4
The Promise and Perils of Corporate Mindfulness
Key Questions
Why does mindfulness practice require an ethical perspective?
What are the common misconceptions regarding mindfulness?
What is “right mindfulness”, and how can leaders nurture and develop it?
How can mindfulness practices be tied to systemic change?
Introduction 1
Mindfulness meditation has become mainstream, making its way into schools, corporations, prisons and government agencies including the U.S. military. Millions of people are receiving tangible benefits from their mindfulness practice: less stress, better concentration, perhaps a little more empathy. Almost daily, the media cite scientific studies that report the numerous health benefits of mindfulness meditation and how such a simple practice can effect neurological changes in the brain.
Needless to say, this is an important development to be welcomed—but is something missing in the midst of all the media hype?
Uncoupling mindfulness from its ethical and religious contexts is understandable as an expedient move to make such training a viable product on the open market. But the rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure or helping executives become better focused and more productive.
Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is sorely lacking. While a stripped-down, secularized technique—what some critics are now calling “McMindfulness”—may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.
Most scientific and popular accounts circulating in the media have portrayed mindfulness in terms of stress reduction and attention-enhancement. These human performance benefits are heralded as the sine qua non of mindfulness and its major attraction for modern corporations. But mindfulness, as understood and practiced within the Buddhist tradition (and others as well), is not merely an ethically neutral technique for reducing stress and improving concentration. Rather, mindfulness is a distinct quality of attention that is dependent upon and influenced by many other factors: the nature of our thoughts, speech and actions; our way of making a living; and our efforts to avoid unwholesome and unskillful behaviors, while developing those that are conducive to wise action, social harmony and compassion.
This is why Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness and Wrong Mindfulness. The distinction is not moralistic: the issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterized by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human flourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself.
According to the Pali Canon (the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha), even a person committing a premeditated and heinous crime can be exercising mindfulness, albeit wrong mindfulness. Clearly, the mindful attention and single-minded concentration of a terrorist, sniper assassin or white-collar criminal is not the same quality of mindfulness that the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist and Christian adepts have developed. Right Mindfulness is guided by intentions and motivations based on self-restraint, wholesome mental states and ethical behaviors—goals that include but supersede stress reduction and improvements in concentration.
Another common misconception is that mindfulness meditation is a private, internal affair. Mindfulness is often marketed as a method for personal self-fulfillment, a reprieve from the trials and tribulations of cutthroat corporate life. Such an individualistic and consumer orientation to the practice of mindfulness may be effective for self-preservation and self-advancement but is essentially impotent for mitigating the causes of collective and organizational distress.
Thus far, those celebrating the mindfulness boom have avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in corporations and society. According to New York Times business reporter David Gelles, author of Mindful Work, “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves”.2 The New York Times featured an exposé on the toxic, sociopathic work culture at Amazon.3 A former employee was quoted as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desk. Would Gelles offer his advice with a straight face to these employees of Amazon, telling them that they have imposed stress on themselves, that they could have chosen not to cry?
Stress and misery are partly due to our habitual reactivity, but Gelles is too reductionist in his advice. His victim blaming philosophy echoes the corporate mindfulness ethos: shift the burden and locus of psychological stress and structural insecurities onto the individual employee, frame stress as a personal problem and then offer mindfulness as the panacea. Critical psychologist David Smail referred to this philosophy as “magical voluntarism”, because it blames individuals for their own stress, ignoring the social and economic conditions which may have contributed to it.4
When mindfulness practice is compartmentalized in this way, there is a dissociation between one’s own personal transformation and the kind of organizational transformation that takes into account the causes and conditions of suffering in the broader environment. Such a colonization of mindfulness also has an instrumentalizing effect, reorienting the practice to the needs of the market, rather than to a critical reflection on ultimate concerns, ethics and human values.
Many corporate advocates argue that transformational change starts with oneself: if one’s mind can become more focused and peaceful, then social and organizational transformation will naturally follow. The problem with this formulation is that today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights—greed, ill will and delusion—are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control.
