Feel Good, Inc.
Can mindfulness cure our stressed-out, overworked culture, or is it part of the problem?
Begin by Bringing Awareness Into Your Body
The workplace perks of Silicon Valley induce envy. Oodles of paid vacation time, extended maternity/paternity leave, slides that cruise from the third floor into a ball pit on the first, and on-site masseuses. The newest addition to the laundry list: mindfulness training.
Amidst the cutthroat intensity of office life at a dot-com giant, there are designated rooms for mindfulness meditation — soundproofed and embellished with Eastern iconography. And the buck doesn’t stop in the Valley: a growing list of companies regularly implement mindfulness trainings, hiring experts to instruct their employees in meditation techniques for use on a day-to-day basis. Even old-guard leviathans like Goldman Sachs have skin in the Mindfulness game. (More on that capital “M” in a moment.)
The phenomenon isn’t just another cultish, pseudo-religious fad (though it shares similar characteristics). The integration of secular mindfulness practices at a national level represents the apex of the mind/body industry’s growth. It’s now rooted in one of the most prized tiers of America’s pantheon: the corporate sector.
The Mindfulness industry is booming, summarily in response to a frazzled workforce that’s about as zen as a hamster on ritalin — it’s doubtful that simple meditation could reengineer our savage culture of overwork. Despite ardent claims for the soothing, life-changing merits of mindfulness, the movement is questionable. Some analyses suggest that workplace mindfulness is covertly nefarious; others downgrade the entirety of the movement to trend status. Other critics — mainly traditional Buddhists — are so disenchanted that they’ve labeled the movement McMindfulness: a diet version of the path to enlightenment, heir apparent in a lineage of Eastern-inspired fads induced by Eat, Pray, Love and “influencers” sporting tribal-patterned yoga mats and cold-pressed juice. Or worse yet, a version of a spiritual practice that’s been hijacked for capitalist endeavors — another Silicon Valley productivity hack in the same camp as the current microdosing fad.
In this article, the current social movement of mindfulness in the West will be referred to as Mindfulness (capital “M”). This is not standard practice, but is used here to delineate between the movement and the practice(s) of mindfulness (small “m”). These practices include: meditation techniques (which usually stem from Buddhism), mindful walking, mindfulness literature, mindfulness seminars/retreats/lectures, and other practices intentioned toward a mindful existence. (The great 1960s philosopher Alan Watts would go into the wilderness, shoot an arrow into the air, see where it landed, go to it, and fire it again. This was one of his preferred forms of meditation).
Feel-good technique or ancient antidote, the Mindfulness movement isn’t going anywhere, and for good reason. The debate around the buzzword leads to implications far beyond the individual seated on a meditation cushion. The Mindfulness movement finds its definition through contrasts, through what it isn’t, and through what it could be. What it isn’t highlights the yearning of the very culture that’s embraced it: a culture desperate for social reform on a grand scale. What Mindfulness could be, if it were understood better, is a standard for measuring the quality of collective human life, an impetus to fight for the changes that would make a truly mindful existence innate.
In the end, it’s not the debate itself that will raise the gavel, but the ways in which the individual, and the society that individual is connected to, chooses to engage with Mindfulness (or not).
Inhale Deeply
… because this is a loaded conversation with roots that go back millennia. Mindfulness is more than just an Eastern spiritual practice; it’s debatable if some versions of it can be dubbed spiritual at all. The movement intentionally shed most allusions to Buddhism when it began, partially in order to assuage zealots who were alarmed by the very word meditation. “It’s a secular approach; it’s based on science” says Marina Grazier, owner of the Mindfulness Exchange Ltd and workplace mindfulness thought leader and teacher trainer. “I’ve got nothing against Buddhism … but I knew that if I was going to execute this in the workplace, it had to be based on evidence, on information, on knowledge … Now we have a whole wealth of evidence from the world of psychology and from the world of organizational psychology, and from the world of clinical psychology.” The research is far from conclusive, but at least from a clinical standpoint, it’s promising that secular mindfulness could yield a net positive at the individual level — stimulating neuroplasticity and regulating stress, for example.
But multiple versions of mindfulness are being peddled to the masses, not all of them informed or well-researched. Depending on the practitioner, mindfulness can be a dangerous choice. Equally worrisome, Western Mindfulness is often tainted by America’s consumer marketing tradition: Its value is more often in the packaging than the product.
