I'm a huge fan of third wave psychology (I sometimes wish I'd persued it as a career), but this article presents a critique of the recent upsurge of "mindfulness" and assumptions it makes.
https://aeon.co/essays/mindfulness-is-loaded-with-troubling-metaphysical-assumptions
@emacsen I have both witnessed and experienced such things used to put the onus on self-care as against a reduction of unecessary stresses in the workplace ie. pile up more and more work and then throw in compulsory courses with colleagues which take place in what might have been their own time and for which they will be expected to be grateful.
@emacsen This isn't the problem of mindfulness, this is the problem of people who believe people who present mindfulness as value-neutral.
@emacsen In the Noble Eightfold Path: Right View, Right Resolve or Intention, Right Speech, Right Conduct or Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort and only then, Right Mindfulness.
@emacsen
1 of 2
I found this article a little odd, seems to lack the scholarly weight that Aeon articles usually claim to have, and is more the ad hoc personal reflection of a graduate student with a buddhist family background. Anyway . . there's currently a fashion for sniping at mindfulness practices as being the new pacifying 'opium of the people', or not real (religious, on the cushion monastic) buddhism, or a diversion away from engaging with actual material trouble in the world.
@bhaugen
@emacsen
2 of 2
I found the intro to secular dhamma thro mindfulness practice (MBCT) greatly helped deepen my sense of what activism needs to be and do. IMO the (materialist) theory of mind present in that tradition, and skills of dealing with ‘having your buttons pushed’ by the world, need to be part of any activist’s skill-set. MBCT didn’t serve to ‘cool me out’ but rather helped tune in to the material conditions of what makes people tick, and make trouble. Invaluable for an activist.
@emacsen
Related: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality
That Guardian text seems to repeat the same simple argument over and over though, so slightly tedious. Didn't get a chance to read the Aeon piece yet.