Mindfulness and the Entrepreneurship of Self?
Mindfulness has become a $1+ billion niche market within the $12+ billion self-help / spiritual-growth industry. Is this a hijacking or trespassing by a host of online carnival barkers and self-promoting snake oil salespeople or something else? Hijacking is a phenomenon we often see in our curate–coopt–shuffle–rebrand–market culture. It’s the way of the world – past & present – on technology steroids these days. Whatever your field, product, or service, tag it with mindfulness and ride the wave.
The term mindfulness is being used and bantered about in a coopting-sloppy fashion. It’s useful to discriminate the “mindfulness” of the “market” from mindfulness as a spiritual practice. The orientation of self to mindfulness or mindfulness to self is key.
The majority of articles and promotions of mindfulness I see are oriented around an individual (self) using mindfulness for some purpose to enhance the self’s life experience. Not a bad thing, but this orientation supports the continuance of the self. Mindfulness, as a spiritual practice, challenges the whole nature of the self and its activity.
Mindfulness, as it developed in spiritual traditions, never promises practitioners a better life, more worldly success, or stress-free living. In fact, it may lead to unimagined challenges; then again, mindfulness practitioners may find themselves living better, stress-free lives with more worldly success, but attributing mindfulness with causality is like claiming that Pinocchio awakened from his own efforts.
As a student of the Diamond Approach, I have many hours of practice with mindfulness, concentration, meditation, inquiry, presence, and other practices. Some of these include awareness of the content of experience, and others do not.
The Diamond Approach is not only an approach to our experience, but it’s actually an approach to understanding reality, it’s an approach to true nature, existence, whatever you want to call it, that we don’t just probe into our issues, but we actually can explore true nature and all of the ways that it manifests.
As we learn more about what we actually are and understand, get in touch with presence, and begin to explore the qualities of presence and the miraculous numinous things that it opens up in us, we begin to actually start to have an inkling of our relationship to a vaster ground that unites everyone. – A. H. Almaas, Founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-realization
Creating a Mindful Life in a Distracted World – Faisal Hoque
Our eye is intently focused on the finish line, while life is happening now.
Living in the moment doesn’t mean we don’t care about the future. It means that when we make the choice to do something, we focus solely on the act of doing it, rather than letting our mind wander into the future or the past.
For a fast-paced entrepreneur like me, perhaps the most paradoxical lesson has been around the need to slow down to move forward. Slowing down is a deliberate choice that can lead to greater appreciation for life and a greater level of happiness, which yields better results in one’s endeavors.
When we are mindful, we begin to be a more objective witness of our own experiences: when placed into a situation where we would normally become aggravated, we can observe our aggravation as it arises. As a meditation teacher once told me, without mindfulness, we are reaction machines. But with mindfulness, we give ourselves some room to move. Instead of acting out of our long-held tendencies, biases, and patterns, we can act in a way that serves the situation and serves the people involved.
Mindfulness provides the capacity to be aware of anything that emerges in experience, regardless of how minute or subtle. The global awareness of mindfulness reveals the patterns of unknowing in experience. And curiosity directs consciousness to investigate the not knowing. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey
Who/what is this self that benefits from mindfulness?
Mindfulness is making us all more selfish – Miranda Larbi
You can’t budge these days without hearing about someone doing something mindfully. From drinking to mediation, nothing, it seems, can just happen. We’ve got ruminate on it, assess why we’re doing it, go ever deeper into ourselves. And that might be the problem. Although it’s undoubtedly a good thing to carve out time for yourself and your thoughts, mindfulness is now thought to have a negative impact on our lives because we’re so inward-focused. Dr Alison Gray, chair of a special interest group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns that mindfulness can lead to us becoming ‘self-involved and self-centred’.
In my opinion, this is a good example of someone who appears to know nothing of mindfulness but has a strong opinion based on ignorance and misinterpretation. Mindfulness has nothing to do with ruminating and assessing. Practicing mindfulness will eventually challenge the whole sense/concept/experience of self. Mindfulness helps to loosen the grip of self not strengthen it.
Mindfulness: Corporate America’s Strange New Gospel – Kevin D. Williamson
Buddhism without Buddha promises to make workers happier and more productive. Mindfulness training is a $1 billion–plus business in the United States alone and growing robustly. The promises made by mindfulness gurus aren’t materially different from those made by earlier generations of faith healers. Arianna Huffington published a book a few years back, called “Thrive,” that’s a classic capitalist-spirituality type of book. It assumes that we can all get rich and be perfectly healthy and happy and that our well-being will flourish, that we’ll flourish as humans, and that we don’t have to worry too much about systems and structures in society, such as corporations, which are notoriously not exactly caring about human beings. Mindfulness has had an overwhelmingly positive popular reception because the idea that our well-being is totally within our personal control — that we are masters of our own destiny and that practicing mindfulness will make us more healthy and wiser — resonates seamlessly with the neoliberal imperatives: Don’t depend on the state, don’t look to the government, you are responsible for your own well-being — you have to become an entrepreneur of your self. (emphasis mine)
An entrepreneur of your “self” hits the nail on the head when it comes to discriminating mindfulness as either ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic. Mindfulness is a good example of an “open secret.” We can read books, attend lectures and workshops and still not grok the nature or power of it as an agent of transformation.
If we have the global awareness that comes through the development of mindfulness, it is possible to recognize that the true ground of our experience is actually a medium of awareness, rather than a collection of perceived objects. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey
My mother was a big proponent of mindfulness. If I had a nickel for every time, she berated me to pay attention…!
We can be mindful in many ways, levels, and degrees:
- Attentive
- Focused
- Open & vulnerable to thoughts, affect, sensations, and reactivity
However we understand it and practice it, we may see benefits in our life. But, mindfulness as an extension of ego-activity will simply perpetuate that activity and ego-identity. Goalless mindfulness invites illumination and transformation from beyond the self.
Every moment we’re practicing something. Our realization is the life we live, not the ideas and thoughts about it that we hope to embody in the future.
FAQ
1. Define mindfulness
Mindfulness as a spiritual practice that challenges the nature of the self and its activities. It emphasizes that mindfulness, as developed in spiritual traditions, does not promise a better life or stress-free living but may lead to unimagined challenges. It also states that mindfulness can help reveal patterns of unknowing in experience and direct consciousness to investigate the unknown.
2. What is the Diamond Approach?
The Diamond Approach is not just an approach to our experience but an approach to understanding reality and true nature. It allows for exploration of true nature and all the ways it manifests. The Diamond Approach is also associated with mindfulness, concentration, meditation, inquiry, and presence.
3. What is the commercialization of mindfulness?
Mindfulness has become a billion-dollar niche market within the self-help/spiritual growth industry. It criticizes the way mindfulness is often marketed, suggesting that it is often used in a co-opting, sloppy fashion that supports the continuance of the self rather than challenging the nature of the self as true mindfulness should.
4. How does mindfulness relate to living in the moment?
Living in the moment doesn’t mean disregarding the future. Instead, it means focusing solely on the act of doing something without letting the mind wander into the future or the past. Mindfulness is presented as a tool that allows us to be more objective witnesses of our own experiences and gives us room to move, acting in a way that serves the situation and the people involved.