In the workplace, mindfulness doesn’t seem like much of a threat — just another Bay Area thing, a corporate fashion statement, as innocuous as kombucha and just as fizzy. Mindfulness is usually a personal practice, so why criticize anyone’s meditation practices, whether they occur with the aid of an app (like the kingpin of meditation apps, Headspace) or not? It should be acknowledged that even the hippy-dippiest guided meditations carry some validity with them. As Buddhism is True author Robert Wright states in a 2017 Wired article, “There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration … many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.”
If Mindfulness is just another stress-reducer — on the same plane as yoga, running, or a deep-tissue massage — it’s time to leave the neophytes to their cushions.
Except that’s not at all what Mindfulness is.
Exhale Slowly
Consider where the practice actually occurs — that squashy gray thing in your cranium. The brain is the area of our anatomy which science knows the least about — a paradoxical statement because it simultaneously knows so much about it. Considering that mindfulness is designed to reconfigure an organ that draws natural metaphors to the deep sea, suspicion is understandable. Factor in the ranks of practicing mindfulness trainers who essentially bought their certificates from an online course, and a search warrant is justified.
In fact, according to Irene Lyon, whose background is in nervous system and trauma healing, mindfulness is one of the worst places to begin mental healing. “Asking a traumatized person to go inside and feel their body and its sensations can be one of the scariest things in the world,” she writes. According to her observations, more of us live with a traumatized neurochemistry than we realize. Her experience is filled with individuals who spend decades and tens of thousands of dollars on the mind/body industry, only to heal much later through autonomic nervous system and stress physiology treatments — and they are furious that these treatments weren’t presented earlier.
Mindfulness is not a panacea. It’s not a practice that should be prescribed lightly or taught by someone who doesn’t have significant training. But it often is, and Lyon’s critique instills serious concern. Lyon warns of a mindfulness bubble waiting to burst, to which she parallels the collapse of the mid-2000s US housing bubble.
The Zen Boom
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”
— Stephen King
Like the cyclical natures that feature in Eastern doctrines, Mindfulness is also a rebirth of sorts. Its past life was the 1960s counterculture movement, which sprang out of the Zen boom of the fifties. The movement saw the dawn of the archetypal hippie and experimentation with nearly every aspect of life. Along with Mindfulness, interests rooted in the movement are reanimating again, such as communes (Netflix’s Wild, Wild Country), and psychedelics as therapy and medication, a realm so irresistibly fascinating that even Michael Pollan has lent his voice to the conversation. The birth of food co-ops occured in the sixties and are now fairly common. And, of course, veteran hippies can now consume cannabis legally in several states.
The movement fruited from a crop of intellectual demigods, people like Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg. Rooting itself in Northern California and San Francisco’s Haight–Ashbury District, it isn’t a coincidence that Mindfulness emerged from the ashes in the same general area.
Mindfulness is connected to many of the Eastern-inspired movements that were introduced in the 1960s — yoga, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and similar belief systems and practices. The counterculture was rebelling against established, Judeo–Christian religions, and the time was ripe for a new spirituality, one that didn’t require rigidity or loyalty to mainstream artifices like churches. As Alan Watts summarized: “… in the West the word god has got so many funny associations attached to it that most people are bored with it … we like to hear new words. We like to hear about Dao, about Brahman.”
But when these Eastern religions appeared on the scenes, they were far from transplants. They were new adaptations. Figureheads like Alan Watts, a definitive philosopher of the time, pulled from a variety of ancient religious practices, which attracted many to his teaching. He didn’t need to use the names of deities at all in order to explain his worldview. Instead he used metaphors, pinpoint observations rooted in the natural world, critique, and syntheses of Eastern wisdom. It was the religion of no religion. Watts was a ferryman, pulling his audience across the river and toward the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, a self-described spiritual entertainer. The onus for the pursuit itself was left in the hands of the individual. Religion was transformed into a personal quest; the divine was no longer institutionalized.
Watts’s philosophy is criticized as being cherry-picked from other religious practices. He was an avowed perennialist (the idea that the mystical experience is recurrent across boundaries of religion, culture, or time); he himself was an ex-Episcopal priest. Given this tapestry of religious experience, what else could Watts’s message be but an ineffable, fresh take on the mystical?
Mindfulness gets similar criticism — there’s palpable resistance to how widely it’s borrowed across Buddhism’s border. Comparing Watts to Mindfulness sheds some light on this resistance. Watts was referred to by Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, as a Bodhisattva, a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings. Watts deeply respected the Eastern teachings from which he drew, but Mindfulness has made a point of only briefly mentioning its roots. “There is a certain cachet and hipness in telling neophytes that mindfulness is a legacy of Buddhism,” writes Ron Purser and David Loy in their article “Beyond McMindfulness.” “But, sometimes in the same breath, consultants often assure their corporate sponsors that their particular brand of mindfulness has relinquished all ties and affiliations to its Buddhist origins.” The accusation from critiques like this — referred to here onward by the umbrella term of McMindfulness — is that Mindfulness is not only disregarding its heritage; it is actively failing as a movement without the context and deeper practice its origin encourages.
Are You There, Buddha?
The import of Eastern practices is often labeled insensitive reappropriation. Along with Mindfulness, that label is also leveled at modern yoga — the practice of asanas (poses) on a mat. Asanas are only one of the eight limbs of Raja Yoga, which is in turn one of four yogic paths. Asana is an undeniably healthful and positive practice for most yogis, yet it still catches flak; it’s criticized as a workout fad that uses vague spirituality as branding. Some call it a sham, but a milder explanation is that yoga can be presented in myriad ways — sweaty yoga classes just happen to work well for a lot of people.
Using another religion’s practices to inspire health and well-being hardly seems malevolent. Even if those practices are used for monetary growth, alleging disrespect seems unfair. And as a 2011 Yoga to the People lawsuit — filed by Bikram Yoga founder Bikram Choudhury — proved, practices like yogic asanas can’t be copyrighted anyway.
“From a more traditional Buddhist perspective, what is missing in the modern mindfulness movement is … active engagement with Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist ‘forms of life.’” — Robert H. Sharf
Mindfulness gets a more vocal rap, however (at least until corporate yoga becomes a thing). It’s an undeniably cherry-picked version of meditation techniques and practices that were popularized during the counterculture movement; an iteration of a distillation, only remotely connected to Buddhism. Says Grazier, “… it can work without that [Buddhism]. And I know a lot of people won’t want to hear that.”
The illusion that mindfulness meditation is Buddhism really starts to break down when definitions enter the arena. There’s the word mindfulness itself, translated from the Sanskrit smrti. But this word refers not to a sense of being in the moment, but rather to the recollection and memorization of authoritative traditions. “Mindfulness,” in the traditional Buddhist canon, does not refer to being in the moment or attention to the present. In fact, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness — a core set of ancient Buddhist teachings — features no mention of the word “now.” The present cultural translation — “present in the moment” — is both a modern conceit, and a notion that’s been railed against historically by East Asian Buddhists. “I suspect that when medieval meditation masters used terms such as ‘falling into emptiness’ and ‘meditation sickness,’ they were targeting techniques that resulted in an intense immersion in the moment …” writes Robert H. Sharf, Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “The practitioner becomes estranged from the web of social relations that are the touchstone of our humanity as well as our sanity.” In traditional Buddhism then, total immersion in the present moment is actually undesirable.
Mindfulness is trendy, in part because it is so easily consumable. This bothers traditional Buddhists, because they believe that a quick-and-easy approach completely misses the point. Writes Sharf, “Zongmi says [referring to ninth-century Buddhist scholar Guifeng Zongmi]: ‘While awakening from delusion is sudden, the transformation of an unenlightened person into an enlightened person is gradual.’ From a more traditional Buddhist perspective, what is missing in the modern mindfulness movement is precisely this gradual transformation, which involves active engagement with Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist ‘forms of life.’”
To Sharf’s credit, the modern mindfulness adept must do very little reading or research in order to dive in. All they need to do is click “Download” on the App Store.
Slowly Open Your Eyes … Now Hand Over Your Credit Card
“America is reputed all over the world to be the most materialistic country … as a matter of fact it is the least materialistic country. If you look at any American settlement … it is a facade down the highway of shop fronts. Go behind the fronts and you will see the junkyards made of shacks, ruined cars, heaps of old bottles — a generally unkempt array of rust and ruin.”
