The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out by Jaime Kucinskas (review)

From the psychologist's examination room to the Fortune 500 board room, from the classroom to the support group, "mindfulness" is everywhere. Once a set of specific Buddhist meditative practices, mindfulness in Western culture has come to mean anything that promises, "better health, more caring relationships, and a compassionate society" (https://www.mindful.org/about-mindful/). Aspects of personal fulfillment are often highlighted while those involving a concrete commitment to reducing the suffering of the less fortunate are downplayed. The mass acceptance of a secularized version of a once specialized religious practice provides a rich entry point into a study of how a new social movement can be unintentionally, and perhaps even negatively, transformed by the very institutions it sought to transform.

The Mindful Elite is a deeply researched, multilayered exploration of how contemplative teachers have made a concerted and, at least, semicoordinated effort to introduce and inculcate Buddhist meditation practices into mainstream Western culture in the hope of producing an ethical and moral shift in the structures that underlie that culture. As such, the movement the author describes is countercultural and the book demonstrates a disciplined focus on investigating a few narrow questions: What is the "mindfulness movement?" Who has spearheaded and promoted its dissemination and expansion? What were/are the goals of those disseminators? What are the means they have used? How effective have they been? And what are the shadow aspects, or conflicting assumptions behind their efforts? The book asks whether we can continue to think of a movement as countercultural when the methods used to maximize adoption and inculcation result in, or rely upon, a significant divergence from the principles that made the movement countercultural in the first place. Author Jaime Kucinskas provides a thoughtful and cleareyed analysis of the means by which an initially small group of meditators sought to transform the medical, educational, and corporate landscape of America through the presentation of secularized mindfulness practices that promised increased personal tranquility, reduced stress, better health, and, in the corporate world, higher productivity.

These efforts, Kucinskas notes early on, were promoted by a group of meditators with an almost naïve, collective sense of utopian idealism. These early promoters included Francisco Valera and Joan Halifax, founders of Mind and Life Institute; Mirabai Bush, founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society; Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School; and Adam Engle of the Mind and Life Institute. Their sincere idealism, Kucinskas argues, masked troubling contradictions that might otherwise have been anticipated when radically transforming a traditional religious practice in order to achieve widespread, secular adoption. This unintentional consequence seems to have largely resulted in rosy feelings of tranquility for some, or perhaps many, even as the broader moral and ethical ideals that were sine qua non of mindfulness in its original form remain unfulfilled or altogether abandoned. This tension between contemplative teachers' "enduring commitments (1) to adapt contemplative culture to contemporary people's needs and subcultures in order to reach them and (2) to maintain authenticity to their Buddhist-inspired practices and their implicit ideologies" (163) informs much of the text and serves as a backbone for the sub-inquires that Kucinskas explores.

The scope of The Mindful Elite is expansive while not feeling burdensome or meandering. Part one of the book outlines a brief history of Buddhism's migration to the West, considered in the context of other, more traditionally "Western" religious and new social movements in America. It emphasizes how Buddhist teachers have attempted to balance the aforementioned competing notions of authenticity and mass palatability.

Part two explores the multifarious means by which Buddhist meditation has been insinuated into institutional structures that might otherwise be considered bastions of skepticism about "religious" methods or ideals, especially the scientific/medical community and the corporate world. In exploring a range of institutions and contexts in which, and the methods by which, mindfulness...