The result is an atomized and highly privatized version of mindfulness practice, which is easily coopted and confined to what Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, describe as an “accommodationist” orientation.5 Mindfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on corporate goals and interests. Most of those in mindfulness movement believe capitalism and spirituality can be easily reconciled; they want a mindfulness that will ameliorate their stress, but without having to look deeper and wider at its social causes.
The mindfulness movement, however, need not follow the usual trajectory of most corporate fads—unbridled enthusiasm, uncritical acceptance of the status quo and eventual disillusionment. To become a genuine force for positive personal and social transformation, leaders must reclaim an ethical framework and aspire to employ mindfulness practices not only for personal stress reduction, but also towards making refuge for the other—developing situational response-ability. Civic mindfulness is a collective inquiry that goes beyond providing individual employees therapeutic interventions; it offers a way of linking individual agency with organizational and social change.
Fortunately, there have been an increasing number of scholars from the humanities and social sciences critically examining how mindfulness can be more than a private self-help technique.
They began asking critical questions, such as: what is mindfulness for? Are mindfulness-based interventions limited to a palliative for individual stress relief and mental hygiene, or can mindfulness programs develop in ways that call into question deeply rooted cultural assumptions which have been the source of so much misery, injustice and unnecessary suffering in the modern Western world?
At a time when the hype, commercialization and popularity of mindfulness is at its peak, leaders should be cautious and discerning. Leaders must be wary of decontextualized treatments of mindfulness and encourage dialogue that will take into account historical, cultural, social, political, economic, racial and ethical dimensions of contemplative practice in and around corporations. Leaders must also appreciate how everyone is implicated in the cultural translation of mindfulness and why we all share an ethical responsibility to question the values instantiated in particular mindfulness practices.
In the next section, we provide a number of guidelines for developing an ethically informed mindfulness practice, as well as principles for advancing a more socially engaged approach to mindfulness training in organizations.
Guidelines for Leading Ethically Informed Mindfulness Programs
Mindfulness Must Be Coupled With Clear Comprehension
Contrary to popular definitions, mindfulness is not merely paying attention to the present moment non-judgmentally. This is a common misinterpretation which obscures the role mindfulness plays as an integrated path, when properly cultivated and developed, can discern wholesome/skillful and healthy states of mind from those which are unwholesome and harmful to self and others. Discrimination, evaluation and judgment are part and parcel of mindfulness.
Mindfulness and clear comprehension are the tools not only for training the mind, but proper investigation of it as well. Mindfulness practitioners, whether Buddhist or secular, share a core commitment to cultivating clear comprehension. Clear comprehension has a reflexive monitoring quality. What seems self-evident often remains distorted by implicit biases, but when clear comprehension and mindfulness are cultivated together, leaders can fully grasp and comprehend what is actually taking place in one’s own mind and surroundings. Developing clear comprehension involves more than simply paying attention to the breath, or concentrating one-pointedly on an object. Clear comprehension can range from basic forms of knowing to discriminative understanding, the latter of which is able to discern wholesome from unwholesome thoughts and behaviors.
Corporate Mindfulness Programs Must Diagnose and Address the Causes of Workplace Stressors
The scientific research on mindfulness has already well established the potential health benefits of mindfulness for individuals. Because the majority of mindfulness programs are designed for individual-level stress reduction and therapeutic relief, these individual-focused programs will not effectively address the structural and systemic sources of stress. Individualized mindfulness programs are not designed to take into account how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests and narratives.
Leaders should take note of a recent Stanford-Harvard meta-analysis of 228 studies showing that employee stress is not self-imposed nor due to a lack of mindfulness.6 Rather, major workplace stressors were associated with a lack of health insurance, threats of constant lay-offs and job insecurity, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long work hours, low organizational justice and unrealistic job demands. These systemic and structural problems cannot be solved at the individual level of personal well-being; rather, they require collective discerning attention and action that connects the work of self-care with social and political engagement.
Mindfulness Is Not a Value-Free Practice
Mindfulness is often thought to be a value-free practice, stripped of its religious trappings and validated by science. The secular status of mindfulness often prohibits an open discussion of ethics. Those who simultaneously claim that mindfulness is value free and universally beneficial escape scrutiny by preventing any critical investigation of who benefits from mindfulness, how and why.
This laissez-faire stance toward mindfulness programs is very disconcerting. In his article, “Mindfulness at Work is Not Mind Control”, Jeremy Smith admits mindfulness might not address workplace inequality and insecurity as we allege, but he rhetorically says, “is it supposed to?” Evidently not for Smith and most corporate mindfulness advocates. Instead, corporate mindfulness apologists, perhaps unwittingly, affirm a neoliberal ideology that limits such practices to forms of self-help. Taking a depoliticized view of mindfulness conveniently forecloses critical inquiry pertaining to the social, economic and political interests linked to such programs. While mindfulness programs may provide salutary health benefits to individual employees (which we applaud), such programs are also training and conditioning individual employees to see themselves as completely autonomous, fully responsible and self-regulating employees who can govern themselves.
Framing mindfulness as a self-improvement and performance enhancement technique confines the practice. This narrowing provides the ground for dismissing structural critiques, because the implicit model of organizational change is limited to individual-level behavioral change. Ethical leadership can correct this limitation by implementing mindfulness programs as a means for uprooting the sources of greed, ill will and delusion in persons and society. The practice of mindfulness is revolutionary to the extent that it transforms the isolated self that is haunted by a sense of lack, while overcoming our dualism and sense of separateness from the world (see also Chris Mabey’s Chapter 3 and David Knights’s Chapter 5). This requires a resituating of mindfulness as a part of a larger life-practice of ethical conscientiousness rather than just a mere technique for self-enhancement
Mindfulness Is More Than a Technique
Unfortunately, the stripping away of mindfulness from its ethical context, whether explicitly or implicitly, comes at a cost. Uncoupling mindfulness from its ethical roots is myopic, promoting an overemphasis on technique. Driscoll and Weibe have aptly termed this trend as “technical spirituality”, where spiritual practices are extracted from their ethical context to be used as tools for improving efficiency, productivity and gaining tangible results.7 Strong institutional structures and market pressures have the capacity to co-opt and appropriate mindfulness to their own ends.
Purser and Loy characterize this as the “McMindfulness” trend—a replica of such technical spirituality.8 Similarly, David Forbes, in his eloquent essay, “Occupy Mindfulness”, puts the matter this way:
My concern is that mindfulness may fall victim to its own success. Mindfulness is not about stress reduction, maintaining a steady state of bliss, helping an individual act with more control or an organization run more smoothly and efficiently. Even after we’re de-stressed and feeling great, we still need to ask: how do we live now? We’re in control and are more efficient, but toward what end?
The rush to dissociate mindfulness from its ethical roots and context is not necessary in order to be palpable and acceptable to our modern sensibilities. Ensuring the ethical efficacy of mindfulness requires a willingness to view it not as simply a therapeutic self-help tool and productivity improvement technique.
The Purpose and Quality of Mindfulness is Context-Dependent
There is a widespread misconception that mindfulness is a universal, ahistorical and context-free practice, since what is being taught is allegedly the “pure essence” of what was once a religious practice. This claim is classic perennial philosophy dressed up in white scientific lab coat attire. It echoes William James’s understanding of mysticism as being a direct experience of a common core essence that forms the basis for all religious experiences. Meditation is viewed as a means for accessing a pure, unmediated and ahistorical essence of human experience that transcends sectarian boundaries and is unmediated by one’s cultural and social context. This appeal to universalism and perennial philosophy isn’t just a matter of decontextualizing and purging meditative practices from their cultural context and religious roots, but of recontextualizing them into the sensibilities of modernity and Western consumer capitalism.