— Alan Watts
Something else that the counterculture movement gifted us was proof that in America, even countercultural movements can serve mainstream commercial aims. Almost as soon as it began, savvy entrepreneurs were stocking retail stores with tie-dye t-shirts and bellbottoms, not to mention best-selling recordings of the movement’s music (cue Bob Dylan), and the libraries of new writing that the movement sparked.
In present day America, the selling of fads as retail is pervasive — fashion firms hire professionals to predict upcoming trends. Every high school clique has its retail store — the jocks shop at Abercrombie and Hollister, the punks and goths go to Hot Topic, and the hipsters go to Goodwill (or Urban Outfitters, if they’re faux hipster). Mindful people download meditation apps, subscribe to Tricycle magazine, and wear prayer beads. Like the selling of counterculture, mind/body pursuits have become an economic pursuit unto themselves, a social clique. The mind/body industry is as much capitalizing on stressed-out American culture as it is serving it — it’s currently worth $1.1 billion in the US. It’s commodified, it’s app-able, it’s monetizable.
Culturally, we love the quick fix. Need to eat? Pop it in the microwave. Want to make more money faster? Here are a billion different books and self-help gurus to send you on your way. It’s no shock that we’re consuming meditation content through addictively engineered smartphone apps (of which over thirteen hundred are available), or subscribing to meditation programs that give us quick and dirty techniques for squeezing in mindfulness. It’s almost unfair to blame workplaces for approaching mindfulness with the same hasty manner that pervades the rest of Western culture.
Many are quick to dismiss purveyors of the McMindfulness critique as spiritually conservative. Practices can evolve, they contend, so why shouldn’t meditation find new, modern applications, even if those applications are speedier? What’s so harmful about reengineering mindfulness for a wider, nonreligious audience? But the strength of these arguments breaks down a little when one considers which country this article is being written from — a culture of rampant consumerists with inflated egos. From this angle, the McMindfulness critique seems less like the grumblings of fundamentalists and more like a valid challenge to embrace a lifestyle that doesn’t involve quick fixes and ego-stroking.
The counterculture engaged with the new spirituality both in practice and as a social force, but the mind/body industry is often just a way to enjoy spirituality on a surface level. After all, most people who visit a yoga studio will never read about the Yamas and Niyamas (yoga’s ethical practice) or visit an ashram. And even though proponents of yoga and mindfulness espouse karma, its application is usually limited to cursory, day-to-day interactions instead of time-consuming, thankless, but truly world-changing activities like community service. According to the Corporation for National Community Service, only a quarter of Americans volunteer at all. Mindfulness and yoga instructors proselytize the importance of self-care as a prerequisite to caring for others, but curiously never seem to offer instructions beyond step one. The pursuit of self-care is a lifelong process; if one’s energy stagnates at the personal level, mindfulness can never materialize in the greater universe.
Meditation Sickness
Sociologists say the Baby Boomer generation gradually lost trust in traditional authority; Generations X, Y (Millennials), and Z were born with that distrust in hand. This is one of the reasons why Watts’s teachings have been repopularized in the past decade — it’s all of the spirituality and none of the institution. But the notion of personal spirituality, finding the divine within oneself, also feeds into a modern culture that breeds pervasive narcissism on a daily basis — like posting on Instagram, which some psychologists say creates an unhealthy “reflective self-esteem.” Unfortunately, mindfulness has been adapted to the self-centered rhetoric as well, and the way McMindfulness sees it, the movement is as much about boosting egos as it is about anything else.
“You are enough.” “You are your own power.” “Experience yourself.” Scribble on the sign-in sheet at any American yoga studio and you’re guaranteed to hear variations of these catchphrases. Eastern religions and their derivative practices aid students in discovering the divine inside themselves. Everything is god; therefore, they are god; therefore, they are everything. But rather than humbling the neophyte, these practices can serve to prop up the ego, to encourage meditators to serve whatever selfish whimsy feels right. If it feels good, do it. Apps like Headspace have become the equivalent of a meditator’s Instagram, encouraging users to share their journey while delivering techy dopamine hits like progress reports — as if anything as complex as meditation could be translated into data.
In Western culture, the pursuit of wealth, material goods, and social status is inherent … Those aims don’t dissipate when we sit on the meditation cushion.
