer from the “frequent lack of an underlying evidence base, a lack of scientific credibility and limited clinical effectiveness.”14 The study’s lead author, Simon Leigh, warns that relying on mental health apps can backfire: “If you go through the process of downloading and using an app and there are no benefits, it can compound your anxiety about your mental health problems.”15
There is a peculiar irony in turning to an app to de-stress from problems that are often made worse by staring at phones. Headspace, like its rivals, has a vested interest in keeping users active. “People Meditating Now” on its homepage shows a real-time count. When I checked, there were 20,996 other people using the app. Why not join in when it’s so easy and fun? However, behind the playful cartoons and kid-friendly user interface lie sophisticated data-mining tools. With location services enabled, a user entering the San Francisco International airport will be pinged with a notification, reminding them to “check in” and use a “fear of flying” meditation.
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