Mindfulness for revolutionaries

For me, as someone who leads mindfulness sessions is a modern unviversity, this article The mindfulness conspiracy | Life and style | The Guardian is interesting, provocative and challenging. However, perhaps not in the way the author (Ronald Purser ) would expect because I actually agree with him in most respects but one. I think that perhaps the heart of his critique can be seen in this paragraph

It is a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologising and medicalisation of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment – in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive.

And the truth is that I agree that mindfulness can be used as a kind of shoring-up of individuals and distract attention from the arguably more insightful and humanly-beneficial work of analysing the structural reasons for distress and to reinforce the privatising and individualising of finding solutions to it that don't involve changing the 'system'. I don't think we should acquiesce in the idea that the real benefits of mindfulness should only be used by big business or its equivalents for their own own ends.

Well, I don't necessarily agree. I do agree that mindfulness can be and often is used as a kind of sticking plaster over a big wound that needs a more corporate treatment. So to be clear, I do believe that the kind of stress that university staff whom I host sessions for would be well served by changes in governmentally-driven regimes which marketise HE and starve it, in effect, of funding. In turn this means that staff are having to do more with less and face greater precarity in greater numbers than before. I'm not saying that there were not faults in the previous systems. Some reforms are helpful but those that are have been overwhelmed by those that are not.

So why do I continue to offer mindfulness within our university? Well, there are several reasons and I'll mention some here that address the critique that Ronald Purser helpfully offers in the article.

Probably the most pressing is that by doing so I think that I am helping people. The research and informal feedback indicate that doing this stuff genuinely does help people to cope. And while I do not think that mindfulness sessions are the ultimate or only thing that should be done, if it helps some people then its usefulness as a kind of first aid, let's say, justifies doing it. Where I would be remiss would be if I were colluding with the forces of market disciplinary ideology but in itself mindfulness is not this: I do point out to people in wider conversation that I believe the more important long-term work is to change the system to be more humane and not to dump its labour-related externalities on its own workers.

In fact, I think that mindfulness can help in this more 'revolutionary' work. The flip side of the critique of mindfulness as co-optable into marketisation prop is that it can assist those working to change things. If mindfulness can help develop resilience for profit, then it can help develop resilience for change-making. If mindfulness can help people to work more efficiently for someone else to profit, it can help people work more efficiently for change. If it helps greater clarity of thought and reaction for profit, it can do so for analysing root causes of distress and help conscientisation.

If we took the message to be, 'mindfulness is being used as a tool to pacify workers in inhumane working conditions, therefore we should stop people learning mindfulness techniques' then I would say we are missing the possibility that mindfulness could be part of wider strategies to change things. It can be part of a message which says, 'use your greater clarity and ability to gain space to not simply react to consider how to make the conditions better and not to need to work so hard to adjust yourselves to unreasonable and inhumane conditions: notice you are not at fault, but the system you are in is. Direct the anger you find to changing the conditions'.

So, I suppose that I am disagreeing with the very next bit of what Ronald Purser writes:

Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practising “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.

Let's look at it a bit more closely. 'Do not permit critique' -I'd agree if it was 'in the usual format on offer by the mindfulness industry'. However, I would say that it is perfectly possible for a mindfulness group leader to have conversations about this and to have conversations about how mindfulness permits us to gain insights which can inform critique and can help us to gain a degree of resilience to take action on those insights. After all, if the problem is that people are being overworked, in effect, then asking them to take more action to resist or overturn things is going to require from them more than they may feel they can do: mindfulness techniques can be something that helps with that.

'Accept things as they are' -yes this can be co-opted into social anaesthesia. But only if it is tied to a conservative no-change vision of the way things are. This may be implicitly what wider society and media do but it is not inherent to mindfulness. Mindfulness can support those engaging in social, political and economic change and is not inherently conservative. In fact, by helping us to be more aware of our own reactions we can begin to be clearer about what is, in fact, our own baggage and our own capability and what needs wider and collective action. Ironically, many businesses want workers to be more creative and to think more widely -but then they may have to work to try to keep that within the bounds of their own enterprise. Creativity could cut both ways and come up with ways for working people to subvert the system. 

'Non judgmental present moment awareness' can lead/help us to be aware that actually it's not us, it really is 'them', that the 'promise/hope' of better life or conditions if we just endure this, work a bit harder etc is not serving us in the present and maybe never will; it can strip off those ideological illusions that keep us being well-oiled cogs in the profit-machine. The task is to provide alternative voices to assist the potential conscientisation that mindfulness can be the midwife for. Don't let the business leaders have all the best techniques for helping us to live a little better -let's harness them to socially transformative work.

Activists can burn out too. If these techniques can help those working for change, let's not write them off by only thinking about them as they work within the exploitative frame of mind. We can imagine differently: we can imagine groups of people better able to challenge injustice because they can identify and channel their rightful anger more effectively and learn to have space to properly care for each other by attending to the present experience of hearing the person in front of them and being present to them.

One things this article has done for me is to consider how best to redesign my support leaflets for mindfulness sessions to highlight the importance of not just individualising our responses to workplace stress. And perhaps I will open up conversations with the union activists in our place around this.

Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Well, despite feeling that Postman is a bit curmdgeonly and dyspeptic in Amusing Oursleves to Death, I'd have to say I love the article of which the summary follows.
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change:

... five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

The reasons for my assessment of Postman can be seen in the above: he is disposed to see the downsides more readily and to assume that change is bad. While change can be bad, we should recall the first point about winners and losers. Sometimes the there is a more democratic spread of winners and the point about ecologic change (4th point) means that we need to be aware also that Fiske's (et al's) point that popular culture is adept at repurposing cultural artefacts and subverting hegemonic as part of the ecology. To be sure this doesn't erase hegmonic moves by the rich and powerful, but it does mean that they can't simply stand still or assume that things will uncomplicatedly work 'for' them.