In most mindfulness trainings, you won’t hear any mention of a wider moral framework. It’s assumed that if you listen deeply enough to your inner voice, that inner voice will automatically align with some vague, universal code of pure intention. This wrongly assumes that cultural preconditioning plays no part, and is therefore dangerous.
In fact, Buddhism makes a strong delineation between right and wrong mindfulness. The Pali Canon (the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha) contends that even a cold-blooded murderer can be mindful — hence, wrong mindfulness. The cultivation of right mindfulness includes a set of ethical considerations, which in traditional Buddhism are far more important than stress reduction or concentration goals. Mindfulness meditation, in Buddhism, is not a tool for continually refocusing on oneself or the moment, but for opening the door to the wider context of existence, which includes social harmony and its related obstacles.
In Western culture, the pursuit of wealth, material goods, and social status is inherent, whether identified explicitly or not. Those aims don’t dissipate when we sit on the meditation cushion. The reason we go there in the first place might be to better concentrate (so we can work more efficiently toward career aims and monetary gain); to be able to tune out factors that aren’t important (which could be synonymous with “not self-serving”); or simply so we can tell others that we practice mindfulness (the game of “spiritual one-upmanship” that Alan Watts describes). If it’s used in these ways, and it unquestionably is, Mindfulness has been transformed into little more than a hack.
Any similarities between sixties counterculture and Mindfulness cease as soon as the scope moves beyond spiritual practice. This is where Mindfulness truly falls flat. It encourages users to engage transformative ideas in the mind, and then leaves them there to rot before they can materialize socially.
Alan Watts’s spirituality, on the other hand, included a vehement criticism of the military industrial complex and a plea for conservationism. According to Mark Watts, his son, “By the sixties, [Alan] was strongly advocating [against] the insanity of commuting … consuming all this gas. And he was an activist, trying to get the Southern Pacific Railroad up and running as a commuter train, which finally happened in the last year. But he was advocating that in the sixties.” Watts engaged with figureheads of the movement like Timothy Leary, whose “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy contributed to the Great Society, a group attempt to imagine a future alternative society. “I think that the culture of that time, of the late sixties, early seventies, was a very ‘get real’ culture,” says Mark Watts. “If you had maintained your position as a bookish philosopher, you would’ve been considered quite a square. And he [Alan Watts] wasn’t. He got into it.”
It’s assumed that if you listen deeply enough to your inner voice, that inner voice will automatically align with some vague, universal code of pure intention.
Buddhism is not an ethically neutral religion, and the Buddha didn’t teach meditation so that his followers would feel less stressed out and more focused at work (or so that they could add “living mindfully” to their Instagram profiles). The McMindfulness critique is insistent, not because mindfulness techniques have been uprooted, but because the practice of mindfulness meditation has been reoriented toward the same greedy and deluded capitalist culture from which Buddhists believe it could — if infused as a complete framework — liberate us.
Begin to Shift Your Awareness … to Your Cubicle
“The Western world has labored for many many centuries under a monarchical conception of the universe where god is the boss, and political systems and all kinds of law have been based on this model of the universe, that nature is run by a boss … What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed. It has no boss, and yet all the parts recognize each other in the same way as the cells of the body all cooperate together.”
— Alan Watts, The Houseboat Summit
If mindfulness isn’t just stress relief, if it can act as mental reengineering, it’s no wonder that misgiving looms around the notion of workplace mindfulness. It’s been pegged as the manipulative echo of fifties and sixties sensitivity trainings — dubbed “cow psychology,” because docile cows give more milk. From the standpoint of McMindfulness, this is exactly what mindfulness can become in the workplace — no more than a pacifier that gives the illusion of progress while toxic workplace practices go on unaddressed. Is workplace Mindfulness corporate quietism (defined as the calm acceptance of things as they are without attempts to resist or change them)? Or is it a Trojan horse?
McMindfulness asserts that workplace mindfulness is particularly cruel when combined with self-care/self-regulation rhetoric. It immediately shifts the onus for handling workplace stress onto the backs of the individuals, frames stress as a choice, and allows employers to wipe their hands clean. Change starts with the individual, many mindfulness trainings say — employers happily thumbs-up that philosophy; the problem is that, often, the buck stops there too.
Meditation is not simply a tool for connecting with oneself; it’s also concerned with meditating on worldly suffering and finding ways to address it.
