Mindfulness is all the rage right now, but how much is it doing? In the Forbes article published on April 21, “Your Mindfulness Practice May Be Working Against You. Here’s Why,” writer Neil Derick Debevoise Dewey unpacks why so many professionals and leadership experts, who have all dedicated time and energy to mindfulness, still feel empty.
He spoke to Dr. Liz Bucar, a professor of religion, author, a Dean’s Leadership Fellow, and WGSS-affiliated faculty, about why that is.
“Self-care doesn’t matter if it doesn’t help us stay engaged,” Bucar told me in a recent conversation. “If it’s just about the individual and survival, it’s not enough.”
In order for the mindfulness industry to comercially grow, a lot of the Buddhist concepts surrounding community and responsibility to others were subtracted from the data, and mindfulness became a performance tool. Bucar describes that what’s crucially missing is a “worldview,” or “the coherent framework of meaning, purpose, and obligation to others within which the original practice was embedded.” Dewey remarks that without a worldview, mindfulness is more like “McMindfulness: a productivity technique masquerading as transformation.” In fact, by stripping the Buddhist context from mindfulness practices, Bucar notes that there is an inherent “worldview mismatch,” and the results of mindfulness engagement “can be disorientation rather than relief.”
Bucar spent a week on silent vipassana retreat at Bhavana Society, a rural West Virginia monastery, learning from the retreat founder Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a 97-year-old pioneering advocate for mindfulness in the United States. This time allowed her to better teach her students and inform her novel “Beyond Wellness,” which argues that rather than the techniques being the problem, it’s their purpose.
Most of us are using wellness practices to optimize the individual self: manage stress, increase output, extend performance. But virtually every contemplative tradition Bucar examines understands wellbeing as fundamentally relational. You are not the main character.
Read the full article here.
