This myopic trend may slowly be changing. Two recent letters in The Lancet Psychiatry, a prestigious medical journal, call for clinicians and policymakers to classify distress in terms of social factors, not as “disorders” within individuals. The authors, who include a former president of the British Psychological Society, say diagnostic codes should take account of the context of suffering:
Broadening routine data capture within UK National Health Service records could establish more inclusive, social, systemic, and psychologically comprehensive patterns of difficulties, which could target information regarding established social determinants of mental health problems, such as inequality, poverty, and trauma. Imagine if it were as serious to fail to document extreme poverty as it would be for a clinician to fail to identify severe depression.20
They add that the World Health Organization already uses a “non-diagnostic, non-pathologizing, scientific alternative” to document the impact of psychosocial adversity on mental health.
Mindfulness has been undermined by its success. Its radical potential was usurped by elites who have a personal stake in their expert status, through which individuals are pathologized. Seeing things as they really are would reveal such distortions of power and privilege, and the neoliberal framework it helps to sustain. Institutionalized greed, ill will and delusion infest our whole culture, infecting the media, corporations, politics, and the military. This institutionalization makes collective sources of suffering almost invisible, argues Bruce Rogers-Vaughn in Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age.21 “Oppressors,” he writes, “no longer have faces, even the impersonal ‘faces’ of the state, the corpo- ration, or the church.” If promoters of mindfulness want to stop serving them, they need to limit the biomedical focus on individuals, and develop new explanatory narratives. They need to stop hiding behind their “universal” rhetoric, pleading therapeutic neutrality, or claiming that ethics are somehow “implicit.” Instead, they need to take a clear stand.
Rewriting the Rules
It is not only diagnostic models that need changing. Therapeutic methods should also be different, combining practice with critical pedagogies. The causes and conditions of social suffering and oppression should be examined, along with collective experiences of cultural trauma, systemic racism, and other forms of marginalization and displacement that cannot be reduced to psychological maladies. “There is no Diagnostic and Statistical Manual For Neoliberal Disorders,” notes Rogers-Vaughn, and attempts to address them should not seek to replicate current methods.22 “I will not be designing a manualized plan for Anti-Neoliberal Therapy (ANT), selling glossy ANT promotional packets, or offering weekend certification programs,” he explains. “We simply cannot beat neoliberalism at its own game, or on its own terms.”23 This means that mindfulness curricula should not be confined to internal self-management. A much wider focus is required, using practice to develop an insight into how social experience is embodied.
Not only has suffering been privatized and interiorized, it has also been amplified and marginalized. The result is a level of suffering that cannot be treated at the individual level. Mindfulness offers palliative care for “first-order” suffering: the human existential distress caused by sickness, old age and death, chronic physical pain, conflicts in personal relationships, divorce and loss. When doctors cannot help, this has traditionally been the domain of religious consolation, counseling and therapy. Nowadays, first-order pain is no longer private. It is entangled with social, economic, political, and environmental suffering. Neoliberalism tries to deny this, placing the burden of coping on autonomous individuals, whose bonds of social and collective support have already been weakened. Mindfulness has helped in this process, reinforcing the myth of private suffering.
Human evil leads to second-order suffering, both personally and collectively. Whether individuals are the victims of violence — or whole populations are afflicted by wars, genocide, social injustice, or oppressive conditions — the source of this suffering is identifiable. The third-order suffering caused by neoliberalism is harder to identify, since it is so amorphous, pervasive and systemic. It gets entangled with the first two orders, so the inner and outer worlds become confused. Mindfulness is ineffective at treating this suffering, unless it raises collective awareness of the forces that obscure power relations, class interests, social inequities, and political oppression. Few teachers of mindfulness do this at present, since they themselves are part of the problem. Their form of relief helps to mold individuals into neoliberal subjects, who mindfully accept the status quo like the “cheerful social robots” once described by C. Wright Mills.24
Programs modeled on MBSR offer “first-order” therapies of self-management. They were simply not designed for social transformation and collective healing, whatever Kabat-Zinn might like to claim. To become revolutionary, teachers of mindfulness need new practices capable of tackling entangled suffering. They need to develop communal attention, solidarity, and resistance. This requires an understanding of sociopolitical and historical contexts, which are mostly excluded. Take mindfulness in schools. Programs for disadvantaged youth are inept at fostering what Paulo Freire called concientización, a critical consciousness that links personal troubles to social situations plagued by violence, poverty, and addiction.25 Teaching inner-city kids to take a three-minute break to observe their breath just defuses frustration. The conditions producing it are simply ignored.