Employers offer benefits for two reasons: 1) they legally have to or 2) it benefits their bottom line in some way. Nationwide, employers are not required to grant paid time off, yet many do because they can better retain staff that way, and because they know that well-rested, mentally sound employees are more productive. So why is mindfulness training being offered? A multitude of studies strongly suggest that mindfulness training can result in more productive, focused, and happy employees. McMindfulness points out that in this case, the pursuit of mindfulness is all about the employer — cow psychology, again. But even if employers aren’t pulling mindfulness into the office as part of a corporate quietism scheme, one still asks: Would employers host mindfulness trainings if the sole beneficiary were its employees?
McMindfulness states that meditation should include an awareness of and engagement with societal context. Meditation is not simply a tool for connecting with oneself; it’s also concerned with meditating on worldly suffering and finding ways to address it. These goals are lost when applied in the form of a coping mechanism, one designed to soothe without truly addressing a stressed-out, overworked culture. According to Marina Grazier, whose practice combines principles of both Buddhist insight meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy, “… the criticism — mindfulness is a Band-Aid — I think is an utterly valid one. There are, I’m sure, organizations who just think, ‘All right, this is the latest fad. It all sounds great and sexy, and everyone’s talking about it, so let’s stick in some mindfulness; let’s do it to our people. And then a month later, we can go back to how things were.’”
An Insider’s Perspective
To point fingers toward anything as large as the Western corporate world necessitates generalizations, and McMindfulness is no exception. Before one begins setting a (figurative!) torch to their office, an insider perspective might abate the 1984-esque bleakness.
McMindfulness assumes lackadaisical or wicked intent from employers, but Grazier — who has trained around two hundred workplace mindfulness teachers over the past four years — sees it as just the opposite. “My experience is that people are talking about stress more openly because there has been a societal shift around how we name and address stress,” she posits. “The World Health Organization noted that by 2020, depression would be the single biggest cause of lost quality of life of all illness … there has been a cultural shift in organizations taking responsibility and being willing to acknowledge that this is a business problem that needs solving.” By this token, stress relief — although not as lofty a goal as enlightenment — is still a commendable aim. So are employers mollifying, or are they doing what they can to alleviate stress-induced suffering?
To the charge that mindfulness is marketed to employers as performance enhancing, Grazier says that’s not far from the truth. However, “How it really helps people and helps their souls and helps their quality of life, and helps their sanity — it’s not because I don’t care about all of that. Quite the reverse. It’s because I have developed a vocabulary that really emphasizes the business solutions of mindfulness, because without that, I can’t get through the door, and I can’t get access to the employees whom I desperately want to help.”
This alludes to the Trojan horse metaphor mentioned earlier — the idea that mindfulness sneaks into the workplace and reassembles it from the inside out. But Grazier doesn’t think that’s Mindfulness’s role in the first place. (There’s also no evidence to suggest that it works that way.) “I’m not suggesting for one minute that mindfulness is the solution for all ills,” she urges. “And it’s definitely not a solution for toxic working practices. Absolutely not.” But, “it can help a lot, for all people who are stuck in a situation where, for all sorts of reasons, they can’t change jobs or change their circumstances right now, and they need tools to be able to manage themselves in the face of the tremendous pressure.”
From Grazier’s perspective, mindfulness is not a Trojan horse. “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that mindfulness could change that [workplace culture]. That is a global cultural challenge.” In her eyes, mindfulness is “just another change program, and therefore, it needs to be managed effectively as such. And when it’s not, then the cultural change, the societal change that’s required, won’t happen.”
To the McMindfulness camp, Grazier might suggest that workplace mindfulness is far more innocent than the critique suggests. Her training — which she refers to as insight meditation rather than mindfulness meditation — doesn’t encourage practitioners to separate themselves from thought, which critics suggest brainwashes employees into compliance. “Quite the reverse,” says Grazier. “I’m constantly helping people to develop the capacity to tune in to the thought from moment to moment. And to notice the embodied emotion. So it’s actually a training that’s about tuning in to all of that. Being present with it.”
It’s also important to note that Grazier’s version of mindfulness training is just that — a version. Not all versions of mindfulness training work in anyone’s best interest. “We are not regulated at all at the moment in the UK,” says Grazier, “and I’d welcome that, ’cause that would shake out a lot of teachers who have just done their one-day training, or worse still, their online training.”
Grazier’s version of mindfulness encourages employees to take responsibility for their stress, not so that they become more efficient employees, but so that they become better people, and insist on better workplaces. “It’s about making choices,” she points out. “So I suppose that on an individual level, taking some self-responsibility, and having the tools and techniques … [to] make a wise decision that says, I’m no longer going to work in this toxic way, and I’m going to leave.” In a 2007 German pilot study on mindfulness, this is precisely what happened — call center agents became more aware of the noxious reality of their work environment, and challenged it as a result.
When it comes to mindfulness’s role in rejigging corporate culture, Grazier asks, “Is it realistic to expect that it ever could? I don’t know. When I start to ponder it from that perspective, rather than give up and go home, I then remember the thousands of people … for whom there has been tremendous personal benefit in terms of their quality of life.” Which pretty much sums up mindfulness’s current role at best. It can be a useful tool for helping individuals manage a less-than-ideal workplace existence. But it isn’t stabbing at the heart of the matter.
The Workplace Crisis
It’s the very nature of modern workplace environments that McMindfulness targets, and this is perhaps its most compelling criticism — the fact that the movement claims a transformative quality without any hard evidence that workplaces have actually improved at all. A truly mindful lifestyle is almost completely at odds with most modern workplaces, and no amount of meditation, no matter how helpful to the individual, can solve larger cultural workplace issues.
If anything, the modern workplace culture is in crisis mode. A 2016 Gallup poll found that American workers are “unengaged and looking elsewhere,” and a recent Harvard Business Review article confirmed that 61 percent of Americans feel they have to cover in some way when at work. Our workplaces don’t reflect our authentic selves, and research points to the ineffectiveness of outdated practices like the forty-hour workweek (most Americans work forty-seven, actually). Long hours backfire, and managers can’t tell the difference between overworking and underworking employees anyway; some people (men especially) lie about how many hours they work in order to seem impressive. Dissatisfaction with workplace lifestyle has paved the way for a whole host of neo-gurus like Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) to capitalize on the discontentment by teaching new, faster, and more autonomous ways to earn income.
Our culture of overwork is killing us, maybe not through seizures, but through stress-related health conditions and a loss of life quality.
Is it really so surprising when articles like this scathing exposé on Amazon’s workplace culture bubble to the top of our news feeds? Or when we hear about the death of a twenty-one-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern who was killed by an epileptic seizure after a seventy-two-hour working streak? (New policies were adopted shortly thereafter to cap intern workdays at seventeen hours; feel free to take a moment to meditate on how ludicrous that is.) News bulletins like this should frighten us to pieces, because our culture of overwork is killing us, maybe not through seizures, but through stress-related health conditions and a loss of life quality.
Work/life balance has become a substanceless concept, and many argue that work should be our life, and so a delineation isn’t necessary. “If you love your job, then it’s not really work,” they counter, a rhetoric that only encourages the competition-based work culture that is mentally ruining us. Many of us have no choice but to engage in toxic workplaces, particularly if we have families or other dependents. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to walk away. If we won’t succumb to a work culture that we feel isn’t conducive to mindfulness, you can bet that someone else will. The only choice is to compete — you don’t want the distinguishing factor to be the working hours the other person put in.
Even a workplace as reputedly forward-thinking as Google does not fall outside the lines of hypercompetition and stress. “What balance?” scoffs one Glassdoor review. “All those perks and benefits are an illusion. They keep you at work and they help you to be more productive.” In an exposé on Google’s work/life culture, former senior account manager Joe Cannella dishes: “… you end up spending the majority of your life eating Google food, with Google coworkers, wearing Google gear … you eventually start to lose sight of what it’s like to be independent of the big G … You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end.”
Google is particularly ripe for scrutiny because it has been so actively engaged in the Mindfulness movement, going so far as to invite Thich Nhat Hanh (also known as Thay) — the celebrated Vietnamese monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — to lead a half-day workshop: “Mindfulness as a Foundation for Health.” But even a visit from a revered Buddhist monk does not immunize Google to misguided mindsets. Scroll down in the video description and you’ll read:
“Life at Google is fast, furious and fun, yet it can take a toll on ourselves and our loved ones. Through Thay’s specially crafted workshop, you’ll learn how to reduce stress, eat for health, sleep better, find emotional stability, improve concentration and sustain optimal performance.”
