Mindfulness meditation and other techniques drawn from Buddhism have increasingly been integrated into forms of psychotherapeutic intervention. In much of this work, mindfulness is understood as a mode of awareness that is present-centered and nonevaluative. This form of awareness is assumed to have intrinsic value in promoting positive mental health and adaptation by interrupting discursive thoughts that give rise to suffering. However, in the societies where it originated, mindfulness meditation is part of a larger system of Buddhist belief and practice with strong ethical and moral dimensions. Extracting techniques like mindfulness meditation from the social contexts in which they originate may change the nature and effects of the practice. The papers in this issue of Transcultural Psychiatry explore the implications of a cultural and contextual view of mindfulness for continued dialogue between Buddhist thought and psychiatry. This introductory essay considers the meanings of mindfulness meditation in cultural context and the uses of mindfulness as a therapeutic intervention in contemporary psychiatry and psychology.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363461515598949

Mindfulness in cultural context

........................................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iii Preface ........................................................................................................................................................ viii Chapter

The Religion of the Heart: Self, Solidarity, and the Sacred in Romantic Liberal Modernity

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are being actively implemented in a wide range of fields – psychology, mind/body health care and education at all levels – and there is growing evidence of their effectiveness in aiding present-moment focus, fostering emotional stability, and enhancing general mind/body well-being. However, as often happens with popular innovations, the burgeoning interest in and appeal of mindfulness practice has led to a reductionism and commodification – popularly labelled ‘McMindfulness’ – of the underpinning principles and ethical foundations of such practice which threatens to subvert and militate against the achievement of the original aims of MBIs in general and their educational function in particular. It is argued here that mindfulness practice needs to be organically connected to its spiritual roots if the educational benefits of such practice are to be fully realised.

The Limits of Mindfulness: Emerging Issues for Education

values (especially freedom and equality), civil religion includes historical narratives and exemplary figures, public poetry and civic heroism, as well as public reason” (Gorski 2017, 205). This ‘realm of pure reason’ is decried as not only unattainable, but downright counterproductive to the task of bringing philosophy to the public. After all, “A new movement on the democratic left, if it emerges, will be organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life” (Connolly 2008, x). But the New Atheists also discard the realm of pure reason as an unrealistic expectation and instead speak of a mutual interrogation of religious and secular worldviews, an interrogation that Habermas dubs as a mutual learning process. For the New Atheists, mutual interrogation means that we “abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith” (Dawkins 2006, 306). It also means that religious citizens do not have to ‘translate’ their beliefs into the language of public reason. The liberal mandate of translation says that “religious arguments have a legitimate place in the public sphere only to the extent that they can be rendered in (ideally rational) terms that are not specifically religious” (Calhoun 2011, 77). This construal of public reason never measured up to the vicissitudes of public unreason that afforded faith-based belief special privileges. Rather,

/pdf/faith-too-big-to-fail-the-struggles-and-wishes-of-new-3ehohcybuo.pdf

Faith Too Big To Fail? The Struggles and Wishes of New Atheism

Interest in the Buddhist concept of mindfulness has burgeoned over the last few decades as a result of its application as a therapeutic strategy in mind-body medicine, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, leadership and management, and a wide range of other theoretical and practical domains. Although many commentators welcome this extension of the range and application of mindfulness—drawing parallels between ancient contemplative traditions and modern secular interpretations—there has been very little analysis of either the philosophical underpinnings of this phenomenon or of its implications for education. This article examines the new interpretations of mindfulness in the following areas—meaning and definition, ethical foundations and spiritual ethos—in an attempt to gain a clearer understanding of what is involved in the process of reconstructing the concept of mindfulness. In conclusion, some implications for learning and education are examined in the light of these recent re-interpretations of mindfulness principles and practices. A central thesis throughout is that—although there are many educational benefits of mindfulness in the areas of moral, affective and spiritual education—such potential gains require the maintenance of organic connections between contemporary practices and their foundations in secular Buddhism.

On the Contemporary Applications of Mindfulness: Some Implications for Education.

Review of Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Review of Antony Flew (with Roy Abraham Varghese), There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, New York: HarperOne, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-133529-7, hb, 222pp

Reg Naulty

Papers

Review of Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Review of Antony Flew (with Roy Abraham Varghese), There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, New York: HarperOne, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-133529-7, hb, 222pp

Review of Julianne Schultz, The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation