Murdering Mindfulness

You know mindfulness has fully penetrated the mainstream when it lands a starring role in a TV drama about the meditative dismembering of a mobster by his morally vacant lawyer. So begins Murder Mindfully, a darkly comic satire about navigating the stresses of modern life with a not-so-delicate blend of three-step breathing spaces and extreme violence. Each episode serves up training points on mindfulness that are neatly woven into the unfolding predicament of the main character, who uses his newfound awareness skills to keep cool and stay alive. By not taking itself too seriously, this show is one of TV’s most illuminating depictions of the promises and perils of modern mindfulness.

​Based on Karsten Dusse’s novel of the same name, Murder Mindfully follows Bjorn, an unscrupulous lawyer endeavouring to keep his mobster clients free from legal sanction, who decides that he wants his life to be different. He knows his job is “bad for the community, bad for my soul and bad for my family.” His marriage is failing and he misses spending time with his young daughter. Seeking some kind of turnaround, he agrees to enrol on a course in mindfulness despite believing it to be “a rehash of the same old esoteric shit that gets recycled every decade.” 

He is pleasantly surprised at how helpful the training is for handling his tension and stress. He recognises knock-on improvements in his family relations. He becomes a mindfulness enthusiast and resolves to transform his life which, sure enough, starts to look up. In the real world of mindfulness, this is a common impetus and trajectory for trainees: a desire to sort out one’s stressful mess of a life that leads to learning mindfulness skills that leads to feeling so much better about oneself and one’s world. Amen?

Self Enhancement

The implicit running joke in Murder Mindfully is that Bjorn doesn’t change his life at all. Instead, he learns to be more strategic and efficient in achieving his desired outcomes whilst remaining the same deceitful chancer he always was. With the help of his handy mindfulness tools, he manipulates, gaslights, tortures and kills people for personal gain without remorse. 

If you listen carefully to the guidance he receives from his slightly sinister and delightfully condescending mindfulness coach, you can hear how none of it contradicts Bjorn’s ruthless campaign of action. Bjorn is simply taking the guidance at face value and instrumentalising it to enhance his dishonourable life. This may border on the absurd at times, but it is an honest portrayal of the real problem of self-enhancement that shows up on badly tutored mindfulness courses – the kind that are championed by supposedly educational TV programmes like Mindfulness Manual. 

Bjorn Again

If you have a ‘serious’ interest in mindfulness, Murder Mindfully is worth watching for those cringey moments when you find yourself wondering if you’re staring into the abyss of McMindfulness or just looking into a mirror on one of your bad days. These moments offer artful teaching points on the ‘near enemies’ of mindfulness that were probably not intended by the scriptwriters. 

You can hear how Bjorn interprets perfectly serviceable mindfulness guidelines as directives to disconnect from his feelings and “mindfully gain control” of his self-serving agenda. You can observe how his developing sensitivity to his own stress levels is in inverse relationship to his consideration of other people’s. You might also want to mull over his conclusion that “mindfulness is about blocking things out”, which helps him to do things like take a chainsaw to a corpse by imagining he’s cutting a cake. In the real world of mindfulness, Bjorn is far from alone in surmising that mindfulness and dissociation can be cosy bedfellows.

If anything, the more Bjorn steeps himself in mindfulness, the more merciless he becomes. He doesn’t mean for this to happen. He doesn’t intend to become what he does. But without any overarching framework for his practice and lacking any semblance of care or curiosity, his life remains unchanged – a little unhinged and wholly unmoored from basic ethical principles. The “inner peace” that he seeks cannot develop under such conditions. No deep shifts occur within him. All he can do is keep on hustling. Expect more of the same in Season 2.

---

Catching the Drift

Good satire always borders on truth and Murder Mindfully is no exception. I like the way this show places mindfulness thematically front and centre while simultaneously relegating it to being a minor contributor to the story as a whole. This tallies with Bjorn’s relationship with mindfulness – it’s not something truly important to him – while saying something about the deficits inherent in mainstream culture’s take-up of its practices. 

The show also outlines the tendency of many meditation courses to assimilate random aspects of psychological education from different therapy modalities and rebrand them as ‘mindfulness’. Assertive communication skills, goal visualisation, time management, delegation skills and, er, deliberate smiling are some of what Bjorn’s coach teaches him. They might be useful but they’re not mindfulness practice. The propensity for contemporary trainings to drift beyond defined parameters into shallower waters is very common – misleading, too, for people interested in authentic forms of mindfulness.

Most of all, though, Murder Mindfully does a great job at exposing how the nature and purpose of traditional mindfulness get inverted by commodified varieties. An example is where Bjorn’s coach encourages him to “step back from life” like so: “When things get too overwhelming, just let go of all concerns. Take a break from your responsibilities.” Real mindfulness, of course, involves a wholehearted taking of responsibility and an active engagement with whatever is of concern, often in bold and selfless ways.

Sadly, such inversions are not confined to satirical TV shows. The real-world correlate of Bjorn’s violent quest for inner peace is Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT), which is used in the military sector to achieve “optimal warrior performance.” In other words, to help soldiers ‘switch off’ their hearts, disconnect from the consequences of their actions, and better handle the psychological impact of killing, maiming and traumatising people. For example, as I write this, drone pilots for the Israel Defence Forces are utilising their mindfulness skills to terrorise and slaughter civilian refugees in Gaza on an unimaginable scale. Here lies the shadow of mindfulness, corrupted to its core, disposed to a genocide. Place this fact next to Bjorn’s quip that “mindfulness can commit murders and break noses” and suddenly he sounds rather timid, doesn't he? Certainly not sardonic or outlandish. And definitely not funny.

---

Main blog