Jeff Wilson: Mindful America

Tricycle managing editor Emma Varvaloucas speaks with author and Tricycle contributing editor Jeff Wilson about how Buddhism influences and is appropriated by minority-Buddhist cultures in the United States and elsewhere. Wilson explains how an evangelical impulse has overtaken some mindfulness advocates. His latest book is Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture.

Transcript

Life can only be touched in the here and the now.

And really try to convince the us that he's going to stay president.

This is Tricycle Talks.

Hello,

Welcome to this special edition of Tricycle Talks.

I'm Emma Varvileukas,

I'm the managing editor at Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review.

Joining me today at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego,

California is Jeff Wilson,

Who is an associate professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at the University of Waterloo,

And is also a Tricycle contributing editor.

He's the author of a new volume called Mindful America,

The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture.

Mindful America is the first comprehensive exploration of the practice of mindfulness here in the United States,

And that's what Jeff's going to be talking to us about today.

Welcome Jeff,

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you,

I'm very glad to be here.

So I wanted to start out,

Some of the more obvious questions that people think about when they think about mindfulness would be,

What is mindfulness,

Does it work?

And actually you take pains in the book to avoid those questions.

Why is that so?

So there's lots of people talking about how to apply Buddhism,

Mindfulness specifically,

And suggesting that you can do it in order to lose weight,

Or in order to lower your stress,

Or in order to increase your work productivity and this sort of thing.

And I'm very interested in those applications.

What people are applying mindfulness to,

And why they're making these applications.

These are not uses that mindfulness meditation was put to traditionally in Asian Buddhism.

So I'm very interested in the processes of the adaptation which is going on here.

The question of whether mindfulness actually delivers the results that are claimed for it,

Whether it doesn't do so,

And when it does,

Maybe it helps you at work but doesn't help you with parenting,

Or maybe it helps you have great sex but it's not so good for your waistline.

It's possible that it has some effects here and doesn't work there.

These aren't really my questions.

I leave that to people who want to do those sort of more intensive clinical trials around that sort of thing.

I want to ask the sort of questions about cultural adaptation and cultural influence.

Why is it that Americans use mindfulness in this way,

A way which it was not used in Asia until at least very recently?

And so what's going on with that?

That's really the big question for me.

As you just said,

It's not like traditionally in Asia people have been using mindfulness to be more productive at work,

Or like you said,

Have better sex.

Why is it,

Do you think,

That Americans are sort of focusing on these questions and adapting mindfulness in this way?

Well,

I think what it is is that mindfulness has been marketed to the mainstream,

And it has been taken up largely by the mainstream.

And mainstream Americans are not terribly interested in being renunciate ascetic monastics,

Living in a forest somewhere.

Mainstream Americans have interests such as sex and money and pleasure and mindfulness,

Which was actually originally intended primarily to detach us from these sort of things in a celibate monastic context in order to decrease attachment to sensual pleasures and reorient the mind,

Purify it and reorient it towards a nirvanic sort of goals.

Well,

Those are not the goals that mainstream Americans have.

Part of the argument that I'm making in the book is that Buddhism,

In each culture that it finds itself in,

Is readapted to meet the desires,

The needs,

The goals of those cultures.

So,

Since North American or Western,

Certainly American specifically,

Since that's what I'm looking at in the book,

Since those mainstream desires are different and the mainstream goals of a 21st century American are different from someone in a pre-modern Asian Buddhist country,

Therefore they're going to take these practices and apply them to the already existing desires that have been formulated by their cultural upbringing.

Especially because many,

Many of the people who are involved in mindfulness have an upbringing outside of Buddhism and outside of the practice of meditation or mindfulness or whatever.

So,

They're already fully formed as cultural subjects by their American upbringing.

Then,

As an adult,

Most often they come into contact with Buddhism at some point.

So,

Naturally,

They use the Buddhism that they encounter for partially achieving the ends that they already had.

And this is especially true because they're actively told by the promoters of mindfulness that that's perfectly fine.

That if you do mindfulness,

It will lower your stress.

It will help you get along with your kids.

It will help you get better grades.

It will help you to have better orgasm.

It will help you to get that promotion at work,

All these sort of things.