Part of the problem is a misunderstanding of what people access. Kabat-Zinn’s claims about a “universal dharma” assume a false unity in human experience, as if just “dropping in” works the same way for everyone. This is a privileged fantasy, positioning the mostly white mindful elite at the helm of a movement for global salvation. After all, “we’re all human,” and other such platitudes blinding mindfulness teachers to systemic inequalities. As Robin DiAngelo points out in White Fragility:
Whites are taught to see their interests and perspectives as universal [and] they are also taught to value the individual and to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racially socialized group. Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today. It allows whites to view themselves as unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial messages in the culture.26
It’s obvious that suffering and distress are not universally experienced, nor are they evenly distributed. The universalizing rhetoric of mindfulness is “a discourse of manic defense covering over a complicated situation in which massive numbers of people think otherwise or have serious doubts about business as usual,” write Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman in Toward Psychologies of Liberation.27
Cloaking it in science, experts use this ahistorical outlook to talk about what is innate to human nature, while avoiding all the intersecting issues that screw people up.
Mindfulness will not stop the military from lying to justify wars, any more than it will stop corporations from maximizing profits. Mindfulness programs are aligned with the interests of power, not questioning the institutional order. There is never a focus on the exploitation of workers, or the mindless export of suffering as pollution, and other externalities. Mindfulness in politics has not had the slightest impact on global warming, unprecedented inequality, poverty, mass incarceration, racism, sexism, corruption or militarism. Why would it when its aims are so tame and inward-focused?
Psychoanalysis was similarly neutered by being Americanized. Many European psychoanalysts were Marxists and socialists. These neo-Freudians viewed neuroses as a social disease, saying personal troubles could not be divorced from historical and social contexts. As Robert Hattam notes in Awakening Struggle, Erich Fromm was dismayed by how “psychoanalysis lost its ‘original radicalism’ because ‘instead of challenging society it conformed to it’.”28 As Fromm himself laments: “The aim of therapy is often that of helping the person to be better adjusted to existing circum
stances, to ‘reality’ as it is frequently called; mental health is often considered to be nothing but this adjustment.” As a result, “the psychologists, using the ‘right’ words from Socrates to Freud, become the priests of industrial society, helping to fulfill its aims by helping the individual to become the perfectly adjusted organization man.”29 Total liberation requires a new praxis, Fromm explains: one that works on the dialectic between self and society, between an interior search for wellbeing and changing socioeconomic structures.
We need to revolutionize mindfulness. This requires us to accept the limitations of what is currently taught, and to dispense with the hype surrounding it. The therapeutic functions of mindfulness-based interventions are clearly of value. We don’t need to stop using them, but we do need to do much more. Calming the mind can help us engage with social, historical and political realities. We don’t need another form of praxis defined in biomedical and universalizing terms. Mindfulness needs to be embedded in the organic histories and local knowledge of communities, empowering them to see how things are.
When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault, but are connected to structural causes, this becomes fuel for igniting resistance. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, “Affective disorders are form of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outward, directed towards its real cause, Capital.”30 The liberation of mindfulness depends on building solidarity out of the ruins of McMindfulness, assisting victims of exploitation to resist the inhuman demands of capitalism. Its aim is an individual and collective “conscience explosion,” converting exhaustion, depression and burnout into constructive forms of activism.
Beyond McMindfulness
Social mindfulness is not an intervention conducted by experts. It makes no claim to sell “evidence-based” services. Its aims are regenerative, helping to repair solidarities and social bonds that neoliberalism devastates. It does not adopt the outlook of power, and refuses to collude with, or act on behalf of, institutional interests. Instead, it serves community interests, recognizing links between personal, social and ecological liberation. It can therefore be thought of as what Kevin Healey calls “civic mindfulness,” restoring collective attention to shared responsibilities.31
Instead of despairing at the ravages of capitalism, or clinging to myths about its instant destruction, we can be liberated moment to moment by meaningful action. This is powerful because it reverses our dismembering by neoliberalism, which leaves us divided to fend for ourselves in a cutthroat environment, erasing our collective memory in the process. It is hardly surprising that so many feel hopeless, passive, and cynical. We need to re-member — to come back together, to recall what has happened, and to cultivate what Bhikkhu Bodhi calls “conscientious compassion,” awakening new visions:
A collective voice might emerge that could well set in motion the forces needed to articulate and embody a new paradigm rooted in the intrinsic dignity of the person and the interdependence of all life on Earth. Such collaboration could serve to promote the alternative values that offer sane alternatives to our free-market imperatives of corporatism, exploitation, extraction, consumerism, and toxic economic growth.32
This approach is the mindful equivalent of liberation theology, allying spiritual practice with radical action. This begins with us bearing witness to shared vulnerabilities, actively acknowledging social suffering, collective trauma and other cultural experiences of oppression. Doing so rebuilds trust and empathy, developing capacities for resistance. Those who suffer together can imagine new futures together. “If our aim is to heal the world rather than to fix it,” writes Peter Gabel in The Desire for Mutual Recognition, “then we must engage in intuitively-based social-spiritual actions that may redeem our collective being rather than in rationally-based formal changes that we think will bring about social-spiritual effects.”33
Revolutionary mindfulness neither fetishizes the present moment nor dispenses with judgment. Rather, it embraces the past and the future in conscious pursuit of social change. This communal approach is unapologetically anticapitalist, building on critique to envision the emergence of a new commons. Individual happiness seems hollow unless all human beings are free of oppression, poverty, and violence — as well as free to speak and act in the public sphere. This doesn’t mean we have to be miserable in the meantime. We can’t help each other if we don’t help ourselves. But we have to go further than the smiley face rhetoric of commoditized mindfulness. Dissatisfaction and unhappiness are not impediments to revolution; they are its fuel.
