McMindfulness, Money, and Meaning: Critiques of Today's Mindfulness Movement

We explore a nuanced look at mindfulness: its benefits, the ethics behind how it is taught, and the critiques around commercialization and depoliticisation. William Edelglass helps us test the line between personal practice and social change with clear questions, research, and examples.

• Angela Davis’s question about mindfulness and injustice
• critiques of commodification and the mindfulness industrial complex
• instrumental use versus ethically grounded practice
• popularity of apps, corporate programs, and military adoption
• research on well-being, emotion regulation, and limits
• risks of individualising distress without systemic change
• reconnecting practice to Buddhist ethics and social responsibility
• trauma-informed design, consent, and community support
• practical ways to teach with integrity and context
• invitation to share perspectives and join deeper study

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Transcript

Setting The Stage And Guest Intro

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Alright, welcome friends. My name is Sean Fargo. I'm the founder of Mindfulness Exercises. I was a Buddhist monk for a couple years, and I'm an instructor for the mindfulness program born at Google. And in this episode, I thought it'd be really interesting to share a lot of the common critiques of mindfulness that some of us are hearing these days. You know, mindfulness has become so popular over the last 20 years, largely because of its evidence showing how good it is for the brain and our nervous system and our resilience, our mental health. But there's also been some critiques of mindfulness. Some of them valid, some of them, in my opinion, not quite as valid. And I thought it'd be really fascinating to hear the take from someone who's very, say, traditional, like I am, someone who comes from the Buddhist world, and to get their take on the critiques of mindfulness. So we invited William Edelglass to share his perspectives. He is the director of studies at the famous Barry Center for Buddhist Studies out in Massachusetts. He works with a lot of the top Theravadan monks and Tibetan monks and Zen monks of the world. He's been a professor at several different universities around the world, including Vermont, Bombay, Tibet, Emory University, etc. And he really knows his stuff. And so he was a guest teacher of our mindfulness teacher certification program. And in this talk, William explores some of the more common critiques of mindfulness, from its commercialization and cultural appropriation to questions around its ethical foundations and social impact. It's a very thoughtful and nuanced reflection on what it really means to practice and also teach mindfulness with more integrity in today's world. So with that, let's get started.

