[DOWNLOAD -PDF-] Mindfulness and Its Discontents

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, corporatized and repackaged as a strategy to cope with our stressful society through an emphasis on self-responsibility and self-promotion, and is ignorant of the larger social, cultural and political contexts that contribute to stress, unhappiness and failure. Rather than a way to promote human development and social justice, McMindfulness covertly reinforces neoliberalism and capitalism, self-promoting systems that worsen our suffering.<br /><br />In <em>Mindfulness and Its Discontents</em> 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 curricul