So,

Since they're being told that it's good for these things and are not being told to give up these things,

Instead,

Why in the world would we expect that it would operate in a different fashion?

So,

You mentioned the marketing of mindfulness in the mainstream,

And one of the ways that that's happening is that there are all these scientific studies coming out that are speaking to the efficacy of mindfulness to achieve these ends that you mentioned.

So,

It's really being marketed as something that's scientific,

That's non-religious,

That's secular.

It's a technique that doesn't come attached to any particular religious beliefs.

And when you hear claims of that nature,

To what extent is that claim a fact,

And to what extent is it an argument?

Well,

I would like to say,

And I'm only somewhat facetious with this remark,

I'd like to say that it's always an argument and never a fact.

But religiosity or secularity or scientificness,

I think I'm making these words up as I go along here,

All of these things are essentially,

They are arguments,

And especially when we look at the mindfulness movement,

They're strategies which are deployed at certain times in order to meet certain ends.

So,

When a person who wishes to promote mindfulness is speaking to an audience which is likely to appreciate Buddhism or appreciate religion,

Then mindfulness and its connection to Asian Buddhism is talked about.

When they're talking to an audience which maybe is not familiar with Buddhism or not necessarily open to this sort of thing,

Then it may be talked about in terms of spirituality instead.

If it's being talked about to another sort of audience which is not going to be friendly to religion or to spirituality,

Then it may be presented in that case as secular or even as scientific,

If that thing is appropriate.

What you find is that people,

When they're attempting to talk about bringing mindfulness into the public schools or into some other setting which has been declared by American culture as allegedly secular,

Then they frame it as secular.

And then if they're on a retreat somewhere,

They frame the same practice as now being Buddhist or being religious.

So,

It really just matters in terms of the environment in which the conversation of the moment is taking place.

So,

That's why I say these are always arguments that are being made.

People are arguing that it's secular.

At this time,

They're arguing that.

But they may not argue it at other times in other places.

There's no real facts here.

If mindfulness was essentially Buddhist or essentially religious or essentially secular,

This would actually violate Buddhist principles.

So,

We have to recognize that mindfulness and religion and Buddhism,

These are always constructed categories that are constructed out of various elements in different times and places.

When we look at the situation of the mindfulness movement,

I'm really going to start in Burma,

In the colonial and then post-colonial situation.

It is explicitly talked about there as being religious,

As being Buddhist.

And then with a sort of a Vipassana being taken to India by Goenka,

He's taking these Burmese mindfulness practices,

But he is a Hindu teaching Hindus in a non-Buddhist environment.

So,

Now he talks about Dharma because that's a category which makes sense in an Indian cultural milieu.

But he's not saying you don't have to be Buddhist to do this,

Although everything he does is a Buddhist practice.

They chant their refuges to the Three Jewels and they use Pali and they're using Buddhist monastic techniques.

So,

They call it Dharma there.

Then when it comes further to the United States,

Well,

Dharma is not a native category.

That makes sense here.

So,

Instead,

They're talking about religion in some cases,

Or spirituality is a really good way to sell it in the late 20th and early 21st century.

And then they'll even take it further to call it secular when that enables it to go into yet further areas.

I think the essential thing to think about is that mindfulness is a sort of an evangelical impulse from within Buddhism.

That's the way it's being used.

So,

The desire is to insert mindfulness into as many different elements of American culture as possible.

And so,

There are places where framing it as secular allows it to go into this place,

And then framing it as spiritual allows it to go to this other audience,

Which is not so interested in science.

And framing it as Buddhist helps over here,

But then hiding the Buddhism helps when you're hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists or something.

So,

That evangelical impulse,

The idea that mindfulness,

Whatever it is,

Is the answer.

The answer to what?

Whatever you want it to be.

The mindfulness is the answer,

And so you will therefore strategically frame it to demonstrate that it's the answer in any given situation.

And do you think mindfulness' ability to sort of fit into these different frameworks works,

In part because the understanding of what mindfulness is in the United States is a little bit loose?

You know,

Different teachers use it in wildly different ways.

That's right.

Arguably,

There's a whole range of things that are being grouped as mindfulness that are not the same thing.

Sometimes they even seem to be opposite to the regular ways that mindfulness is now being talked about.

And yet,

You can put the label on it,

And because it's fuzzy in a way,

But it's kind of positive,

No one's like,

I hate being mindful.

I want to be mindless.

That just doesn't seem to compute,

Right?

So,

It becomes a somewhat empty signifier that you can use in all these different ways,

Kind of traveling along the same paths that Zen did for a previous generation,

Right?

Where you can just be so Zen,

And it doesn't refer to the extremely hierarchical and ritual form of lineage-based Buddhism,

Which one finds in Japan,

It refers to being cool,

Kind of like in a simple aesthetic,

And just applying it to anything,

Motorcycle maintenance or whatever it may be,

Right?

So mindfulness now,

Because it's used in this fuzzy way,

That actually gives it more power.

Preciseness is a limiting factor,

Right?

And actually,

Knowledge is a limiting factor as well.

Ignorance is more useful if you want to reinvent things.

If you don't fully know what the past has been or don't fully recognize what you're doing,

This actually enables you,

Therefore,

To be more creative,

To make it up as you go along.

And being inexact,

Which is kind of the step back from actual ignorance,

So being inexact is a way that allows you to then make it more malleable,

So you can reshape it in all these different instantiations that are specific to this time,

This place,

This audience,

This speaker,

These motivations for speaking in the first place.

I think there's definitely,

As you were calling it,

An evangelical impulse.

I think that lots of Buddhists in the West sort of view mindfulness as a skillful means to bring people into the Buddhist fold.

And in a way,

It's a little bit deceptive.

Yeah,

You can make this argument.

So we're at the American Academy of Religion,

And I was in a session this morning,

And there was a presentation on the use of mindfulness in American public schools.

And they were talking there,

The presenter was talking about this idea of stealth Buddhism,

Is essentially what mindfulness is.

And this is actually a term which has been used by some of the people who are promoting the mindful school movement,

Which is just one sub-movement of the overall mindfulness movement.

It's something I talk about in the book to some degree.

And so,

Anyways,

She was talking about that they say,

Well,

This is stealth Buddhism,

That we hide the Buddhist elements of it,

And we bring it into the schools,

And then it's useful to the people there.

And then we believe that they will likely go further,

That they learn the denatured stuff in the classroom,

And then that's okay for making the classroom nice and quiet and calm and good as a learning environment.

But then likely,

They believe,

People will be interested.

And so outside of school,

They'll start doing their homework,

So to speak,

They'll start researching these things,

And discover the Buddhist connections,

And then they'll start bringing on board additional elements of Buddhism.

This is what they're saying.

So this operates sort of in a stealth mode.

Hearing this,

I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity to what was going on with the Christian coalition,

Which was an evangelical conservative Christian political movement of the late 80s and early 90s.

And they used to run what are known as stealth candidates.

So their idea was that they felt that Christians were losing control over the public schools,

And therefore,

Godless,

Satanic ideas such as evolutionary theory were being taught in the school systems,

And also sex ed and other things that they disapproved of.

So the idea was,

Because they couldn't garner enough votes on their own overt platform,

Saying,

Hi,

I'm the Christian guy,

Vote for me and I'll get rid of all these evil atheists or something like that,

What they would do is,

On the local level,

They coordinated this.

So at school boards across the nation,

They would have people run as stealth candidates.

So they would just say,

Hi,

I'm Jeff Wilson,

I'm a Republican,

And I'm running because I want fiscally balanced school budgets and this sort of stuff.

And this was the platform you'd run on.

But the reason you got into it in the first place was you wanted to get to sit on the school board to have control over the textbooks and over the courses and everything to get the stuff that you saw as bad out and to replace it with more Christian friendly or indeed Christian content,

If possible.

And so there were many places in the US during that time period where these stealth candidates successfully ran and were elected and began to insert Christianity in a stealth mode back into the public school because they felt it had been illegitimately removed,

Right?

So just this sort of similar pattern and the use of the same language,

Which I'm not asserting that somehow the people who are in the mindful school movement look to the Christian coalition as models of how to do this or aware that they're traveling along a similar trajectory.

