Collaging Educational Orientations: A Whitening of Mindfulness

Abstract

Mindfulness is everywhere, from academia to corporations. But mainstream understandings of Mindfulness are heavily saturated and redefined by systemic whiteness. In this essay, I use autoethnography to explore the ways I have witnessed the commodification of Mindfulness in education. I use narratives from different educational orientations to explicate the ways in which White feminists have co-opted Mindfulness to create false narratives of self-care as a smoke screen to examining our own roles in systemic oppression. In the end, I argue for a nuanced and careful understanding of the origins of Mindfulness instead of taking the redefinition as truth.