Beyond White Mindfulness

Beyond White Mindfulness: Critical Perspectives on Racism, Well-being, and Liberation brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on mind-body interventions, group-based identities, and social justice. Marshalling both empirical data and theoretical approaches, the book examines a broad range of questions related to mindfulness, meditation, and diverse communities. While there is growing public interest in mind-body health, holistic wellness, and contemplative practice, critical research examining on these topics featuring minority perspectives and experiences is relatively rare. This book draws on cutting edge insights from psychology, sociology, gender, and, critical race theory to fill this void. Major themes include culture, identity, and awareness; intersectional approaches to the study of mindfulness and minority stress; cultural competence in developing and teaching mindfulness-based health interventions, and the complex relationships between mindfulness, inequality, and social justice. The first book of its kind to bring together scholarly and personal reflections on mindfulness for diverse populations, Beyond White Mindfulness offers social science students and practitioners in this area a new perspective on mindfulness and suggestions for future scholarship.

Beyond Mindfulness is for intellectually-minded seekers who are wary of the dogmas of traditional religion but are interested in mindfulness meditation. It explores our unexamined adherence to the materialistic worldview and its ignorance of the primacy of consciousness. Nirvana-mental liberation-is then presented as the most meaningful goal to strive for, with the Buddhist path being the ultimate expression of self-improvement and spirituality.

Grounded in critical race feminism, this book explores mindfulness as an empowering approach in multicultural education. The author explores how learners of multicultural education—by (re)centering the body through mindfulness with concrete strategies and scaffolded practice—can be empowered to handle the activated emotions and deep self-inquiry that come with the work of social justice, liberation, and anti-racism. This book includes counter stories of students of colors and offers both an epistemological and a curricular approach to mindfulness in multicultural education, including discussion of theory and key principles in addition to ten modules with practices to engage learners. These modules can be directly applied as the basis for curricular changes in teacher education and university-wide social justice courses, or they can be independently read by learners interested in enhancing their wellbeing and social justice. Written for teacher preparation and university social justice courses, this book encourages educators to contextualize their mindfulness practice within a critique of systems of oppression and ask questions about how mindfulness can empower action towards a more just society.

Enacts a radically interdisciplinary intersectionality to position performance-based research in solidarity with decoloniality This boldly innovative work interrogates the form and meaning of artistic research (also called practice research, performance as research, and research-creation), examining its development within the context of predominately white institutions that have enabled and depoliticized it while highlighting its radical potential when reframed as a lineage of critical whiteness practice. Ben Spatz crafts a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies that includes Spatz’s own practice-as-research, to productively confront hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality. Ultimately taking jewishness as a paradigmatically “molecular” identity—variously configured as racial, ethnic, religious, or national—they offer a series of concrete methodological and formal proposals for working at the intersections of embodied identities, artistic techniques, and alternative forms of knowledge. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research takes inspiration from recent critical studies of blackness and indigeneity to show how artistic research is always involved in the production and transformation of identity. Spatz offers a toolkit of practical methods and concepts—from molecular identities to audiovisual ethnotechnics and earthing the laboratory—for reimagining the university and other contemporary institutions.

An empowering guide to help you navigate racism in the workplace, find solutions that work for you, and stay focused on your professional goals and well-being. Have you ever been in a meeting or had a conversation where a coworker or manager said something racist, and wondered how to respond? People often understand racism in terms of blatant, overtly hostile behaviors and attitudes—such as verbal abuse or physical intimidation. At work, however, racism is typically more subtle, and often takes the form of microaggressions, being ignored, being invalidated or talked over, being overly criticized, or having assumptions made about your abilities. The perpetrator might think nothing of their actions, but the impact is real, and over time it may deteriorate your mental health, well-being, and job satisfaction. You should not have to experience racism—and it is not your fault—but the unfortunate reality is that many Black people do, especially in their workplace. Experiences of racism can leave you feeling disempowered, hurt, and unsure of what to do next. Having the confidence to stand up to racism can be incredibly difficult. And once you muster the courage to say something, what do you say, and when do you say it? Based on the author’s innovative SNAPS (Strategically Navigating Anti-Black Racism in Professional Spaces) decision-making model, this empowering workbook provides practical skills for navigating and responding to anti-Black racism in the workplace. With this much-needed guide, you’ll find solutions that work for you and your unique situation, as well as tips for addressing interpersonal issues, setting boundaries, and attending to your emotional and mental health while ensuring that you achieve your professional goals and aspirations. Whether overt or covert, if you’ve experienced racism in the workplace, you may feel trapped in a dilemma. How should you respond to an incident of racism? Should you ignore it, potentially allowing it to fester beneath the surface like an unseen infection? Or should you speak up, and risk the very real consequences: being disbelieved, criticized, or worse, fired? This workbook offers essential tools to help you make informed choices about how to respond to racism in the workplace, assert yourself with confidence, and prioritize your own well-being.

This book is a philosophical and historical study that explores how meditative practices for cultivating mindfulness can be regarded as a unique form of education against violence—one that emphasizes stopping and contemplation as a necessary precursor to action. It brings together the idiosyncratic but insightful musings on violence by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek with recent research on mindfulness and violence as a lens. Using this lens, it looks at two exemplary educators and how they taught mindfulness meditation as a way of resisting the types of violence they and their students faced: the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh amidst the brutality of the Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and the African-American studies professor and cultural critic bell hooks in the face of systemic oppression in the United States of the 1980s.

Mindfulness-Based Teaching and Learning is the first comprehensive survey text exploring the history, research, theory, and best practices of secular-scientific mindfulness. With a focus on how mindfulness is taught and learned, this book is an invaluable resource for aspiring or expert mindfulness specialists. Integrating and defining the emerging field of MBTL within a common purpose, evidence-base, and set of transprofessional—and transformational—practices, the book provides both a visionary agenda and highly practical techniques and tools. Chapters provide curriculum design and teaching tips, explore the expert-validated MBTL-TCF competency framework, and reveal insights into the ways self-awareness can evolve into ecological awareness through intensive retreats.

An effective new approach to Buddhist practice that combines the rigor of traditional meditation and study with the psychological support necessary for practice in modern life. Zen teacher Jules Shuzen Harris argues that contemporary American Buddhists face two primary challenges: (1) “spiritual bypassing,” which means avoiding or repressing psychological problems in favor of “pretend Enlightenment,” and (2) settling for secularized forms of Buddhism or mindfulness that have lost touch with the deeper philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the religion. Drawing on his decades of experience as a Zen practitioner, teacher, and psychotherapist, Harris writes that both of these challenges can be met through the combination of a committed meditation practice, a deep study of Buddhist psychological models, and tools from a psychotherapeutic method known as “Mind-Body Bridging.” Using this unique approach, students can do the real work of awakening without either denying their embodied emotional life or missing out on the rich array of insights offered by Buddhist psychology and the Zen practice tradition.