Chapter summaries of What's Wrong with Mindfulness

Introduction: Universal Mindfulness— Be Careful What You Wish For?

Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum and Barry Magid

This chapter is more directly about so called McMindfulness than subsequent chapters: "mindfulness morphs into myriad strains of self-improvement, self-actualization, and … simply the self-involvement of a consumerist culture." It also summarizes the following chapters.

1. Mischief in the Marketplace for Mindfulness

Marc R. Poirier

This is also definitely about McMindfulness, emphasizing that it is driven by greed. The importance of sangha and teacher. Scientific justifications of mindfulness. "By peddling so hard the usefulness of meditation as technique, these approaches can obscure the basic Zen practice of just being, with its experience of noticing, stillness, and occasional joy." "Meditation and mindfulness instructors who respond by marketing their products in a way claiming to offer some final satisfaction are stimulating greed and aversion, perhaps without even being aware of it."

2. "I" Doesn't Mind

Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum

By limiting its instruction to increasing "ego strength," McMindfulness promotes a false sense of an essential self. Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches that the self is the main source of our misery and that there is no such thing as an essential self.

3. The Three Shaky Pillars of Western Buddhism: Deracination, Secularization, and Instrumentalization

Barry Magid and Marc R. Poirier

This was an interesting chapter. Westernized mindfulness is not the first deracination (uprooting) of Buddhism. It was modernized and secularized in Japan well over a century ago. The real problem is instrumentalization: repurposing Buddhism to improve physical and mental health, increase self-improvement, and promote self-actualization. This turns Buddhism into a commodified consumer product. That may be an unavoidable consequence of introducing Buddhism into a Western culture so thoroughly permeated with individualism, materialism, and secularism. "What does it mean to go glibly, seamlessly, weekend to weekend, from African drumming to Tibetan Tantra to a simulacrum of an American Indian sweat lodge?"

Magid was a student of Joko Beck, who stressed psychological aspects of Buddhist practice. "The scandals that rocked the first generation of Buddhist communities were not unfortunate anomalies, but rather they were symptomatic of a widespread disconnect between American fantasies and idealizations of liberation and enlightenment, and the reality that Asian forms of practice did little to work through, at a psychological level, the shadow side of teachers and students alike."

4. Mindfulness Myths: Fantasies and Facts

Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum

This is better than Rosenbaum's earlier chapter. It's mainly a discrediting of using scientific studies, especially of the brain, to promote meditation. The mind is not the brain. "[I]nstead of relying on magnetic imaging and radioactive isotopes to tell us meditation is 'working' for a person, wouldn't it be better to assess the effects of meditation on individuals by finding out if they treat the people and objects around them with more kindness and compassion?" "Relying on neuroscience to validate Dharma practice implies that the spiritual practice of meditation is not valuable in and of itself: we must justify it with something outside itself. … The Western need to justify a practice by measuring and quantifying assumes utilitarianism as the highest good, but this is ultimately tragic, for it implies you, too, must justify yourself as having some use. Simply being yourself, it seems, is somehow not enough."

And the following is an excellent point for his argument: "the benefits of quiet, relaxation, and stress management are so powerful it is often difficult to demonstrate that meditation contributes much beyond potentiating and enhancing the non-specific mechanisms at play in deep relaxation." He goes on to discredit psychological studies that credit a particular technique for the observed outcome, while ignoring the client's motivation, psychological health, and socioeconomic status. "The finding that it is the client, not the therapist nor the technique, that is most important in the process of change is not a popular finding among adherents for this or that particular 'brand' of treatment, but the evidence is overwhelming."  

5. One Body, Whole Life: Mindfulness and Zen

Hozan Alan Senauke 

The best part of this otherwise rather boring chapter is when he quotes from Purser and Loy's essay "Beyond McMindfulness."

6. The Buffet: Adventures in the New Age 

Sallie Jiko Tisdale

A rather self-indulgent description of teaching at a New Age retreat center. Nothing worth quoting.

