McMindfulness in the Era of Accelerated Life

Abstract

This article addresses how we are to understand mindfulness as a cultural phenomenon and why it has changed so little of what it originally set out to address. In the article, it will be argued that we need to understand the development of mindfulness as a part of the progression of neoliberalism. Central in the analysis of neoliberalism stands Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession (2003, 2007) helping us understanding the transformations mindfulness has made from being a part of a religious practice to becoming a product in the modern health discourse through processes of privatizing and commodification. Finally, the article discusses if mindfulness contains critical potentials for change.

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• Vol. 1, No. 1 • 2021 • (pp. 49-62) •
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/irtp.v1i1.127078
McMindfulness in the Era of Accelerated Life
Klaus Nielsen
Department of Psychology, Aarhus University
Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
This article addresses how we are to understand mindfulness as a cultural phenomenon and why it
has changed so little of what it originally set out to address. In the article, it will be argued that we
need to understand the development of mindfulness as a part of the progression of neoliberalism.
Central in the analysis of neoliberalism stands Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession
(2003, 2007) helping us understanding the transformations mindfulness has made from being a part
of a religious practice to becoming a product in the modern health discourse through processes of
privatizing and commodification. Finally, the article discusses if mindfulness contains critical
potentials for change.
Keywords: Mindfulness, neoliberalism, David Harvey, accumulation by dispossession, change
McMindfulness in the Era of Accelerated Life
Even though most psychologists take mindfulness to be an instrument and as a technique
that can be uncritically applied to solve individual problems in therapy or in counselling
sessions, mindfulness was originally developed as an answer to cultural problems (Nielsen
& Bondo Lind, 2016). In Kabat-Zinn’s groundbreaking work, Full Catastrophe Living: How
to Cope With Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Mediation (Kabat-Zinn, 1990),
Kabat-Zinn addressed stress in particular, as a significant cultural problem embedded in a
cultural practice: “The popular name for the full catastrophe nowadays is stress” (p. 270).
In some respects, Kabat-Zinn’s short analysis of our full catastrophe living has similarities
to Rosa’s (2013) theory of social acceleration, which states that a number of significant
problems, like stress, are embedded in ways of living in modernity. However, Kabat-Zinn’s
analysis of the catastrophe in general and stress in particular as cultural problems is
restricted. As will be elaborated below, he turns our catastrophic living into a health problem
that can be solved by mindfulness. Basically, Kabat-Zinn argued that we already know what

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the problem is, so what we need to figure out how to solve the problem. Even though Kabat-
Zinn acknowledged that the pressure to constantly change is at the heart of the stressful lives
we are living, he exclusively focused on developing an instrument to solving the problem.
The solution is the mindfulness-based stress-reduction (MBSR) program, the mindfulness
program that Kabat-Zinn himself developed.
In this paper, I would like to take Kabat-Zinn and the mindfulness folks up on their intention
to introduce mindfulness as way to deal with the cultural practice of social acceleration, or
full catastrophe living. How is that working out? I would like to focus on mindfulness as a
way to address full catastrophe living as a cultural phenomenon. In that respect, a quick
glance over the developments of the last several decades gives a depressing answer to
whether the development of mindfulness has changed full catastrophe living in any way. In
a recent study from the United States, over 50% of the participants complained that they
were so stressed that it influenced their productivity at the workplace (Fink, 2016). The
World Health Organization has labeled stress “The Health Epidemic of 21th century” (Fink,
2016), and the number of persons feeling severely stressed has risen by 10–30% among all
occupational groups in the United States from 1983 until today (Fink, 2016). This is more
or less the same period of time when the mindfulness movement greatly expanded and swept
victoriously throughout the Western world. The number of books, courses, lectures,
research papers, TV programs, apps, and many other things related to mindfulness have
more or less exploded in the last several decades (Purser & Loy, 2013) but with apparently
little effect on what mindfulness was set out to address.
