McMindfulness, Ronald E. Purser
McMindfulness, Ronald E. Purser
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McMindfulness
How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Author: Ronald E. Purser

Narrator: Jeff Harding

Unabridged: 8 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/10/2019


Synopsis

A lively and razor-sharp critique of mindfulness as it has been enthusiastically co-opted by corporations, public schools, and the US military.

Mindfulness is now all the rage. From celebrity endorsements to monks, neuroscientists, and meditation coaches rubbing shoulders with CEO's at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it is clear that mindfulness has gone mainstream. Some have even called it a revolution.

But what if, instead of changing the world, mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo?

In McMindfulness, Ronald Purser debunks the so-called "mindfulness revolution," exposing how corporations, schools, governments, and the military have co-opted it as technique for social control and self-pacification. A lively and razor-sharp critique, Purser busts the myths its salesmen rely on, challenging the narrative that stress is self-imposed and mindfulness is the cure-all.

If we are to harness the truly revolutionary potential of mindfulness, we have to cast off its neoliberal shackles, liberating mindfulness for a collective awakening.

About Ronald E. Purser

Ronald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His essays and cultural criticism have appeared in the Huffington Post, Salon, Alternet, and Tricycle magazine. His viral article, "Beyond McMindfulness", opened the floodgates for the mindfulness backlash. His books include the Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context and Social Engagement and the Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness. Dr. Purser began his Buddhist training beginning in 1981 at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California and is an ordained Buddhist teacher in the Korean Zen Taego order. He is cohost of Mindful Cranks podcast and is a regular speaker and guests on radio shows and podcasts. He lives with his family and dog in San Francisco, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gabrielle on August 21, 2020

Review/rant. “If I feel resentful, exploited and stressed-out at work, and I am instructed simply to focus on the present, how will that change the conditions that have helped to produce my agitation? It won’t.” At the risk of being mistaken for Britta Perry, I have to say that I am pretty peeved with......more

Goodreads review by Alan on July 19, 2019

I was introduced to the raisin in the last few years of my work. Eating a raisin is often used as an exercise to explain the mechanics and theory of mindfulness. I, along with a group of mental health service providers, were invited to look at the raisin, smell it, examine its contour and texture, h......more

Goodreads review by Randall on May 11, 2023

Neoliberalism has entered the mindfulness field to the point that Slavoj Zizek wrote that mindfulness is, “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” As this book shows, the problem is that mindfulness is now devoid of the ethics which clearly accompanied it when it was a p......more

Goodreads review by Tom on March 12, 2024

Mindfulness? Great tool! Use it like the Buddha please, not the Pentagon. 2 stars. I feel like Purser is so caught up in making Point A (we gotta dismantle neoliberal capitalist systems) that he doesn't take the time to line it up all that carefully with Point B (mindfulness is best paired with moral t......more

Goodreads review by Tina on August 26, 2019

I was stunned. I've bought into the whole, "the only thing you can change is how you cope" practice of moving through the world. Instead, we all need to know that only changing things in the world will enable us to cope! The extremes of our current political/social culture (Trump, climate change, we......more