7. Two Practices, One Path       

Gil Fronsdal and Max Erdstein

How should we translate "sati?" Fronsdal, and then Fronsdal and Erdstein,  compare Zen and Vipassana.

8. Solitude: On Mindfulness in the Arts      

Norman Fischer

This chapter is different. It begins with a free form poem by Fischer. Then a description of his mind while he was writing it. It's about creativity and what I would describe as being in a state of flow ("the thinking is free and open, not driven by desire associated with self and its productions and needs"). "[T]he value of improvising and 'authenticity' in the moment of composition has probably been the dominant ideology in art of the last hundred years or so … Before I practiced zazen I was trying to express myself and my ideas in my writing, and I was trying to write well, to achieve something of worth and note. … When I began to devote myself to zazen almost out of desperation I found eventually that I could enjoy writing, forget myself, and approach the work as adventure, surprise, practice, without having myself at stake." This is thought-provoking for anyone who engages in a creative endeavor. He draws a parallel between putting too much effort into practicing mindfulness and into a creative project: in both cases the effort is counter productive.

9. Plastic, Zen, and Mindfulness         

Janet Jiryu Abels

Being mindful about the plastic in your life as a practice. If only we could all be as ecologically mindful as Janet Jiryu Abels.

10. Drowning in Suffering: Mindful Feminism Finds Zen Liberation  

Grace Schireson

Grace Schireson communicates to her Japanese Roshi her misgivings about what she thinks of gender discrimination. In Japan, Japanese women are not allowed to practice in monasteries. She is disappointed when the Roshi lectures to women on the ancient teaching of how women can escape the five hindrances: "Pray that all of your oppressors are born in Heaven, and pray that you yourself drown eternally in a sea of hardships." In a subsequent dokusan with the Roshi she brings up the issue. Their discussion does not make any progress on the issue. Her takeaway is: "What was and is important to me was my decision to take my mindfulness practice off the cushion and into my life." The issue of gender discrimination is still much worse and overt in Japan than in the US, but it remains very much an issue.

11. A Bite of the Universe        

Sojun Mel Weitsman

How to be mindful while making an avocado sandwich. Nothing worth quoting here.

Epilogue: Is Mindfulness Buddhist? (And Why It Matters)

Robert H. Sharf

This chapter was scholarly and academic, but very much worth reading. Sharf refers to Buddhist modernism: "an approach to Buddhism that evolved out of a complex intellectual exchange between Asia and the West that took place over the last 150 years or so." In particular, he discusses the intellectual history of how sati (mindfulness) came to mean "bare attention" or present-centered awareness: attending to the here and now. This understanding of sati was actually quite radical in its time, as were other changes, such as continuing to live the life of a lay person and learning the essence of practice in a relative short period of retreat. This made Buddhism easy to export.

He goes on to discuss objections to understanding sati as bare attention. This devalues or neglects the importance of ethical judgment that was implied by the term. He doesn't say this, but this is the basic complaint of Purser in McMindfulness. He does draw the parallel that "the teachers who advocated this new style of practice were also those who had garnered a sizable lay audience, an audience that presumably had little interest in monastic renunciation and little background in Buddhist doctrine." He goes on to draw other parallels with current McMindfulness.

I especially liked this: "Rather than enjoining practitioners to renounce mainstream American culture, mindfulness is seen as a way to better cope with it. There may be no better exemplar of this ethically dubious and politically reactionary stance than Tricycle Magazine, with its advertisements for expensive meditation gear, for Dharmic dating services, Dharmic dentists and accountants, and its implicit authorization of the entrepreneurial and commercial activities of countless dharma centers and self-styled Buddhist masters. The packaging of mindfulness in programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is arguably a variant on the same theme."

Coda

Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum and Barry Magid

This is short and to the point. "[A]ny practice can become reified. When a practice is taken out of its original context and is codified, instrumentalized, and constrained to become a means to an end, it runs the danger not only of losing many of the rich meanings of its original sources but of getting in the way of what it intends to express."