mindfulness is a neutral quality of mind that we all experience. if a mindfulness INSTRUCTOR encourages you to build mindfulness in a way that dismantles your critical thinking or treats YOU as the problem that must be adjusted in all situations, that is abusive. period.
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if you feel yourself starting to use your newfound mindfulness skills to move your attention away from gut feelings or desires to make boundaries, and it feels like an instructor is encouraging you to do that, RUN.
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mindfulness can be a great discipline & foundation for other work. but orgs who fetishize it as a main practice, especially w/t regard for the fact that people experience it differently depending on things like trauma history, JUST might be keeping you frozen.
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mindfulness is a completely unregulated industry at this point, and i reject the idea that it is a student's fault for not vetting a teacher enough, especially when teacher bios can be cobbled together from absolute nonsense that will never get verified
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You really want a bunch of bureaucrats and insurance companies to "regulate" your scene, tho?
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is that the only other option you can think of? lots of communities have mechanisms of accountability and self-regulation.
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i have seen attempts to regulate mindfulness instruction in that way and they are a nightmare!
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Yeah. It's a mess on every end. I usually hate "cultural appropriation" as a term, but Mindfulness(tm) really is theft.
And not only do you have legit unqualified, inexperienced people teaching this stuff, but the actual traditions are far too esoteric for normies to evaluate.
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it becomes the worst kind of context-free advice, where various levels of practice are collapsed into aphorisms
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Right?
Every solely mindfulness-oriented practitioner I've talked to who was any good has run into Serious Shit that no weekend coach could help with.
"You're seeing what in this room? You have completely overwhelming outbursts of which emotions? You're -depersonalizing-???"
i didn't really realize how potentially dangerous that was (as someone who was taught 'it's not like you're going to break anyone's brain' in teacher training) until I took a trauma-informed yoga teacher training and was like, ohhhh, this is not at all how I learned to guide ppl
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"it's not like you're going to break anyone's brain"
This could easily be a tagline for a horror movie about these topics. Grim.
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