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Chapter 8 unpacks the modern American concept of “mindfulness.” Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979, provides a model for mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBSR is nominally “secular” and supported by scientific research, yet infused at every level—concept, structure, teaching training, and graduate resources—with systematic instruction in Buddhist-derived assumptions, values, and practices, what Kabat-Zinn interprets as the “essence” of Buddhism. Many MBPs exhibit the Malnak-Meyers indicia of religion. Certain mindfulness missionaries conceptualize their tactics as “skillful means,” “Stealth Buddhism,” “Trojan horse,” or “script.” Other proponents may understand mindfulness teachings as self-evidently true and “universal,” without recognizing that supposedly “secular ethics” are socially constructed and contested by others, including Christians and certain Buddhists. MBPs exemplify the difficulty of extracting the “secular” from the “religious.” Mindfulness is “secular” in privileging present experience and “religious” in comprising a world view and way of life premised on more-than-physical assumptions about the nature of reality, self, and the path to salvation from suffering. The chapter argues that secularization requires more than subtracting religious language and adding scientific framing: rebuilding from foundations uncontrolled by assumptions about the nature of the self and the world.

This chapter introduces psychotherapists’ translating religion approaches to Buddhist traditions focusing on the therapeutic use of mindfulness practices as a popular case example. In these approaches, Buddhist elements are “translated” into biomedical treatment interventions admissible to secular-designated psychotherapy. Influenced by a number of institutional and affiliative factors, cognitive behavioral psychotherapists were predisposed to seek to maintain scientific legitimacy while incorporating Buddhist practices. Taking a closer look at the historical origins of contemporary therapeutic mindfulness practices and the currently-untold stories of the development of some of the most prominent mindfulness methodologies (Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, etc.), the chapter interrogates the prevailing narrative that “mindfulness was extracted from Buddhism” and completely remade into a secular biomedical item. The chapter elucidates the ongoing contestation among clinicians - spurred by encounters with multiple, overlapping institutional authorities (not only biomedical or Buddhist, but academic as well) - over whether to define their “translations” as Buddhist or psychotherapeutic, religious or not-religious.

The introduction traces the astonishing growth of the Mindfulness movement over the past four decades and sketches the usual narrative about how it began in the 1970s, when Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol. This book seeks to change that narrative. It traces the origins of efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically back to nineteenth-century teachers of Mind Cure, a religious movement led largely by American women who had learned these methods from Buddhist and Hindu missionaries; and further back, to eighteenth-century research on magnetism, the unconscious, and psychic phenomena. The introduction offers an overview of the book: four chapters of history, two chapters offering critical analysis of the modern Mindfulness movement, an epilogue, and an appendix describing the theoretical and historical challenges of piecing this complex story together. This account draws upon multiple academic disciplines, including the histories of science, medicine, psychology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Western esotericism, and American religions.

This chapter considers whether Mindfulness can reasonably be considered a kind of religion, despite proponents’ claims to the contrary. If so, what kind? Is it Buddhist? If so, what kind of Buddhism? The rhetoric of Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the modern Mindfulness movement, is tested against several different theories of religion, as well as critiques by specialists in both Theravāda and Māhāyana forms of Buddhism. While Mindfulness is positioned as a strictly secular therapeutic method, it has all the characteristics of American metaphysical religion, as well as of modernist Buddhism and neo-Vedanta. Kabat-Zinn claims his teachings are “universal,” yet they actually reflect his own eclectic blend of elements from various religious traditions with roots in Asia, the United States, and Europe. As Mindfulness is increasingly promoted in public schools, government agencies, and the military, this raises legitimate questions about the separation of church and state.

This chapter asks whether mindfulness is as broadly effective and powerful as proponents claim and considers methodological and other critiques of clinical research on mindfulness. Neuroscientists have produced vivid images of meditators’ brains, using functional MRI and PET scans, which seem to show clear, positive changes attributed to meditation. Such images are effective rhetorically but are produced in a “black box” of assumptions, technological constraints, and human factors that make them less definitive than they may appear. Other types of studies rely on meditators’ self-reports, which are not always reliable. A major issue in clinical research is that mindfulness is inconsistently defined and may be measured by scientists unfamiliar with the ways that meditation is described in canonical texts and understood by experienced Buddhist teachers and yogis. While research data do suggest that mindfulness can be beneficial, it is not the panacea that some advocates seem to suggest it is.

This chapter considers the early, community-oriented wing of New Thought movement and the Mindfulness movement side by side and identifies several characteristics they have in common, as well as significant differences between them. The Mindfulness movement is similar in various ways to Individualist New Thought. This analysis reveals some of the problems and limitations inherent in the Mindfulness movement’s approach to meditation, from both Buddhist and scientific perspectives. By extracting meditation from its religious contexts and meanings and turning it into an individual technique for reducing stress, several important resources get “lost in translation.” These include the social and spiritual benefits of religious community; fundamental aspects of Buddhist and neo-Vedanta spiritual paths, particularly the ethical foundations of meditation and yoga; and systemic analyses of the causes of suffering and stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.

The conversation and the dialogue are key to the practice of Self-inquiry. This chapter records and analyzes this discipline. A special emphasis is placed on the spiritual skills associated with listening as a contemplative skill.

For Fitzgibbons, the modern term “mindfulness” becomes a lens through which to consider medieval poetry and social practice. She argues that the fourteenth-century Conscience-poet emphasizes “mynde,” “resoun,” “skil,” and “wit” in order to foreground the role of self-aware cognition in the human encounter with death and judgment. Within this context, Fitzgibbons also explores the inevitable problem of disabling madness, as the Conscience-poet describes it, showing us through this text “the complications involved in yoking the soul's salvation to the mind's activity.” Fitzgibbons’ essay deeply engages the poetics of this work by tracking subtle shifts in the meanings and resonances of specific words – such as “mynde” – repeated throughout the text. The Prick of Conscience, Fitzgibbons demonstrates, depends upon its formal features and diction to make its point: that pedagogical intervention into any community requires a mindfulness “both rigorous and humane.”

The first big wave of scientific research on meditation came in the 1970s and mainly focused on the physiology of relaxation. The second wave, which is still ongoing, has a stronger focus on modes of attention and their neural correlates. In both waves of meditation research, Anglo-American scientists have dominated the arena, but the kinds of meditation investigated have almost exclusively been of Asian origin. This essay argues that the shifting focus of scientific studies is not only determined by the available scientific methodology, but also by the form of meditation under investigation, as well as the influence from society and popular culture.

This chapter explores Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness meditation, above all in his writings about his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. It argues that Kabat-Zinn’s vision conveys a profound sense of enchantment, a deep sense of life’s value. The chapter argues that this vision reworks fundamental conceptual categories, especially those of the secular, the spiritual, and the scientific. Life’s meaning is formulated as flowing naturally from mindful observation of everyday life, especially of painful experiences. This naturalizing approach, drawing on bodily experience, the authority of science, metaphysical religious roots in American culture, and Buddhist teachings, makes mindfulness occupy many registers at once: Buddhist yet ecumenically inclusive, secular yet spiritual, scientific but revealing a larger sense of purpose. This multimodal character of mindfulness, always available through simple awareness, explains its popularity, which is helping to reshape American culture.

This chapter examines the ways in which the practice of Buddhist meditation enables a professor to embrace her vocational aspirations. Drawing on personal examples, the chapter describes how meditation practice frees the mind from the tyranny of ego, allows greater intentionality and mindfulness as a teacher, encourages honoring more fully what the Buddhist call the “inner nobility” of students, and makes possible the capacity to live fully in the present as a teacher. An autobiographical account that defines the practice of insight meditation, the chapter explores the intimate relationship between the inner life and the professor’s practice of her vocation as a teacher of American literature.

Mindfulness in Asia was part of a set of beliefs and practices related to supernatural forces and posthumous existences. But mindfulness has been greatly aided in its penetration of American culture by a process of medicalization that reframed mindfulness as a psychological technique that provides scientifically verifiable physical and mental benefits. The most important driving force behind his process has been Jon Kabat-Zinn and his creation of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). This chapter examines how mindfulness was repackaged as a psychological process or technique, in part as a strategy to deliver the alleged benefits of meditation to the widest possible client audience. This has led to a shift in those who claim expertise on mindfulness, as it is increasingly the property of scientists, doctors, therapists, and motivational speakers, rather than religious leaders. A whole host of new mindfulness-based therapies has resulted.

This chapter describes clinicians’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions. Contemporary psychotherapists often express a prodigious enthusiasm about neuroscientific research purporting to prove the healing potential of Buddhist practices. Here scientific experimentation is seen as filtering away the taint of the religious or as leaving only a religious essence that is compatible with science – a “filtered religion” akin to filtered coffee. The seeds of filtering religion approaches lie in the work of early psychologists of religion like William James and James Bisset Pratt who also sought to filter Buddhist teachings through the high-technology psychologies of their own day in a search for new therapeutic religious forms (epitomized by “mind-cure” and James’ “religion of healthy-mindedness”). Today, experimental research design is applied to Buddhist meditation and Christian petitionary prayer practices alike in order to validate their so-called secular biomedical use. The chapter thus concludes that therapists’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions destabilize religion/secular binaries even as they submit the religious to the scientific or biomedical.