For several decades, mindfulness-based interventions and courses were situated in clinics and hospitals—in medical and therapeutic contexts. The medicalization of mindfulnesss draws from a biomedical paradigm, where stress is understood and theorized as an individual pathology and dysfunction in managing one’s habitual thoughts, emotions and mental ruminations. Psychosomatic symptoms, such as chronic stress, depression and anxiety, along with interventions for enhancing health and well-being, are seen as matters for autonomous individuals to resolve. Consequently, this frame has delimited discourse to primarily viewing mindfulness as a stand-alone practice, with a focus on internal mental-brain states measurable objective methods such as neuroscientific fMRI brain scan studies.
Recontextualizing mindfulness within an individualistic and neoliberal worldview has “overstated internal pathology while understating environmental stressors”.9 Importing a medicalized view of mindfulness into organizations disavows them from any responsibility in addressing the social, cultural and economic factors of workplace stress.
Contrary to this above myth, lived cultural contexts are inextricably interwoven and constitutive of mindfulness practices. Leaders need to appreciate that mindfulness as both a social and embodied practice situated within particular historical, cultural and economic contexts. Moving from medical centers to corporations, we are unbundling practices that is changing them in ways we do not truly understand. Mindfulness is always grounded in forms of life inclusive or individual and collective dimensions. Furthermore, mindfulness is embedded within a complex web of interdependencies, conceptual systems, aesthetic factors, social settings, motivation and aspirations, emotional factors, individual differences and temporal contexts.
Given these contextual complexities, leaders can begin to understand why context matters, and how contextual factors are constitutive of contemplative practices in terms of their transformative potential.
Beware of the Commodification of Mindfulness Programs
There is a widespread belief in the marketplace that we need not worry about corporate mindfulness programs so long as teachers are competently trained. The complexity of issues concerning corporate applications of mindfulness practices, along with the potential risks to individuals—are reduced simply to an issue of teacher competency. Such reductionism ensures it all boils down to individual personal responsibility, smoothly resonating with a neoliberal ideology. This message also assumes that corporate mindfulness offerings—the programs, practices and curricula—are just fine as they are, it’s just a qualified teacher shortage that is the problem.
The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. And it’s no surprise that corporate mindfulness programs command premium consulting fees. We know of a prominent corporate mindfulness consultant whose fee for training is $12,000 USD per day. Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) charges $8,000 a day minimum for its training. Clearly, corporate mindfulness trainers have a great deal to gain financially from marketing such programs as being universally beneficial and profitable to their corporate sponsors.
Yet, Barry Boyce, the editor of Mindful magazine, asserts in his editorial “It’s Not McMindfulness”, good teachers are those who “show a strong measure of independence” from their corporate sponsors.10 But is such independence really possible? Conflicts of interest is the big elephant in the room and a matter that is almost never raised or discussed in these circles.
Can we really rely on personal testimonies that we need not worry or be concerned about issues raised by skeptics and critics when these assurances are given by trainers, consultants and teachers who have a significant financial stake in selling and sustaining their corporate mindfulness training programs?
The commercialization and commodification of mindfulness practices puts them at risk of becoming co-opted and denatured for instrumental ends. For millennia, mindfulness practices were integral to a path of spiritual liberation, for overcoming personal greed, anger, pride and an exaggerated sense of self. These methods were considered sacred, offered for free and transmitted from highly qualified spiritual monks to their disciples.
Introducing Mindfulness Requires Full Disclosure
We have repeatedly observed leading corporate mindfulness teachers declare to their corporate sponsors, especially when trying to sell a program, that mindfulness practices have nothing to do with Buddhism. But backstage, at conferences and in social media, these same corporate mindfulness teachers wax poetic about how they are “teaching the Buddha-dharma”. However, deceit is contrary to the ethics of honest speech and truthfulness—factors upon which mindfulness depends.
Leaders have an ethical obligation to fully disclose that the majority of mindfulness practices being taught today are adapted from Buddhist sources. We recommend that participants in such programs should have informed consent with a choice for opting out.
