Assembling mindful bodies
August 13, 2019 Steven M. Stanley, Ilmari Kortelainen 10 citations
This chapter examines how mindfulness is practically taught and enacted in therapy, arguing that 'mindful bodies' are assembled through concrete training encounters. Since the late nineteenth century, Asian mind-body practices have been adapted in Anglo-American and Nordic countries as therapeutic responses to industrial capitalism. Humanities scholars have shown that Buddhist disciplines like mindfulness are transformed as they move across contexts, becoming compatible with empirical science and secularized for self-healing. The authors contend that for an inner state to be recognized as 'mindfulness', public criteria must exist. Mindfulness is promoted as a way to reclaim agency and humanity within 'digital capitalism'.