“Buddhist-based mindfulness practices are used to teach dissatisfied cogs in corporate systems to suck it up”
Mindfulness practice like everything else is much more complicated. It is more than a management tool for complacency. There are times when you have to really just have to suck it up and times when you don’t. The overall goal is to stop torturing yourself about things you cannot control even if you are trapped with no options. The more you peer through delusion the less you need to suck it up. You might even start to see new possibilities where none were apparent.
There is a big difference between an individual using it as a tool to cope with the difficulties of corporate life and a business using it to try and improve their bottom line.
Agreed. However, there are people in organizations that are actually trying to improve the welfare of the employees (by introducing mindfulness programs) who work in soul-less corporations. In the company I work for, the mindfulness program is a bottom up initiative, but we do need to request for office space and budget to run it. To that end we do need to demonstrate why this might be in the interest of the company to fund it.
How do you differentiate between a business using it to "improve their bottom line" vs a business that is trying to provide their employees with some increased life quality? Is everything a business does evil just because they are a business?
Is everything a business does evil just because they are a business?
If a business really wanted to deal with the excess stress in their organisation then they would start with the causes rather than trying to treat the symptoms.
As someone who has done extensive mindfulness training and recommends it to others, I would actually argue that lack of mindfulness, of other emotional and psychological skills is the source of the problem many times. If you look at foxconn or some other slave-ish companies in China then yes, perhaps conditions are really harsh. But for most western companies it is not the case. People are not stressed because the life is somehow very complicated - they are stressed because in our culture they are not given proper tools in the childhood: very few families have this in their ethos, and public education is completely lacking in this regard.
I don't think so, that sounds like blaming the victim, it's more to do with long work hours, office politics, poor workstation ergonomics, open plan offices, dysfunctional management, long commutes, etc.
Mindfulness practice like everything else is much more complicated. It is more than a management tool for complacency. There are times when you have to really just have to suck it up and times when you don’t. The overall goal is to stop torturing yourself about things you cannot control even if you are trapped with no options. The more you peer through delusion the less you need to suck it up. You might even start to see new possibilities where none were apparent.