Assembling mindful bodies

Abstract

This chapter explores how mindful bodies are assembled within mindfulness-based therapies. Since the late nineteenth century, people of Anglo-American and Nordic countries have adopted Asian mind-body training regimes as therapeutic ways of living with industrial capitalism. Humanities scholars have shown how Buddhist disciplines such as mindfulness have been transformed as they move across time and place. Mindfulness has been made compatible with empirical science and turned into a secular psychological therapy for the purpose of self-healing. To practice mindfulness, people must learn how to ‘be mindful’, and it is how mindfulness is practically realised through concrete teaching and training encounters that we are interested in examining. To recognise an inner state, practice or event as illustrating ‘mindfulness’, there must be public criteria which make it recognisable as ‘mindfulness’. Mindfulness is often promoted as a way for people to regain control and agency, making ‘choices’, in the face of increasing automation, thus reclaiming their humanity within an expanding ‘digital capitalism’.