Because liberation is a systemic process, it cannot rely on individual methods. Social mindfulness starts with the widest possible lens, focusing collective attention on the structural causes of suffering. Groups work together to establish shared meanings and common ground, developing a socially engaged motivation before turning inwards. Clearly, this is different to an eight-week program in a boardroom. It goes much deeper and has longer-term objectives, combining resistance with meditative practice. The aim is not to de-stress for more business as usual. It’s to overcome alienation by working with others in a common struggle, using inner resources to seek social justice, resisting unjust power both to liberate oppressors and oppressed.
Occasionally, Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests his approach might be mistaken. Despite writing off his critics, he concedes: “There is room for an infinite number of imaginative approaches to healing the human condition.” When pushed in a film about The Mindful Revolution, he acknowledges that capitalism might stop CEOs from fulfilling his dream. “Well,” he laughs awkwardly, “I don’t have a problem with the capitalist logic having to change. I mean like everything else it’s evolving. The real question is: is it evolving in the direction of greed or is it evolving in the direction of wisdom?”34
We don’t have time for such indulgent rumination. Liberating mindfulness requires us to face our own delusion. Although this is sometimes a solitary process, it isn’t a retreat from the outside world. Instead, it can deepen our sense of connection, provided we see beyond clinging to the illusory separateness of self. If we shed this defensive skin, along with the constant sense of lack that it produces, we face our individual powerlessness. In that insight into the emptiness of self, into the futility of grasping for comfort and control, we find liberating power beyond the isolated “me.” Truly revolutionary mindfulness is non-dual: its transformative strength is undivided, owned by no one. By harnessing this together, we can seek the liberation of all sentient beings.
Notes
Chapter One:
What Mindfulness Revolution?
1 http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/transcripts/jon-kabat-zinn.php
2 http://time.com/1556/the-mindful-revolution/
3 Jeff Wilson, Mindful America. Oxford University Press, 2014. p.164
4 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. Hachette Books, 2005. p.143
5 Ibid., p.160.
6 https://www.mentalpraxis.com/zombie-mindfulness.html
7 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. MIT Press, 2015. p.15
8 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life. Sounds True, 2012.
9 https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_four_keys_to_well_being
10 https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/83/3/624/722898?redirectedFrom=fulltext
11 David Forbes, Mindfulness and Its Discontents. Fernwood Publishing, 2019, p.34.
12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kpiqOGpho4
13 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3916
14 https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/meditation-nation/
15 http://religiondispatches.org/american-buddhism-beyond-the-search-for-inner-peace/
16 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mc-mindfulness_b_3519289.html
17 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8e29ffcd39c3de-866b5e1/t/5b53
03d91ae6cf630b641909/1532167130908/McMindfulness.pdf
18 Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. Routledge, 2005. p.5
19 Ibid., p. 22
20 Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2017.
21 https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2011/07/03/elixirof-mindfulness/
22 http://theconversation.com/mcmindfulness-buddhism-as-sold-to-you-by-neoliberals-88338
23 Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2017. p. 30
24 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289.html
chapter Two:
Neoliberal Mindfulness
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/well/mind/how-tobe-mindful-on-the-subway.html
2 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hachette Books, 2005.
3 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/corporations-newest-productivity-hack-meditation/387286/
4 https://medium.com/thrive-global/the-father-of-mindfulness-on-what-mindfulness-has-become-ad649c8340cf
5 https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475
6 https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu
7 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php
8 https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104052
9 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. Translated by G. Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books, 1978. p.60
11 Ruth Whippman, America the Anxious. St Martin’s Press, 2016.
12 https://www.templeton.org/
13 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1999. p.160
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