 So good morning. Welcome to what is mindfulness anyway. I'm Beth Renestis and I'm going to be introducing our speaker today and I'm a member of the Diversity Committee at the iSchool at San Jose State University. Everyone's talking about it as a way to distress. So we're going to discuss today what is mindfulness anyway. Be more productive and improve mental health. It's now a billion-dollar business that includes corporate trainings, apps, products and online courses. But what actually is mindfulness anyway? This webinar will examine the recent popularity of mindfulness in Western society as well as its history and tradition as a Buddhist spiritual practice. What parts of mindfulness have been embraced and adopted by our culture and which portions have been ignored? What do its proponents rave about and what do its critics argue? Is mindfulness a cultural movement or is it a fad? Is it a spiritual endeavor or an intellectual one? Is it political or apolitical, activist or apathetic? Is it an example of globalization or is it cultural appropriation? These are some of the questions that will arise during the exploration of this topic. You'll come away with a greater understanding of mindfulness, be able to detangle the ongoing conversation surrounding it and perhaps develop a curiosity to learn more. We encourage you to place questions into the chat. We will however not be addressing questions until the end of Jamie's presentation. So a little about our speaker today. Jamie Lin is a librarian, educator and designer living in Southern California. She's a 2014 graduate of the San Jose State University School of Information and has worked as a corporate researcher as well as an instructional designer in online higher education. It's my pleasure to introduce Jamie Lin. Thank you Beth and hi everybody. Just hearing the description of my talk for today. I was like wow that was really ambitious. And you know thankfully I think I pretty much tried to stick to what I had described but there is a lot that that I will be covering today. And so first of all thank you so much for taking time out of your day. Thank you for joining me. This is a topic that I'm sure you hear a lot about and maybe you have positive feelings about mindfulness. Maybe you're a skeptic and maybe you're sick and tired of hearing about it and seeing it everywhere because we do see it everywhere. We see it on newsstands at the grocery store and in our online news and social media feeds. And there are so many books about mindfulness and not just books to read but activity books, coloring books, puzzles, games, workbooks, books for kids, books for parents, books for teachers, books for all ailments. And there are apps, lots of them. This article is actually from three years ago. So that number is outdated. In fact the first market research report on mindfulness came out in 2017 and it forecasted an animal growth rate of 11.4% for this industry. So in 2017 that was $1.21 billion expected to be $2.08 billion by 2022. So I did a little bit of math and I calculated that our current app market might look something more like this. And I used to work in corporate research which is all about data. So here's a little bit more data. Google trends data is a great way to track popularity of a topic. And so here we can see the circles for mindfulness have increased by a factor of four in the last 10 years. And all these slides do is illustrate the extent to which this topic captures our collective interest. One last chart here just because I think it's so delightfully librarian-ish. This is from a scholarly article published in 2017 and it uses Lexis-Nexis data for news articles about mindfulness, which are shown in pink. So there's about 33,000 of them published in 2015. Scholarly articles shown in blue outpace these in growth from about 200 in 2005 to 1100 in 2015. And that's really incredible. That is five and a half times growth. And as for the question of what are all these articles examining, you know, I that's unfortunately another talk for another day. I did the ones that I did look at do seem to cover all pretty much everything that I talk about today and much more. So we won't be touching so much on the reasons why this is happening, though this is clearly, you know, showing our society's interest in both popular and scholarly perspectives. What I do want you to consider as I'm talking today is this. What is the potential given all of its interest? How can it be used? How can it be abused, squandered or nourished? The subject of mindfulness is gigantic and complex. And I really did try to narrow my topic. But I do recognize that I am fitting in a lot today probably more than I should have for one session. It's just really interesting. So we'll be looking at how mindfulness appears in our society in the United States, where a capitalist society and we have the history of valuing the strong individual who against all odds works really hard and succeeds in making a lot of money. But mindfulness comes from the eastern spiritual tradition and it's part of the Buddha's practice or part of the Buddha's teachings to end suffering in ourselves and the world we exist within. When brought to a country that is highly suspicious of religion, specifically non-Christian religion, and values the individual over the larger community, how does something like mindfulness change? How does a culture that commodifies everything treat a philosophy that was meant to be offered to all people who expressed interest in it regardless of their ability to pay? Is it still mindfulness? And what is mindfulness anyway? So I am not a cataloger, but for those of you who are interested in cataloging, you may want to consider these three current LC subject headings for mindfulness and think about where you might classify the information I'm sharing with you. Maybe it's time for a new subject heading, and if so, what would that be? Okay, so we will start in 2007 at a tech company called Google. An engineer named Ched Meng Tan came up with an idea. And I'm going to let Meng describe for you what his idea was. This is a video from 2012, and for some