Don’t Over Promise and Over Sell Mindfulness Programs
Our observations suggest that most corporate mindfulness consultants are overselling the benefits of individualized mindfulness training. Going beyond individual level health benefits, proponents are promising that mindfulness can act as a “disruptive technology” reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. Corporate mindfulness teachers who claim that individualized mindfulness programs are subversive often evoke the “Trojan horse” metaphor. They speculate that over time, leaders, managers and employees trained in mindfulness may wake up and effect major transformations in corporate policies and practices. However, the jury is still out. It’s also hard to fathom how simply training individuals to be mindful of their breathing will lead to systemic changes in corporate culture, power structures, and policies.
It remains an open question as to whether current training in mindfulness will transform corporations and society, or whether it merely amounts to individual-level employee stress reduction and a form of corporate quietism. As Farb notes, on the one hand we have those who regard the idea of mindfulness as a beneficent Trojan horse in organizations, others see mindfulness leads employees to spiral into complacency and subjugation.11 This open question of what mindfulness may or may not lead to is really the rub of the matter, which asks that all parties invested in mindfulness collectively inquire into the multifarious forces of altruism and exploitation that might occur in organizations.
Corporate Mindfulness Programs Must Face the Question of Ethics
Many mindfulness teachers have argued that any single set of ethics would be an inappropriate imposition. Instead, ethical concerns are reduced to being contingent on the integrity of the mindfulness teacher, who serves as a model and embodiment of ethical behavior. This not only reflects the values of individualism in the mindfulness movement, but it also takes a laissez-faire, “let the market decide” attitude. In the absence of an ethical vision to guide mindfulness practice, its potential will be limited to therapeutic aims and self-improvement, without issuing any challenge to one’s beliefs, values and way of life.
The legacy of our Judeo-Christian heritage, where ethics is conceived in terms of prescriptions, duties, edicts and coercive moralizing is also not appropriate for secular mindfulness programs.12 However, rather than simply eschewing ethical principles or imposing Buddhist ethics through distorted Western lenses, we propose that leaders explore adopting a non-normative ethical orientation that may be expansive and flexible enough to serve as a guiding ethos for what we propose as the twofold task of the critique of mindfulness and the mindfulness of critique.
Following feminist commentators, we are guided by an ethos of responseability.13 This is a form of dispositional ethics which attends to the situational capacity for responsiveness in any given encounter, rather than the substantive terms of the encounter. The capacity for responsiveness enables mindfulness practice and is in turn strengthened by it. Within the context of formal practice, it is necessary to be repeatedly responsive, so that we may repeatedly “let go” whenever we are distracted by a stream of thought and “start again” by recollecting the task of attending to the object of contemplation, like the movement of the breath or the feeling tone of sensations. With sustained practice, this capacity of responsiveness becomes more sensitive and it may begin to serve a therapeutic purpose by helping people respond differently to afflictive habitual reactions that may be triggered by various situations. But this capacity for responsiveness extends beyond individualistic and therapeutic contexts of mindfulness practice, as we must necessarily rely on this capacity too in our social and political lives.
Regardless of whether it is an encounter with a traumatic memory co-arising with an unpleasant sensation, or a racist or homophobe abusing a passerby, or a presidential candidate spreading lies and hate about refugees and migrants or an organization callously ravaging the lands and homes of others in its drive for profit—in these different scenarios the determinate course of moral conduct to be taken must first require a degree of attentiveness towards our capacity to be responsive, and the degree to which we are sensitively responseable would influence the determinate course of action that is taken to respond to these challenges.
This capacity of responsiveness is necessary for ongoing response-able action, whereby we retake our decisions to repeatedly respond to the challenges confronting us, steering our decisions in a different direction if necessary to reconsider the dangers or harms that might have been overlooked. By adopting this ethical orientation of response-ability we countervail the disproportionate emphasis given to individualistic and therapeutic applications of mindfulness, supplementing existing approaches with critical and civic applications of mindfulness. With such an ethical orientation, it would be possible to take seriously the suggestive evidence that corporate mindfulness programs may help employees manage stress and even perform better at work. But it would also admit into the purview of mindfulness the systemic and structural problems that might contravene the claims of altruism and social responsibility behind corporate or other institutional programs of mindfulness.
A non-normative ethos of response-ability can thus serve as the “flip switch” that connects the critique of mindfulness with the mindfulness of critique.
