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McMindful Thinking
My old sociology prof used say that most sociology was either trivially true or interesting but false. The new book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser manages to be a bit of both.
The book argues that Mindfulness has become a $4bn industry. In an article for The Guardian, Purser estimates that there are 60,000 books on Amazon with a variant of “mindfulness” in their title ‘touting the benefits of Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, Mindful Finance, a Mindful Nation, and Mindful Dog Owners.’ In health, we’ve seen some of this mindless bandwagon-jumping too.
But that mindfulness has been appropriated and sold back to us shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It’s how capitalism works - that’s the trivially true bit. Music, the internet, sex, travel. It happens to anything remotely interesting that human beings come up with. But just because more and more clicks on the internet are being monetised doesn’t mean that the internet is a bad thing. Just because I can buy a mindfulness colouring book doesn’t mean mindfulness is all washed up.
The interesting but false bit is the idea that by practising mindfulness, practitioners are somehow supporting the status quo. Acceptance of the moment as a part of a process for the restoration of some internal equilibrium does not, for me, imply acceptance of the society that has, in part, caused the disequilibrium in the first place. The fact that we might find some answers within doesn’t mean that the cause of the problems are not without. Indeed, calmness, and a technique to get there, will surely make you better able to challenge the system?
Purser concludes that ‘the cruelty (of mindfulness) lies in supporting the status quo while using the language of transformation.’ And that would be true were mindfulness simply something that was done to us. But it seems to me that the whole point of it is that it is not. It’s something we can do for ourselves. What you do afterwards - whether you embrace the neoliberal mindset of winners and losers or oppose it - is up to you. At least you’ll be doing it with a clear head.
- McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser (Repeater Books; July 2019)
- What is mindfulness?
Jim Pollard, site editor
[Jim also blogs at jimpollard.co.uk]
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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