Clinical psychologist who teaches and practices mindfulness here.
I often hear the argument that the current applications of mindfulness in corporate or otherwise commercial settings are a perversion of the original teachings. While to some extent it’s true that teachings have been adapted and the adaptations are sometimes (maybe often) problematic, the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me. Attention and acceptance training (the two fundamental aspects of mindfulness in my research supported but not definitive view) don’t belong to Buddhism or any other system or set of teachings. The underlying science of mind training can be applied wherever we see fit. There’s no “what mindfulness is about and what it’s not” in a corporate versus holistic sense. There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.
The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me. What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience. Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state. That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.
And to the extent that we have a large number of poorly trained teachers selling a poorly designed product AS mindfulness, THAT in my mind is the larger issue, rather than the context or clientele. I saw a teacher once tell a student that her overwhelming obsession with her physical pain WAS her being mindful. This and the reverse problem whereby mindfulness is equated with dullness, sleepiness, or numbness are the real dangers in my view.
> I often hear the argument that the current applications of mindfulness in corporate or otherwise commercial settings are a perversion of the original teachings.
Buddhism teaches that you should tackle the coarser causes of suffering first. If there is a thorn in your foot, no one is suggesting you should go do a good sit to deal with the pain. First you remove the thorn, then you sit.
In my opinion mindfulness at work (or anywhere) can be beneficial, but if we only use it to paper over the structural problems that make work life stressful for so many, we are losing the opportunity to eliminate the coarser causes of suffering.
Think of it as an 80/20 rule. Probably eighty percent of the suffering at work comes from twenty percent of the causes. We should be tackling those, and that requires political engagement. It may even require oppositional methods in some really bad cases.
”if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
I think what’s wrong is that they don’t realize that the environment that’s causing stress is very damaging and they should change that environment instead of putting a bandaid in the form of mindfulness on it. Even worse is that they keep pushing that stress down the hierarchy causing harm to their employees.
> There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Mindfulness cannot fix the underlying problems that lead to mindfulness being useful to capital in the first place. Personally I’d rather my CEO make work less miserable and sleep that way (say, hire people for fewer hours and raise wages) than sleep well because they paid for someone to soothe them through the arduous travails of being a high paid executive.
That said, anyone who didn’t see capital swallowing this is dense. Anything that can be commodified will be. Arguing over it is pointless.
> The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me
Read Brian Daizen Victoria's Zen At War. OK, Zen, but the principle's the same. Effective mind training techniques sans ethical critique can create cooler killers & greed mongers. Mindfulness' popularity amongst the ethical hellscape of contemporary SV culture is surely also at least a tad suggestive?
I strongly agree. Anyone who tries to create a monopoly on meditation and mindfulness is misguided. The author is a self-described Buddhist, and some Buddhists can be a bit dogmatic to be perfectly honest.
The military issue is a great example. The author is trying to impose his own opinions about morality on the rest of humanity. This is misguided, there are other credible views that differ from his.
For example, in ancient Japan, there was no conflict between the martial arts and Buddhism. Instead there was a synthesis. For example, there a 17th century Buddhist monk wrote a book about applying mindfulness to sword fighting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfettered_Mind).
> That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.
I had a therapist who basically told me that mindfulness means accepting harmful and immoral actions (of others). On the one hand this does make it easier to go through the day without getting caught up in q
> Clinical psychologist who teaches and practices mindfulness here.
The author has been practicing Buddhism for 4 decades.
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
But the author never makes this assertion. His point is that mindfulness training is hypocritical and inauthentic when used in a corporate environment.
No, that is not ok. You cannot take a name from a thousand year philosophy and change it's meaning to suot your needs but keep the name for marketing purposes. Just call it a different name then and don't mention the other thing
I have a feeling that you've somewhat missed the author's intended point. Or, I don't think the two of you are in disagreement on the fundamentals, but you haven't noticed some of the intended nuance, which I think is where the intended message lies.
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
Technically, the author didn't say this, but rather pointed out some criticisms (holistic shortcomings) of the manner in which it has been deployed in corporations, specifically:
>> For example, corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work. So there's certainly a problem. There's no doubt that people are suffering from anxiety and stress and depression. No one no one is going to argue that that's not the case.
>> The problem is: what is the remedy? The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions [rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.]
To my reading (interpretation) of the article, that last portion is the main point the author is trying to make.
> Attention and acceptance training (the two fundamental aspects of mindfulness in my research supported but not definitive view) don’t belong to Buddhism or any other system or set of teachings. The underlying science of mind training can be applied wherever we see fit. There’s no “what mindfulness is about and what it’s not” in a corporate versus holistic sense. There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.
All (mostly) of this is true, but it misses the point the author was trying to make, and I think the author would take exception with your closing: "there’s nothing wrong with that", his assertion seemingly being ~"actually, there is something ~"wrong" (less than perfect) with that".
> The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me.
Fair criticism, but the degree to which such things are actually true is unknowable, with any sort of accuracy.
> What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience.
Different people teach different things, and different combinations of things. This is one of them.
> Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state.
Here I will respectfully disagree. Indeed, the physical practice is "simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state", but "mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch" seems to be (based on my personal experience and reading of anecdotal experience) an incorrect assertion. Rather, it often (but not always) seems to be described as just that, some sort of a "magical" way to lower stress and raise consciousness, without explicitly (consciously) setting those two outcomes as goals.
> That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.