Angela Davis And The Justice Question

The Neoliberalism And Commodification Argument

Instrumentalization, Ethics, And Pacification

Popularity, Apps, And Corporate Adoption

Military, Sports, And Everyday Life

SPEAKER_01 3:41

It may be a slightly different talk than some of the speakers who I've seen have shared with this community before. It will include some of the critiques, ethical and political critiques of mindfulness and the mindfulness movement, and some possible responses. I work at a Buddhist center, I teach retreats at IMS, the Insight Meditation Society, the Barry Center for Buddhist Studies, and other Dharma centers. So I should say I am kind of firmly rooted as a scholar practitioner. I think mindfulness is really important. And I'm going to be sharing some things which are critical of mindfulness today and some responses. So I know that the reason you're all here is because you have your own thoughts and wisdom and background and experience and reflections and readings, the questions that I will be exploring, and we'd all benefit from hearing multiple voices. I don't know if everyone knows who Angela Davis is. She was, she is, a remarkable, remarkable human being, a philosopher. She was a professor of philosophy at UCLA before Ronald Reagan had her fired because she was a member of the Communist Party. She's also widely known as a Black Panther, as a prison abolitionist. She's a great scholar, revolutionary activist, Marxist. And she was in jail for some time, the early 70s, when some people used some weapons that belonged to her, but she was she was not guilty. But she was getting headaches. And a doctor in the prison gave her, doctor who was taking care of some of the Black Panthers, gave her a book on yoga to address her headaches. And she became a lifelong yogi or a many decade-long yogi who is both doing yoga, postural yoga, and meditation. In 2014, there was a fundraiser for the East Bay Meditation Center. There was a conversation between Angela Davis and John Cabotzin. You can see a chunk of it, not all of it freely, but some of it YouTube. Angela Davis was a yoga student of John Cabotzin's daughter, Nashon Cabotzin. And John Cabotzin, I assume you all know who he is. He his father-in-law, Howard Zinn, was a great, very progressive historian, and he was an active John Gabotzin was an activist earlier in his life. And Angela Davis opens this conversation with the question: what good is mindfulness if we are inhabiting a world that is so unjust? And that's kind of the question that I want to explore this afternoon. And complicated a little and explored in various ways. I should say that there is a widespread critique of mindfulness for ethical and on ethical and political grounds. Some of you may be familiar with this critique. One of the most famous places where this critique is found is in a book by Ronald Purser called Mick Mindfulness. He originally articulated this in the Huffington Post commentary. The basic argument runs something like this: that mindfulness seems to have all the authority of an ancient Buddhist wisdom tradition like Buddhism, and also the authority of the legitimacy of modern science as a practice for healing and self-cultivation. It has enormous authority. And with that authority comes this message that typically the way many people talk about mindfulness suggests that the well-being and stress of workers or members of communities and family systems are the responsibilities of individuals. That is, it's my responsibility to be mindful and take care of myself rather than be rather than addressing structural conditions that make us stressed or diminish our well-being. So critics like Ron Purser argue that mindfulness is a neoliberal technology of the self. And I'll unpack what all that is, what how they think about this that doesn't demand social change, but individualizes, psychologizes, and medicalizes distress in the framework of consumer capitalism. So if you unpack this critique, and there are a number of people who've made this, it's not just Ron Purser, but basically the critique is that the discourse around mindfulness individualizes. And by that, it makes us each responsible for our own well-being and suggests that we should all be dedicated to self-improvement, that we should all be self-disciplining and self-controlling. And the another critique they make is that mindfulness has been commodified in a problematic way. So Calm had over half a billion dollars in income last year. If you're able to teach in for corporations, mindfulness, you can make a ton of money. I suspect that none of you are making tons and tons of money teaching mindfulness. So you may not relate to uh this particular critique. And if I'm wrong, good for you. And another critique that they make that is made is that mindfulness is instrumentalized. So if you ask, well, is mindfulness good? Then the question is, good to what end? So mindfulness in this case is the claim is made. Well, the sniper who's training with mindfulness is using mindfulness towards a bad end. And I couldn't resist putting this quotation in from Rupert Murdoch, somebody who, if you live in Australia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, all of our world, I mean, the whole world has been profoundly influenced by this man in ways that some people appreciate and others may not. And he says, trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything. So the critique is that, yeah, it improves everything, but if you're doing things that are not wholesome, is that problematic? And finally, the critique is that it depoliticizes or pacifies. So instead of changing the material conditions, mindfulness focuses on accepting them. So I'm gonna come back to some of these later, but I wanted to uh just put these out to give you a sense of what the critique is. And so in the kind of scholarly debates about mindfulness, mindfulness is used in all kinds of ways. On the one hand, as a kind of natural or basic capacity to pay attention, as what the critics would say, a practice of being mindful the way we talk about