Mindfulness is problematic

Instead of setting people free, mindfulness help practitioners adjust to the conditions that caused their problems and reinforce its destructive logic.

People are expected to adapt. Stress has been pathologised and privatised, and the burden of managing it is outsourced to ...

Instead of discussing how attention is monetised and manipulated by large corporations such as Google and Facebook, we are told to find the crisis in our minds, saying it is our failure to be mindful and resilient in an unsure economy. 

If we are sad about being unemployed and losing our he...

Proponents of mindfulness believe that the practice is apolitical and that moral inquiry should be avoided.

It is assumed that ethical behaviour will happen naturally from practice, through the teacher's example of soft-spoken niceness, or through the chance of self-discovery. But it is fla...

All that mindfulness promise is "cruel optimism", as cultural theorist Lauren Berlant shows. We are told that if we practise mindfulness and get our individual lives in order, we can be happy and secure. We are promised that stable employment and success will naturally follow. It is implied that ...