By Henry Blanke

When I was a boy growing up in the 1960s, I enjoyed helping my mother cook the famous Italian Sunday gravy. As I chopped the requisite onions and garlic with a very sharp knife she impressed on me the importance of paying close attention. The sauce took a long time to simmer, so I would go out to play ball with my friends and she would call after me to be mindful of the time. These are ordinary qualities of attention and presence of mind that everyone more or less learns.

Over the last 20 years or so Mindfulness has come to signify something far more grandiose. If we are to believe its proponents, its techniques offer relief from stress, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and substance abuse. It is promoted as a way to enhance virtually every aspect of life.  Amazon is crowded with books on Mindfulness applied to parenting, sex, eating, finance, entrepreneurship, leadership, pregnancy, dog training, and more. It can also be learned from any of hundreds of apps as well as a plethora of online and in-person workshops, courses, and seminars. In toto, Mindfulness is now an industry valued in the billions. 

In the 1970s the Theravada Buddhist vipassana meditation method was brought to the United States by a group of Americans that included Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzburg, who had learned it from teachers in Burma, Thailand and India. This practice (which included sati, translated as mindfulness) was embedded in a robust ethical framework and constituted a religious way of life aimed at insight into the nature of reality.

Concomitantly, Japanese Zen teachers arrived in the United States espousing similar meditation methods. They trained U.S. students and established thriving monasteries and meditation centers. Then, in 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn developed a program that he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MSBR). This was a secular, therapeutic approach that eliminated the ethical framework  and soteriological aims of Buddhism (though it retained a patina of spirituality for those with New Age inclinations). It was perfect as a practice to assuage the frayed psyches of the U.S. middle class, which was buffeted by the frenzied pace of technological change and increasingly subject to the competitive pressures of corporate work. MSBR established the template for the  subsequent avalanche of commodified and marketed Mindfulness.

Aside from the outsized claims made by the medical and psychotherapeutic community as to the enormous benefits of mindfulness meditation, the basic techniques actually work. Deep abdominal breathing is calming and soothing, and practice at avoiding distractions, wandering thoughts and focusing on the present task can allow for more efficient functioning. This is why Google, Apple, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and an estimated 25 percent of U.S. companies offer their employees some form of mindfulness coaching, meditation breaks, and such. The belief is that these initiatives will increase job satisfaction and productivity with an added benefit being that workers will view their work-induced psychological maladies and gnawing dissatisfaction as internal matters that can be cured by a few minutes of meditation or by really concentrating on the taste of their granola (one of Kabat-Zinn’s exercises actually involves slowly chewing a raisin and attending to the changing flavors). The alternative is unacceptable: to place blame on the stultifying, routineized nature of corporate work that allows for no real expression of autonomy, creativity or creative decision-making.

I contend that Mindfulness is the ideal therapeutic adjunct to the current phase of neo-liberal capitalism that increasingly emphasizes immaterial production and the commodification of desire. Information, images, affect, spectacles and experiential moments (including the experience of meditation) are now commodified and marketed. And by inculcating an ideology of autonomous, isolated individualism in which all stress, neurosis, and personal dissatisfaction are entirely interior, capitalism puts collective political action toward progressive social change outside the horizon of the possible. However, core Buddhist postulates of change, no-self, interdependence as well as its ethical framework intended to mitigate greed, incessant craving, ignorance, and hatred in the context of community (sangha) run counter to the ethos of consumer capitalism.

Zen people practice a form of meditation roughly similar in some ways to some of the methods of Mindfulness, but are taught that the practice itself is of intrinsic value as an expression or actualization of awakening. Seated meditation is not an instrumental means-to-an-end activity.  But Mindfulness, shorn of its Buddhist context, is sold as a cure for a plethora of maladies and as a self-help technique to derive more pleasure from life activities. As such, it fits cozily within the wellness self-help industry. And that corporations have latched onto it with such enthusiasm indicates that it is a useful tool for alignment with consumer capitalism. Travis Bradberry, well-known corporate exponent of Mindfulness, is quoted in a publication of the World Economic Forum (whose members are the richest and most powerful people in the world) as saying that “perhaps the most important reason that companies such as Google are sold on [Mindfulness]  is its ability to directly improve performance.” 

 At this moment, the political leadership of the United States has taken on a dangerously authoritarian cast. Rather than Mindfulness, which encourages people to look inward and adjust to an increasingly frightening and dysfunctional system, we need praxes both spiritual and political that allow us to collectively challenge the status quo and work toward systemic change.

Henry Blanke is a Soto Zen Buddhist and long time member of DSA. He enjoys jazz, cooking and walking New York City in order to experience it.

Image credit: Art by Christine Meighan