it, is conditioned by particular interests that are often obscured, and then what they call the mindfulness industrial complex. So here are some questions that we're going to explore. Is mindfulness an example of individual practice that contributes to transformative social and political action? Is mindfulness a form of neoliberal self-governance? Can it be either one depending on the context? Is it neither? What about ethics? How does mindfulness impact our moral lives? Is mindfulness necessary for ethics? And again, as I said at the beginning, my background is very much rooted in Buddhism and in all classical Buddhist traditions. Mindfulness is indeed necessary for ethics, and mindfulness does help us become more ethical. So we're going to look at some of that. So, first, some preliminaries. One of the reasons that this critique, that these critiques have been a part of the discourse around mindfulness, and many people are critical of mindfulness, is that mindfulness has become really popular. In the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health survey of 135,000 Americans, something like 60 million Americans meditate. Here it says 18.3%. And these are people who are meditating at least several times a week. And if you look at less frequent, this is a Pew research study. Overall, 23% of US adults say they meditate for spiritual reasons at least once a week. And if you look at the number of Americans who are meditating at all, about half say that they do, or a little bit more than half. And if you look at the apps, the apps are hugely popular. There are many millions of people using the meditation apps. And between 2015 and 2020, there were more than 2,500 apps that were launched, meditation apps. So that is giving access to meditation that is much, much, much more broad than there was ever before. You don't have to live near a meditation teacher or never near a meditation center. You can just get on your phone and start meditating. So then it has percolated throughout society. You can do programs on mindful money, how to engage mindfully with money, which is important, and how to be more mindful at work. So you're probably familiar with program meditation programs at work. These are some of the big companies who offer mindfulness programs to their employees. And this is partly why these critiques have risen up, because these colossals of capitalism have invested real money into providing mindfulness programs for their employees. You can do mindfulness in the military. The military has its own mindfulness app and a mind, there's a military mind meditation podcast. So the military has invested a lot into it. It's, you know, this is a complicated question. People who soldiers who go through a mindfulness program are less likely to suffer from PTSD after their deployment than soldiers who don't. And so if soldiers are going into combat on behalf of their society, or at least ordered to by their government, there's an argument to be made that they should not have to suffer PTSD, not be as likely to suffer PTSD. But it's a question that people think about. There's probably familiar with mindful sex. If depending on how mindful you were, you may then it may then be an opportunity for mindful birthing. But of course, mindful sex might be, may or may not involve birth control. And that leads to mindful parenting. There's mindful athlete. A meditation room, this headline says, could one day be as much a part of an athletic program as the weight room, film study, and the training table, all the things that are helpful for athletes and major teams in colleges, high schools, professional leagues. There's a baseball team, a football team, and a basketball team, all have meditation programs for their athletes. And putting that together, here's even a book, Let Them Play, The Power and Joy of Mindful Sports Parenting. So there's a parenting and athletes come together. So there's a mindful, a book for being a mindful sports parent, depending on what happens with the mindful sex and mindful birthing. There may be mindful marriage. And if that doesn't work out, there's always mindful divorce. Either way, one hopes that there's mindful aging and eventually mindful dying. And all along the way, ideally, there's mindful eating. And if you need a product to mindfully eat, you have mindful mints or trip, mindful blend, calm melon cucumber drink, or mindful mayo, which is a vegan mayo. I mean, what you can see here is that mindfulness sells. Mindfulness has a certain, je ne sais quoi, a certain power in our society, in our culture, that things can be sold using it. If you don't like mindful vegan, you can have mindful meats. These are organic meats that are cows or both dairy cows and then become beef cows. You can paint your room a mindful gray and you can have mindful gifts. This is one of my favorite socks that support mental health. But if you if you want the mindful moment curated gift box, you can give someone a sock that supports their mental health, or a mindful potion kit for a wild adventure, or mindful hair care, or a mindful knitting collection. And here, especially coming from a Buddhist background where the fifth precept is about not being heedless, this is my personal favorite. Of the images I found, this is a woman in a meditative posture with a bunch of pot plants behind her. And she works for a cannabis company, which is called Mindful. This is their image. And you can see, I don't know if you can read it, but Mindful's Meg Sanders. So Mindful is the company, the cannabis company. And it's the power of positive branding. What this this is the cannabis business times. What it's saying is that positive branding is using mindful. So all of these things, oh, and here's another one I like. If you if you're taking the mindful cannabis, here's mindful munchies for you, mastering cannabis cravings. So that's a book. So all of this together shows the power of mindfulness in our society today. And it is endorsed or justified by science, which brings together kind of science is a kind of a common language that the shared