In a frequently quoted passage, the American professor of medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “a way of being in a wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience… cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. It sounds harmless enough. But San Francisco-based academic Ronald Purser thinks not. He has written a strident polemic attacking the secular mindfulness movement.
Forty years ago, Kabat-Zinn set about distilling Buddhist wisdom into a framework that could address modern concerns. He originally designed a short course for people suffering from chronic physical pain. These programmes have since been extended to treat a wide range of cases including depression, addiction and workplace stress. They have been adopted in schools, businesses, criminal justice systems, in the US military, the NHS and UK parliament. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are likely to have encountered them.
Critics of secular mindfulness often argue that it is influenced by Buddhism either too much or not enough. Purser, an ordained Korean Zen teacher, holds the latter view. He regrets that, as mindfulness has grown in popularity, it has been extracted from its Buddhist roots, turned into a product and debased.
According to McMindfulness, there are more than 100,000 books on Amazon with “mindfulness” or something similar in the title. The movement has sprouted mindful surfing, mindful bread and mindful KFC chicken pot pies. Mindfulness apps have become big business, and Purser notes that there is a “peculiar irony in turning to an app to de-stress from problems that are often made worse by staring at phones”. As he points out, these superficial, gamified versions of mindfulness are a pale imitation of the real thing.
Purser’s critique cuts deeper. He thinks that mindfulness has not just been diluted and commodified by the market – it is also itself deepening harmful free market ideology. As he sees it, mindfulness claims that “the source of people’s problems is found in their heads”. It thereby distracts from the worldly, societal causes of stress and anxiety. If you are burnt out from overwork, stressed by precarious employment, or anxious for future generations as a result of climate change, the mindfulness diagnosis is, as Purser puts it, that your “thoughts are the culprit, every time!”. The upshot for him is that mindfulness disables any impetus for collective organisation and action – it implicitly conserves the neoliberal status quo.
Purser’s aspiration to address injustices in society is, of course, laudable. But why does mindfulness have to be purposed for these revolutionary ends? A careful reading of Purser’s book suggests that he accepts that mindfulness-based interventions can help someone cope with chronic back pain, reduce the chance of a person with depression killing themselves, or make a vulnerable teenager less reactive. Is it not excessively demanding to ask of a short course in mindfulness that it also address society’s systemic problems?
The ethicist Jeff McMahan notes that “we do not condemn a doctor who treats the victims of a war for failing to devote his efforts instead to eliminating the root causes of war”. In our big, rainbow-coloured world, war doctors, anti-war activists and activist doctors can all contribute. Similarly, we should not condemn mindfulness teachers who treat the bewildered victims of neoliberalism for not also fighting neoliberalism itself. There seems to be scope for both palliative mindfulness and mindful activism to add layers of value.
“Some may think I want to drown the baby, never mind throw it out with the bathwater – I do not”, Purser reassures the reader during his relentless salvo. There is an awful lot of bathwater in the world of mindfulness. Purser’s amusingly crotchety account of corporate mindfulness depicts a particularly vapid subsector of the wellness industry. One detail that stands out is that, according to Purser, the Californian guru Dawa Tarchin Phillips charges $12,000 for one day of corporate mindfulness training. It’s a far cry from the Buddhist custom of teachers giving their time freely.
Practitioners seeking an account of mindfulness that is responsive to the kind of criticisms Purser makes should consult Christina Feldman and Willem Kuyken’s new book, Mindfulness: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Psychology. Feldman, a leading Buddhist teacher, and Kuyken, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University, are as critical of “McMindfulness” as Purser.
“Mindfulness is neither a quick fix nor simple… it is not about emptying the mind, not thinking, or turning away from experience… it is not attentional training that can be used for ethically questionable practice,” they write. For Feldman and Kuyken, mindfulness can play a legitimate role in reducing individual suffering and facilitating wholesome action, even if it only makes a neutral or modest impact on the wider world.
Philosopher Amia Srinivasan has written that we “should be guided by both a concern for appreciating the world as it is, and making the world as it ought to be”. Purser makes the first concern an enemy of the second. In the course of his plea for “truly revolutionary” mindfulness, perhaps inadvertently, he ends up fulminating against evidence-backed interventions that can ease suffering in the here and now.
This review is from the Observer
• McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser is published by Repeater (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Mindfulness: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Psychology by Christina Feldman and Willem Kuyken is published by Guilford Press (£22.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