Again, I don't think this is what the author is saying. Rather, he seems to be saying that if you teach only the mindfulness portion of these traditional practices, they can be used to the benefit of "improper" greater causes, like individual/corporate greed. Whereas, if some of the additional teachings that have historically accompanied mindfulness are included in the package, this exploitative approach would be less successful.
> And to the extent that we have a large number of poorly trained teachers selling a poorly designed product AS mindfulness, THAT in my mind is the larger issue, rather than the context or clientele.
Maybe. But maybe not. It is certainly "an" issue, but imagine a parallel universe where mindfulness along with some of the other traditional practices was adopted to the same degree that only-mindfulness has been adopted in this universe. Which scenario would have the greatest difference in positive outcome? Again, this is one of those things we have no way of knowing, but perhaps the simple act of thinking about things in this manner might yield positive results. Who knows, but it's fun to think about.
I happen to believe well intentioned mindfulness advocates like Sam Harris are also overlooking the potentially important truths contained in the authors words. I'd be interested to know whether he disagrees with this sentiment, but my perception is that it currently isn't even on his radar, due to his aversion (ironic, if you think about it) to religion.
>I did hear recently [someone saying] that Buddhism doesn't own mindfulness, giving a simile, that just because Newton discovered the law of gravity, it doesn't mean that it's English. [..] not a very clever simile. Yes, Isaac Newton was English, but he was a scientist. So the law of gravity is science, in the same way that mindfulness is Buddhist.
If you want attention and acceptance training then call it that. If you want mindfulness then see it in the proper perspective, which is not ripped out of its context to serve consumerist/capitalistic goals.
I once got an offer to teach a yoga and meditation class at a company. The stated goal was to give employees tools to handle stress better. I pointed out that the result of mindfulness would most likely be that people would see how harmful a stressful environment Is and either try to change it or to avoid it. Never heard back :)
The same happened with yoga. We picked a very small part of the tradition as in asana and removed most of the spiritual aspects. Almost nobody teaches pranayama or meditation in any meaningful way. It’s basically a different form of aerobics or calisthenics.
Hehe. This is what I basically wondered when someone told me that mindfullness was helping her cope with pressure of work life.
The new decolonization movement in India has been thinking quite deeply about this and other developments where Indian traditional knowledge is taken to the US and then copyrighted, patented and trademarked, and then sold around the world, incl. India. Amusingly, with American marketing being so brilliant, Indian knowledge has in recent history become far more popular once it was "U-turned" in this way. Lots of interesting work being done.
Interestingly, you can also see similar developments as those done to appropriate non-Western mathematical/scientific knowledge in the centuries prior within Europe. Yoga, and Mindfullness are en course to being de-rooted and turned into Western inventions, by rewriting histories or by silencing them. SOAS for instance has one guy who was anointed a Mahant, and he writes books with another guy who says Yoga is a cynical rebranding of Swedish exercises. It's all very very curious.
I suppose, if a foreigner flatters an Indian, he'll give you every bit of wealth he has (and then cry foul later). Hehe.
A typical American thing: having a structural problem with how companies are structured (too stressful, useless deadlines, not enough down time), and instead of collectively fixing the problem, focusing on technical individual solutions that are supposed to help you cope. Tech companies are impressive at this.
You see the same shit in healthcare with a ton of supposed innovations that don’t go to the core of why the system is broken.
The asanas are a good gateway drug, if the teacher constantly reinforces the student to listen to what their body is saying and understand it better. It leads to realizations of a deeper sense of self, and that awakening can lead to interest in the other aspects of yoga.
One of my favorite stories/theories is that Yoga isn't ancient and Indian at all. It's an originally Scandinavian thing that got exported to India in the 1800s.
> Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week - very stressful.
Is this true? I worked a hard 35 hours a week when I was at Google. Granted, I was a junior engineer, but the fact that I could get away with that and have it not affect my career unduly always makes me surprised to hear descriptions of Google as a sweatshop.
Can any Googlers say whether this has changed in the few years since I left? I know they're a massive company so generalizing can be hard, but this is so far from my experience that if be surprised if it was true of enough of the company to make anything approaching a blanket statement. I've always thought that it would be nice to go back to Google to retire in a few years.
Perhaps the myth of the 70 hour google work week is a remnant of their startup days.
My experience was like yours - 35 hours per week ( plus summer fridays and tons of personal days and vacation days ). The only exception was the one startup I worked at where we did put in a lot of work in the hopes of a huge payoff. But even there, we put in 70+ hours a week or two before a major milestone/deliverable/etc.
I have not heard of anyone working more than 40hrs regularly and when NEST and DropCam was acquired by Google and tried to make people work long hours, it led to a huge backlash.
I've always found the Japanese adoption of Zen to be very interesting historically. As a "technology" or body of techniques, the advantages one can gain from meditation, enhanced awareness, and asceticism are well-documented.
Where I would caution practitioners is to be very wary of religious invitations to ego death and loss of control over chakras (Never "open" your chakras - which are a physiological metaphor for very important aspects of your Self. These aspects should be disciplined and controlled, never "opened.")
Everything below your heart represents your base passions and failure to discipline these most of all turns you into an easily manipulated slave.
When you see mindfulness taught and promoted like some sort of relaxation technique or that if you just think mindfully you’re going to cope with stress better, then it’s easy for someone coming from a Buddhist practice to say, that’s not mindfulness—at least not in the same spirit of the word.
I took transmission of the precepts twice and the 2nd time was with Thich Nhat Hanh who called them the “Mindfulness Trainings” instead of the “Precepts”. That’s how I came to know mindfulness. It is intertwined with refuge, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s a faith in the precepts. It’s not a practice one can do on their own nor a practice that’s separate from meditation.