Leading in a Culture of Change

It's not often I get excited about a bit of change-management literature, but this one named for me a number of things that resonated with a couple of decades of involvement in church leadership. The Alban Institute - 2009-05-04 Leading in a Culture of Change. A bit that seems to give the flavour of the matter is this: "The organic nature of organizations is more apparent in most congregations, however. There is great informality in the way decisions actually get made; there is a reliance on more casual conversation and the building of consensus. Therefore, linear planning processes placed in the hands of a few most often seem alien to congregations, if not an out-and-out imposition. People may go along, because they want to be cooperative or because they do not know what else to do. Most often, though, these step-by-step processes do not produce the desired results. We’ve all heard the stories about the months spent crafting a purpose statement that gets hung on the wall or printed in the Sunday worship bulletin but has no discernable impact on the ministry of the congregation—it’s the kind of thing that happens when congregations rely on a linear process to enable organic change."
I felt vindicated that I have often tried to encourage and 'empower' (and make accountable) more informal decision-making processes. It also helped me to realised that the difficulties I'd experienced trying to follow patterns recommended by CEO-style leaders of big churches were not just down to my incompetence but rather the incompetence was trying to follow an inappropriate model.
The main thing is to realise that non-linear dynamics obtain: it's chaotic but with enough of the right kind of forces and -crucially- feed-back, a strange attractor can form giving a degree of relative stability. Of course, it also means that little perturbations can make big changes to that apparently equilibrial state!

I think this may find its way onto a reading list.

Now, how does this apply to college ... ?

Freeing the Saints From Hallmark Festivals

First this specific got my attention: "Robyn learned the story of St. Nicholas, the Turkish bishop who became a symbol of anonymous gift-giving by providing dowries to three destitute sisters. (You can read the story in Samantha Baker-Evens article, “The Real Santa Claus”.) When Robyn shared the story of St Nicholas with her children, she was able to encourage them to focus their gift-giving on those who were really in need at Christmas and remember the One who gave us the greatest gift of al—Christ our Saviour. The whole family volunteered to serve Christmas dinner at a local homeless shelter, and they bought a goat for a poor family in Ethiopia. “It was our most satisfying Christmas ever,” she said."
As much as anything because I'm considering sending a note to most of the people that usually buy me presents to suggest to them that (a) I don't really have anything that I especially want as a present, (b) I recognise that it can be difficult to know what to get someone and (c) when people have done what I'm about to suggest for me in the past, I have found it really moving and quite exciting. So I'm going to suggest that they surprise me by whatever it is they select to improve the life of someone in the developing world. Here's one site that enables that Present Aid.

It was actually the more general message of this article that got my attention in the first place, so secondly I'm signalling my agreement with the basic message here about extracting ourselves, somehow, from the fact that our culture has a really unhealthy and vicious little trap around gift and card sending. The occasions for these things are expanding and you are made to feel a heel if you try to opt out of the spiral of reciprocity. So the important message here is "Rather than ranting and raving against consumerism, however, I think that we need to explore ways to transform these corrupted symbols of the consumer culture into real celebrations of our faith." And it gives an example. We need to be able to do this kind of thing with Valentines, parents' days, and so forth, not to mention Christmas and Easter.

Starting article: Mustard Seed Associates � Freeing the Saints From Their Hallmark Holidays � Creating the future one mustard seed at a time:

Shift Happens

YouTube - Shift Happens - UK Version

Canadian Department of Justice: use “singular they”

Htt Language Log � Canadian Department of Justice: use “singular they”:for this alert to what may be a first 'official' recognition of singular 'they' for legal documentation. "A page at www.justice.gc.ca recommends that people drafting legislation should “consider using the third-person pronouns ‘they’, ‘their’, ‘them’, ‘themselves’ or ‘theirs’ to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun”."

Don't you just love this evolving thing we call English?

I just loved these that I'd not come across before. Looking for opportunities to use them in blogging! "Some words are lovely additions - I'm particularly fond of whataboutery ('the practice of repeatedly blaming the other side'), and silver, which enters as a verb, meaning 'to age'.
Others, meanwhile, just make you despair. Has it really been necessary to cultivate masstige ('the impression of exclusivity in goods that are affordable for many')? Or preneed ('arranged or made available in advance of eventual requirements: preneed funeral arrangements')? Now that's a barbecue-stopper."Aida Edemariam: More new words (most of which we could do without) | News | Guardian Unlimited Books:

Unionising heaven

Having just set in motion becoming a member of the Higher Education union UCU, I was interested in Walton's comment about unions just out today. I've been noting how the unions I've been involved with in the last five years or so have been in the process of becoming more focused on the all round welfare of members in terms of career development, financial services and deals with organisations to help get goods and services at better rates. Which is probably as it should be. Walton made me smile with this;
"But unions have had to rethink themselves quite drastically, and there are some early signs that this is paying off in some interesting and exciting ways.
Unions have been reaching out to groups of workers who have never been organised before. The union I work for, Unite - traditionally an engineering union - now has a faith workers branch, with clergy from most religions. The union has a recognition agreement with the Church of Scotland, and it is a very interesting and heartening experience to meet a senior shop steward with the title 'Reverend'.
Comrade reverend, do you think the members will vote for strike action if their demands for more divine intervention are not met?
That'd make the old gaffer sit up and take notice."
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Red Star Coven: The end of black men in blue overalls?: