Lost Horizons? The emergence and contested nature of secular mindfulness.

Mindfulness has become a cultural phenomenon. Mindfulness interventions have been introduced into multiple professional contexts including health care, business, sport, and education with claims for its virtuous effects including in areas such as stress relief; enhanced communication; better emotional intelligence; enhanced self-awareness; free will, and an increase in attainment. This paper considers these phenomena, seeking to address questions such as:
• What is the appeal of mindfulness at this time?
• To what extent can mindfulness be secular?
• How robust is the evidence for some of the claims for mindfulness?
• What are the criticisms of mindfulness?
This paper argues that mindfulness has a particular appeal to those within technologically advanced, increasingly secular and individualised societies. Arguably mindfulness is a manifestation of the needs of a disenchanted population who, having secularised clumsily, have turned uncritically to a sanitised form of spirituality and specifically an essentialised and sanitised form of Buddhism. Mindfulness and Buddhism have arguably been shaped to fit the needs of late capitalism.
This paper considers criticisms of mindfulness such as its commodification and deployment in corporate and military settings; critiques from religious communities, most prominently from Buddhist sources, and secular voices about cherry picking, indoctrination and misuse of mindfulness, and views that mindfulness may be a tool for pacification rather than empowerment and social action.
This paper is a chance to reflect on the extent to which mindfulness is or can be truly secular, and to consider the origins and purposes of mindfulness. The ‘mindful revolution’ can be considered a mirror by which to consider the social, economic, and ideological grounds for its appeal. Hopefully what emerges is a considered, critical, inclusive, and cautiously optimistic view of mindfulness and it’s potential.