But I just note that it has a similar sort of situation whereby they say,

Well,

This is skillful means.

I'll just present the useful technique of Buddhist mindfulness,

But I won't call it Buddhist,

And it will help the people and they will eventually go into Buddhism.

And so this will mean that they're going to school learning Buddhist type content,

And this will cause them to become Buddhists at some later point,

Right?

That's the same argument that the conservative Christians were making and that outraged people,

Right?

Probably outraged many of the same people who are the ones pushing the stealth Buddhism,

The stealth,

You know,

The mindfulness in the schools these days.

But when it's their own religion or their own practice,

Let's say,

And something that they believe is the answer,

Christians believe that Jesus is the answer.

And,

You know,

These mindfulness advocates,

They believe mindfulness is the answer to,

Again,

What is the problem?

Well,

Any problem you bring is said to be solved pretty much by mindfulness,

Especially,

You know,

The more extreme advocates.

So it really is fairly similar in a way.

This is not to say that this is an illegitimate practice that they're doing,

And I'm not suggesting that school children are not benefited by doing mindfulness potentially or that teachers are not benefited by mindfulness or having a mindful classroom.

My role as a scholar of religious studies is not to judge whether these are authentic or legitimate or appropriate in some way.

It's to observe and analyze the trends that are going on to the best of my ability and then to point out that these things are occurring.

You know,

The audience can decide for themselves whether they support this sort of practice,

Whether they feel it's problematic,

Whether they want to support it but tweak it in some way.

But my job as a scholar in religion and cultural studies is to observe this and analyze it so that we can sort of talk about it aboard and figure out what others think is going on.

As you said,

I think most of the people listening to this podcast and Buddhists in the United States in general would look at the example that you just talked about,

You know,

With the sort of stealth Christianity,

You know,

Getting seats on the school board as extreme,

And there's danger to that.

You can clearly see why that would be dangerous.

But the propagation of mindfulness,

Especially in secular institutions like schools,

It seems benign.

How could you not benefit?

What's wrong with it?

But it does seem like you're saying here that you think that there's a slippery slope you might be traveling down.

Yeah,

So I suppose it is possible,

But I really don't think that the first step is my kid eats a raisin quietly in class,

And then the last step is jackbooted Buddhist thugs come in and like shave everybody's head or something.

I don't think the slope is all that slippery,

And I don't think the destination is all that dire.

I'm just noting a similar type of practice and a similar type of pattern that's occurred in these two different American situations,

Which were both about attempting to bring religious elements strategically into the allegedly secular public school system,

Right?

And so people from very different demographics,

Very different religious demographics and so on,

Nonetheless used similar strategies and are using similar strategies to accomplish aims that are actually fairly similar.

Now,

Again,

It's not my point,

My role really to say this is dangerous and that is benign,

But I'll just point out that for the conservative Christians,

They believe,

Of course,

That bringing Christianity is a benign thing.

I mean,

It's not even benign,

It's a benevolent thing,

It's an important thing,

It's a crucial thing as far as they're concerned.

And mindfulness advocates,

They have similar ideas.

I mean,

They believe not only that this is a wonderful practice and a potentially helpful practice,

But many people are,

As I say,

Quite evangelical with their rhetoric.

And so they say things like this can potentially save the children,

It can save the classrooms,

It can save American society.

People are writing books about how we need everyone to be mindful,

We need Congress especially to be mindful,

And this will therefore cause a positive transformation in American society.

Some of these books,

Including some of the best selling of all these books,

Talk about how the entire world can be potentially saved if everyone would just become mindful.

So there's a larger agenda which is going on here.

It's not just about,

Oh,

I want little Timmy to do better at math and so he needs to sit down and follow his breath for 10 seconds or something like that.

It's hooked into larger agendas and the idea that there's a salvific sort of power to mindfulness practice.

And maybe it would work.

I'm not trying to be obstructionist about this.

I'm trying not to come down on either side and just to note what is going on here because we haven't had people really analyzing these sort of practices,

Especially not analyzing them from the outside in a scholarly manner.

And of course there's an irony about it being marketed as a distinctly non-theological technique.

It's being used in a distinctly theological way.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

So people say that mindfulness is a non-judgmental form of awareness,

Right?

