Week 14 post 1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X18301209
Mindfulness in politics and public policy by Jamie Bristow, the director of the mindfulness initiative in the UK.
Highlights of this study
National politicians have taken part in mindfulness training courses derived from eight-week clinical health interventions.
Legislators have reported personal benefits for attention regulation, impulse control, care, compassion and meta-cognition.
A cross-party group of politicians has proposed that mindfulness-based interventions could help address a range of societal challenges.
Prevailing policy narratives around wellbeing, technology and attention, care and compassion and job automation are driving further interest.
Politicians are starting to consider mindfulness as a foundational capacity, rather than just as a targeted intervention for specific problems.
A key factor in the popularity of mindfulness training in public life is the conviction of grassroots advocates seeking to pass on the benefits they have experienced through personal practice
In this manner, mindfulness training has found its way into the realm of government, with parliamentary programmes seeding ambition amongst politicians to research and employ its transformative potential at both interpersonal and policy levels.
In a high-stakes, adversarial setting, mindfulness practice helps elected representatives to cope with specific challenges, and an inquiry by the UK Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group has contributed to the emergence of mindfulness training in numerous policy narratives.
WE SHOULD ALL TRAIN LIKE JEDIS
By developing a new kind of familiarity with their own inner lives, a growing number of politicians are finding a new way to approach political discourse, and a corresponding enthusiasm for policy that tackles society’s problems at the level of the human heart and mind
Some are starting to ask whether mindfulness might be more than a targeted intervention for specific issues, and may in fact contribute to the flourishing of society more broadly — marking an important development from concern with individual benefits to benefits for the whole.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474474020918888
Transformative mindfulness: the role of mind-body practices in community-based activism
This article emerges from the simple observation that community-based social and environmental activists often engage with practices of mindfulness, either personally or collectively
It draws on two case studies, a UK-based Transition initiative and a community of social entrepreneurs in Germany
post-foundationalist understandings of community, particularly Nancy’s being-in-common – popularised within geography as ‘community economies’ – and the philosophical and spiritual roots of mindfulness are two lines of thought that provide clues to the co-occurrence of political change
This article argues that both the political and spiritual aspects of activism are integral parts of social change. It concludes that post-foundational and Buddhist-inspired lines of thought cross-fertilise and chart a course towards transformative mindfulness.
In these studies which were inherently different, one commonality arose which is mindfulness. One study was about community based environmentalism and the other was about alternative economic practices
Recent geographical work has drawn attention to mind-body practices, including mindfulness as variously: an attitude; a part of Buddhist lineage; a secular form of meditation; or a neoliberal technique engendering individual, personal resilience
In the context of neoliberalism, however, mindfulness can slide into self-enhancement and responsibilisation of subjects and communities
On the one side, it argues that the political implications of activist practices such as mindfulness are not only important and overlooked, but are also profoundly geographical. Centrally, we propose that these practices are political because they accompany a spatiality
Mindfulness thus offers a perspective on the ways in which togetherness, politics and space can be rethought
On the other side, we consider how the philosophical foundation of mindfulness itself speaks to scholarship on societal change
This article argues that both political and spiritual activism, as observed in the two case studies, are integral parts of social change.
Transition Town initiatives and eco-social enterprises constitute different community-led responses to social and ecological crises
Participants of Transition initiatives engage in a broad range of activities aimed at increasing self-sufficiency and resilience – including (permaculture) community gardens, energy reduction and renewables, strengthening of neighbourly relations and awareness-raising
Eco-social enterprises share Transition’s pressure to act in face of social and ecological injustices
Distancing from the profit-orientation of the formal market economy, however, they hover between monetised relations, ecological and social purposes, local ownership and democratic governance
Centripetal and centrifugal mindfulness
https://www.mindful.org/how-mindfulness-can-help-us-talk-about-the-things-that-divide-us/
How Mindfulness Can Help us Talk About the Things That Divide Us by barry boyce and stephanie domet
As children we are told that we should never talk to anyone about their religion, income, or politics
Where does politics fit into mindfulness and where does it not?
As Aristotle indicated, human beings are political animals, by which he meant that each human being lives within a community, if not many communities and within those communities we seek to work together to make a good life for all concerned. We aspire to make the world a better place
Why are small politics inevitable in the practice of mindfulness?
the etymology of the word political, which comes from polis, a polis is a polity and is simply a community. So we live together. We share resources and food and we have to work together in communities families, extended families. So that is an inevitable part of our lives. And why is it that small-p politics comes in, in terms of mindfulness?
When we start practicing mindfulness, we tend to be paying attention to ourselves, to our own anxiety, to the difficulty we may be having with our inner critic, to the feeling that we’re not able to pay attention.
when you look at your connections to other people, it automatically gets you into realms that end up being political. How do we share resources, for example?
Which gets you into issues of equality and equity. Are people treated the same?
Did they have the same opportunity?
Are they discriminated against in various ways?
Do they get the same level of attention to their health, to their education?
Or are we just spoiling the planet, the environment that provides our shared resources?
You can’t help but stumble into this kind of arena.
We’re going to allow people to see wherever their own mindfulness and awareness takes them, in however they want to manifest and then engage the world. That’s up to them.
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