The questions for this paper are how we understand mindfulness as a cultural phenomenon
and why it has changed so little of what it originally set out to address? I will argue that we
need to understand the development of mindfulness as a part of the progression of
neoliberalism. In this paper, neoliberalism will be understood in Marxist framework
inspired by Harvey (2003, 2007). In this perspective, neoliberalism is comprehended as a
part of a political project re-establishing the conditions for capital accumulation and
restoring the power of the economic elites (Harvey, 2007, p. 19). Central in Harvey’s
analysis of neoliberalism stands the concept of accumulation by dispossession entailing a
very different set of practices than capital accumulation as originally described by Marx
where capital accumulation primarily happened through expansion of wage labour in
industry and agriculture (Harvey, 2007, p. 159). Accumulation through dispossession
involves capital accumulation through the commodification and privatization of all kinds of
public assets, which hitherto has been as regarded off-limits for privatization and
commodification (Harvey, 2007, p. 160). If we return to the aim of this paper, we will argue
that the development of mindfulness must be seen as a part of how neoliberalism
dynamically transformed modern capitalism through accumulation by dispossession. As
will be argued below, Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession will help us
understanding one of the transformations mindfulness has made, namely from being a part
of a religious practice, to becoming a product through processes of privatizing and
commodification. Furthermore, being decouple from a religious practice and privatized,
mindfulness opens options for how individuals can find ways of self-healing, and hence,
making mindfulness central to a modern health discourse.
The Social Production of Mindfulness
In this article, I will mainly focus on Kabat-Zinn and his understanding of mindfulness.
Since Kabat-Zinn is completely dominant within the field of mindfulness, I will dwell on

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his transformations of the understanding of mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn is, by all standards,
“Mister Mindfulness.” In Barker’s (2007, as cited by Gordon, 2009) words, “If one is
interested in understanding the essence of mindfulness as it is articulated in the popular
media, one is interested in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn” (p. 22).
Kabat-Zinn graduated with a degree in molecular biology, after which he founded the Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 and developed the MBSR
program. Since 1979, over 20,000 patients have undergone one of the 740 programs
worldwide, which typically include 8-week theory and meditation practice courses. Kabat-
Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living from 1990 has become the curriculum for most MBSR
instructors and has long since found its way to booksellers’ shelves. Kabat-Zinn and his
group of affiliated peers (Kabat-Zinn, 2005; Hyland, 2015b; Segal et al., 2002; Williams &
Kabat-Zinn, 2013; Williams et al., 2007) also stand behind the global spread of interest in
mindfulness through interventions in a variety of areas, such as in schools, prisons,
workplaces, and hospitals, as well as in psychology, psychotherapy, education, and
medicine (Hyland, 2015a). Kabat-Zinn was thus the founder of both mindfulness as a
medical intervention technique and mindfulness as a medical prevention tool.
From Religious Practice to Medical Intervention
Technique
To understand how mindfulness became a commodity, it is important to understand how
mindfulness has been transformed from being an element of religious practice (Buddhism)
to being reified into a technique of medical practice.
Mindfulness has roots in Buddhism, and sati is the Buddhist word for mindfulness. In
traditional Buddhist thinking, sati is closely associated with the concept of memory
(Stanley, 2013) and can best be translated as “remembering.” Based on the historical
Buddha’s teaching in the fifth century AD, mindfulness is defined as a process in which
“things said or done long ago are recalled and remembered” (Stanley, 2013). Thus, the
original understanding of mindfulness did not focus on deepening the here-and-now
situation, as we find in the modern understanding of mindfulness, but rather strongly
focused on memory. Sati thus describes that the prerequisite for awareness of the here-and-
now situation requires an awareness of what has happened in the past. As one of the
historical Buddha’s followers of the sixth century summarized about the mindfulness
process, “Once mindfulness is present, memory will be able to function well” (Analayo,
2006; Stanley, 2013). In Buddhist thinking, mindfulness is not only a mental function or
mental trait but also part of a specific practice (Grossman & Van Damm, 2011, p. 221). In
Buddhist thinking, Satipatthana Sutta (one of the oldest Buddhist texts on mindfulness)
describes mindfulness as a practice of five features: (a) conscious, open-minded awareness
of the experience of the present situation; (b) a process that develops human qualities such
as kindness, tolerance, patience, and courage; (c) a persistent nondiscursive and nonanalytic
study of our experiences; (d) an awareness that is markedly different from our everyday
experiences; and (e) a process that requires systematic practice to cultivate its practitioner
(Grossman & Van Damm, 2011; Langer, 1989; Nanamoli & Bodhi, 2001; Stanley, 2013).