Mindfulness Needs to Move Beyond the Rhetoric of Stress-Reduction, Well-Being and Happiness
In outlining these points, we are taking a step back to summarize some of the outstanding issues that the mainstream mindfulness movement largely continues to ignore. At the same time, we are laying the groundwork for charting a new course.
The critique of mindfulness is part of a larger movement to build new approaches for socially engaged mindfulness interventions as a corrective and supplement to the individualistic and therapeutic focus of prevailing approaches. The critique of mindfulness is thus twinned with a reciprocal task of the mindfulness of critique, which is the work of attuning ourselves with new modes learning, inquiry and social engagement so that we may become more responsive towards the challenges and conditionings entangling the well-being of individuals and the messy worlds we inhabit. Given the limitations of the prevailing rhetoric of “non-judgmental awareness” and focus on “happiness” or “stress reduction”, we offer the guiding rubric of “refuge” as a countervailing alternative to help cultivate the mindfulness of critique.
Transforming Mindfulness: The Promise of Making Refuge
The promise of refuge is a starting premise of Buddhism. But the metaphor and ideal of refuge can be found in different religions and even non-religious lineages of understanding. The metaphorical import of refuge for a secular world can be extended to a non-doctrinal and non-sectarian principle of responsive responsibility and responsible responsiveness—an ethos of response-ability—which entangles the self with others and the world. We propose that ethical leadership entails the work of making refuge, beginning with the promise that all of us, human and non-humans, must invite from and gift to one another mutual recognition, respect, care and concern in order to grow and thrive as communities and habitats in a precarious world, where vulnerability to conditions beyond our choosing is a fact of life (see Box 4.1)
Moreover, refuge places an ethical demand to exercise more than simply paying attention to the present moment “non-judgmentally” and seeking calm and equanimity for only one’s own benefit and well-being. Rather, refuge provides leaders the ethical and material axis around which mindfulness can be collectively articulated in a more socially engaged direction. It communicates how leaders can imagine the future and how they wish to practice mindfulness in their organizations to bring it forth (Box 4.2).
The Making Refuge metaphor can help leaders to pay attention—to be mindful—with greater response-ability. We challenge leaders to develop a much broader vision for mindfulness, one that goes beyond the fashionable rhetoric of ‘happiness’, ‘resilience’, ‘well-being’ or ‘stress-reduction’. The question of refuge also relates to other challenges like social justice struggles against racism or the development of ecological conscientiousness and sustainable living—because the work of addressing casual and systemic acts of discrimination and exclusion is a matter of welcoming those who are being denied certain basic conditions safety, in this broad sense of refuge. Likewise, the work of addressing ecological harm is a matter of ensuring that humans and non-humans may continue to share the planet as the only home we have. These challenges do not have any one solution which can be applied universally; but any hope of even addressing these problems must begin with leaders developing the situational capacity for responsiveness: an ethos of response-ability.
Current initiatives to experiment with socially and ecologically engaged forms of mindfulness illustrate the potential of placing these practices in the broader ethical frame of Making Refuge. The Mindfulness for Social Change course developed by Paula Haddock in the U.K. provides a good example. Unlike clinical and therapeutic mindfulness programs, Haddock’s program incorporates an analysis of the systemic causes of social, economic, and environmental problems, and it supports personal wellbeing through active political struggle, rather than just social or psychological adjustment. Another good example is the year-long Practice in Transformative Action course at the East Bay Meditation Center. Besides its focus on political activism, the center’s focus on diversity is particularly noteworthy, because it demonstrates how its commitment to social justice is integral to its mindfulness practice. The center bars white or straight people from attending specific classes in order to allow community members to practice mindfulness in safe spaces. Affording marginalized people space to practice mindfulness in communities where white, male, middle-and upper-class, European perspectives are not the norm is an important step in decolonizing mindfulness.