reason, sometimes when I press play, it doesn't start to play correctly, the link points around, so I may need to... Like, my name... Yep, here we go. ...is the question of why did I do this? How did Search Inside Yourself begin? Embarrassingly enough, it began with world peace. Search Inside Yourself started because I wanted to create the conditions of world peace in my lifetime. And the way it started was we have this thing called 20% time project. For those of you watching on TV, engineers, at least in my days, when I was a young man, we could spend 20% of our time working on whatever project we wanted. And I figured, since I can do whatever I wanted, I might have solved the toughest problem I know, which is world peace. I mean, mining asteroids, anybody can do that. World peace, that is tough. So I started thinking to myself, the first question asked, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for world peace? I figured something out. I figured that there are two conditions which are necessary, each one insufficient, but combined may be sufficient. The first is the end of global poverty. The second is inner peace, inner happiness, and compassion on a global scale. And combined, I think they are necessary and sufficient. And then I figured, since Gates and the rich guys are working on the first one, the second one, nobody's working on it, I'll work on it. How do I do that? And then after a few months, I figured it out. I figured out that the way to create inner peace, inner happiness, and compassion worldwide is to align it with the success of individuals and businesses. If you can create those qualities in ways that help people succeed at work, that help business bottom line, it's going to spread. If it's just about goodness, it's kind of nice, go hug a tree. But if it's this thing, this thing, it will help you get your next three promotions and you will earn the company a lot of money. Oh, by the way, you will create world peace. Okay, so where do I sign up? So the idea, there's a word for it. I'm blanking out right now, upaya, skewful means, which means that to do something good, do what align with the people's self-interest in the way that the goodness is a necessary and unavoidable side effect. So help people succeed in a way where world peace is the unavoidable side effect. That's what I'm trying to do. Good, how do I do that? And then a couple of months of thinking, I figured it out. I figured out the way to do that is to create a curriculum for emotional intelligence for adults. And that was how SIOI started. That was the story. So SIOI, Search Inside Yourself, started or began with the story of one funny little engineer at his pursuit for world peace. And I hope that this story will have a funny and happy ending. Okay, so I'll pause there. This is actually the ending part of a one hour long video. And it's actually quite enjoyable and informative. Michelle's just put the link in the chat if in case you had some issues watching it or you want to watch it again later. So Meng is a really charming guy. And he uses analogies like horseback riding and lifting weights to describe mindfulness. And Meng believes that mindfulness takes only 100 minutes of practice to have an effect and is trainable to a meaningful degree in seven weeks. Now the institute that he created to teach this, help employees get promoted while also creating world peace is called Search Inside Yourself. And it has now become its own entity separate from Google. And its mission statement is we help people develop the leadership and emotional intelligence skills needed to intensify focus, manage stress, harness creativity, and improve resilience. And this is what corporate mindfulness is about, managing stress, improving worker productivity, and learning how to recover quickly from any number of workplace related issues. How do they piece this? You go to their website, you'll see that the oh here we go, that they offer trainings for organizations and for individuals. And let's just start by taking a look at an individual training. Right away we can see that they're offered all over the world. I'm going to choose one in the U.S., so we'll take Chicago. And you'll see it is a two-day course, nine to five. Join the emerging movement of companies integrating evidence-based mindfulness in their workplaces, emotional intelligence, neuroscience, and mindfulness. And so it's a two-day program followed by a four-week online journey. So it's a little less than the seven weeks that he was saying is, you know, what is needed for training to a meaningful degree. But I'm sure you'll learn the basics in this. This coaching education credits is actually new since I added this to my presentation because it's very interesting because it will relate to what I'm going to be talking about in just a little bit too. And here are your facilitators, these very friendly-looking people. And here we go. Okay, so one ticket is $1,250 and plus a $45.69 fee. I don't know about you, but that seems really expensive to me. I can't or, you know, I guess no, no, I don't know if I would spend that much on a two-day training. But, you know, they did say that they offered organizational training, so maybe having them come talk to the organization would be better. Now, they don't actually list their corporate prices on the main website, but I did find these figures on another page. And I just want to say, I wish I made $30,000 for two days of work. So two-day program $30,000, a one-day program, $20,000, a half-day program, $10,000, and if you want a keynote, anywhere up to $7,500. So thinking about this a little bit, I wonder, well, how would someone like me, for example, go about becoming an SIY trainer? Keep your training. Okay, so we're looking for candidates with established sales and marketing skills and or an existing network of clients to whom SIY can be offered. By the way, this emphasis on the text is there, screenshot from their website. So once certified, the institution offers some support for business development. However, the expectation is that teachers would build their own business and client base. But to be a