There's a lot of talk about the non-judgmentalism,

At least in the most popular forms these days.

But it comes with a whole package of judgments about what would be good in life and what should be avoided in life and what would be good even for society and what would be bad for society.

So these are not actually practices that are value-free and that operate in an ethical vacuum.

But when the values and ethics are not explicit,

Then there's a lot of room for the values to be attached to be whatever is floating around in the mainstream because it's kind of nebulous exactly how you want to use it.

So then it's available for appropriation by various people with various sorts of agendas.

Jeff,

I think that many people might object to your characterization here of mindfulness as essentially religious in nature because it's been backed up by multiple scientific studies,

Lots of scientific research.

So to you,

Is it possible for something to be backed up by science and still be religious in nature?

Yeah,

I think certainly just to answer that in a narrow way,

It is possible for something to be backed by science and to be religious in nature.

For example,

Petitionary prayer has been shown in similar clinical studies to be effective,

At least allegedly effective,

In the treatment of various sort of illnesses.

So there's many famous papers about how people who are being prayed for and did not know they're being prayed for nonetheless had quicker recovery rates and so on than people in control groups,

Right?

So this is what Christians and others who want to advance that sort of argument would point to these papers and say,

Hey,

Look,

Prayer to Jesus Christ,

This is clearly a scientifically validated form of treatment.

So why are you not letting me bring it into the hospitals and into the schools and this sort of thing,

Right?

So we have to be careful.

When we want to say scientifically validated,

Well,

There's a lot of things that have some seeming scientific validation.

For me,

Though,

I'm not terribly interested in whether it actually works or whether it doesn't actually work.

I'm interested in the processes to which Buddhist meditation is subjected in order to make it seem scientific or seem secular.

Or seem religious,

For that matter.

The default assumption seems to be that it was religious and that then you have to do certain things to it to cleanse away the taint of religiosity.

And then when you do so,

It will now be purified and that this purified,

Denatured mindfulness can then be value added into all these different realms of life and that it will bring these sort of results.

So you can make objections about the science.

Certainly,

Many of the studies are quite limited.

They're often quite small.

Most of the people,

Actually the great majority of the people running the studies,

Are themselves already mindfulness practitioners and promoters.

So that's an issue there.

And oftentimes,

Their results are small in scale and suggestive,

Not conclusive in nature.

And yet what happens is that they publish a paper which says there may be this limited but measurable effect which mindfulness has on this particular condition.

Well,

Then the next step is that people in the self-help or pop psychology fields,

They read this paper,

They hear about it,

And then they say,

In their more general consumption audience works,

They say mindfulness has been scientifically proven to change your life.

And maybe they cite a paper,

Maybe they don't,

Which their readers or listeners are never going to go and look up that thing in the medical journal,

This sort of thing.

And they make claims that go well beyond the claims of the original science.

So even if the science is perfectly valid,

I'm not saying it is,

I'm saying it isn't.

I'm not a scientist.

I'm not actually qualified to judge those claims.

But I can know what happens with those claims.

The claims are made and then they're expanded and they're expanded further as it goes further and further into the sort of pop culture.

And therefore mindfulness comes to be a sort of universal panacea when the original studies are often much more limited and hopefully a professional in their nature.

So that's one thing to note there.

Another thing is that whether or not it is scientific or is secular,

And I still want to say that these are arguments and strategies,

They're not facts,

Right?

It is certainly connected to religion and it does religious work.

So when it's presented as being scientific,

It's scientific and you should add it into your life and it's going to make your life better.

And you're going to have your suffering reduced and you're going to go on to be happy in these sort of ways.

And so it's sort of doing religious work on a small private scale there.

But for most of these promoters,

There's a sense that happiness,

If you increase everyone's happiness,

That this is a wonderful thing.

So there's a worldview here.

There's a goal of making everyone happy,

Making the world happier,

Making society a better place.

And so these are moral judgments.

These are values that are connected to this sort of thing.

So even if you want to accept the hardest interpretation of this as scientific and secular,

It nonetheless is reproducing the work that religions do while wearing this guise of being secular.

And I think that's something for us to note.