As the Sutta text shows, an ethical set of values are linked to the pursuit of mindfulness
(developing kindness, tolerance, patience, and courage).
In the Western world, historically, there has been a movement toward understanding
mindfulness as a particular form of attention, while the ethical practice of Buddhism

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gradually moved into the background or, as we shall see, been directly decoupled from
mindfulness. The term mindfulness has been known in the English-speaking world since the
15th century in a variety of different meanings: to pay attention, remember something, be
thoughtful, or be conscious of something (Stanley, 2013). Around the beginning of the
modern Enlightenment period in the 16th century, the term gained a more specific meaning
of attention, memory, or intention, but it was only in the mid-19th century, in Rhys David’s
1881 translation, that the sati concept of Buddhist thinking was attempted to be translated
directly into English so that the present meaning of the word mindfulness started to be
configured. Rhys David admitted that mindfulness is a difficult concept to translate from
the ethical psychology of Buddhism, as he described it, and that he gently translated sati as
“that activity of mind, constant presence of mind, wakefulness of heart, which is the foe of
carelessness, inadvertence, self-forgetness” (Rhys Davids, 1881 as cited in Stanley, 2013).
As described above, the original understanding of sati includes an attentional dimension
associated with the memory process. This Western translation of sati, which focuses directly
on the dimension of attention, has been termed bare awareness or bare mindfulness
(Stanley, 2013). Bare awareness is attached to the perceptual dimension that precedes and
forms the premise that a particular object is recognized and later conceptualized as a specific
object. For example, in sati, understood as bare awareness, there is an awareness of how the
body is experienced before a particular object is conceptualized as well as a focus on how
the body can develop its sensitivity in this process and thus develop the awareness that
makes one particularly sensitive to what is going on in and around them.
Bare awareness played a key role in how the concept of mindfulness was later defined in
the Western world (Stanley, 2013). In 1953, Nyanaponika Thera defined mindfulness
precisely as a nonconceptual perceptual dimension focusing on the here-and-now situation:
“the clear and single-minded awareness of what happens to us and in us, those are the
successive moments of perception” (Thera, 1953, p. 30; Stanley, 2013). For Thera, the
awareness dimension has become a model for and the very essence of how we understand
mindfulness today, as a particular kind of awareness linked to the individual. American
Buddhist and psychotherapist Jack Kornfield sharpened the understanding of mindfulness
as a nonjudgmental bare attention. Kornfield (1977) defined mindfulness as “the attitude of
non-judgmental observation (i.e. mindfulness) [that] allows all events to occur in a natural
way. By keeping attention in the present moment, we can see more and more clearly the
true characteristics of mind and body process” (Stanley, 2013). The most dominant
definition of mindfulness today is found in Kabat-Zinn (1990, 1994), who maintained the
determination of mindfulness as bare awareness closely related to the individual, but he also
does something else with mindfulness—namely, he transformed it so that it could be
included into medical practice (Stanley, 2013).
The Decoupling of Mindfulness From Buddhism
Even though Kabat-Zinn was strongly inspired by Buddhism, one of his central
achievements was to decouple the concept mindfulness from Buddhist practice, claiming
that the concept is not related to particular religious ethical practices but covers the universal
human phenomenon as bare awareness (Gordon, 2009; Fields, 1992). On the relationship
between Buddhism and meditation, Kabat-Zinn (2005) wrote:
When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird
cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it. It does not involve becoming some

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kind of zombie, vegetable, self-absorbed narcissist, navel gazer, space cadet, cultist,
devotee, mystic, or Eastern philosopher. (p. xvi)
Kabat-Zinn argued that mindfulness has a universal human character related to the
individual and can be achieved without submitting to any form of religious thinking or
training and that mindfulness can be understood independently of a Buddhist context
(Gordon, 2009). According to Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is simply a particular way of being
aware and a certain way of seeking to understand oneself, where there is no need to appeal
to any religious tradition. In this regard, Kabat-Zinn (1990) defined mindfulness as a way
of “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-
judgmentally” in a way that “nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-
moment reality” (p. 3). Thus, mindfulness involves nonjudgmental bare attention in
everyday activities and offers a “powerful route for getting ourselves unstuck, back in touch
with our own wisdom and vitality” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, pp. 4–5). In addition to claiming that
mindfulness has a universal quality, Kabat-Zinn distances mindfulness from the Buddhist
context for another reason: to adapt mindfulness to a medical discourse. As mentioned,
Kabat-Zinn was trained in the medical field and saw great opportunities in mindfulness. The
medical discourse is dominated by positivism’s ambition of value freedom and has no room
for the normative ethical practice underlying Buddhism. It would be considered unscientific.