If you relate corporate mindfulness with Buddhism, it is a perversion. It’s a different practice and it’s dishonest to promote it otherwise. Call the practice whatever you want, call it mindfulness, call it prayer, call it feel-goodness, but it’s deceptive to call it a Buddhist practice if you ignore its underpinnings.
My impression is that most people promoting mindfulness are often keen to avoid the association to Buddhism or at least downplay it, not exploit it, to avoid a resistance to picking up a religious practice.
Gil Fronsdal in his "Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation" jokingly talk about how organizations holding courses in "Mindfulness based stress deduction" carefully avoid the "B-word", and then go on to give a pratical introduction that barely mentions Buddhism.
Quite a bit of mindfulness meditation material has been published by Buddhist monks and teachers that have taken care to stress their utility as methods separated from the Buddhist tradition. Fronsdal's courses is one example. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English is another popular example that takes great care to explain its position in Buddhist practice and then promptly point out that his book is a practical guide to the meditation practice, not a guide to the spiritual aspects, and mostly ignores Buddhism from then on.
When talking about mindfulness in a secularised form, we are usually talking specifically about mindfulness based meditation, not the other aspects, or at least to a lesser extent other aspects. To me that was what made it palatable, as I'd had a casual interest for a long time, but found spiritually focused descriptions very off-putting.
It strikes me as odd to depict improving soldiers' performance as a distortion of mindfulness without mentioning the long history of meditation in the martial arts.
That’s because the current mindfulness (something about that term irks me) trend originated in hippie circles. Or at least, everybody I came cross using that term was of a notable flowery persuasion. Not meditation, mind you. But mindfulness.
So it’s not surprising that some are shocked to find a core part of their identity is used as a tool to improve those parts of humanity they despise the most.
Can someone tell me why it’s socially acceptable to have these mindfulness things in work? I’m sympathetic to the argument that religions should be largely kept out of the workplace, so this isn’t a “checkmate atheists” argument. But if some guy came into my office and started saying we’re going to recite the rosary with all the “Jesus” and “Mary” parts replaced with something generic like “the universe” I cant imagine he’d get away with it.
“Successful branding stories are often characterized by disruption, which turns an established industry or experience upside down. The MBSR brand is one such disruptive force, with Kabat-Zinn’s talking points including pithy quips such as: “The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist,” or Buddhists “don’t own mindfulness” because it is “an innate, universal human capacity.” Potential customers are thereby assured that MBSR is a non-religious product, yet still offers the best bits of what the Buddha taught. In Kabat-Zinn’s words, his version of mindfulness is “a place-holder for the entire dharma.”
The Western world has co-opted an aspect of Buddhism, which works to improve productivity, and discarded the part that doesn't fit its worldview; the other pillars of Buddhism. This enables it to be sold as non-religious.
You're misunderstanding mindfulness as a tool or symptom of religiosity. Mindfulness, put another way by John Yates the neuroscientist-cum-Buddhist-teacher, is a poor word for peripheral awareness. That's it. No rosaries or unlimited abstractions to cloud it.
I think the main thing is that generic mindfulness exercises don't have a devotional aspect, i.e. no worship or veneration of deities, prophets, saints, spirits, or the like. A lot of people in cultures influenced by Abrahamic traditions don't think of something as "religion" unless it has devotional practice.
An important exception is that some Christian fundamentalists regard any form of magic or mysticism other than God's miracles as being inherently Satanic. This can even extend to fictional systems of magic (as in fantasy novels or RPGs), which may be regarded as an obfuscated form of the real thing.
Ironic that Ron Purser hijacked the term McMindfulness from Miles Neale who first wrote about it back in 2011. In fact, the opening of Neale's essay "McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga" sounds an awful lot like this post (not to mention Purser's own 2013 article "Beyond McMindfulness").
Ref: "McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga:
Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom" (2011)
Purser acknowledges that Neale came up with the term in his book, and e.g. here: https://insighttimer.com/blog/ronald-purser-mcmindfulness-we... so I'm not sure that counts as hijacking. Especially as hijacking implies not retaining the original meaning of the word.
"The problem is that the way they brought these into institutions was very non-confrontational, very non-oppositional, in order to to get a foot in the door. And so they're working with these other elites in these institutions and over time they became co-opted in my opinion. So by not offering a challenge to these corporate interests, the radical revolutionary potential of these practices have been neutered."
Somehow I have a feeling that this desire for meditation practices to be "radical revolutionary" in terms of political economy is more Californian than traditional Buddhist...
No - Buddhism sees its central ideas to be radical and counter-cultural - particularly that one's actions should come from ethical principles rather than just conforming to a group.
Embracing mindfulness practices literally saved my business this year. It has turned me into a machine, my productivity has skyrocketed. I work alone and from home most days, procrastination was a massive issue - but now just clearing my head twice a day through a simple routine ensures I never shy away from anything.
I am not interested in the religious aspect, as much as I respect the fact that the practice as we know it evolved through the ages thanks to Buddhist and Hindu monks. I don’t see a problem with it: one doesn’t have to be Christian to appreciate Latin calligraphy, or to be Muslim to appreciate algebra.
This said, the critique against corporate entities coopting the practice is predictable and inevitable. If any human technique or technology can be put to good use in order to make money, it will be. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. A pen can be used to write a novel or a prison sentence, it doesn’t mean the pen itself is bad or that we are somehow “betraying” the intentions of the original inventors of pens.
(Edit: i also don’t think I could ever really meditate with other people... I bet most of these corporate congregations actually achieve very little and are just another social occasion for the people involved).
The idea that the only source of stress comes from work or that you shouldn’t separate mindfulness from the rest of Buddhist teachings seems wrong to me. Buddhism takes generally useful philosophy and adds a bunch of supernatural bs to it that isn’t need get the benefits.
IMHO Daoist philosophy got it right and is the secret to removing stress and anxiety from almost everything. Daoist teachings have been adopted into traditional cognitive behavior therapy now called “dialectic behavioral therapy”
I learned this when I was in my 20s in college during huge bouts of depression and social anxiety and haven’t been depressed in 20 years.
My son who was recently suffering from social anxiety disorder was practically cured by it.
Strip down these mindfulness systems their simplest, and discard all the supernatural mumbo jumbo, incense burning, and ritual chanting. It’s easier to digest and remember.
If you just try to imagine that the past and future don’t really exist, that categories and divisions of reality are wholly created models of it by our mind, and that we can relinquish and let go and let negative thoughts or events wash over
us like water, you can get a long way to ignoring most of the stress inducing phenomena in your life unless they are really salient.
At least that’s what’s worked form me. Should some starstuff on the pale blue dot really get worked up by wholly changeable and artificial deadlines? You can view them as important and plan for them yes, but don’t let your cortisol levels flare when things don’t go according to plans. Plans are changeable, life and health is more important.
Absolutely appalling. This is something that I've intuited happening for many years now, but couldn't quite find the words to describe. This phenomena is pervasive and, dare I say, integral to the functioning of capital in the 21st century.
People are more alienated now than ever before in the course of history, so it follows that the machinations of capital come to a pseudo-religion in order to pacify dissent. It's staggering, and should give everybody on Hacker News pause.
Lots of the goals of mindfulness are useful, but I find the term overly reductive, and the way it's taught too abstract. Ask yourself if the more shallow goals of mindfulness make sense. For example, Thich Nhit Hanh constantly says it's about presence, peace and happiness.
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be. If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie? Can you get angry about social injustice? We need a range of emotions. Really we should want to manage them better, not just always try to be happy, as if that's the state we should always be in.
Also, thinking about the past and the future is useful, as long as you have a practical purpose for it. Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house! And the past is a great teacher to learn from. Dwelling in a negative way is bad for us, but that can apply to the present, too. Really we should just not be absent-mindedly preoccupied with negativity, regardless of time.
I am (morbidly?) curious how Thich Nhat Hanh is experiencing life after a severe stroke; he is around 93 years old and has been paralyzed and unable to speak for about 4 years now; we'll never have a clear view whether a lifetime of mindfulness practice has helped him make peace with this compared to other elderly stroke sufferers, or whether the damage to his brain has changed his experience a lot. I've sometimes felt that the only way to get through a massive life upheaval is to have prepared for it in advance - in more common geeky terms, "I have already planned a secret so I can verify if I ever meet my clone" is something you can only do in advance; possibly a state of being OK with dementia or brain damage and waking every day not knowing where you are is something you can only prepare in advance while healthy, so those habits carry on after the point where you need them but no longer have the wherewithal to create them.
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be.
Dr David Burns, psychiatrist frames it to patients that people can expect 5 days of happiness and 2 crappy days in a given week, and if you don't have 5 happy days you should adjust something, but if you don't have 2 crappy days, then you're bordering on manic and should adjust something the other way. But then he considers a few minutes of feeling bad enough to count as time to take note and adjust for it.
My take on this is that "you should be happy all the time" is the wrong way to look at it, more "you shouldn't be unhappy against your will, because of negative thoughts circulating in your head which you are ignoring and hardly aware of". Being aware of your thoughts so you understand why you are unhappy and then you are informed enough to take action if you choose to; but since a lot of the reasons for unhappiness are fixations on the past and the future, on the incorrect idea of permanence of the ego or disconnection of ego from rest of world, or sadness at being imperfect, then becoming deeply aware of these thoughts implicitly involves them dissipating away as you understand how ridiculous they are; and with the sad, depressing, distorted thoughts fading away, there's room for plenty of happiness in mindful pursuit of ordinary activities. Thich Nhat Hahn uses examples like brushing your teeth or washing your food bowl - these shouldn't be hurried through so you can get to the rest of your life, these activities are your life and you should be aware of your desire to hurry through them and be elsewhere which is making these activities feel worse than they are. You need to do them, you don't need to wish-you-weren't-doing-them-and-feel-sad. They need doing, you are doing them, you may as well pay full attention to them and enjoy doing them. Alan Watts says "Zen spirituality isn't thinking about God while peeling potatoes, Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes", and "mindfulness isn't an activity to do while sitting, mindfulness is just the way a Buddha sits (and the way a Budda does everything)".
If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie?
If you're sad about not driving a Lamborghini and your startup customers leaving and your partner being angry at you, and depressed about ageing and your joints hurting, are any of those things helping you experience the emotion of a really tragic movie? Yes I say a person who is generally happy and content with life including all its problems can still experience the emotions of a movie. (But would they want to? Can a person who is happy and content really feel angry at treading in dog poop? Maybe they can, but would they want to feel angry about such a thing?).
Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house!