One thing we haven't touched on yet that you write about in your book is about the relationship between gender and mindfulness.

How exactly is mindfulness gendered?

Okay,

So this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart at the moment.

I've just come from delivering a paper at the American Academy of Religion on this very topic,

So my brain is full of this today.

My paper there was about mindful femininities,

The idea that mindfulness is being used to promote various visions of womanhood,

Proper womanhood,

Proper roles,

Exciting or useful or necessary roles for women in contemporary American culture.

That mindfulness is helping people to fulfill these roles,

And it actually becomes part of a feminine lifestyle.

So I used various examples.

For example,

When we look at the mindful parenting movement,

This is one sub-movement within the mindfulness movement,

We find that there's a lot of representation of women in this situation.

There's lots and lots of blogs and articles and books that are about being a mindful mother,

About mindful mothering.

There's very little material that's explicitly about mindful fathering.

It doesn't mean that some sort of generic mindful parenting guide can't be read by a father versus a mother,

But we have to note that when gender appears overtly,

It's almost always the female gender,

Which is being talked about,

Not the male gender.

And we have books like The Mindful Woman.

We don't have a book that I'm aware of called The Mindful Man,

This sort of thing.

And we see a lot of interesting aspects of fashion and even jewelry and these sort of things being sold with a mindfulness tag on it,

And that somehow dressing a certain way or wearing certain things.

These are actually mindfulness practices because as you put on your jewelry,

You can be mindful and think intentionally how you want to live out your life in this way.

Or being mindfulness will help you in various parts of your life and you'll get the things that you want as a young woman sort of making her way in the world.

I really don't see this sort of advice being given out to men overtly in this way.

We also have to look at the sort of the faces of mindfulness,

Right?

So there's an awful lot of books out there published on mindfulness and there's an awful lot of women on the covers of those books,

Especially on things like mindful eating,

Mindful parenting.

They almost always have a female or parts of a female on the covers if they have any human figures.

If there are male figures and there's far fewer books that have male figures on them,

They're almost always also female figures.

So you don't find males in their solitude,

Excuse me,

But you find female figures in this way.

Look at the covers of the popular magazines.

It's very often women that are depicted in this way.

So I think there's a real sort of connection here.

The funny thing is that there certainly are unexplored male role models in the mindfulness movement and sort of the professional mindfulness instructor might well be one of these.

So someone like Jon Kabat-Zinn or someone else in that sort of professionalized mode,

Wearing a nicely tailored but casual suit and with a professional haircut and speaking in a calm and authoritative manner about how scientific and rational it is to do the practice of mindfulness.

I would say that this is actually drawing on male gender norms,

At least of a certain class,

But they're not surfaced as being male gender norms.

That's just a scientist being a scientist or a doctor being a doctor.

But you have all this stuff about mindful femininity much more overtly.

It's about people who are wearing dresses and wearing a jeweler and they have certain hairstyles and they are mindful about their self-presentation in these ways and they're mindful about how they eat because the sad truth of the matter is that eating disorders,

Which mindful eating is partially designed as a solution to,

Eating disorders are overwhelmingly found among women in North America.

Not to say there aren't any males but it's a very gendered sort of thing,

Right?

Parenting,

Again,

This is one of the biggest sub-genres.

Parenting duties in 2014 still strongly fall upon the women in society and not upon their male partners if they have male partners.

So there's many ways in which gender is really tied into this mindfulness movement but it isn't something that's been very actively explored.

So I think you're making a pretty compelling case about the connection between female gender norms and the marketing of mindfulness.

My question is why do you think that that's happening?

Why is there a connection there?

So part of it is that it's been found that women are enthusiastic consumers of mindfulness,

Both mindfulness as a product or a commodity itself and various products or commodities that mindfulness can be used to promote.

So when we think of mindfulness,

What are its associations?

A lot of it is with health,

Healthy living,

With style,

With beauty products.

When you just go and look and see mindfulness,

Mindful that what products,

What companies are putting mindful into the words either in their advertising copy or in the actual names of their products.

So they tend to be the sort of environmentally conscious allegedly or healthy allegedly or stylish allegedly sort of things.

And these are not only female concerns but they speak to ideas of self-care,

Self-nurturance and also care for others which are often gendered in female ways.

Certainly something like mindful fashion companies,

These tend to speak more to women than to men.

That said,

It doesn't mean that there's nothing like this.

There's a company,

For example,

Called Best Dressed Bunk which uses mindfulness rhetoric in its ads and it's primarily marketing upscale fashions for men.

So men are not entirely absent from it but I think also because an awful lot of the discussion of mindfulness these days is in the self-help genre.

And women are quite active consumers of that particular genre of literature,

Right?

So it really is therefore naturally skewed in that direction.

Something that we've been covering a lot in this conversation is that the dialogue surrounding mindfulness has a lot to tell us about ourselves as 21st century Americans.

How might that be?

So I think that what it comes down to is that looking at the mindfulness movement and how it's grown in the ways that it's grown and the directions that it's grown,

It shows us things about ourselves.

It reveals things about ourselves as a society.

It shows us what our desires are.

We want better sex.

We want to be thin.

We want our children to stop screaming and pay attention to us,

Right?

And we want to be better parents.

We want to stop screaming at our unruly children,

Right?

We want better education.

We want better health.

It's not,

To me,

A coincidence that mindfulness as a health maintenance strategy that you can take on yourself and that allegedly doesn't cost you anything,

This is so popular in a large industrialized society that does not have good comprehensive health care,

Right?

I don't think that these are coincidences here.

So it shows us what our desires are and what our needs are by showing us what we want mindfulness to do for us.

It also shows us the limits of aspects of our society because we look at the things that mindfulness could be allegedly applied to,

And we can see where there's things that we don't want.

So we don't find that mindfulness is used as a strategy or a tactic,

A practice to help with renunciation,

Which is what its original context was in Asia,

Right?

So that tells us about hang-ups or limits that we have around the idea of renunciation,

And it shows us also our willingness to take on aspects of originally foreign cultures in order to better our lives,

But the things that we bulk at as well.

So I think there's a lot that we can learn just by looking at this phenomenon.

It's not only revelatory of the nature of Buddhism in the 21st century,

But it shows us aspects of who we are,

For better or for worse,

Who we want to be,

What we feel are the problems that we have.

It reveals these things to us when we look to see what we thought mindfulness was supposed to deliver to us.

So it works as a kind of mirror into our own psyche,

I suppose.

I suppose that is one way you could look at it,

Definitely.

Obviously,

You know,

The mindfulness movement has come out of Buddhism,

And you could ask,

What does this mindfulness movement mean for the Buddhists?

Well,

There's a lot of different effects that the creation of this sort of massive mindfulness industry has on Buddhism,

Specifically in North America.

And one thing is that it alters basically the landscape.

It alters the environment that Buddhism exists in.

So once upon a time,

Buddhism was relatively ignored,

And it developed in its own sort of ways,

And elements of Buddhism seemed foreign or strange or so on.

But now at least one aspect of Buddhism,

Mindfulness meditation,

Has become very popular and has become in many ways the cultural property of not only Buddhists but of non-Buddhists as well.

So that causes people to believe that they understand what's going on with meditation.

They say,

Oh,

Meditation is mindfulness,

And mindfulness has no content,

And mindfulness is what helps me to eat well and be healthy in these things.

And that's actually the goal of meditation,

Essentially,

Right?

And that mindfulness and that meditation in general is somehow scientific,

That is not religious,

And so on.

So this puts pressure onto overtly Buddhist communities to conform to this larger cultural narrative.

The funny thing is that the Buddhists sort of give mindfulness to the rest of the culture,

And then the rest of the culture takes it and expands on it,

And now the Buddhists have to work in that environment where they're being told that Buddhism is about mindfulness and mindfulness is about being happy in the present moment.

So there are aspects of Buddhism that would agree with that,

But there's an awful lot more to Buddhism,

Including there's a fairly substantial in size Buddhist groups in the United States that have very different orientations within Buddhism,

Where they're working on nirvana or they have other sorts of goals in mind,

But now they have to deal with in various ways the fact that everybody thinks that it's about mindfulness,

So that people are coming to their monasteries,

They're coming to their temples or whatever,

And saying,

I heard about mindfulness on CNN and I want to do better at work and this sort of thing.

