Let’s Talk About Meditation in America
The United States once again struggles in ridding itself of one of its most ‘American’ practices: ‘discovering’ an ancient and foreign entity, stripping it of its identity, and ultimately using it to further the nation’s capital gain. This time, it’s meditation.
The United States continues to grasp at the tiny threads that tether it to some sense of mental stability. Americans breathe in…breathe out…breathe in…and breathe out again, but the forever bustling and never-resting lifestyle of the average American corporate employee leaves little room for a life without constant stress. In the US’s current era, one must operate at maximum efficiency at all times, and anything else simply seems inadequate. This world in which capital gain seems to be the utmost priority, leaves Corporate America’s employees seeming expendable; burnout is just too easy to reach. As a whole, the American population is suffering: “the mental health of the nation has declined in the past 20 years…and the toll of mental disorders has grown, even as other serious conditions have become more manageable” (Higgins, 2017). Apart from genetic mental disorders, much of America’s crisis is derived from life in America’s fast-paced capitalist society; keeping up with the nation’s demands for increased capital has taken a significant toll on the country’s mental wellbeing. Given that the US still cowers from the taboos of mental illness and mental health treatment, it is not at all surprising that the American public has needed some solution that is more commercially appealing, that distracts from the ‘shame’ of Corporate’s toll on the American mind. To mask the exhaustion that naturally comes with a capitalist society’s demands, America has indeed created a ‘market’ for a mental health mediator.
A practice whose teachings originate in 5000 BCE India (Puff, 2013), ‘meditation’ is referred to as Dhyana — translated directly to “training of the mind” in Sanskrit and has been integral to Hinduism’s spiritual teachings (Mead, 2020). Where Dhyana’s millennia-old goal lies in “attaining oneness of one’s spirit with the omnipresent and non-dual almighty” (Tapas, 2018), and whose process serves to “become consciously aware of, and to investigate into, one’s own mind and body to know oneself…to participate in focused thinking with or without the exercise of individual will…and to gain insightful awareness to control our responses and reactions,” (Jayaram, 2019) it has not been culturally concerned with the maintenance of mental health in the slightest. Even after its journey into America by way of Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda in the early 20th century, meditation’s popularity has only really taken off in the last few years, quite conveniently coinciding with the nation’s mental health crisis. Its appeal to the average American consumer understandably lies in its scientifically proven benefits, which unanimously assert that meditation can:
· Help one navigate stress.
· Improve one’s mental focus.
· Boost one’s self-compassion, and compassion towards others.
· Reduce harmful biases that permeate one’s mind.
· Aid in recovery from mental blocks, negative thinking, anxiety, and depression.
· Overall, improve mental health. (Tlalka, 2018)
But it is abundantly clear that America’s attraction to meditation lies in the act of cherry-picking the aspects of the Ancient Vedic culture that most effectively serve as a balm to the nation’s troubled psyche. Meditation finds its appeal in America as a friendly way in which to help manage the demands of a capitalist society without falling apart. With a surplus of scientific praise backing its benefits, meditation has begun to supply America’s demand for a low-key mental health palliator, all the while eerily evading connection to its cultural history. The beginnings of a fascination with meditation’s benefits have kicked open the door for a market of Americanized meditation culture, subsequently bestowing upon the nation a digital app-based world of meditation.
To say the least, digital meditation culture has been whitewashed; in both of the world’s most popular meditation apps — Calm and Headspace — there is no reference to the Vedic tradition. Rather worryingly, both apps serve as proof of another instance of ‘cherry-picking’ the aspects of the tradition for American popularization and deeming it “mindfulness” (Headspace App). Perusing both apps extensively, it becomes increasingly clear that only Headspace refers to its creator, Andy Puddicombe as being trained as a Buddhist monk in the Indian Himalayas, before popularizing his learnings through the app to guide others towards “demystifying the mystical” (Puddicombe, 2021) while Calm does not make any statement about the matter. When commenting on his new app — Oak — that follows in Calm and Headspace’s footsteps, tech mogul Kevin Rose asserts that he “embraces the cultures that birth [meditation] but wants to avoid it [in Oak. He] will get into more traditional language [later], but [he] doesn’t want to scare people away” (Rao, 2018). Such comments prove that America’s acceptance of meditation is inhibited by accrediting it to its origins. Only when white tech moguls and meditation experts whose studies originate in Asia commercialize and whitewash the ‘exotic’ meditation, the American public is ready to accept it as good. No matter how benevolent the intentions of all three apps’ creators, it is incredibly difficult to ignore the trope of the white American (Englishman, in Puddicombe’s case) commercializing — and really, colonizing — a deeply rooted Asian tradition without reference to its history or meaning and portraying it as their own discovery and businesses from which they make immense profits. It seems that America will not accept meditation’s teachings or spiritual truths unless it is specifically curated for American life and painted as an American practice.