Which is fine in a measured way - but do be mindful that this happiness is a fantasy about a future which has not happened, and might not happen, and almost certainly won't happen perfectly in every way. To be excited for the future is one thing, to base your happiness on being able to buy that house is to invite suffering when you hit an unexpected bill and the house seller pulls out of the market or someone else pays more, etc. Mindfulness as "be aware of your thoughts, don't let them push you around" rather than "get rid of your thoughts"
"when push came to shove, if it threatened the centres of corporate power, these experiments in industrial democracy were basically unplugged and defunded"
This sounds like when he got to having to tackle actual issues, he didn't have the political tools necessary to effect real change. Of course if the establishment was all on board to guarantee worker happiness, you wouldn't even need mindfulness in the first place, but the problem right now is that you can't replace the establishment and the establishment doesn't care about you. He might want to look into working with unions and how to structure their demands and policies in a way that will reduce people's stress. You don't enact democracy by telling the current tyrant how cool it would be if all his serfs revolted and took his head off.
It's not new; since the last half of the 20th century, there's been an often unstated business religion that says that if you concentrate hard enough you'll develop a psychic dominance that will make you successful (in sales and management.) IMO the only reason it gets connected to Buddhism is since the people who propagate it now are unaware of its origins (in Silva Mind Control/Leadership Dynamics/Holiday Magic), and to give it a classier, older pedigree.
The reason it seems like a bastardization of Buddhism is because it's not really Buddhism at all, just a spurious justification of why the people who are making the most money are making the most money, namely their more perfectly ordered minds (rather than their connections and luck.)
If they wanted to provide a tested therapy as an option to staff, that would be fine. It unfortunately generally seems to be some poorly thought out program slapped together by management.
My mother used to be a nurse, and they brought in some people who were apparently actual Bhuddhists of some sort. She found the whole thing offensive for religious reasons.
On the more practical front, they were encouraging medical staff to all put their hands in bowls of beads as an everyday activity. Not exactly the greatest idea given that they want to keep everyone's hands sterile, and no one washed the things.
This notion has long exited and is something which Buddhists are all to aware of. Attachment, Value, What is there to hijack anyway when all is illusion?
It is just unfortunate that what humans have created within this inherent existence is a reliance on money and laws protecting ownership.
If you read the Heart Sutra it will help you understand a little bit of the struggle of absoloute reality and inherent reality.
[+] [-] anbende|6 years ago|reply
I often hear the argument that the current applications of mindfulness in corporate or otherwise commercial settings are a perversion of the original teachings. While to some extent it’s true that teachings have been adapted and the adaptations are sometimes (maybe often) problematic, the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me. Attention and acceptance training (the two fundamental aspects of mindfulness in my research supported but not definitive view) don’t belong to Buddhism or any other system or set of teachings. The underlying science of mind training can be applied wherever we see fit. There’s no “what mindfulness is about and what it’s not” in a corporate versus holistic sense. There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.
The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me. What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience. Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state. That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.
And to the extent that we have a large number of poorly trained teachers selling a poorly designed product AS mindfulness, THAT in my mind is the larger issue, rather than the context or clientele. I saw a teacher once tell a student that her overwhelming obsession with her physical pain WAS her being mindful. This and the reverse problem whereby mindfulness is equated with dullness, sleepiness, or numbness are the real dangers in my view.
[+] [-] gerbilly|6 years ago|reply
Buddhism teaches that you should tackle the coarser causes of suffering first. If there is a thorn in your foot, no one is suggesting you should go do a good sit to deal with the pain. First you remove the thorn, then you sit.
In my opinion mindfulness at work (or anywhere) can be beneficial, but if we only use it to paper over the structural problems that make work life stressful for so many, we are losing the opportunity to eliminate the coarser causes of suffering.
Think of it as an 80/20 rule. Probably eighty percent of the suffering at work comes from twenty percent of the causes. We should be tackling those, and that requires political engagement. It may even require oppositional methods in some really bad cases.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
I think what’s wrong is that they don’t realize that the environment that’s causing stress is very damaging and they should change that environment instead of putting a bandaid in the form of mindfulness on it. Even worse is that they keep pushing that stress down the hierarchy causing harm to their employees.
[+] [-] StuffedParrot|6 years ago|reply
Mindfulness cannot fix the underlying problems that lead to mindfulness being useful to capital in the first place. Personally I’d rather my CEO make work less miserable and sleep that way (say, hire people for fewer hours and raise wages) than sleep well because they paid for someone to soothe them through the arduous travails of being a high paid executive.
That said, anyone who didn’t see capital swallowing this is dense. Anything that can be commodified will be. Arguing over it is pointless.
[+] [-] crispinb|6 years ago|reply
Read Brian Daizen Victoria's Zen At War. OK, Zen, but the principle's the same. Effective mind training techniques sans ethical critique can create cooler killers & greed mongers. Mindfulness' popularity amongst the ethical hellscape of contemporary SV culture is surely also at least a tad suggestive?
[+] [-] riskneutral|6 years ago|reply
The military issue is a great example. The author is trying to impose his own opinions about morality on the rest of humanity. This is misguided, there are other credible views that differ from his.
For example, in ancient Japan, there was no conflict between the martial arts and Buddhism. Instead there was a synthesis. For example, there a 17th century Buddhist monk wrote a book about applying mindfulness to sword fighting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfettered_Mind).
[+] [-] jdavis703|6 years ago|reply
I had a therapist who basically told me that mindfulness means accepting harmful and immoral actions (of others). On the one hand this does make it easier to go through the day without getting caught up in q
[+] [-] hypewatch|6 years ago|reply
The author has been practicing Buddhism for 4 decades.
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
But the author never makes this assertion. His point is that mindfulness training is hypocritical and inauthentic when used in a corporate environment.