mindfulness teacher through SIY, I basically need to be a good salesperson. That's probably not me, but we're investigating now. So let's just keep continuing. Okay, so the cost of the teacher training is going to be $9,800. And if you jump to the end of this, it says it does not include the cost of attending a today program. So I will have to pony up that $1,250 anyway. It's just clearly an investment. I guess if you're thinking about it, from the lines of I'll make $30,000 per training, maybe it's something worth it. But then there is this 25% licensing fee that's taken from my proceeds. And also, it turns out that teachers need to sign a non-compete agreement as well. So any existing companies that work with SIY or any other SIY trainers are off limits. That's why I would need to bring my own client base. Okay, so some people might do well in this model and many will not. How much money does SIY make anyway? For those of you who are interested in a career in research, please make note of this. Financial information for non-profits can be found through IRS Form 990. It won't have the most recent figures, but these can often be estimated. SIY is a registered non-profit. In 2015, it's asset a little under half a million dollars. And you can see that it grew quite a bit over the next two years. If we calculate the year on year growth rate, and there are online calculators that do this for you now, so you don't need to do fractions on paper, we find an absolutely astounding growth rate of 41.5% and 46.5%. Wow. So taking this a little further just to show you, if you were doing this for your, you know, for your work, you can estimate 2018 and 2019 assets just using a figure within this range. So I use 40% to 50% growth to come up with 2019 numbers of 1.9 to 2.2 million. Now these are not giant numbers from a business perspective. It's really about that growth, the over 40% annual growth and starting from, you know, less than half a million dollars four years ago. And if you were in business, these would be extremely attractive figures to anyone looking to start a business. Oh, maybe it should be a mindfulness-based business. Maybe I can grow 40% every year. So SIY, a project originally created to help Google employees obtain promotions with the side effect of world peace, has another side effect becoming a profitable business model. Meng said it himself, it's not about kindness, otherwise go hug a tree, this is business. So remember this slide, it's quite a bit more conservative than that 40% growth, but still significant. To give you some comparison, the organic food market industry grew by about 6%, advertising by 9.6%, and the entire education sector by 7.9%. So it's not Buddha statues, coloring books and meditation cushions that are raking in the big books here. It's business models like this one. Now I'm personally not going to pay 10 grand for an SIY certification and then pay them 25% of my earnings. We live in a world of options. And in this case, there are 103 million of them, which is the number of my results when I Googled mindfulness training. So I picked a site from its ad, of course, and here's what I got. Okay, and I have no idea if this program is good, if it bad, mediocre, amazing, it was really chosen pretty much at random. But let's think about how we evaluate websites. What would this course need in order for us to consider it to be credible and having authority? I'll just lie down a little bit. Okay, great. Certificate, yes. We definitely want some sort of proof that we have completed this training. Some great information about what we're getting, a review, the curriculum looks quite intense. There are 30 sessions. Okay, here's our instructor and a hawk, accreditation and certification. This is probably a good idea to have a certificate vetted and validated by somebody. Certificate again, just in case you missed it. Okay, here's our creditor and $540. Now maybe just because we were comparing it to SIY, but this looks much more reasonable to me. Let's scroll back a little bit to that accreditation information because we are librarians and we're going to follow this trail. So international mindfulness and meditation alliance, IMA. Let's type in IMA. I've been here before, so it's already on my history. Okay, so here's some information about IMA. It's telling you why it was set up and here's the advisory board. So we've got this guy, a corporate trainer and nature connection guide. We've got a life coach, CEO of HeartLife Academy, change coach, facilitator, speaker, mental health advocate and an author. Okay, so here's the advisory board and you know this is super quick and dirty evaluation. I'm just going to click on accredited schools now and the first thing I see is HeartLife Coaching and I do remember that that was the name of one of the advisory board members programs. A couple more in Australia. She's in Australia for children. The next one is the Nature Mindfulness, also a program by one of the advisory board members and then you'll see and then the one that we had looked at. So you know really I guess you'd have to ask what does it take to start an accrediting body in this business of mindfulness and very little apparently. A willingness, a website really is the wild west right now but what we see is that the business of mindfulness not only includes large and small companies that provide corporate mindfulness training, it also includes the education process to become the trainer, certified online courses, the institutions that accredited them, membership fees, accreditation fees, certification fees, all another side of the business and once you have your certification you can start your own business or join a company that hires heart certified teachers like The Den in Los Angeles. The Den has a glossy website and brochures and offers a variety of mindfulness services. So we'll see here classes, workshops, private meditations, private healings, corporate kid retreats, online podcast and their model is that of the yoga studio with drop-in courses. So here's today's schedule. Mindfulness at 10, and a bunch of other things as well. So on their corporate brochure I mentioned that their teachers meet the highest standard for training and education. What does that mean? And does it mean anything given what we've just seen? Oops we're going back again. Continue on. Okay and so for businesses that want to take a different approach perhaps more cost-effective approach there are software platforms like this one which is called eMindful and this shows in the data and the numbers that businesses understand why mindfulness is something that companies should embrace. And for the budget minded organization there is the do-it-yourself kit. Everything you need to teach a one-day workshop for improving mindfulness including the instructor guide and the training manuals. Okay so how did we get here? That was a very quick look at the business of mindfulness, the burgeoning industry of mindfulness as it appears in the U.S. from a root in Buddhist philosophy and teachings. So our next section now is a very brief and very incomplete history of mindfulness in the United States. This is easily another hour-long talk in itself. So I've determined three distinct types of mindfulness, Buddhist, MBSR and MBCT which I'll get to in a bit and of course the New Corporate Mindfulness that we just learned a little bit about. In the Buddhist tradition and this is this itself is very misleading because there are many Buddhist traditions on lineages. It may help to think about the variety of Christian denominations and then you start to get the picture. In the U.S. Buddhist tradition one of the most recognizable figures in the West is Thich Nhat Hanh. He's a Vietnamese monk and the founder of the Plum Village tradition which I've read as the largest Buddhist organization in the West. He came to the United States in the mid 1960s as academic faculty at Princeton and then Columbia and he is a well-known author. He's published over a hundred books and these books are generally very easy to read in short chapters and paragraphs and he's credited with making mindfulness really accessible to the average Westerner by not focusing on Buddhist texts but speaking of the practice of being mindful of taking it off the meditation cushion with you mindful eating, walking, talking, even mindful fighting. Some call him the father of mindfulness. He's also a peace activist and poet. He was exiled from Vietnam for four years because of his anti-war activities and Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Esen Goenka was a wealthy Burmese businessman from the country we now know as Myanmar. He started meditating because of facilitating headaches and it completely changed his life. He brought vipassana meditation, a style of sitting meditation that centers around mindfulness of breath and of body to India in the 1970s and he started his first U.S. center in 1982. There are now hundreds of his centers and locations in the world. 20 of them are in the U.S. and three of them are in California and what's really interesting about Goenka's model is that he's, he's, they've always been offered completely free of charge and keeping with the Buddha's intent that his teachings be offered to all those interested regardless of their ability to pay. So if you've heard of meditation boot camps it probably refers to a Goenka center. These are very traditional retreats. There's chanting in Pali, the original language of the Buddha and they're intended to teach the experience of mindfulness through 10 days of silent sitting meditation. Now because he spoke English Goenka attracted a number of western students including Ramdas, Baba Ramdas, Daniel Goldman, the guy credited with emotional intelligence and Sharon Salzburg. Sharon Salzburg along with Jack Cornfield and Joseph Goldstein established the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts in 1975 based on Vipassana teachings and a few years later Jack Cornfield established Insight Meditation West which is now called Spirit Rock in the Bay Area. These centers are the best known secular Buddhist meditation centers in the U.S. and they offer retreats that can be quite expensive costing several thousands of dollars. The words Vipassana and Insight Meditation are now used interchangeably though I'm going to say that Insight embraces the idea of secular Buddhism while Goenka refers to his style of Vipassana as non-sectarian and I had to look up the differences in those words so I'll share them with you. Secular means not religious and non-sectarian means not related to a specific religious group so yes religiously sort of but even if you're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim you can still practice Vipassana without being Buddhist. So in addition to embracing a secular view of Buddhism the history and culture of Insight meditation has been predominantly white, liberal, college-educated and middle and upper middle class. Recently there has been significant movement to diversify with scholarships offered to people of color and now retreats specifically for people of color you know but it is maybe a little ironic that Western Buddhist meditation in the U.S. has been historically white and wealthy and is now trying to include people of color. Mindfulness became a part of the U.S. scientific community through the work of John Cabot-Zinn. He studied with Tsigma Khan and the Insight Meditation Society and he found the teaching to be very valuable but he was concerned about the religious side of it so as a scientist he knew his intended scientific audience wouldn't accept a foreign and religious practice as the basis of medical treatment so he completely removed Buddhist elements and took only the small section that included mindfulness. The result of this was an eight-week clinical program for pain management called mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR. So you can say you know Cabot-Zinn really understood his intended user group and how to gain traction and success within that community and he designed something specifically for them. MBSR has been the foundation for mindfulness in the neuroscience, psychology and counseling communities with offshoots such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, MBCD, and mindful self-compassion and these are considered well-established and respected program for mental health care. There have been many scientific studies now that prove using tools like fMRIs how meditation affects our brains. The benefits have been validated through scientific study when we saw that a little bit earlier with that you know amazing chart. So John Cabot-Zinn by the way he is the son-in-law of Howard-Zinn I found that really interesting and I thought you might too. He's been called the founder of modern mindfulness. He legitimized the practice of mindfulness through the scientific medical community which allowed our western secular society to embrace an eastern spiritual practice without the eastern spiritual practice. So here's a depiction of the Eightfold Noble Path the path that the Buddha outlined we must follow in our daily lives to end suffering within ourselves to develop a heart of generosity of compassion towards others and to eventually at some point in our multiple lives achieve enlightenment. So you'll see that right mindfulness is just one spoke of the eight spoke wheel and the word right in front of mindfulness refers to a set of moral and ethical guidelines like don't lie don't steal don't kill similar to the Ten Commandments in Christianity. Now in addition to the Eightfold Noble a full noble path there are four foundations of mindfulness in Theravada Buddha's teaching I'm not going to get into that today but also mindfulness is the first of the seven factors of awakening. So you see here that right mindfulness goes together with investigation energy and joy some of these lead to each other in fact like mindfulness leads to investigation leads to energy leads to joy some of them arise concurrently so tranquility concentration which is really clear awareness and equanimity which is defined as mental calmness composure and evenness of temper especially in a difficult situation. Now this mental calmness and composure is how today's mindfulness is marketed to you and me right don't stress be calm be mindful and yet here we see it's just one thing and that calmness is actually considered something else in here so you can ask what is mindfulness without the rest of the spectrum and how are we supposed to get to enmity if we only have one. So Kabat then took mindfulness without the right from this larger structure and he created MBSR and an entire system of thinking about mindfulness which has become the widely accepted and understood definition of mindfulness in the West and speaking of definitions part of the challenge of understanding mindfulness are the variety of definition for it. So let's compare one of Thich Nhat Hanh's descriptions with John Kabat-Zinn. But Thich Nhat Hanh says mindfulness is the continuous practice of deeply touching every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly present with your body and your mind to bring harmony to your intentions and actions and to be in harmony with those around you. Kabat-Zinn says mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment. So the first definition includes something outside of yourself the harmony of intention and action to yourself as well as those around you and mindfulness is described as a continuous practice. Second definition defines mindfulness as something that is within oneself and awareness that emerges and it's of the present moment and if you'll recall that Mank Tan company is called search inside yourself. So this second definition is what is often used to describe mindfulness in the United States. For a country that thinks in terms of the individual and the self mindfulness then becomes something centered and existing within the individual. Also note that mindfulness itself is an English word it's a translation of a poly word Sakti which is very loosely defined as remembrance on the awareness and in the Buddhist context something that is developed through certain actions such as meditation. And meditation a word that's often paired with mindfulness is not necessarily mindfulness there are forms of meditation that are not related to mindfulness and while mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition is a form of meditation in the United States it's not necessarily considered meditation but concentration and focus. So here's where I say will the real mindfulness please stand up because this is a central part of the confusion surrounding the term and what it means. Etymologist please you know chime in here if you translate an idea with an English word does that English translation become its own thing separate from the original and historical root. And you know too what I'm sharing with you today is a very cerebral look into the meaning of mindfulness. I want to emphasize that the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness is not through our conceptual thinking brains which we're using now but through our experiential bodies. So for example you can read as many books about learning how to play the piano as you want but you'll gain a much better understanding of how to play the piano by actually sitting down at one and playing it and practicing it repeatedly over years. The one practices mindfulness through a certain way of paying attention to what is happening within and around you. Let's return briefly to MBSR it has its own certification and training process and school and accreditors and historical precursor to corporate mindfulness. Of course MBSR practitioners fall within a spectrum some study MBSR and then continue to explore and practice mindfulness within their lives and explore further. And then of course you know there are those who will get the certificate so that they can do their job and offer a certain kind of mental health care to their clients. I think it's probably an oversimplification to blame or credit depending on how you see it cabots in with corporate mindfulness. We live in a society based on free market enterprise that esteems science and that thinks in terms of the individual instead of the community and you know maybe that also has something to do with our social elements that we suffer from stress depression and anxiety. This Boston Consulting Group article describes mindfulness as a centuries old idea reinvented to address the challenges of our digital age. Mindfulness is perfectly suited to counterbalance the digital age challenges of information overload and constant distraction. And here are a couple more examples of the need for and the benefit for mindfulness. On the left a section from the Den's corporate brochure. Today's employees are over-scheduled, burnt out and report feeling little bandwidth for innovation and big picture thinking. Effective teamwork is about more than finishing a task list. Employees need clear focus, flexibility and purpose in the face of pain. On the right we have an example of how corporate mindfulness makes etna employees more productive saving the company $3,000 per employee per year. Okay so now we come to the backlash the criticism. Oh man that was that was my reveal okay pretty didn't see that. So the term mic mindfulness was coined in 2011 by a psychotherapist named Dr. Miles Neal who practices Tibetan Buddhism. The name refers to the surface level treatment of mindfulness in our culture not just corporate culture but also in the MBSR counseling world. So he according according to Dr. Neal so he has similar concerns about the way we understand and embrace yoga and he calls it frozen yoga. So both of these practices provide immediate nutrition but no long-term sustenance end quote. And by this he means a spiritual sustenance one that will truly tame you open you and connect you. And I find this yoga example especially compelling because yoga as we know it is more established in our society so let's take a look at this for a minute. I'm going to assume that many of you have attended a yoga class at some point in your life or you know people who go to yoga regularly but do do you know that the yoga poses the asanas are only one part of a larger spiritual tradition. We're taught the poses for flexibility strength and de-stressing and we're largely unaware that there is anything else to it. So as we're talking about mindfulness today compare this with your experience with yoga. People love yoga it makes you feel good and people also love mindfulness. Does it matter? Does it matter that there is more? And does it matter that that is not commonly understood or practiced by many yoga teachers themselves? So when you say namaste at the end of class you know what it means. I see it in a lot of memes social media memes usually followed by a swear word and you know it's usually used or sometimes used sarcastically and is a way to make fun of yogis. And it means the divine in me recognizes and acknowledges the divine in you. So what happens when we are disconnected or ignorant about the foundation of something like yoga or mindfulness? Something to think about. So Ron Percer is the guy who made the term mic mindfulness famous or infamous. He's a professor of management at the Francisco State University also a Buddhist in the Korean tradition and he's written academic as well as popular articles on the subject and a book that is called mic mindfulness how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. His question of purpose here is not about individual stress reducing benefits but inquiry into social structures and the way that Percer explains it our personal stress has societal causes and without addressing this mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training full of self discipline disguised as self-help instead of setting practitioners free as it is meant to do in its original form to be free of suffering is the very goal of Buddha's teachings it helps them adjust to the very conditions that cost their problems. So for instance social problems such as inequality racism poverty addiction they become viewed as individual issues and work stressors like working long hours or working multiple jobs job insecurity and the threat of constant layoffs and subsequently losing your health insurance a bad boss lack of autonomy all of these become an individual's responsibility to manage after all if the fmri shows that stress physically appears and disappears in a person's brain then it's something that the person created right and can therefore control this kind of thinking about mindfulness according to Percer keeps you focused on yourself and how to improve yourself and everyone else's problems are their responsibility to manage and you never need to examine the social and structural causes of your suffering this mindfulness tells you that you can fix yourself you just have to find the right podcast the right app the right workshop and keep shopping if one of those doesn't work for you and if nothing works for you then that's your failure that's not that of an unbust system so Percer is just one man he happens to write a lot and he also writes very well his articles are really interesting but i did find in my research that he is either the author or the co-author of all the articles that i found online that address this type of criticism for mindfulness and that define it as a product of capitalist neoliberal greed and as you can imagine practitioners of mbsr object to this lump of themselves into his characterization in this mindful response the authors explain that no contemporary mindfulness is a marriage between secular buddha contemporary buddhism and science not capitalism but they do in this response they do recognize there is a brand of mindfulness light that shows up in corporate trainings and they distance themselves from saying that this is not what is taught in mbsr and mbct now mindfulness is a way to observe and identify your emotions and how they appear and disappear in your body and teaches you to not self identify with the emotional reaction a lot of people most of us i would say have never learned to do this or we've never been encouraged to do this so a corporate mindfulness workshop might be the only exposure that someone has to the idea that to this idea and that it's also okay and even may be good to take some time to just sit and pause for a minute tick not haunt as someone who believes that real change can happen in businesses that practice mindfulness this belief is called the trojan horse theory in academic work and it's you know referring to sneaking in that disguised weapon that will bring down the fortress so meng tan also believes in this side effect of world peace while searching inside yourself you will open to compassion for the suffering of others in a way they're just you know bringing mindfulness into the the existing structure capitalist structure of society so while there has been no evidence of this level of institutional change today um this would definitely be something that takes time right and it would probably be part of something larger like more mindful consumers demanding that the companies or for be more socially responsible and also a shift in corporate culture which is often generational that wants physical and mental wellness to be a part of employee care living in a free world means that we have plenty of choices for how to become familiar with mindfulness multiple day sitting retreats are not for everyone and even if you wanted to go it might not be possible to find what kind of time an app might be ideal for you right now a book might be good for your friend a drop in class might work best for your co-worker and yes some of these options may provide a more limited view of mindfulness but whatever works best for you might change you might make you make you happier and you know that's a good thing what we want to avoid is the mental exhaustion on rebellion that arises from having it marketed to us everywhere so i think this is what makes us start dismissing it has us treating it like namaste you know with sarcasm with vision with rolled eyes we don't control how and how often this is advertised to us but we can learn to be mindful in our response to it and to understand that it's not mindfulness that it's annoying it's the way it's being shoved in our faces marketed whitewashed and used to make us feel bad about ourselves and in fact i think welcoming my mindfulness as a practice into your life will actually help you not buy or buy into anything that is marketed to intended to make you feel bad about yourself maybe it'll be even maybe it could be the downfall of consumer culture we can only hope right um so i meditate i go to retreats and i think my mindfulness is great it's changed my life i used to be the kind of person not too long ago actually who absolutely hated the word gratitude and saying things like best kind or breathe out love so if you're a skeptic i definitely get you um i reveled in my bad attitude and in my emotional pain because i defined myself by that and now i can say i am a very grateful and happy person and by happy i don't mean you know la la la everything is awesome uh it's more a peace of mind and a sense of my place in the larger world and it really is because of mindfulness which led me to dive a little deeper into that whole eightfold noble path to self-compassion passion others and a heart that wants to share to be open and breathe out love buddhas are very familiar with this sensation and they refer to it as cultivating a heart or generosity and this appears in many ways so you for instance you're being offered an example of it in the mini conference that's starting right after this webinar about wholehearted librarianship this is very closely related to mindfulness loving kindness compassion and how to bring this into your work it's breathing out love right and remember how i mentioned that buddhism in the u.s has been historically white and wealthy well time changes hearts open and people really begin to truly examine themselves and their institutions closely and take concrete purposeful steps to change the status quo and now there are quite a few teachers who are people of color not trainers but teachers in the buddhist armor the buddhist path and what happens when you have people of color especially with those who have a background in nbsr or social work community work counseling education and to have years of experience studying and practicing mindfulness meditation when people like this begin teaching the dharma the path this is where it gets really radical and this is where we witness the dream of a collective transformation of suffering into freedom mindfulness is neuro decolonization according to social worker michael yellowbird a dean and professor at the university of menetoba you take that science-based concept of neuroplasticity and rewrite how you view yourself in the world and how you react to it it's about self-empowerment through overcoming histories of trauma and using that empowerment to teach others to heal the east bay meditation center in oakland california is composed of about 40 to 50 percent people of color and equal numbers who identify as part of the lgbtqi community the meditation coalition in los angeles holds talks on subjects like undoing patriarchy and prison reform and liberate is a free app that offers recordings by teachers of color to the black identified community on subjects like handling microaggressions racism ancestors self-worth love and compassion these are examples of a growing movement of creating aware and engaged spiritual based communities within our increasingly fractured society and i'm not particularly surprised that this is being led by people who have historically found themselves written out of history and who have generations of collective pain and trauma to address and who choose as their heart-based work to heal their communities we live in a country that gives us options you get to choose how we see mindfulness whether it's as a commodity a tool for capitalists a religious thing a way to better understand yourself or even as a movement to bring about great social change so what appeals most to you about all of this you get to choose but uh you know what would it be like to break together rather than to break apart uh finally i'll close with a meta prayer a loving kindness blessing may you be peaceful may you be happy may you be safe and healthy and may you grow through wisdom and love every day and intention thank you there's a little resources link at the end here it's not really complete but for those of you who want to learn a little bit more you can visit the slides later thank you so much jamie there are some questions that came in so i do want to make sure we have 11 minutes so you do have time for questions uh anybody can place questions in the chat um yes thanks michelle i also want to say if your question is more of a personal nature i'm not a mindfulness trainer or teacher but i'm happy to i'm going to share my personal email in the chat and if you want to email me i'm happy to you know answer you one on one and while you're doing that jamie i'm going to scroll up because we had a question that came up around 11 24 from norton and i can read it to if you'd like yes please okay the question was are you aware of any studies research that explore how mindfulness is operating in libraries for librarians uh like not just try it articles but good hard looks um the only one that i saw was um not quite because i did look i did do a search for mindfulness in libraries and it was um see now i can't even remember because it wasn't actually relevant to what i was researching um i think that that is actually a fantastic research opportunity right there um and especially because you know my libraries and especially public libraries are communities that um that would be practicing this or welcoming it into their community spaces um yeah i think there's an excellent research opportunity there but but no i'm not aware of um that particular aspect but i also am not aware of the huge amount of academic articles that have been published recently on this topic and i did a quick search just in google scholar and it looks like there has been uh some literature written and there are several books one i see amanda just typed in uh it's a more recent one recipes for mindfulness in your library um and then there's one called the mindful librarian connecting the practice of mindfulness to librarianship and a whole host of um articles it looks like a lot of them are come from the academic sector but um maybe when i check into that um let me see i'm going to scroll and see if draia douglas did share a great npr article uh how namaste flew away from us so uh just want to let you know about that yes thank you that one that one always makes my heart hurt a little bit every time i see it used really sarcastically um here's another question um it looks like a Jill just taco i hope i said it correctly um we'll like to learn how we can continue the conversation after this webinar and um Jill has provided some background um as to sounds like her experience and working in colorado and would like to learn how others are using mindfulness in the library setting and collaborate with others to find ways to bring meaningful programs to staff and patrons and so she says thank you um for starting the conversation if there's any other questions go ahead and place them in the chat uh it looks like there's a lot of wonderful thank you oh here's a question um it's from i'm not sure who it's from a number but it the question is what was it that changed you from a bit of a skeptic to someone who believes in mindfulness um great question and it was the practice of it it was actually taking the time to sit down and try it and um i started with just reading some of tichnot han's smaller books um and then trying to explore you know how i would or finding those so helpful for me and then jumped right into a 10 day silent going to a retreat um which i really enjoyed well enjoyed is not the quite word the quite the correct word it's not for everyone for sure but um just being able to sit for 10 days with myself and actually experience what was happening was life changing great um i will have to do that more often even even there are many options there are two-day retreats there are four-day retreats um you know 10 days i is good because you can't leave i'm you know they kind of lock you in because it is you know your mind is kind of wild crazy place and after a couple days you're like okay i got to get out of here um so the 10 day really does make you say no you have this there's no option you have to sit um but there are definitely some some easier um more gentle options to defeat this and are there any other questions you can play some of the chat and while we're waiting for questions to come in i do want to remind everyone of uh i already posted it in the chat but right after this is the wholehearted library soft skills for 21st century information professionals it is from noon to 3 p.m pacific it's a free online will be recorded a mini conference um really adding on even to this topic so you can go to the link and register and then secondly i will mention our upcoming webinar so on our website and here's the link for this are the upcoming webcasts on a variety of topics and we have a host of uh diversity series coming up different topics um the next one in april will be around uh the topic of library services to immigrants a discussion on the role of information and migration so we welcome you to attend those as well uh the recording there is a question what will happen is the recording and the presentation will be posted on our website generally within one to two weeks of the actual presentation so look for it on our website on the on-demand webcast page within two weeks of this presentation and here's that link if you would like to have it so it'll be recorded posted there with these slides and then i see josh had a comment thank you great presentation i love the criticism of capitalism and mindfulness this piece is usually missing but is essential and then some more thank yous well thank you all for attending for taking the time out of your busy day um and yeah i do hope that you have the time to see what the um wholehearted librarianship mini-conferences about that that sounds really interesting thank you again jamie we really appreciate it and thank you to beth and debbie for your support today and for all of you for attending and we look forward to seeing you at a future session thank you again jamie thanks bye everyone