In an interview, Kabat-Zinn stated,
If you go into talking about the Buddha and inviting masters with shaved heads for lectures,
you’re going to be perceived right away as some foreign cultural ideology—a belief system.
Understandably so, it would likely be rejected. (Streitfeld, 1991, p. 19)
This decoupling of mindfulness, in the form of a universal bare awareness belonging to the
individual, from religious practice has been criticized in recent years, especially by scholars
practicing Buddhism (Brazier, 2013; Grossman, 2011; Grossman & Van Dam, 2011).
Critics have emphasized that with the decoupling, the social, ethical, and critical dimensions
in which the concept of mindfulness is embedded within Buddhist thinking also disappear,
and then mindfulness becomes merely a technique on par with other intervention techniques
(Carrette & King, 2005, pp. 102–105).
Mindfulness as a Self-Healing Phenomenon
In order for us to understand how and why mindfulness has become so popular, we need to
understand the ideological dimensions of mindfulness. The Gramscian concept of common
sense, defined as ‘the sense held in common’, plays a significant part in the ideological
transformation of mindfulness (Thomas, 2010). Common sense is constructed out of
longstanding practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional and national
tradition and common sense, therefore, can be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or
disguising real problems under cultural prejudices (Harvey, 2007, p. 39). In the case of the
long march of neoliberal ideas, the narrative of individual freedom works as “(….) a bottom
that elites can press to open the door to the masses to justify almost anything” (Harvey,
2007, p. 40). Where “classical” capital accumulation in the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to an
oppositional culture (trade unions and political parties), neoliberalism and accumulation by
dispossession talk into the central narratives of the cultural elites and also into the
progressive individualistic discourse rooted in countercultural thinking, in which the subject
is understood as bearing the potential to transform their own life. This is the central narrative
Kabat-Zinn is using for popularizing mindfulness. This thinking originated in Western

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romantic thinking and had its heyday around the youth revolt in the 1960s, after which it
has left deep traces in Western culture. Understanding the individual human being who
carries the potential to transform themselves has played a vital role in the popularization of
mindfulness.
In producing the progressive self-healing individual, Kabat-Zinn drew upon a special
tradition of American spiritual life: American transcendentalism, which is particularly
represented by iconic American writers of the 20th century such as Emerson and Thoreau
(Gordon, 2009). American transcendentalism was born from the idea that the principles of
human life are derived from its inner essence and that given the right framework, the human
inner essence sparks genuine human development. American transcendentalism was
inspired by romantic thinkers like Rousseau, from whom one finds the same idea that
humans are born with a good nature and that under the right conditions (freedom), each
individual carries the prerequisites to transform themselves. American transcendentalism is
skeptical of materialism, mass society, and modern institutions and tries to formulate an
alternative to the forms of life that modern society offers. In their work, central
transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau thematized simple living and nature as
alternatives to industrial mass society.
Best known in this context is Thoreau’s 1854 Walden book, in which Thoreau describes
how he lived in a small cabin out in the wild nature at Walden Pond in Massachusetts for 2
years (Thoreau, 1854/2012). In the book, Thoreau described how he turned his back on the
dehumanization of mass society and tried to live a simple life in the wild to deepen his own
self-reliance. American transcendentalism played a major role in Kabat-Zinn’s formulation
of mindfulness, and Thoreau and Emerson are frequently cited in his books, such as
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness in Everyday Living (Kabat-Zinn, 1994).
