Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation - Softcover

Forbes, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1773631160 ISBN 13: 9781773631165

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd, 2019

Synopsis

Mindfulness, a way to alleviate suffering by realizing the impermanence of the self and our interdependence with others, has been severed from its Buddhist roots. In the late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal, solipsistic West, it becomes McMindfulness, a practice that instead shores up the privatized self, and is corporatized and repackaged as a strategy to cope with our stressful society through an emphasis on self-responsibility and self-promotion. Rather than a way to promote human development and social justice, McMindfulness covertly reinforces neoliberalism and capitalism, the very self-promoting systems that worsen our suffering. In Mindfulness and Its Discontents, David Forbes provides an integral framework for a critical, social, moral mindfulness that both challenges unmindful practices and ideas and provides a way forward. He analyzes how education curricula across North America employ mindfulness: to help students learn to succeed in a neoliberal society by enhancing the ego through emphasizing individualistic skills and the self-regulation of anger and stress. Forbes argues that mindfulness educators instead should uncover and resist the sources of stress and distress that stem from an inequitable, racist, individualistic, market-based (neoliberal) society and shows how school mindfulness programs can help bring about one that is more transformative, compassionate and just.

About this title

Review:

Extending and deepening the McMindfulness critique, David Forbes takes a fearless stance by peeling away the self-centered, hedonic façade and rhetorical muddle of the Minefulness Industrial Complex.

--Ron E. Purser, author of Handbook of Mindfulness and McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

David Forbes develops a much-needed focus on a range of misuses of mindfulness in Western culture that distort education and personal development and consequently inhibit social and cultural change.

--Deborah Orr, York University

Forbes's trenchant analysis of mindfulness in American culture will appeal to readers interested in the intersection of market forces and spirituality.

--Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

David Forbes is the co-editor of Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement and author of Boyz 2 Buddhas.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1773631160
• ISBN 13: 9781773631165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254