Mindfulness
June 21, 2023
Masoumeh Rahmani, Valerie van Mulukom, Miguel Farias
14 citations
People's beliefs about what mindfulness can do—such as improving relationships, fostering peace, or transforming inner experience—shape how they respond to mindfulness interventions. A new scale, the Belief in the Powers of Mindfulness Scale (BPMS), was developed from participants' key beliefs, which fell into three themes: interpersonal relationships and compassion, peace and violence, and the inner world. These beliefs were tied to broader cultural ideas like expressive individualism and New Age philosophy. The BPMS showed strong internal consistency and validity. Older and more spiritual individuals practiced mindfulness more often and longer, reported greater mindfulness skills, and scored higher on the BPMS. The findings underscore the need to account for people's beliefs and cultural context in mindfulness research and practice.
Drifting through Samsara
December 2, 2021
Masoumeh Rahmani
People who left Goenka's Vipassana movement after years of intense commitment often used ambivalent language in their disaffiliation narratives. They maintained convictions about the technique's transformative power while doubting their own ability to progress toward enlightenment. Although their conversion process was tacit, many aspects of their stories matched existing literature on religious disengagement.
Drifting through Samsara
December 2, 2021
Masoumeh Rahmani
A new analytical framework called 'tacit conversion' is introduced to understand personal transformation and growing commitment within Goenka's Vipassana movement. By closely examining an experienced student's language, speech inflections, tone, and narrative delivery, the chapter shows that committed long-term students perform narratives resembling 'conversion narratives' found in other traditions. Central themes in participants' self-transformation include self-acceptance, agency, and the mind-body relationship.
Drifting through Samsara
December 2, 2021
Masoumeh Rahmani
Deconversion from Goenka's Vipassana movement is rare. A single case study examines one narrator's attempt to leave the movement's universe of discourse. The chapter introduces 'authenticity talk' as a style of discourse that serves both as a resource for self-reconstruction after exit and as a rhetoric providing the narrator with autonomy, empowerment, and self-validation. The chapter argues that disengagement literature mistakenly takes authenticity talk at face value, treating it as an actual motive for exit rather than a post-hoc rhetorical tool.
Drifting through Samsara
December 2, 2021
Masoumeh Rahmani
Using Gooren's conversion career model, this chapter demonstrates how a person's universe of discourse changes with increased participation in Goenka's Vipassana movement and identifies the linguistic markers of that change. The chapter is divided into four sections: preaffiliation context through biographical narratives; formal affiliation practices and their significance for conversion; sociocultural and institutional factors behind participants' rejection of the conversion category and Buddhist identity, with analysis of linguistic patterns; and commitment, depicting core member identity through meditators' language, reasoning, and self-representation.
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation
October 8, 2020
Masoumeh Rahmani
S. N. Goenka's Vipassana movement, though rooted in Theravada Buddhism, presents itself as non-religious through ten-day silent retreats. Based on qualitative research, the chapter identifies rhetorical strategies Goenka uses to distance the movement from religion, which shape distinct patterns of conversion and disengagement. It introduces "tacit conversion," where deeper involvement and adoption of the movement's language make conversion invisible to the member. The chapter also examines various pathways for disengaging from the movement.
Handbook of Leaving Religion
February 11, 2020
Masoumeh Rahmani
Former members of S.N. Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement describe disaffiliation narratives shaped by the organization's emphasis on experiential practice over intellectual understanding. Goenka's network, the largest donor-funded Vipassana organization with over 170 official and 130 non-official centers worldwide, offers courses from 3 to 60 days, with standard ten-day retreats being most common. The teachings are based on Buddhist doctrines of suffering, impermanence, and not-self, and the Noble Eightfold Path divided into morality, concentration, and wisdom. Goenka argues that intellectual understanding alone cannot liberate one from suffering; instead, insight must be gained through embodied experience. This epistemic strategy underpins the movement's efforts to abstract itself from conventional categories.