For Kabat-Zinn, the individual is not to move out into nature in the physical sense; rather,
the move must be made in a psychological sense, and mindfulness plays a central role in
this connection. Thus, mindfulness is the technique by which an individual comes in contact
with their inner nature through meditation.
The basic assumption that Kabat-Zinn shares with the American transcendentalists is that
humans are fundamentally self-healing, which, in this context, means that humans
themselves possess the potentials needed to transcend the ills that follow the general way of
life of modern society. More precisely, the concept of healing in Kabat-Zinn’s work points
to the fact that the individual must learn to be accepting in the present. Kabat-Zinn (2005)
wrote, “When we use the word healing to describe the experiences of people in the stress
clinic, what we mean above all is that they are undergoing a profound transformation of
view” (p. 168). Healing means accepting things as they are, “rather than struggling to force
them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be” (Barker, 2014; Kabat-Zinn,
2005, pp. 136-137). Under the right circumstances—in this context, mindfulness, like the
mental version of Walden—our bodies and minds can heal themselves.
Mindfulness in an Evidence-Oriented Medical Discourse
By decoupling the concept of mindfulness from a religious practice and turning it into a
concept which opens possibilities for the individual’s self-healing, through activating deep-
rooted narratives about personal transcendence, mindfulness is ready to enter into an
evidence-oriented medical discourse. In this section, I will thus describe Kabat-Zinn’s

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mindfulness program as well as a series of offshoots originating from the involvement of
mindfulness in medical practice.
Kabat-Zinn was not the first to seek to use elements of Eastern thinking in medical practice.
In the early 1970s, Wallace (Gordon, 2009; Wallace, 1970, 1971) conducted a study
showing that people using transcendental meditation (TM) had significantly reduced oxygen
uptake and heart rate. Although TM did not originate directly from Buddhism, this form of
meditation bears a strong resemblance to mindfulness (Gordon, 2009). Similarly, in a study
on the medical implications of meditation, Benson (1975) found that meditation leads to
increased well-being, among other things, through lowered blood pressure. Benson (1975)
argued in the bestseller The Relaxation Response (Benson, 1975) that the very fact that
individuals think differently about themselves can lead to increased well-being and that one
can find this way of thinking in a variety of traditions other than Eastern religions.
As one of the first to do so, Kabat-Zinn created a systematic treatment program based on
mindfulness called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which is basically an 8-
week stress-management program for a group of 30 people at most. The MBSR program
utilizes three mindfulness practices such as body scanning, sitting/walking meditation, and
hatha yoga. It was initially applied only at Kabat-Zinn’s own stress clinic (Kabat-Zinn,
2011). A number of other intervention programs have been developed based on Kabat-
Zinn’s MBSR program, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), created by
Segal et al. (2002), which has a special emphasis on treating depression, in relation to both
the concept of mindfulness and the development of specific techniques. Like MBSR, MBCT
incorporates both breathing and breathing techniques but combined with elements of
cognitive behavioral therapy. MBCT consists of eight weekly 2-hr workouts (Kang &
Whittingham, 2010; Nilsson & Kazemi, 2016). Linehan developed dialectical behavioral
therapy (DBT), which was inspired by MBSR, in the 1990s (Linehan, 1993) to treat patients
with borderline personality disorder. Since then, DBT has been applied to other diagnoses,
such as depression and some binge-eating disorders. Therapy uses mindfulness as a “part-
tool”—that is, along with other tools based on dialectical thinking (Kang & Wittingham
2010). Some evidence shows that DBT has an effect on personality disorders (Fiegenbaum,
2007).
In an evidence-based medical discourse, the legitimacy of mindfulness rests on the
effectiveness of the program being measured. In this context, various forms of
“measurement instruments” have been developed to measure the effects of mindfulness. At
the time of writing, there are already nine different self-report questionnaires that attempt
to measure whether participants in various types of research are “mindful” (Stanley, 2013).