Unlike the metaphors of happiness, wellbeing, and efficiency—which bind mindfulness to the neoliberal subject—practicing mindfulness as an act of making refuge opens up space for recognizing people’s vulnerability, our mutual dependency, and our ability to face an uncertain future in solidarity with one another. Whereas mindfulness for stress reduction retroactively rationalizes our present situation by treating the symptoms, rather than the causes and conditionings of our suffering; socially engaged mindfulness interventions are oriented toward a collective future of liberation, never fully realized, but nevertheless expressed in our commitment to each other: a shared promise of making refuge.
As mindfulness moves in this new direction towards an explicit social and ecological engagement, the critique of mindfulness does not end but always begins anew as the mindfulness of critique.
Personal Reflections
Ron Purser: Based on my 40 years of practice and study, I have a deep appreciation, gratitude and respect for the Buddhist tradition. Even so, the meteoric rise of the secular “mindfulness revolution” took me somewhat by surprise. I am disappointed that mindfulness has been coopted for instrumental purposes and profit-making. Secular mindfulness advocates have no qualms about flaunting Buddhism for its symbolic cultural cachet—capitalizing on its exoticness—but at the same time dismissing the Buddhist religion as saddled with “cultural baggage” that must be purged of its foreignness. Moreover, I am dismayed by the rhetoric of laying claim to the authentic essence of Buddhism to bolster branding prestige, while simultaneously proclaiming the Western scientific approach has allowed access to a “universal understanding of mindfulness” that supersedes Buddhism. This discursive habit amounts to a form of epistemic border control and cultural one-up-manship, a legacy of Western colonialism.
When corporations and the U.S. military began introducing mindfulness programs as a method of performance enhancement, I felt it was my moral duty to intervene. In 2013, I published with David Loy a blog article “Beyond McMindfulness” in the Huffington Post that called into question the efficacy, ethics and narrow interests of corporate mindfulness programs (Purser and Loy, 2013). To our surprise, it went viral and we found ourselves in the middle of a heated debate over the virtues and vices of this latest corporate fad.
Many of my Buddhist friends and colleagues told me privately that they were pleased that I had the courage to speak truth to power, calling into question how mindfulness practices were being coopted and adapted to further corporate interests. It seemed that our article broke the floodgates, and more critiques of secular mindfulness began to appear in the press, media and journals by Buddhists and non-Buddhists. This growing trend was labeled by the media as a “mindfulness backlash”. Following this trend, I began to speak out even more, publishing in widely read outlets such as salon.com (e.g., see “Corporate Mindfulness is Bulls*t” and “Mindfulness’ Truthiness Problem”), as well as in academic journals (e.g., see “Mindfulness Revisted: A Buddhist-Based Conceptualization” in the Journal of Management Inquiry).
As my social media articles went viral, so did the pushback and attacks. Petulant comments started appearing on blogs, and ad hominen arguments were directed against me. On Facebook, I faced a considerable amount of hostility and ridicule by many mindfulness teachers and even a few academics. I was even trolled repeatedly by a promiment spokesperson for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and secular mindfulness. And as the visibility of my critiques increased, I found that I was becoming the “go to critic” when journalists or conference organizers were seeking a contrarian perspective on mindfulness. I often felt that I was entering a “lion’s den” when speaking as the lone critic amongst the faithful mindfulness followers at such conferences as Mind & Life Institute’s International Symposium for Contemplative Studies and Bangor University’s Centre for Mindfulness Practice and Research.
Yet, despite this flack and lack of intellectual hospitality, I perservered, pushing on little by little. Slowly, those sympathetic with my critiques of mindfulness started emailing me. Vigorous exchanges and sharing occurred, and before I knew it, a new “critical mindfulness” network was taking shape. I no longer felt isolated and alone. I made many new friends and colleagues from around the world. They started to visit me in San Francisco. Soon, I realized that it was time to organize a major international conference on mindfulness that would welcome critical perspectives. Without any funds or staff support from the university, I did. To my surprise, some 275 people attended. A year later, my colleagues and I published the Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context and Social Engagement (Purser et al. 2016) which included thirty four chapters offering critical perspectives on mindfulness in such domains as philosophy, psychotherapy, business and education. The purpose of such critiques is grounded in the faith that secular mindfulness practices can be reformed and reoriented to enhance the common good. Each author displays courage for going against the mainstream narrative with its self-help rhetoric and psychological-neurospeak explanations that have characterized the benefits of mindfulness. Because mindfulness practices are intended for the relief of human suffering in society, it has taken a considerable amount of courage to question and challenge the dominant narrative that has, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated an accomodationist orientation to the norms and imperatives of neoliberal capitalism.
