Recently I got the feedback that "for someone who practices mindfulness you make a lot of waves." I replied that being mindful doesn't mean being a sheep. On the contrary, mindfulness offers more opportunity to notice, and to not agree with people or situations that don't resonate with you. It gives more space to discern whether you want to engage with a certain person or situation.
Any means that are good can be used for bad purposes. This is no different for mindfulness. Mindfulness practice can easily be applied to make 'good consumers' or 'obedient employees' etc. is it not taught in a proper way. Companies sometimes offer mindfulness training for employees to benefit their well-being by reducing stress and strengthen their resilience. However, if stress is caused by e.g. work overload, imbalance in work-life balance, underpaid salary, etc. a mindfulness training is not the solution (it might be if it would be organized for the managers). Mindfulness is not a tool for dodging responsibility.
That is not the point of mindfulness.
Practicing mindfulness is a conscious action to counter the current status quo which has squeezed our ability to critically think about what is actually going on, into a box so small not even a peanut can fit in. It's time to expand and include, and eventually act wisely.
John Kabat Zinn who started Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1979 said in an interview with Drake Baer that "The whole idea was to transform and heal the world, and I know that sounds arrogant, but that was, in fact, the sense of it."
Even after we are less stressed and feel better, we need to ask the question: where and how do we go from here? If managers of companies offer mindfulness courses for employees with the expectation to solve systemic problems that are not for the employees to solve in the first place, we are employing mindfulness for the wrong reasons.
Mindfulness entails the intention to be kind and open to our own experience and the experience of other people. The intention is not to put one's own benefit at the expense of others. If you are planning to learn mindfulness, ask yourself what is the intention of the institution that is offering to teach it.
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