this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I mean, look up "mindfulness" on Amazon. There are a million books for sale out there. And people like John Kabat-Zinn have made plenty of money selling mindfulness to everyone from mental health clinics to the military.
Mindfulness in this context is generally just defined as paying attention to the present moment. But that's ethically neutral and can be used to, for example, make the horrors of late-stage capitalism more bearable for its subjects, or to help soldiers focus on the act of killing rather than the horror of it.
Bleh, I like my version better. I feel a more diverse range of emotions, and I feel those feelings more, not less. I used to be able to ignore things that made me unhappy or were actively hurtful/harmful, and now I can't really do that (except for trivial things). I'm now aware that I feel progressively more miserable if I don't take some sort of action to deal with my feelings. I'm coming at this from a place of intense childhood trauma, so that may explain the difference. I had to do a bunch of EMDR and other very unpleasant things to reach the point where I could stand to live in my own head. That's probably where the disconnect between my mindfulness and the commercial self-help mindfulness comes from.