Abstract
The article by Oman courageously deals with the promises and problems of integrating mindfulness meditation into public health. Here, I would like to expand on what he considers critical points, namely the adaptation on mindfulness into local cultural and religious contexts. In addition, I will focus on one important omission concerning the significant individual variations in meditation effects for which there is now robust evidence. I conclude by offering a counter-analogy to that of mindfulness as a gym to the mind: the ethical danger of turning mindfulness into an agricultural monoculture, like that of soya plantations in the Amazon, which wipes out the native biodiversity of other contemplative practices. To counter this monocultural model, I suggest that contemplative science would gain considerably, both ethically and scientifically, by developing a systematic study of other meditation practices, which overall remain under-researched and, often, unacknowledged.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | (In-Press) |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Mindfulness |
| Volume | )In-Press) |
| Early online date | 17 May 2024 |
| DOIs |
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| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 17 May 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.
Funder
The author’s work on meditation is currently funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (Grant 0595: “Testing the efficacy of heart-centred contemplation”).Keywords
- Adverse effects
- Christian mindfulness
- Colonialism
- Contemplative practices
- Ethical dangers
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Health(social science)
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Applied Psychology
Themes
- Faith and Peaceful Relations
