Mindfulness Within Capitalism: A Practice of Remembering In The Depths of Despair
Mindfulness is an anti-capitalist practice that seeks and serves to remind us that in the depths of our humanity, we are whole and enough. We are connected through interdependence, and it is through remembering who we are that we find connection and belonging in community.
Mindfulness has been a slow and tenderly growing presence in my life for almost ten years now. It started with an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course in Boulder, Colorado in 2016. At the time I was drowning, and it was a Hail Mary attempt to find some way out of the depths of disconnection and loneliness that I found myself in. An unbearable ache in my soul brought me to my knees and I knew there was something more, I just didn’t know what or how to get there.
My understanding of Mindfulness has changed significantly since then as I have delved deeper into more spiritual practices and begun unearthing the deep tradition and meaning of what Buddhist Mindfulness actually is, outside of my Western context.
Unfortunately, Western context serves the roots and rhythms of capitalism — pushing a washed-down version of Mindfulness that caters to the continuation of working, performing, and producing.
Our modern understanding of Mindfulness has been shaped by centuries of imperialism and oppression. Capitalism does that — extracts the ideas and practices that it deems ‘useful enough’ to keep the infinite machine of exploitation going and going and going. A perpetual grinding that crushes human beings down to their core in the name of ‘progress.’ It is inevitable in a system that serves to uphold profit and ‘winnig’ over wellness, connection, and belonging.
The Oxford Dictionary defines capitalism as:
‘An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit’
What is left out of this incomplete definition is the impact this system has on people — individuals and communities — and society as a whole. Capitalism depends on the exploitation of people to maximize profit and depends on their forced expendability. We are all born into a system that doesn’t set us up to connect and depend on each other. Instead, we are forced into an endless competition with those same ‘would-be’ community members.
The goal of capitalism is profit — or capital — it’s in the name. In this structure that is driven by greed and pits us against each other in a boundless pursuit to be ‘better’ and have more than the person next to you, wealth and success are measured in dollar bills, stocks, and assets. How much capital do you have? What tangibles measure the value and worth of your life?
The word Mindfulness comes from a 19th-century translation of the Pali words — Sati & Smriti. The man who first translated this term was Thomas William Rhys Davids — a white, British, devout Christian and son of a clergyman and over a hundred years later, his translation is now a buzzword among the modern wellness and self-help community.
When Google-ing the term Mindfulness, answers of all kinds show up, but they are usually in this realm:
1. the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.
2. a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
3. Mindfulness is a cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation
4. Practicing mindfulness involves breathing methods, guided imagery, and other practices to relax the body and mind and help reduce stress
Mindfulness is being sold to us as a tool of recovering just enough, from the eternal exhaustion of pushing our minds and bodies to their breaking point in pursuit of gaining capital. Slowing down and breathing deeply, taking small breaks in our day to rejuvenate ourselves from our constant striving and working just to keep striving and working even more. To what end?
Mindfulness originated as a practice aimed at cultivating compassion, deepening our connection to ourselves and each other, and relating to life as a human being in a way that is honest and spacious. Mindfulness invites us to view ourselves and our lives with a gentle and steadfast truthfulness. One part of a lifelong path that is not aimed specifically at reducing ‘stress.’
It invites us to remember that we are so much more than the actions and narratives of our lives or the amount of work we produce with the sole purpose of trading it in for capital. Mindfulness is a reminder of who we are and what we are capable of outside of a system that doesn’t value what the ancient tradition of Mindfulness is.
This separation of self from community is a fundamental flaw in Western culture. The pressure to not only survive but thrive on your own is a scam that I have fallen for myself. As a self-described ‘hyper-independent person,’ my own journey into Mindfulness has been one of profound undoing. As well as a raging mess.
Individualism is a foundation of capitalism — it is on this idea that so much disconnection from each other stems from. Individualism is upheld as the highest standard while depending on and relying on others is sold to us as a weakness. It rips us away from the connection and belonging that only comes from community and being in relationship with others. It was a hard but welcome truth to realize as my ideas of the world fell away one after the other.
Mindfulness turned my entire life upside down and there was no going back. It took years of work in this profound undoing to learn to ask for help, rely on others, and lean into my community.
I have formally practiced Mindfulness and Meditation for close to a decade and Zen Buddhism for the last several years. I am certainly no expert, but my time in silent contemplation on retreat, years of personal study and community work, and my bachelor’s degree in political science have placed me on a path that feels like coming home. I can’t ignore its pull or unsee the connections that have revealed themselves over time.
In tandem with my evolving path into Mindfulness, Meditation, Yoga, and Buddhism, I have thrown myself into intensive trauma recovery therapy rooted in somatic and attachment-based modalities: Emotionally focused, compassion-centered, embodied healing.
The same unbearable ache in my soul that brought me to my knees in 2016 brought me to each of these practices and they started to blend beautifully together — like a symphony growing into a cohesive sound.
After a few years of continued study, practice, and therapy, my life started to change shape and my understanding of reality shifted. Something was happening to me as I woke up again and again, tiny glimmers of the next step and lights being shone in dark corners lit the way.
Don’t get me wrong, it was beautiful, but it was also grueling and arduous. A life of trauma set me up for an early failure at the healing I was trying so desperately to force into myself and my body. Before anything could happen I had to learn to soothe my nervous system and untangle the mess of my life. My mind and body had been caught in a loop for twenty years and it was almost impossible to make sense of it all.
Complex PTSD left me in a space where I had no control, space, or understanding. No compassion, no kindness, and nothing but shame and hatred toward myself. It was this darkness that I needed to navigate through, and I thought I had to do it alone for it to be real. I was caught in the trap of capitalism — alone and afraid.
Mindfulness invited me back to myself and the embodied knowing that I was always enough.
It took time for the repetitive small practices to sink into my daily life and even longer for them to sink into my bones. Moments of Mindfulness here and there, Yoga classes, and short Meditations gradually turned into Yoga teacher trainings, silent meditation retreats, and a regular practice in Zen Buddhism. Connection with community transformed into the visceral knowing of my entire being that healing happens in community and relationship with others. I didn’t have to do it alone. No one does.
It isn’t just Buddhism that teaches and emphasizes that we aren’t meant to navigate life alone. Connection and belonging are ingrained in our biology as attachment creatures; human beings have gathered together for thousands of years.
We are intrinsically drawn to each other and we currently find ourselves together in cities, towns, churches, football stadiums, bars, and Yoga studios. There is a deep ache in all of us whether we acknowledge it or not.
Even though capitalism pits us against each other for a fight to the top, it is also our practice of profound undoing to remember our connection to each other. Despite this fight to survive, we depend on one another and we thrive in community.
Day in and day out, each of us clamors over the other in our struggle to survive in a system that doesn’t emphasize or support community, rest, and healing. Instead, we ostracize each other for not being the ‘same.’ We rally ourselves in those same cities, towns, churches, football stadiums, bars, and Yoga studios as ways to separate ourselves from others instead of coming closer. A continuation of the perpetual competition mirrored in the grand scale of the societal norms and political and economic systems that dictate so much of our lives.
Mindfulness is being falsely sold to us as an antidote to the very system that is running all of us helplessly into the ground. It is a tradition being used to trick us into a false sense of calm and peace, only to continue to serve itself as a system of oppression and exploitation.
Capitalism doesn’t care if human beings are happy, well-rested, or compassionate. It doesn’t care that we all have an ache that draws us toward not only each other but to something ‘more.’
Mindfulness being integrated into my life made me desperately seek to understand its origins more clearly. My search led me to know that English is undoubtedly lacking compared to Sanskrit's ancient language. Out of the many translations of Smrti, the one that makes sense to me the most is—
‘That which is remembered’
In my many years of therapy and learning how to intentionally return to myself, I have come to understand Mindfulness as an act of remembering. Remembering that every moment has the potential to show me that I am always linked to connection, intention, and belonging no matter how separate I might feel. Remembering that I am enough all the time, we all are.
The washing and re-packaging of this ancient practice with the intent and purpose of using it to aid a system of exploitation is inevitable. ‘Corporate Mindfulness Retreats’ and ‘Mindfulness in the Workplace workshops’ are presented as a shiny new cog in the same old machine. This is nothing new, only the continuation of a process that repeatedly steals certain practices to push the status quo forward.
Part of Mindfulness is seeing things exactly as they are, not how we wish they were. We so often turn away from the hard and painful moments of this life and we ignore the parts and pieces that don’t align with how we want life to be. When we do that, we are left in a position of willful ignorance with no space or awareness to make choices that tend not only to ourselves but to others with care and compassion.
Capitalism strips us of our intrinsic ability to know that each of us is part of a greater whole. Part of humanity’s evolutionary imperative is to be close to each other and realize our interdependence. We need attachment, we need community and mindfulness brings us back to that truth again and again.
‘You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop’ — Rumi
Mindfulness is a potent practice and intentional choice that has the power to disrupt capitalism at its deepest level. It takes conscious action to choose connection and belonging especially when it is against everything we have been conditioned to believe. The path forward is with each other and it always has been, we just have to remember.