[+] [-] kungito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|6 years ago|reply
> the assertion that mindfulness training doesn’t belong in the boardroom seems silly to me
Technically, the author didn't say this, but rather pointed out some criticisms (holistic shortcomings) of the manner in which it has been deployed in corporations, specifically:
>> For example, corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work. So there's certainly a problem. There's no doubt that people are suffering from anxiety and stress and depression. No one no one is going to argue that that's not the case.
>> The problem is: what is the remedy? The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions [rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.]
To my reading (interpretation) of the article, that last portion is the main point the author is trying to make.
> Attention and acceptance training (the two fundamental aspects of mindfulness in my research supported but not definitive view) don’t belong to Buddhism or any other system or set of teachings. The underlying science of mind training can be applied wherever we see fit. There’s no “what mindfulness is about and what it’s not” in a corporate versus holistic sense. There’s only the strength of the programs and how much value people derive from them, and if 20 executives are able to sleep and handle their stress a little better, there’s nothing wrong with that.
All (mostly) of this is true, but it misses the point the author was trying to make, and I think the author would take exception with your closing: "there’s nothing wrong with that", his assertion seemingly being ~"actually, there is something ~"wrong" (less than perfect) with that".
> The idea that mindfulness creates better killers or justified immoral behavior also seems spurious to me.
Fair criticism, but the degree to which such things are actually true is unknowable, with any sort of accuracy.
> What we’re teaching is an awareness of what’s happening inside of experience.
Different people teach different things, and different combinations of things. This is one of them.
> Mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch. It’s simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state.
Here I will respectfully disagree. Indeed, the physical practice is "simply greater awareness of the nuances of our internal state", but "mindfulness is not a magical stress and conscience lowering switch" seems to be (based on my personal experience and reading of anecdotal experience) an incorrect assertion. Rather, it often (but not always) seems to be described as just that, some sort of a "magical" way to lower stress and raise consciousness, without explicitly (consciously) setting those two outcomes as goals.
> That internal state is where moral judgment and discernment live, so it’s hard for me to see how that would systematically produce harmful or immoral actions.
Again, I don't think this is what the author is saying. Rather, he seems to be saying that if you teach only the mindfulness portion of these traditional practices, they can be used to the benefit of "improper" greater causes, like individual/corporate greed. Whereas, if some of the additional teachings that have historically accompanied mindfulness are included in the package, this exploitative approach would be less successful.
> And to the extent that we have a large number of poorly trained teachers selling a poorly designed product AS mindfulness, THAT in my mind is the larger issue, rather than the context or clientele.
Maybe. But maybe not. It is certainly "an" issue, but imagine a parallel universe where mindfulness along with some of the other traditional practices was adopted to the same degree that only-mindfulness has been adopted in this universe. Which scenario would have the greatest difference in positive outcome? Again, this is one of those things we have no way of knowing, but perhaps the simple act of thinking about things in this manner might yield positive results. Who knows, but it's fun to think about.
I happen to believe well intentioned mindfulness advocates like Sam Harris are also overlooking the potentially important truths contained in the authors words. I'd be interested to know whether he disagrees with this sentiment, but my perception is that it currently isn't even on his radar, due to his aversion (ironic, if you think about it) to religion.
[+] [-] depr|6 years ago|reply
>I did hear recently [someone saying] that Buddhism doesn't own mindfulness, giving a simile, that just because Newton discovered the law of gravity, it doesn't mean that it's English. [..] not a very clever simile. Yes, Isaac Newton was English, but he was a scientist. So the law of gravity is science, in the same way that mindfulness is Buddhist.
If you want attention and acceptance training then call it that. If you want mindfulness then see it in the proper perspective, which is not ripped out of its context to serve consumerist/capitalistic goals.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
The same happened with yoga. We picked a very small part of the tradition as in asana and removed most of the spiritual aspects. Almost nobody teaches pranayama or meditation in any meaningful way. It’s basically a different form of aerobics or calisthenics.
[+] [-] thrwe4234safd|6 years ago|reply
The new decolonization movement in India has been thinking quite deeply about this and other developments where Indian traditional knowledge is taken to the US and then copyrighted, patented and trademarked, and then sold around the world, incl. India. Amusingly, with American marketing being so brilliant, Indian knowledge has in recent history become far more popular once it was "U-turned" in this way. Lots of interesting work being done.
Interestingly, you can also see similar developments as those done to appropriate non-Western mathematical/scientific knowledge in the centuries prior within Europe. Yoga, and Mindfullness are en course to being de-rooted and turned into Western inventions, by rewriting histories or by silencing them. SOAS for instance has one guy who was anointed a Mahant, and he writes books with another guy who says Yoga is a cynical rebranding of Swedish exercises. It's all very very curious.
I suppose, if a foreigner flatters an Indian, he'll give you every bit of wealth he has (and then cry foul later). Hehe.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|6 years ago|reply
You see the same shit in healthcare with a ton of supposed innovations that don’t go to the core of why the system is broken.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
https://mereorthodoxy.com/call-danish-gymnastics-yoga-body/
[+] [-] wutbrodo|6 years ago|reply
> Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week - very stressful.
Is this true? I worked a hard 35 hours a week when I was at Google. Granted, I was a junior engineer, but the fact that I could get away with that and have it not affect my career unduly always makes me surprised to hear descriptions of Google as a sweatshop.
Can any Googlers say whether this has changed in the few years since I left? I know they're a massive company so generalizing can be hard, but this is so far from my experience that if be surprised if it was true of enough of the company to make anything approaching a blanket statement. I've always thought that it would be nice to go back to Google to retire in a few years.
