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.

Keywords:

• Autoethnography
• Education
• Mindfulness
• White Feminism
• Whiteness

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Diane Grimes, Shinsuke Eguchi, and Bernadette Calafell for their patience as well as their thoughtful and productive feedback for this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.