Can Mindfulness Change The World?

The monetisation of spirituality is nothing new. From televangelists to gurus, there’s a tangled thread between the dollar and the dharma. McMindfulness, Ronald Purser’s exploration of the popular awareness and meditation technique’s embeddedness in corporate life, chronicles the most recent incarnation.

In the last couple of decades, mindfulness has become a big deal. Courses have found their way into U.S. schools, massive corporations like Google, the U.K. National Health Service and even the British Houses of Parliament. Democratic Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan is a devotee. The app stores teem with downloadables, YouTube has a gazillion free meditations, there’s a plethora of celebrity evangelists and a host of neuroscientists affirming its benefits. Even the American military has its own mindfulness program.

Mindfulness, for anyone who has been living under a rock, is a practice of non-judgmental, present-moment awareness. It may help you become more focused and engaged with the world around you by facilitating dissociation from the constant background noise and mind-chatter most of us live with — projecting, ruminating, regretting, debating. Whether you’re practising mindfulness in close-eyed meditation, or at work on a conference call, the aim is not to try to stop the chatter — to resist is only to embolden it. Instead you become the watcher, sitting on the proverbial riverbank observing the thought-waves go by.

What’s the matter with that? With ever-updating newsfeeds and clanging notifications, the news cycle, and an increasingly global 24/7 work culture in which busy is seen as badge of honour, we could surely all do with techniques that help us to calm down and focus.

The problem is that when a practice that encourages an “accept the things you cannot change” mindset is heavily embedded in corporate culture, the socioeconomic foundations that said culture rests upon become themselves “things you cannot change.” And sometimes those things are harmful or unjust.