One could argue successfully that for the individual, meditation apps navigate the process of “[participating] in focused thinking…and [gaining] insightful awareness to control responses and reactions,” (Jayaram, 2019), but the goal of app-based Americanized meditation again only serves to optimize the average American’s performance as an individual in society. Take, for example, Headspace and Calm: listing sundry guided meditations in which instructors lead the practitioner through a navigation of troublesome feelings and experiences to ultimately achieve peace of mind, the apps seem to hold a key to calming down the stress-ridden American. Headspace, in particular, provides a specifically designed section of meditations within the app for user who need to “manage work stress” or “focus at work”, but only those who pay extra fees are granted access to it (Headspace App). Not only does Headspace provide stress-relieving sessions for overwhelmed employees in high-pressure jobs, but it necessitates that those who require such mental relief have access to personal funds to pay for the meditations.
On the surface, meditation apps take steps towards reuniting the average American with mental peace, but they perpetuate the power imbalance imparted by American capitalism.
To further understand just how deeply meditation apps fall in line with America’s capitalist philosophy, the valuation of the Americanized meditation industry must be analysed. With tens of millions of users, Headspace offers an annual subscription to its services for $49.99 annually (Headspace App) and is valued at $320 million (Curry, 2020); and Calm’s subscription competes at $69.99 per annum (Calm App), while clocking in at a staggering $2 billion valuation (Mascarenhas, 2020). So, not only do the most popular meditation apps in America popularize Americanized meditation as the ‘appealing’ way to practice, but in taking from another culture’s tradition, meditation CEOs profit immensely. But despite many questionable decisions in cultural ethics, it cannot be ignored that such apps have paved the way for meditation’s full-fledged popularization in America, so much so that CEOs of Corporate America have taken to the introduction of Corporate Mindfulness.
Corporate Mindfulness has found itself to be an unmeasurable meter of irony since its conception. Among some practitioners of ‘mindful’ meditation, as popularized by such apps, have been large-name CEOs of Corporate America, many of whom are taking to introduce meditation as a practice to uphold in the workplace. Google, Goldman Sachs, and General Motors — to name a few — boast of their ‘successful’ Corporate Mindfulness programs (Ng, Purser, 2015). Such corporations have taken to designating space in their offices to serve as ‘perfect’ meditation areas, and even more companies host ‘corporate meditations’ in which teams meditate together in the office, often using apps like Headspace and Calm to do so. And of course, the movement is beneficial to the individual employee’s performance; once again, science cements mediation’s aid in increasing productivity, creativity, efficiency, stress-management, etc. in the workplace, but is Corporate Mindfulness the benevolent gift unto the workplace by CEOs wishing their employees mental peace that it claims to be?
In reality, while mindful breaks are productive, employees spend more hours at work but are ultimately paid less for the hours they actually spend at the office since, by meditating, they are not actually working. Ronald Purser and Edwin Ng push further in their scathing analysis of Corporate Mindfulness, referring to a Stanford-Harvard study whose meta-analysis “shows that employee stress is not self-imposed nor due to a lack of mindfulness. On the contrary, major workplace stressors were associated with a lack of health insurance, threats of constant layoffs and job insecurity, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long work hours, low organizational justice, and unrealistic job demands” (Ng, Purser, 2015). Corporate America engenders the need for the average American employee to pursue meditation and yet simultaneously positions itself as the hero for coining ‘the solution’ to workplace stress in the form of Corporate Mindfulness. Really, though, how can Corporate Mindfulness not be perceived as Corporate America’s attempt to push employees to pursue meditation such that they ultimately function at peak performance? Employees are in better condition despite workplace stressors, perform more efficiently, make more money for their employers but less for themselves. In many cases, the movement may be a poorly conceived attempt at a benevolent attitude towards employees, but surely a free company-wide subscription to a meditation app, through which employees can maintain their mental health in their own time would be a better solution? Or perhaps sorely needed corporate reform? In this light, American meditation in the workplace seems verifiably contorted to suit the capital gain of the few, behind a guise of foolproof benevolence to the many. Instead of training the minds of Corporate America’s employees to withstand the never-ending increase of intolerable stressors in the workplace, CEOs must prioritize the voices of their subordinates and listen to their cries for necessary reform.
Though, on the individual scale, meditation’s popularity to ameliorate the mental condition of many struggling Americans is a wonderful saving grace, practitioners of meditation as a Vedic and Buddhist tradition may find the commercialization of American meditation to be upsettingly distasteful. Where one of meditation’s primary traditional purposes lies in detaching oneself from the material to focus on the ‘self’, Americanized meditation serves to quite a polar opposite goal. After all, Americanized meditation, to some extent, is quite deeply materialistic and serves to further capital gain or to perpetuate the peak performance of individuals who uphold capital-generating corporations. A cruel distortion of an ancient spiritual narrative of peace and harmony of the mind, body, and spirit, America’s meditation covers society’s eyes to a capitalist nation’s effort to silence its workers as they plead for corporate reform.
Sources:
Headspace App.
Calm App.