Zack Walsh: I undertook formal training in Buddhism and mindfulness during a five-year period of living in Asia and studying at various monasteries and seminaries in Thailand, China and Taiwan. Despite the relative affordances offered by my white privilege, more often than not, I was the Other, and I experienced Occidentalism on a daily basis. What might give me an advantage at home—my whiteness, cisgender, heterosexuality, critical intellect—were all checked at the door of Chinese Buddhist communities. I almost always had to keep my head down, shut up and assimilate—and in the process, I forsook my identity to abide by the norms of my host culture and uphold their standards for social harmony.
But I chose to experience this, and that is in itself a unique white privilege. I liked being other to myself, exposing myself to the contingencies of the moment and to the foreignness of an encounter with otherness. It was at times ecstatic and transcendent, as it forced me outside myself and my comfort zone. It brought me to a better understanding of myself as notself. But at other times, I exposed myself to too much vulnerability and risk, and even lost touch with that most prized of possessions—integrity. I was not always authentic under the social pressure to become other.
My identity was frequently erased both within homogenous Chinese communities and within Chinese Buddhist or secular mindfulness communities in the U.S. Today, I uphold and betray multiple conflicting identities and inheritances which exist only in the interstices of each other. Since I was young, I have felt a migrant, a vagrant, a refugee to myself—alone in one way or another. But isn’t that the path that calls many of us to become Buddhists—to be alone together?
I admit, I am not a “good Buddhist”. I have taken refuge in the Triple Gem, and I have even received formal Bodhisattva precepts which orient my practice. But, to me, Buddhism is not about taking refuge, since taking refuge is so often predicated on false promises and ideologies—a retreat into the comfort of one’s own community and self-absorbed fantasies. Frankly, I am also not interested in mindfulness, which may seem strange coming from a scholar whose last six publications were on the subject. What interests me is bearing truthful witness to my experiences and the multiple conflicting identities and inheritances that I embody. That motivates my promise to #makerefuge for myself and others.
#Makingrefuge is about sharing the responsibility to provide hospitable conditions for living and dying well together. And by dying, I do not only mean when one’s heart stops beating, since each moment we are always dying to ourselves and to each other, at the same time that we are renewing the conditions for living and dying, for better or for worse. And let’s be honest. #Makingrefuge is a survival strategy. When faced with the precariousness of one’s existence, all beings whether human or non-human have sought the conditions for a hospitable co-existence amidst pervasive violence and suffering.
Of course, I say these things at the risk of exposing my perfect Buddhist image to all of my inadequacies and vulnerabilities. You can call me a crank or an unmindful, unhappy, bad Buddhist, and I can accept it, as I am not interested in abiding by the false pretenses of your prescribed path. I am, however, interested in developing people’s capacities to contemplate suffering, so that together, we may respond to injustice through informed and compassionate action. That is my promise to #makerefuge.
Notes
1 Parts of this introduction have been adapted and edited from Purser and Loy (2013).
2 Gelles (2015).
3 Lynch (2015).
4 Smail (2005).
5 Carrette and King (2005).
6 Kantor and Streitfeld (2015).
7 Driscoll and Wiebe (2007).
8 Purser and Loy (2013).
9 Goddard (2014).
10 Boyce (2015).
11 Farb (2014).
12 Although see Chapter 3 by Mabey in this volume for a re-interpretation of this heritage.
13 Beausoleil, E. (2016) Embodying an ethics of response-ability. Borderlands: e-journal, available from: www.borderlands.net.au/vol14no2_2015/beausoleil_embodying.pdf
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