Nilsson and Kazemi (2016) cite the following instruments as common ways of measuring
outcomes in relation to the use of mindfulness techniques: the Mindfulness Attention
Awareness Scale, the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, the Southampton Mindfulness
Questionnaire, the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills, and the Philadelphia
Mindfulness Scale. The effects of using mindfulness in a medical practice has not been
unequivocally positive (Grossman and Van Dam, 2011). In recent years, there has also been
a significant methodological criticism of the many studies showing an effect of mindfulness
interventions. Criticism points out, 1) that there is a low intercorrelation in the use of
different questionnaires' measurements of mindfulness (Grossman, 2011), 2) the use of self-
reported questionnaires is problematic in relation to measuring the degree of mindfulness
(Grossman and Van Dam, 2011), and 3) there is a lack of control groups and a sufficiently

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large number of participants to uncover the effect of mindfulness interventions Nilsson &
Kazemi, (2016).
McMindfulness: Mindfulness as Market Product
At the same time as mindfulness became a part of the medical discourse, it did also turn into
both a commodity to be sold on the market, helping it’s users improving their performances
in general. Mindfulness has been turned into a commodity—what some has called
McMindfulness—with which one can add a piece of mindfulness to their everyday practice
to improve their performance (Purser & Loy, 2013). Many titles of the books being
published are about improving one’s performance: Mindful Parenting, Mindful Teaching,
Mindful Politics, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, A Mindful Nation, Mindful
Recovery, The Mindful Mind, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Way Through Depression,
The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion (Purser & Loy, 2013). Likewise, in browsing the
Internet, it seems limitless what mindfulness can do for a person. It can increase one’s work
efficiency, reduce children’s school absenteeism, increase employees’ “soft” skills, and
change companies with a problematic workplace culture for the better. Mindfulness has
become a major industry with an estimated billion dollars in sales of products and services
involving mindfulness in 2015. The mindfulness industry is expected to more than double
its revenue in the following years. Employees and executives regularly use mindfulness in
a number of large companies such as Google, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, and
Monsanto (Purser & Loy, 2013). Mindfulness has become a central part of the U.S.
Military’s training. Elisabeth Stanley, founder of the Mind Fitness Training Institute,
commented on the military’s use of mindfulness that “These techniques can be very
effective in increasing situational awareness on the battlefield” (Hruby, 2012).
To return to my original question, mindfulness has become a commodity that has
accelerated the striving to optimize performance; hence, mindfulness seems to have
accelerated competition more than the opposite. In that sense, it has improved factors that
enhance stress more than it has the opposite. A severe side effect of mindfulness as a cultural
phenomenon is that produces the conditions that it is concurrently fighting. It is like trying
to put a fire out by using gasoline.
Mindfulness: Being Habituated to the Neoliberal Market
As argued above, by seeing the individual as potentially self-healing, Kabat-Zinn’s concept
of mindfulness is aimed at the well-being of the single individual, which perfectly resonates
with the dominant values in a neoliberal worldview. In a neoliberal economy—
characterized by social acceleration, with an emphasis on flexible, informal, or part-time
labor as well as rapid technological shifts and increasingly brief cycles of obsolescence—
workers must develop new emotional, social, and relational skills to survive (Rosa, 2013).
According to Sennett (2006), given the erosion of steady, long-term employment and the
frame of reference such employment provides, the individual must learn to navigate the
“fragmentary social conditions” of neoliberal capitalism and improvise their life narrative.
The ideal neoliberal subject must become an entrepreneur who constantly retrains and
updates their skills in the face of rapid technological and scientific changes. In that context,
mindfulness becomes a powerful tool for boosting one’s emotional capital, and practicing
mindfulness literally becomes a way of investing in one’s entrepreneurial self-project.
Mindfulness and neoliberalism exactly converge at the attitude of being the entrepreneur of

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one’s own life and managing oneself. Kabat-Zinn argued that practitioners are taught to “let
go” of habitual ways of perceiving and of instinctual emotional reactions through
meditation, thereby allowing themselves to choose more skillful, positive, and creative ways
of responding to events and circumstances.
