Weaving Complementary Knowledge Systems and Mindfulness to Educate a Literate Citizenry for Sustainable and Healthy Lives

Abstract

In this chapter, we the authors critically examine how mindfulness is taken up in education, and attempt to re-calibrate its use in education so as to suggest better ways to work with what mindfulness practice is truly capable of: liberating humanity from the narrow and limiting confines of reified ego consciousness and its perpetual condition of schism and conflict, internal and external. We make the case that for mindfulness to fully function in this liberatory capacity, it must not be offered as a stand-alone technique, taken out of the whole contemplative ontology and epistemology, such as, for example, the Buddhist path of liberation. As well, the usual cognitive approach to mindfulness that leaves out the affective dimension of contemplative practice that cultivates compassion, kindness, and empathic joy, is also limiting and does not do full justice to the liberatory aims of meditation. At its most limited application, mindfulness becomes just a temporary pacifier for stress-ridden individuals who have been and continue to be subject to increasing socioeconomic pressures and geopolitical oppression. We are critical of such ethically unaware uptakes of mindfulness, especially in the way schools use mindfulness for self-regulation, and we further raise concerns over the usage of mindfulness for suppressing or controlling feelings, especially negative feelings. Our chapter reiterates the purpose of mindfulness as a practice that aims at the transformation of ego-driven consciousness liable to self-other dualism and conflict to self-other integrative consciousness.