Mindfulness and Self-Care: Why Should I

Care?
By Edwin Ng and Ron Purser

Part One considered the current hype surrounding workplace mindfulness against the
dubious history of management science. Part Two here considers the use of critical
mindfulness in experiments with ethical self-care.

Though we are skeptical about celebratory claims, we actually do hope that mindfulness
might become a disruptive technology to transform prevailing systems. However, we insist
on the importance of collective attentiveness towards the workings of power, which have
shaped the dominant individualistic-therapeutic approach to mindfulness and the stresses
we face in our private and public lives.

I’d like to clarify the notion of governmentality that guides our work. The blended concept
of govern-mentality derives from the work of Michel Foucault. Governmentality does not
refer only to the processes of the state. Rather, to think about governmentality is to explore
how diverse types of knowledge, expertise, and practices are developed to guide people’s
voluntary conduct.

Consider, for instance, the contemporary interest in “wellness“. We learn about the research
conducted by medical institutions on exercising or meditation. This knowledge filters
through the advice we find in the media. With the help of a trained expert or through our
independent efforts, we might cultivate a daily practice of jogging or yoga or mindfulness.
Companies and institutions might incorporate a wellness program into their operations.

To put it another way, governmentality plays out formally and informally as the everyday
“rules of the game” for responsible conduct. Under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism,
the logics of governmentality are imbued with the moral rhetoric of “free choice” and are
geared towards self-optimizing, consumerist and entrepreneurial ends.

When we say we are concerned about the workings of power, we are not imagining some
conspiracy of coercion, “brainwashing,” or “mind control.” We are mindful that the
exercise of power over people cannot do without people’s power to act.

Foucault’s curiosity about the ethos of the care of self guiding Ancient Greek practices of
spiritual cultivation is instructive here. The care of self was a vigilant attitude that
individuals adopted towards their behavior and thought. The aim was to expose and
transform unacknowledged habits, and to enable fresh ways of relating to others and the
world. With ethical self-care the Ancient Greeks developed mastery over their passions and
fostered their responsibilities as citizens.
Foucault distinguished this relational approach to self-care from the narcissism of “the
Californian cult of the self.” Ethical self-care is a mode of expérience, in the way Foucault
evoked the dual meanings of this French word as “experience” and “experiment.”

An academic friend recently started a small business in handmade facial care products.
Together with her like-minded friends, they have been experimenting with self-care to
work through the existing “rules” policing their experience as women/people of
color/minoritized individuals within an increasingly corporatized university and in broader
society. Some colleagues of mine have also started a blog featuring selfies and stories of the
fashion styles of academics. The blog showcases these practices of self-care to experiment
with experiences of anxiety and insecurity, and the implicit “rules” on gendered life and
labor within the institutional space of academia.

In these projects of self-care the “I” is turned from a given to a question. Consumerist,
entrepreneurial practices of self-care have the potential to become disruptive technologies
against prevailing systems of inequality, racism, sexism, and so forth. But importantly, this
potential must be nurtured with critique.

When we speak of “critical mindfulness,” we are following Foucault in performing critique

not simply to decry that things are not right as they are. Rather, it is “to show that things are
not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no
longer be accepted as such.” Critical mindfulness does not pretend to offer predetermined
“solutions”. It doesn’t say “This, then, is what should be done” because that’s not its task.
As a questioning attitude critical mindfulness questions.

I’ve mentioned two scenarios involving academics, but the task of critique is not restricted
to professional intellectuals. Let me quote Foucault on this:

I believe it is quite possible ... to do one’s job as a psychiatrist, lawyer, engineer, or

technician, and, on the other hand, to carry out in that specific area work that may properly
be called intellectual, an essentially critical work. When I say “critical”, I don’t mean a
demolition job, one of rejection or refusal, but a work of examination that consists of
suspending as far as possible the system of values to which one refers when ... assessing it.
In other words: What am I doing at the moment I’m doing it?

We’ve witnessed a friend who works as a nurse use critical mindfulness for ethical self-
care. His personal practice of mindfulness has helped him to manage PTSD, and to cope
with the stressful and potentially violent working conditions of a psychiatric ward. The
hospital’s management is advocating workplace mindfulness. But our friend questions the
management’s professed concern for staff well-being. He finds it hypocritical because the
management has also been pursuing budget cuts, reducing health insurance benefits, and
undermining union efforts to advocate for adequate staffing and support.

We take first-person reports seriously. But we recognize that it is impossible to document

the experience of everyone. There is no such thing as an objective self-reporting of
subjective experience. We accept that some people may speak positively about workplace
mindfulness, and that there is suggestive evidence for both the benefits and risks of
individualistic-therapeutic mindfulness. But the dubious track record of management
science reminds us also to be cautious about celebratory hype.

Yet, commentators have responded to such concerns by saying: “This is not what I see”.
Personal incredulity is not an argument; it is gainsaying. Personal incredulity is not proof
that the limitations and dangers are not there. Personal incredulity is a subjective appeal; it
expresses disbelief in one claim whilst inviting trust or good faith in another. In using
anecdotal reasoning as a counterclaim, they affirm rather than refute our argument — that
we all share the same conundrum of faith-as-trust, an open question of “who knows?“.

One possible objection is that I too have relied on anecdotal reasoning. Yes, I admit as
much. Because this is not a scientific conversation about objective facts but an ethical
conversation about subjective habits.

Critical mindfulness invites people to be receptive to “who knows?” by questioning for

themselves the everyday “rules of the game.” To use critical mindfulness for ethical self-
care is to perform an experiment. But this is not an experiment to gather evidence about
subjective experience. This is an experiment to expose and transform the assumptions and
conditionings shaping subjective experience.

We could perform this experiment by probing the motivations steering our preferred
approach to mindfulness (or other practices of self-care) — to what end? for whom or
what? in whose interest?

But perhaps before all these we must ask ourselves: why should I care?

——————

Edwin Ng, Ph.D. is an author and cultural critic currently based in Melbourne, Australia.
His writings on the cultural translation of Buddhism and mindfulness have appeared in the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion & Ethics blog, Salon.com, and in the
Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s Turning Wheel Media.

Ron Purser, Ph.D. is Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His
article, “Beyond McMindfulness,” in the Huffington Post went viral in 2013.

Follow Edwin Ng on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edw_ng

Follow Ron Purser on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ronpurser