Social Justice, Critical Psych & Transpersonal Perspectives on Mindfulness

Practices of meditation such as mindfulness meditation have been a part of many indigenous cultures beliefs and traditions from around the world for thousands of years. In particular, these traditions often emphasized that training in meditation could help people to face the suffering of their lives with compassion and wisdom to find their deepest potential to help themselves and all other sentient beings. However, the adoption of mindfulness within psychotherapy has primarily served to be a secular practice that is mainly oriented towards helping individuals cope with the stresses of modern life without any real appreciation of the rampant social injustices that are operating on interpersonal and systemic levels. Therefore, it is not very surprising that mindfulness has often been hailed by corporations as a practice that can help improve worker productivity and even the shareholder value of the corporations they work for. In this presentation, I will discuss the disadvantages of the current culture of the appropriation of mindfulness in the USA which has been termed: McMindfulness, offer a social justice and transpersonal vision of what McMindfulness could become, and finish with perspectives from critical psychology about the systemic nature of how mindfulness became McMindfulness in the United States.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

1767 S 8th St, 1767 South 8th Street, Colorado Springs, United States