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightrooms|6 years ago|reply
My experience was like yours - 35 hours per week ( plus summer fridays and tons of personal days and vacation days ). The only exception was the one startup I worked at where we did put in a lot of work in the hopes of a huge payoff. But even there, we put in 70+ hours a week or two before a major milestone/deliverable/etc.
[+] [-] cromwellian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eden_hazard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgrieselhuber|6 years ago|reply
Where I would caution practitioners is to be very wary of religious invitations to ego death and loss of control over chakras (Never "open" your chakras - which are a physiological metaphor for very important aspects of your Self. These aspects should be disciplined and controlled, never "opened.")
Everything below your heart represents your base passions and failure to discipline these most of all turns you into an easily manipulated slave.
[+] [-] GeorgeWBasic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decasteve|6 years ago|reply
I took transmission of the precepts twice and the 2nd time was with Thich Nhat Hanh who called them the “Mindfulness Trainings” instead of the “Precepts”. That’s how I came to know mindfulness. It is intertwined with refuge, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s a faith in the precepts. It’s not a practice one can do on their own nor a practice that’s separate from meditation.
If you relate corporate mindfulness with Buddhism, it is a perversion. It’s a different practice and it’s dishonest to promote it otherwise. Call the practice whatever you want, call it mindfulness, call it prayer, call it feel-goodness, but it’s deceptive to call it a Buddhist practice if you ignore its underpinnings.
[+] [-] vidarh|6 years ago|reply
Gil Fronsdal in his "Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation" jokingly talk about how organizations holding courses in "Mindfulness based stress deduction" carefully avoid the "B-word", and then go on to give a pratical introduction that barely mentions Buddhism.
Quite a bit of mindfulness meditation material has been published by Buddhist monks and teachers that have taken care to stress their utility as methods separated from the Buddhist tradition. Fronsdal's courses is one example. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English is another popular example that takes great care to explain its position in Buddhist practice and then promptly point out that his book is a practical guide to the meditation practice, not a guide to the spiritual aspects, and mostly ignores Buddhism from then on.
When talking about mindfulness in a secularised form, we are usually talking specifically about mindfulness based meditation, not the other aspects, or at least to a lesser extent other aspects. To me that was what made it palatable, as I'd had a casual interest for a long time, but found spiritually focused descriptions very off-putting.
[+] [-] harimau777|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gherkinnn|6 years ago|reply
So it’s not surprising that some are shocked to find a core part of their identity is used as a tool to improve those parts of humanity they despise the most.
[+] [-] szemet|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#Narrative
If this is not a traditional example, then what?
[+] [-] bigred100|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] depr|6 years ago|reply
“Successful branding stories are often characterized by disruption, which turns an established industry or experience upside down. The MBSR brand is one such disruptive force, with Kabat-Zinn’s talking points including pithy quips such as: “The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist,” or Buddhists “don’t own mindfulness” because it is “an innate, universal human capacity.” Potential customers are thereby assured that MBSR is a non-religious product, yet still offers the best bits of what the Buddha taught. In Kabat-Zinn’s words, his version of mindfulness is “a place-holder for the entire dharma.”
The Western world has co-opted an aspect of Buddhism, which works to improve productivity, and discarded the part that doesn't fit its worldview; the other pillars of Buddhism. This enables it to be sold as non-religious.
[+] [-] emptysongglass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|6 years ago|reply
An important exception is that some Christian fundamentalists regard any form of magic or mysticism other than God's miracles as being inherently Satanic. This can even extend to fictional systems of magic (as in fantasy novels or RPGs), which may be regarded as an obfuscated form of the real thing.
[+] [-] hownottowrite|6 years ago|reply
Ref: "McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga: Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom" (2011)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8e29ffcd39c3de866b5...
[+] [-] depr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prisonality|6 years ago|reply
Mindfulness is only one aspect that is part of a system that is the 'eightfold noble path' which have to be taken wholesome:
right view, right motivation, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right endeavour, right mindfulness, right collectedness / stillness
They're of equal importance, if not higher: particularly #1, #2 and in the context of the discussion: #4: right action.
[+] [-] mbrock|6 years ago|reply
Somehow I have a feeling that this desire for meditation practices to be "radical revolutionary" in terms of political economy is more Californian than traditional Buddhist...
[+] [-] cjg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|6 years ago|reply
I am not interested in the religious aspect, as much as I respect the fact that the practice as we know it evolved through the ages thanks to Buddhist and Hindu monks. I don’t see a problem with it: one doesn’t have to be Christian to appreciate Latin calligraphy, or to be Muslim to appreciate algebra.
This said, the critique against corporate entities coopting the practice is predictable and inevitable. If any human technique or technology can be put to good use in order to make money, it will be. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. A pen can be used to write a novel or a prison sentence, it doesn’t mean the pen itself is bad or that we are somehow “betraying” the intentions of the original inventors of pens.
(Edit: i also don’t think I could ever really meditate with other people... I bet most of these corporate congregations actually achieve very little and are just another social occasion for the people involved).
[+] [-] cromwellian|6 years ago|reply
IMHO Daoist philosophy got it right and is the secret to removing stress and anxiety from almost everything. Daoist teachings have been adopted into traditional cognitive behavior therapy now called “dialectic behavioral therapy”
I learned this when I was in my 20s in college during huge bouts of depression and social anxiety and haven’t been depressed in 20 years.
My son who was recently suffering from social anxiety disorder was practically cured by it.
Strip down these mindfulness systems their simplest, and discard all the supernatural mumbo jumbo, incense burning, and ritual chanting. It’s easier to digest and remember.
