Mindfulness in Modern Times

Buddhism and the Brain: Mindfulness in Modern Times | Big Think

I’m very concerned with what I would call a decontextualized — or maybe the proper word would be recontextualized — consumerist notion of mindfulness, where mindfulness is about paying attention non-judgmentally in the present moment. That gets framed in terms of paying attention non-judgmentally in your little office cubicle so that you can take a mindfulness pause and get back to work for a corporation that is maybe contributing to global warming. Or the use of mindfulness under the heading of "mental fitness" in the context of the military. That’s really quite problematic. In the Buddhist tradition, even if the notion of mindfulness is not, technically speaking, to some schools "intrinsically wholesome," it’s against the background of the whole Buddhist tradition, where there’s certain basic ethical considerations that are in place. That’s often missing in present uses of mindfulness, and that’s something we should be very concerned about.