[Read] Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation Complete
- 4 years ago
https://msc.realfiedbook.com/?book=1773631160
Mindfulness, a way to alleviate suffering by realizing the impermanence of the self and our interdependence with others, has been severed from its Buddhist roots. In the late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal, solipsistic West it becomes McMindfulness, a practice that instead shores up the privatized self, corporatized and repackaged as a strategy to cope with our stressful society through an emphasis on self-responsibility and self-promotion, and is ignorant of the larger social, cultural and political contexts that contribute to stress, unhappiness and failure. Rather than a way to promote human development and social justice, McMindfulness covertly reinforces neoliberalism and capitalism, self-promoting systems that worsen our suffering.In Mindfulness and Its Discontents David Forbes provides an integral framework for a critical, social, moral mindfulness that both challenges unmindful practices and ideas and provides a way forward. He analyzes how education curricula across North America employ mindfulness: to help students learn to succeed in a neoliberal society by enhancing the ego through emphasizing individualistic skills and the self-regulation of anger and stress. Forbes argues that mindfulness educators instead should uncover and resist the sources of stress and distress that stem from an inequitable, racist, individualistic, market-based (neoliberal) society.
Mindfulness, a way to alleviate suffering by realizing the impermanence of the self and our interdependence with others, has been severed from its Buddhist roots. In the late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal, solipsistic West it becomes McMindfulness, a practice that instead shores up the privatized self, corporatized and repackaged as a strategy to cope with our stressful society through an emphasis on self-responsibility and self-promotion, and is ignorant of the larger social, cultural and political contexts that contribute to stress, unhappiness and failure. Rather than a way to promote human development and social justice, McMindfulness covertly reinforces neoliberalism and capitalism, self-promoting systems that worsen our suffering.In Mindfulness and Its Discontents David Forbes provides an integral framework for a critical, social, moral mindfulness that both challenges unmindful practices and ideas and provides a way forward. He analyzes how education curricula across North America employ mindfulness: to help students learn to succeed in a neoliberal society by enhancing the ego through emphasizing individualistic skills and the self-regulation of anger and stress. Forbes argues that mindfulness educators instead should uncover and resist the sources of stress and distress that stem from an inequitable, racist, individualistic, market-based (neoliberal) society.