interests of religious, typically Buddhist, but not just Buddhist and secular communities have. And it provides economic and cultural resources. I also want to say it alleviates suffering. I I don't want to leave, I don't want to let that part go, but I just want to talk about some of the cultural phenomena of mindfulness. And there's enormous amounts of academic literature now on mindfulness. So these are the number of publications in the last 55 years on mindfulness. If you can see earlier slides from 2018, the remarkable thing is that it has continued to grow and continue to increase at such a remarkable rate. So there's almost 3,000 publications in 2020 on mindfulness, and there's more now. I just couldn't find a more recent graph. This word map is taken from, with keywords, is taken from an article which is a meta-analysis of all the publications on mindfulness. So you can see the different colors of their different areas: acceptance, so the green, depression, anxiety, cognitive behavioral therapy, these therapeutic ones, the red, the red, emotion regulation, self-report, emotion, personality, stress, intervention, outcomes, quality of life, women. It's it's a mindfulness is studied now very, very broadly. And there are all these different, all these different therapies that reduce stress, that address mood disorders, anxiety, bipolar, chronic fatigue, binge eating disorders, maternal well-being during and post-pregnancy, psychological health and quality of life in cancer patients, trauma resilience, all kinds of things. There's so many therapists now using mindfulness. So you can see this list. Better sleep is an interesting one because if you meditate more than 45 minutes a day, supposedly, you're not going to need as much sleep and you don't sleep as deeply. So people who meditate a lot don't sleep as deeply necessarily. That was one of the findings of Willoughby Britton, her first one that made her recognize that meditation may not do everything we might think it does. And some of you may be familiar with this study that Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert did at Harvard. They gave about 5,000 people handheld devices. And at random hours during random times during waking hours, they asked three questions. What are you doing? What are you thinking about? And how happy are you? And there is a very strong correlation between thinking about what you were doing and being happy. So the more you were doing things that you were thinking about doing other things, the less happy you were. And this is a widespread correlation. And it's also connected to kind of how people think about Buddhism. There's this book, The Happiness Project, which was a New York Times bestseller. And there's a chapter that begins when I told people I was working on a book about happiness. The single most common response was, you should spend some time studying Buddhism. A close second was, So are you drinking a bottle of wine every night? So the book that gets most recommended to her is the Dalai Lama's book, The Art of Happiness. And a friend says, I can't believe you're not practicing meditation. If you're studying happiness, you really have to try it. The fact that you don't want to try meditation means that you need it desperately. So you get all these books on happiness in Buddhism, which is really about happiness and meditation for the most part. Loving-kindness, the revolutionary art of happiness, Buddhism for busy people finding happiness in an uncertain world, real happiness, the power of meditation, and of course the Dalai Lama's book, The Art of Happiness. And Matthew Ricard is the scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, did a bunch of tests on him, which led to the press saying that he was the happiest man in the world because of his meditation. So to sum a lot of that up, here's a systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological interventions to improve mental well-being, which says that mindfulness-based and multi-component positive psychological interventions demonstrated the greatest efficacy in both clinical and non-clinical populations. So for overall well-being, these people are arguing, mindfulness is of paramount, well, is most efficacious, which is why sometimes you bump into people. I work at a meditation center. And so you may bump into people like this Chinese monk. If you're not familiar with The Onion, it's a uh it's a publication that, as it says, America's finest news source. Historians discover meditation spread by from ancient China by an annoying monk who wouldn't shut up about how it changed his life. Just the idea being that there are plenty of people, you probably know some of them. You may be one of them, for whom meditation has been transformative and you want to share it with others.

unknown 22:21

All right.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Thank you so much for listening. You know, these guest teacher workshops are just one of my favorite parts of our mindfulness teacher certification program because people like William share a lot of nuanced thoughts and reflections that really help us to grow and evolve and understand new perspectives. And I'd be curious what your take on this is. Like, do you feel like mindfulness is too commercial or that it's lacking ethics, or that it's not embodied enough? Just be kind of curious what your take is on how mindfulness is taught these days, and and what your perspective is. So if you'd like to join conversations with us with people like William, you can join our mindfulness teacher certification program at mindfulnessercises.com slash certify, where you can deepen your own practice and discover your authentic voice as someone who shares mindfulness with others. You can also connect and join our supportive global community. If this episode supported you in some way, we'd love it if you could take a moment to give a five star review or share it with your friends so that we can help others. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you again soon in a different podcast episode. Thank you.