"Why Corporations Want You to Shut Up and Meditate/Ron Purser’s new book McMindfulness examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance."

Headline at The Nation. Excerpt:

Rooted in a centuries-old Buddhist meditation practice, mindfulness, like the religion it originates from, is based on the Four Noble Truths, the first of which loosely translates to “Life is suffering.”...

Today’s corporatized mindfulness is largely a do-it-yourself practice (with countless books, meditation apps, podcasts, gurus, and seminars) filling the vacuum of a lonely culture obsessed with self-optimization, mind hacks, and shortcuts to self-care. Modern mindfulness is often sold as evidence-based, sanitized of any cultural baggage—neuroscience with a dash of what Jon Kabat-Zinn, known as the father of the modern-day mindfulness movement, calls “the essence of Buddhism.” It’s at once secular and clinical yet sacred....

The article is written by Zachary Siegel, who interviews Ronald Purser (author of "McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality"). Excerpt:

ZS: Your book chronicles various spiritual movements rising and falling in America—the rise of New Age in the 1970s and Transcendental Meditation in the ’90s. Who is behind the mindfulness boom?

RP: In terms of other social movements, the mindfulness movement is an elite social movement, which started with white elite males like Dale Carnegie and the prosperity-gospel guys. It’s quite unlike more grassroots activist movements like the civil rights movement, where you could see a more communitarian strand of mindfulness, run by people of color. There was coming together, talking about our oppression, sharing our vulnerabilities and working together to resist. That was very spiritually and religiously motivated and required a tremendous amount of mindfulness, but in collectives. Nonviolence takes a lot of mindfulness to pull off, but you can’t do it alone. It’s a stark contrast to what we see with these very rich, wealthy white men who are the promoters, who I call mindfulness merchants, and they’re spouting that mindfulness is good for everybody, it’s universal. These differentials in power trouble me, and I think we need to interrogate these differentials....

ZS: What was going on in Google’s mindfulness program?

RP: The Search Inside Yourself seminar promised the program “increases productivity, enhances leadership effectiveness and supports happiness.” What more could an employer want? The workshop was an amalgam of childish icebreakers, turn-to-your partner exercises, three-minute breathing meditations, and a hodgepodge of superficial materials on emotional intelligence as a pathway to career success, along with the usual neurobabble that meditation changes your brain....

ZS: In breaking down the science behind mindfulness, you write, “The widespread belief that there is compelling clinical proof that ‘mindfulness works’ is simply not supported by the scientific evidence.” Is “evidence based” built on a house of cards?

RP: One of the problems is a big gap between the rhetoric on the so-called science of mindfulness and the actual science. If you read the journal articles, there are a lot of qualifications and hedging. But when it is translated into the public domain—like in Harvard Business Review, which claimed, “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain”—that’s where you see sweeping claims exaggerating the efficacy....
 Mindfulness is a very unregulated industry. Unlike psychotherapy.... I know for a fact that some corporate mindfulness trainers just take an online course and in eight or 10 weeks they reinvent themselves. They were probably corporate trainers in some other area, and now they’re experts in mindfulness training....

ADDED: Considering buying this book, I read the 1-star review (there's only one). Excerpt:

... I don't think it was a very bright idea to deface a Buddhist statue on the cover. Did somebody skip sensitivity training? Oh, go ahead and explain that to an Asian Buddhist seeing this in a bookstore, with some deep philosophical discourse on love, peace, harmony or the "dark side of mindfulness"....

Here's the cover: