The Violent Possibilities of Mindfulness Pedagogies: Neoliberalism, Secular Mindfulness in American Schools, and Buddhist Liberation

• In Event: Pedagogies of (Resistance to) Neoliberalism

Abstract

This paper examines the growing trend of mindfulness in American culture and social institutions. In particular it investigates mindfulness as pedagogy, both in the context of its increasing popularity and secularization in American public schools, as well as its longstanding function as a spiritual technique for liberation in the indigenous Asian knowledge system of Buddhism.

Drawing from and expanding on Henry Giroux’s (2010) conceptualization of the “new racism” of neoliberalism, I situate the growing phenomenon of secular mindfulness in schools within the intersecting context of race and neoliberalism. I argue that secular mindfulness programs appropriate and commodify Buddhist practice, in order to transform a pedagogy for liberation into a neoliberal pedagogy for disciplinary self-regulation (Foucault, 1988). Such appropriation attempts to circumscribe Asian American and Asian diasporic Buddhist students within a “model minority” framework, which delegitimizes their spiritual practice to produce a commodity product for the management of the behavior of other students of color, namely, their black and brown classmates. Thus, I also argue that when used to counter so called disciplinary and behavioral issues, secular mindfulness education programs can enact a fundamental violence upon Black, Brown, and Asian American students of color.

In regards to methodology, I develop a theoretical analysis of secular mindfulness education programs and draw specifically from methods in media analysis. I present a close reading of a short PBS Newshour television segment that details the implementation of a secular mindfulness program in a low-income school in the gentrifying neighborhood of East Palo Alto, CA. In doing so, I demonstrate that low-income students of color who have been segregated into poor neighborhoods may be taught secular mindfulness for the purpose of instructing them into a program of self-regulatory behavior that maintains the logic and isolationary mechanism of neoliberalism. Though Asian American students may not be present in the classroom, I present a reading of their erasure against the invocation of their spiritual tradition as part and parcel of the secularization and commodification of Buddhist mindfulness as a means of neoliberal educational discipline.

I also couple Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter’s (2010) critique of safe spaces and their call for a risk discourse with the Zen Buddhist philosophy of “no self” and Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh’s (1993) notion of “interbeing” to intentionally intervene in the safe, secularized, individualized space of mindfulness in education and argue for the possibilities of a mindfulness education that encourages an ontological violence which eliminates the neoliberal sense of self, particular the structure of the whiteness self.

This paper draws from interdisciplinary modes of inquiry and thus contributes to work in the fields of education, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, American studies, and religious studies. It provides an important intervention to the dominant literature on secular mindfulness, which tends to celebrate its use in educational settings for the purposes of managing stress and behavior. There is little research that provides an examination on the racial and neoliberal implications of secular mindfulness pedagogies. This paper begins to fill this urgent need.

Author

• Funie Hsu, San Jose State University