‘The anatomy of our discontent’: from braining the mind to mindfulness for teachers

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over ‘the death of God’ in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of bios. We also examine what emerges in the wake of such debates, including how Biologies New and a transcendence/immanence horizon continues to reverberate through popular, contemporary recommendations for mindfulness in teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindfulness
• neuroscience
• teaching’ new biology
• history of science
• Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear [that enabled man's appearance] … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 422). Man is the term of the time which Foucault was discussing, which included and exceeded its gendering.