Can you teach me to meditate?

And that's not necessarily the goal that these Buddhist institutions have.

It's certainly not necessarily the way they were founded.

So some of them then take on mindfulness training for the public as a strategy to help them to bring people in,

Thinking,

Well,

I'll give them meditation and then that'll be kind of the hook,

And once they're hooked,

Then they'll come into mainstream Buddhism and they'll do all these other sort of things.

So they're using it sort of strategically in this way.

Or they may say,

Gosh,

Mindfulness is not actually a practice in our school.

There's many forms of Buddhism where mindfulness is not a central practice,

Certainly not for laypeople.

But now I feel like I have to provide it and I have to focus on this to the relative detriment of my school's actual traditions and practices in this way.

So this is certainly another sort of pattern that can happen there.

Also,

When it all gets framed as scientific,

Then religious groups,

They can be pleased and say,

Hey,

This is great.

Science has proven some aspects of our religion,

But that's sort of a Trojan horse in a way,

Because then you say,

Well,

This stuff is good because it's been scientifically proven.

All this other stuff,

Which is also important to the people in the tradition,

Has not been scientifically proven.

So maybe it should go by the wayside.

So now what you have is allegedly secularized mindfulness is dictating in certain ways,

Potentially to the religious groups,

What their religious tradition should be about.

So that's an interesting sort of effect.

And I'll need to explore more of this in the future with my research.

So in a way,

The selling of mindfulness is making the rest of Buddhism that's not so sexy a tougher sell.

Yeah,

Absolutely,

Potentially.

And people have different reactions.

Some will say,

Good.

The last thing we want is sexy Buddhism.

And it's good that you can't commodify elements of the tradition,

And that will help us to preserve those sort of things.

And then others will say,

Well,

This is a real problem.

So there's many potential attitudes out there.

It's not really my goal or really my role to say that this is a legitimate or illegitimate way of using this sort of thing,

Or to say that these groups should be unaffected by changes in the culture around them.

But it is interesting to note these things are going on and also to see the power differentials that exist in these sort of situations.

What exactly do you mean by the power differentials?

So the mindfulness movement is diverse in its totality,

But is overwhelmingly white and middle class and professional class specifically.

So people are basically taking practices which were originally the practices of Asian people,

Mostly monks and in some cases nuns.

There are monastics who lived in very different type of society even within their own societies,

Right?

And were used for very different goals than what we see here.

So now you have the authority over these practices being taken away from them.

And many people in the mindfulness movement talk about this isn't a monastic path,

And that's a selling point for them.

This meets you where you are.

In other words,

Monasticism is dead or it's defunct or it's outdated.

There's no need for it,

Right?

And we,

The white professionals,

Are able to teach you about mindfulness often for a fee.

I mean there's many people making their living these days as mindfulness instructors,

Which was not a class of professional that you had a generation or two ago,

And you certainly did not have this in Asian Buddhist history,

Right?

So you monks will go by the wayside and I guess you'll have to grow up and get a job at Google or something like that.

We will have the control over mindfulness instruction and will be put to the uses that we already empowered white people in the professional class believe are the most appropriate purposes.

Now I'm not trying to say that white people or middle class people or upper middle class or professional,

That these people don't suffer,

That these people should not have their suffering dealt with,

And that they are not,

That it's not right for them to practice mindfulness or anything like that.

I in no way mean that.

I'm just noting that the authority over these things shifts and that there are,

Among other things,

Economic consequences of these shifts,

And that the people who have the greatest degree of power,

They end up coming to have the control over this.

So just as we know that these days wealth distribution tends to happen,

That the wealthy get wealthier and there's racial and class and other implications there,

And so there's a transference of wealth from people in the allegedly marginal positions into these empowered positions.

There's a transfer of authority and knowledge over religious practices from various Asian traditions.

We see this with yoga as well.

We see this with mindfulness.

You can create a whole list of these things,

And they become now available for the consumption and redeployment of the people who are already relatively empowered in these situations anyways by their cultures.

Well,

Thank you so much,

Jeff,

For joining us.

Thank you very much.

It's my pleasure.