Thinking Inside the Box

Now that ‘mindfulness’ is firmly established in our cultural lexicon, a pattern has become clear in how the broadcast media engages with this most mutable of concepts. A recent and worthy example is Mindfulness Manual, a three-part documentary streaming on Netflix and the latest televisual treatment of mindfulness following the inane Headspace Guide to Meditation and the awful Mindful Escapes. The bar may be low and Mindfulness Manual might even have elevated it slightly, but this programme rarely deviates from the same tired templates the media is keen to exploit. If you are considering watching it, here is a brief dissection that might give you pause for thought.

Image courtesy of Michael Leunig

From the outset Mindfulness Manual conflates ‘mindfulness’ with ‘meditation’ and further misguides viewers by equating the latter term with leisure pursuits such as dancing, painting and listening to music. If that weren’t bad enough, the first two episodes spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing celebrity meditators, all of whom display a flimsy grasp of contemplative practices. 

These people’s endorsements of mindfulness are justified by a perceived inflation in their self-esteem brought about by their meditation practice. This is a basic misunderstanding of mindfulness that leads nowhere fruitful. What these people are advocating is mindfulness debased into performance enhancement and fixations on the self. A healthy practice, by contrast, would involve seeing the nature and impact of such light-minded concerns as “How am I doing?” and “How can I like myself a bit better?” for the mental projections they are, rather than championing them.

Remote Control

​With a running time of just under three hours, the programme manages a few redeeming moments, including some useful neuroscience on the effects of meditation, an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a smattering of little gems from a Buddhist nun, Bogwan Woljeonsa, who has that knack of saying things that are deeply wise if you can get past their apparent simplicity. In the final episode, there is also a novel attempt at giving a group mindfulness course the docu-soap treatment, which adds no educational value about mindfulness but does provide some rather curious TV.

Taken as a whole, Mindfulness Manual seems to advocate the application of embodied awareness practices to help one feel more positive about oneself by conforming more efficiently to social norms. Whether it’s the baseball player “shaking off bad thoughts” in order to focus on hitting the ball, college students “controlling emotions” and “increasing concentration” to improve their studies, or hospital employees taking breaks to “disconnect from the world and focus entirely on themselves”, the same propositions recur throughout the series: calm down, disconnect from others, control thoughts and feelings, perform better, achieve more, behave yourself. If you’ve read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, you may note parallels with the fictitious drug soma.

Neoliberal Mindfulness

Mindfulness Manual was made in South Korea and some of the programme’s core messaging could be explained by how that country’s social conservatism and strong pressure to conform have affected its adoption of secular mindfulness. But it is the dubious alliance forged between the country’s unbridled neoliberalism and mind-training technologies, including mindfulness, that is most eye-catching. 


​There is something recognisable to any discerning TV audience in how the show bridges ‘stress’ and ‘wellness’ in terms of capitalist values. Not once does Mindfulness Manual entertain the possibility that responsibility for stress, for example in the workplace, should land anywhere but on the individual. There is no mention of economic injustice, insecurity, exploitation, prejudice, alienation, boredom, bullying, surveillance or any other common cause of stress. Alas there is nothing particularly Korean-centric in this presentation. Mindfulness Manual could have been made by and for almost any nation on the planet. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land

If you want the crux of Mindfulness Manual without having to watch it, may I refer you to another contribution South Korea has made to the world of secular mindfulness – an activity known as ‘hitting mung’ – that happens to bear a close resemblance to what this show is ultimately about. ‘Hitting mung’ is a slang wellness term that means something like ‘spacing out’ or ‘zoning out’. It refers to ways of superficially relieving the pressures of daily life by taking a brief respite from your busy schedule before returning to the grind. 

‘Hitting mung’ can take many forms, such as sipping tea, journalling or listening to relaxing sounds. One popular method is to pay money to sit for a while in a quiet space facing a large screen. There you can ‘space out’ to footage of clouds, waterfalls and imagery of the natural world. Hopefully you will feel a bit more relaxed when your time is up. Then you can return to work, or some other socially sanctioned activity, and be more efficient and/or successful at it.
 
When I first heard about ‘hitting mung’ it made me think of a scene from the movie Soylent Green, a cinematic exemplar of today’s flourishing dystopian-future genre. Despite being over 50 years old it’s a film prescient in its vision of a world buckling under a climate and nature crisis. In the elective euthanasia scene, one of the characters is granted permission to watch filmed footage of rare and extinct natural beauty – flowers, clouds, trees, animals, oceans, sunsets – in exchange for his life. Such is his despair at the polluted and amoral world he inhabits that he is willing to trade his life for a collection of images. His rhetorical question – “how did we come to this?” – could also be asked of today’s secular mindfulness world. ‘Hitting mung’ is a real-life example of swapping your innate capacity to be awake and aware in an interpenetrating world for a two-dimensional simulation. How dispiriting to plump for the image over the real thing in the name of mindfulness.

Selling Happiness

If you’re interested in intelligent and creative on-screen depictions of what mindfulness is really about it’s best to steer clear of the likes of Mindfulness Manual. There is more natural wisdom to be found in Kung Fu Panda than the entire Netflix mindfulness genre put together. Non-literal presentations offer sturdier ground. Mainstream classics like Groundhog Day and The Matrix, with their juicy metaphors for what matters in life, are leagues ahead of all the ‘mindful me on my wellness journey’ junk that clogs up today’s TV schedules.  

My personal favourite depiction of mindfulness is just one scene. It’s the last one from Mad Men, where the main character, Don Draper, has a lightbulb moment whilst meditating at a Californian retreat centre. But this is no spiritual insight or transformative shift to a new way of being. It’s Don conceiving a brilliant advertising campaign for Coca-Cola. The implication is that Don has made peace with himself by doing what he does best: coming up with novel ideas that can be used to sell a fantasy of happiness to millions of people.

It's an uncomfortably honest illustration of how mindfulness can corrupt into naked self-interest. Fitting, too, how Don ‘finds himself’ through meditation, but only in the sense of being the advertising man he always was. For this is a person compelled to create, to never stop, to always go forward, to always be seeking the next moment. Caught in a state of perpetual grasping for what’s next, he does to himself what he does to those who watch his ads by insisting there can be no settling for what is already here. His idea of happiness, as he once told a client, is “a moment before you need more happiness.” 

Such happiness, by its own definition, falls short. Mindfulness practices, in contrast, were originally devised as vehicles to liberate ourselves from this kind of subtle yet persistent dissatisfaction, not to mention the outright delusions that Don constructs for himself and sells to others. Don doesn’t understand any of this and so plumps for the image over the real thing. His eureka moment with the Coca-Cola ad anticipates, rather superbly, the popularity of Silicon Valley-style McMindfulness several decades later.

One interpretation of Mad Men’s final scene is that it gives viewers the chance to glimpse what Don has missed. It also happens to highlight something that Mindfulness Manual naively promotes – a design for life that promises a lot, delivers much less, and goes something like this: unplug from the world in order to replenish your resources, then thoughtlessly resume your hyper-individualistic existence more efficiently than ever. Real mindfulness, on the other hand, involves seeing this set-up for what it is and transforming your world in the process.

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