The personal and political benefits of practices like meditation have been a staple of Transformation’s coverage since the site was launched eight years ago. These practices can help us to confront the fear, mental confusion and other limitations that weaken our potential to be agents of change on the broader stage of politics, economics and social struggle. But it’s clear that these effects aren’t automatic or uncomplicated.
Over the past few years there’s been increasing interest in exploring one particular kind of practice called ‘mindfulness’ - “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” It seems clear that strengthening these capacities is a useful thing to do for individuals, but can mindfulness also play a role in promoting broader social change? What can the articles we’ve published tell us about the answers to that question?
A good place to start is Ron Purser’s book “McMindfulness,” which exploded onto the scene in 2019 and sharpened the conversation enormously. In his piece about the book for Transformation, Purser argued that the mindfulness movement has degenerated into “the new capitalist spirituality,” a form of individualized stress relief that encourages practitioners to accommodate themselves more comfortably to the world as it is, packaged and sold by increasingly commercially-minded providers and gutted of any broader social utility.