Mindfulness teaches practitioners to develop control over their minds; manage their
reactions; and develop emotional qualities like gratitude, positivity, and resilience leading
to happiness (Eisen, 2014, p. 50). While “negative” emotions like anxiety, anger, and
sadness are to be accepted but only so that they may be managed and eventually let go,
“positive” emotions like joy and love are to be cultivated so that one can a deeper sense of
happiness and spiritual fulfillment. The basic idea for both neoliberal thinking and
mindfulness seems to be that people suffer because they have “mismanaged” their emotions.
The problem does not lie in the conditions themselves but rather in how one has “chosen”
to perceive those conditions. Even physical health problems can be linked to happiness and
hence to a matter of choice. As argued by Kabat-Zinn, “the ways in which an individual
chooses to be in a relationship with his/her stress and stressful conditions can actually reduce
the rate of telomere shortening” (Eisen, 2014, p. 66; Paulson et al. 2013, p. 97).
In this perspective, one can argue that mindfulness thinking, at its essence, develops with
neoliberalism a “responsibilization” of the individual. A rational and calculating individual
bears full responsibility for the consequences of their actions. One is poor and unhealthy
because they lack self-control and entrepreneurial spirit, not because of their social
background, economic issues, or class politics. Someone who is unhappy has nobody to
blame but themselves; if someone is happy, good for them—they have earned it. In this
perspective, negative emotions are no longer related to anything vital about the world that
calls for action and change. Negative emotions are considered matters of personal
idiosyncrasy that must be managed as one find one’s way, in the neoliberal market thinking.
This neoliberal dimension to mindfulness becomes even more problematic when different
mindfulness supporters all over the world—Denmark included—suggest that mindfulness
should be a mandatory part of institutional practices to solve and prevent problems in the
areas of health, education, labor, and crime (e.g., Loughton & Morden, 2015). From a
critical perspective, this institutionalization of mindfulness would work as a systematic
habituation to neoliberal thinking. To shortly return to the question I started out with,
mindfulness works seem to have accelerated neoliberal thinking rather than setting up an
alternative.
Final Remarks: The Critical Potentials of Mindfulness
Given these critical comments about mindfulness, one could easily conclude that society
should give up on mindfulness and fight and discard it whenever one has the chance. This
is neither realistic nor desirable. Instead, I will shortly consider whether mindfulness has
any critical potentials that could be used to formulate critical questions about the Western
world’s social-acceleration process. I believe there are. The central ideas of mindfulness
spring from a Buddhist tradition in which one of the ethical-religious messages was a radical
respect for all kind of organic otherness (both humans and otherwise), and Buddhists have
formulated the heaviest critiques of modern mindfulness.
In Buddhism, classical mindfulness has other connotations that the one found in modern
mindfulness. I will briefly mention some of these connotations because they seem to contain
important critical potentials. In Buddhist thinking, (a) mindfulness is a practice that one

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slowly acquires through years of training. It is not technique one can learn over a short
period of time. In general, there is a critical stand against social acceleration in general. (b)
In classical Buddhist thinking, mindfulness is an ethical practice in which respect for
otherness is central (in the Satti texts, one of the central dimensions is to learn to develop
human qualities such as kindness, tolerance, patience, and courage). (c) In classical
Buddhism, mindfulness is not an individualistic practice but a shared practice. It is not the
well-being of the individual in itself that is central but a question of how people should live
together. What I am trying to say here is not that we should become Buddhists but that we
need reinstall and emphasize the ethical, social, and political dimensions that the Kabat-
Zinn tradition cut out of the classical Buddhist mindfulness tradition to fit the latter into
Western culture. Doing so would allow mindfulness to function as genuine platform for
posing critical questions about our full catastrophe living. Rather than comprehending
mindfulness as a way to reinstall modern neoliberal individualism, mindfulness should re-
connect individuality to shared human conditions and ethical practices, which potentially
would open for critical questions concerning capital accumulation by dispossession (see
also Analayo, 2006; Grossman & Van Damm, 2011; Nanamoli & Bodhi, 2001; Stanley,
2013).
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About the author
Klaus Nielsen is currently based at Department of Psychology, Aarhus University. His
research centres on learning, social practice and theoretical psychology.
Contact: Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Email: klausn@psy.au.dk
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7287-8400