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McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga:Rediscovering the Essential Teachings of Ethics and Wisdom
Dr. Miles Neale
Over the last several decades, the popularity of yoga has grown tremendously in the West. Anemerging need tomanage the stress and dissatisfaction of busy lives by looking inward for peace and stillness has motivated many to participate in the yoga revolution, whichhas become a multibillion-dollar industryin America. People of all ages are turning to yoga to relax, recover from health problems, ease the difficulties of pregnancy, improve sexual vitality andintimacy, sharpen mental focus and generally look and feel better. More recently, there has been a similar upsurge of interest in meditation, particularly in a Buddhist form of practice called mindfulness. On the heels of theyoga boom, the mindfulness fad seems to mirror the motivating factors that initially drove people toward yoga: namely enhanced health and happiness. While meditation offers less immediate gratification (no endorphin rush or image-enhancing results) than its physical counterpart, it also leads to inner peace. During the mid-1990s, rising interest in mindfulness meditation culminated in an explosion of scientific investigation by healthcare professionals and researchers seeking to determine the clinical effects and health benefits of this ancient practice. Nothing has been the same since.Focus on meditation has reached critical mass. A large body of reliable evidence nowsupports claimsand demonstrates the mechanisms that makemindfulness effective. Most major hospitalsrun some sort of outpatient meditation program,dharma and spiritual centers are attracting more people than ever,and as many as one in four psychotherapists incorporate mindfulness into clinical work with patients. As greater numbers of people engage in yoga or meditation, their lives are transformed for the better. But is something being lost in translation?Are these practices, brought to the West from India and other parts of Asia in the early nineteenth century, being diluted? In our attempt to secularize, make culturally accessible and mainstream these ancient spiritual practices, we may bethrowing the baby out with the bath water. It behooves us to consider what, if anything, has been sacrificed in the effort to satisfy our voracious appetite for Asian contemplative techniques. Americansare notorious for extrapolating what theyidealize,plucking the desirable from foreign cultures and simply disregarding the rest. We are also prone to seeking quick fixes and inciting temporary trends, lacking the patience and long-term commitment needed for lasting change. Arethe yoga boom and mindfulness fad yet othersinstances of these Amerocentric inclinations? Itwould be an enormous loss for us to water down or, worse, jettison the essential transformative ingredients that constitute the Indic liberation traditions, turning them into colorfully packaged bite-size morsels for our mass consumption. Is this the dawning of the age of McMindfulness and Frozen Yoga?What exactly is being lost as yoga and meditation wendtheir way into America’s diet? And what, if anything, can we do about it? I propose that we are losing therich and sophisticated psychological context underpinning the practices of yoga and mindfulness, and that by reuniting them with their original matrixes we can turn the yoga boom and mindfulness fad into a spiritual revolution unlike any we have seen in our young country.