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.

Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a timely commentary on the dominant narratives that shape the mindfulness industry - whiteness, postracialism and neoliberalism. Its positioning as ‘apolitical’ forges institutions that fit comfortably into increasingly divided societies. The race-gender profile of these institutions reveals a White, middle-class profile of decision-makers, educators and staff that is mirrored in its audiences. Mechanisms that recycle the industry’s whiteness include corporatist pedagogies, edicts of authority, disengagement with difference and inappropriate uses of mindfulness that distance People of the Global Majority. A growing emergent movement focused on a justice-infused mindfulness and liberatory wellbeing decolonises mindfulness and de-centres whiteness. Its premise in indigenous, global South, queer knowledges leverages difference to produce multiple solutions focused on liberation. There is room for White Mindfulness to change.

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.

A powerful, step-by-step guide to help your child foster strength and resilience when faced with racial stress. Has your child experienced racial aggression, bullying, or harassment? Have they been discriminated against in the classroom, in extracurricular activities, or amongst peers? Have they ever asked you why they are treated differently? If so, you are not alone. Discrimination and racism in society are a constant stressor and painful topic of conversation for many Black families. As a parent, you want to protect your child from these injustices; but the truth is that the best way to protect them is by giving them the tools needed to build resilience, and by instilling unshakable pride in who they are. In this much-needed resource for parents of Black children, race and mental health expert Erlanger Turner combines evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) skills with mindfulness and liberation psychology to help your kids cope with race-based stress, challenge systemic oppression and marginalization, and thrive. Using the author’s innovative HEAL method (Healing Emotions and Anxiety through Liberation), you can help your kids: Better understand what causes racial stress and how to navigate it Take charge of their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors Feel empowered and prepared to cope with in-the-moment racism Build resilience, soulfulness, and joy Cultivate racial literacy and become advocates for change Although some children may not experience racism or discrimination directly, their emotional health and wellness may still be negatively impacted. Using the HEAL approach in this workbook, you’ll know what to say to your child who has experienced or witnessed racism, when to say it, and how to help them heal and flourish.

Meditation can be a way to radically encounter bliss and to begin—and sustain—real transformation in ourselves. In Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond, self-described meditation junkie Ajahn Brahm shares his knowledge and experience of the jhanas - a core part of the Buddha's original meditation teaching. Never before has this material been approached in such an empowering way, by a teacher of such authority and popularity. Full of surprises, delightfully goofy humor, and entertaining stories that inspire, instruct, and illuminate, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond will encourage those new to meditation, and give a shot in the arm to more experienced practitioners as well.

Written by meditation expert, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher Stephan Bodian, this book takes you beyond familiar mindfulness practices by offering guided meditations and direct pointers that invite you to realize your natural state of inherent wakefulness and peace. No regular practice is required, just the willingness to open yourself to a transformative new way of experiencing life. Mindfulness has permeated our modern lives, and with good reason—it’s been proven to boost mood, reduce stress, improve health, and maximize performance. But in our achievement-oriented culture, the practice of mindfulness can feel laborious and mechanical, like one more task on your endless to-do list. What if you could let go of effort and struggle and relax back into the happiness and ease that is your birthright—and is always readily available to you? Beyond Mindfulness offers teachings and practices based on the direct approach to spiritual awakening that take you beyond the mechanics of being mindful and open you to the non-dual dimension of being, where the separation between self and other reveals itself to be a painful but seductive illusion. Once you realize this new way of seeing, you’ll learn how to move beyond mindfulness into awakened awareness and discover that the love, compassion, wholeness, health, and happiness you’ve been seeking were there all along.