Google has unwittingly admitted to the same toxic philosophy that McMindfulness accuses: Your work/life balance is your responsibility. Your stress is your choice. If you are struggling, it’s you who needs to make adjustments. All you need is a little mindfulness.
Of course, if you do encounter Mindfulness in your workplace, you can simply not engage. After all, mindfulness trainings are optional. And if you’re presented with a mindfulness seminar that isn’t optional, well, you don’t need a meditation practice to realize it’s time to pack up your desk.
Let Us Close with the Sound of Om
“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
— Joseph de Maistre
The sound of om (sounds how it’s spelled) is a sacred sound in Hinduism and a mantra in Buddhism. It refers both to one’s soul, and everything else (Wikipedia: “ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, knowledge”). It’s in the context of om’s inward/outward connectivity that one can begin to make sense of the Mindfulness debacle.
In the same way that workplaces won’t change without pressure from employees, workplaces won’t change without a culture that allows employers to make that shift. We live in a competitive, capitalist society, so why would employers encourage mindful lifestyles if doing so scrapes away at their bottom line? The problem is interconnected by one common molecule.
Organizations and governments are simply conceits; people are people. When employees complain about toxic workplaces, they aren’t referring to some nameless entity — they’re referring to other people, people who happen to be in leadership positions. In this way, responsibility for encouraging a more mindful existence does rest on the individual — all individuals, employee or CEO, congressperson or senator, whether they practice mindfulness or not. In Buddhism, no one arrives at liberation over anyone else’s back.
The challenge of mindfulness means pressing for a mindful quality of existence in every aspect of life — it could be that mindfulness is simply a synonym for social reform. Actually, the movement for a more mindful existence has already started, though it doesn’t don that moniker. In the case of overwork, multiple nations are reforming their workplace policies. (West) Germany cut the average working year from 2,163 days per year in 1960 to 1,363 days today; in 1993 it instituted a mandatory twenty days of vacation for employees who work a five-day workweek, and German employers commonly grant two weeks of vacation beyond that. Working remotely and flexible work hours are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. And no number of life hacks — mindfulness techniques or otherwise — can quell the unrest among millennials, who are the first generation to emphasize work/life balance over career progression. The overwork has to stop, and pressure for that change is happening both at the individual level and as a result of the neural network to which all of us are connected. These changes are occurring because of action, whether or not one claims that mindfulness is behind it.
But Grazier isn’t “… optimistic about the capacity for [mindfulness] to effect the change. I’m not a historian, but I can’t think of many times where that’s happened” — a sentiment that could be readily applied to a laundry list of practices, spiritual and secular, that claim the ability to alter human existence. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there is no Big Answer — there is only action and progress, and the prerequisite discomfort, strife, and relentlessness to see it through. Only the individual can decide whether a mindfulness practice will encourage these aims. In Mark Watts’s opinion, “The wheels of justice grind slow, but fine. And I think that these forces [internal change] will have, and do have a dynamic effect. It’s just that they’re far more subtle and less aggressive than the things that we’re faced with.”
A final lesson from Alan Watts, here. During the era of his teaching, nuclear holocaust seemed imminent, and yet the way Watts engaged Margaret Mead — who was vehemently advocating restraint and nonproliferation — is striking. Says Mark Watts: “He said, ‘You scare me. You sound like the kind of person who is worked up about this. And you might push the button first, to keep somebody else from pushing it.’ And of course, she was furious with him. But he maintained his position, which was, ‘Look at your state of mind.’ He didn’t get involved in these controversies, and all the vitriol around the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, because he saw that that state of mind was a problem.” Watts saw polarization as the bigger problem; in some ways, he did not engage. “When he saw people yelling, and screaming, and shouting down, and protesting, it just seemed to him wrong,” explains Mark Watts.
When asked how, then, his father chose to advocate for change in the world, he simply replied: “By doing it.”
The solution for suffering might not be a new technique or practice, but the quality of mind with which we approach conflict in the first place. That could be mindfulness’s ultimate role. It might better tune us in to reality, or it might be the gateway to a spiritual quest. But it will never fix modern suffering simply because we meditate before we check our emails, or fit in a quick meditation through our smartphones.