If you just try to imagine that the past and future don’t really exist, that categories and divisions of reality are wholly created models of it by our mind, and that we can relinquish and let go and let negative thoughts or events wash over us like water, you can get a long way to ignoring most of the stress inducing phenomena in your life unless they are really salient.
At least that’s what’s worked form me. Should some starstuff on the pale blue dot really get worked up by wholly changeable and artificial deadlines? You can view them as important and plan for them yes, but don’t let your cortisol levels flare when things don’t go according to plans. Plans are changeable, life and health is more important.
[+] [-] ydb|6 years ago|reply
People are more alienated now than ever before in the course of history, so it follows that the machinations of capital come to a pseudo-religion in order to pacify dissent. It's staggering, and should give everybody on Hacker News pause.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|6 years ago|reply
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be. If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie? Can you get angry about social injustice? We need a range of emotions. Really we should want to manage them better, not just always try to be happy, as if that's the state we should always be in.
Also, thinking about the past and the future is useful, as long as you have a practical purpose for it. Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house! And the past is a great teacher to learn from. Dwelling in a negative way is bad for us, but that can apply to the present, too. Really we should just not be absent-mindedly preoccupied with negativity, regardless of time.
[+] [-] jodrellblank|6 years ago|reply
But you can't be happy all the time, and shouldn't be.
Dr David Burns, psychiatrist frames it to patients that people can expect 5 days of happiness and 2 crappy days in a given week, and if you don't have 5 happy days you should adjust something, but if you don't have 2 crappy days, then you're bordering on manic and should adjust something the other way. But then he considers a few minutes of feeling bad enough to count as time to take note and adjust for it.
My take on this is that "you should be happy all the time" is the wrong way to look at it, more "you shouldn't be unhappy against your will, because of negative thoughts circulating in your head which you are ignoring and hardly aware of". Being aware of your thoughts so you understand why you are unhappy and then you are informed enough to take action if you choose to; but since a lot of the reasons for unhappiness are fixations on the past and the future, on the incorrect idea of permanence of the ego or disconnection of ego from rest of world, or sadness at being imperfect, then becoming deeply aware of these thoughts implicitly involves them dissipating away as you understand how ridiculous they are; and with the sad, depressing, distorted thoughts fading away, there's room for plenty of happiness in mindful pursuit of ordinary activities. Thich Nhat Hahn uses examples like brushing your teeth or washing your food bowl - these shouldn't be hurried through so you can get to the rest of your life, these activities are your life and you should be aware of your desire to hurry through them and be elsewhere which is making these activities feel worse than they are. You need to do them, you don't need to wish-you-weren't-doing-them-and-feel-sad. They need doing, you are doing them, you may as well pay full attention to them and enjoy doing them. Alan Watts says "Zen spirituality isn't thinking about God while peeling potatoes, Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes", and "mindfulness isn't an activity to do while sitting, mindfulness is just the way a Buddha sits (and the way a Budda does everything)".
If you're happy, can you experience the moving emotion of a really tragic movie?
If you're sad about not driving a Lamborghini and your startup customers leaving and your partner being angry at you, and depressed about ageing and your joints hurting, are any of those things helping you experience the emotion of a really tragic movie? Yes I say a person who is generally happy and content with life including all its problems can still experience the emotions of a movie. (But would they want to? Can a person who is happy and content really feel angry at treading in dog poop? Maybe they can, but would they want to feel angry about such a thing?).
Thinking about the future is a great motivator, and can make us happy. Oh boy, my birthday is coming up! I almost have enough money to buy that house!
Which is fine in a measured way - but do be mindful that this happiness is a fantasy about a future which has not happened, and might not happen, and almost certainly won't happen perfectly in every way. To be excited for the future is one thing, to base your happiness on being able to buy that house is to invite suffering when you hit an unexpected bill and the house seller pulls out of the market or someone else pays more, etc. Mindfulness as "be aware of your thoughts, don't let them push you around" rather than "get rid of your thoughts"
[+] [-] observr9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asooka|6 years ago|reply
This sounds like when he got to having to tackle actual issues, he didn't have the political tools necessary to effect real change. Of course if the establishment was all on board to guarantee worker happiness, you wouldn't even need mindfulness in the first place, but the problem right now is that you can't replace the establishment and the establishment doesn't care about you. He might want to look into working with unions and how to structure their demands and policies in a way that will reduce people's stress. You don't enact democracy by telling the current tyrant how cool it would be if all his serfs revolted and took his head off.
[+] [-] pessimizer|6 years ago|reply
The reason it seems like a bastardization of Buddhism is because it's not really Buddhism at all, just a spurious justification of why the people who are making the most money are making the most money, namely their more perfectly ordered minds (rather than their connections and luck.)
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
My mother used to be a nurse, and they brought in some people who were apparently actual Bhuddhists of some sort. She found the whole thing offensive for religious reasons.
On the more practical front, they were encouraging medical staff to all put their hands in bowls of beads as an everyday activity. Not exactly the greatest idea given that they want to keep everyone's hands sterile, and no one washed the things.
[+] [-] benbojangles|6 years ago|reply
It is just unfortunate that what humans have created within this inherent existence is a reliance on money and laws protecting ownership.
If you read the Heart Sutra it will help you understand a little bit of the struggle of absoloute reality and inherent reality.
Om Mani Padme Hum
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|6 years ago|reply
AH ha ha. Military intelligence.
Oh well. I'd guess that Buddhism has wandered about as far from Buddha's original teachings.