It is Saturday night, and you are driving through a cityscape of twinkling skyscrapers and neon signs. People are out enjoying downtown’s pleasures. Some dash in and out of sushi joints while others stumble and smile from one pub to the next. Their exuberance is electric. You feel the hair on your arms raise in excitement. The night is addictive. You crave its delights. You want what they want. You want them.
You cruise down main street slowly sucking in the atmosphere. You roll down the window and let the sounds and smells devour you. The lights are brilliant, and you are a moth. Your attention darts to every flicker and to every laugh. At a red light, you idle in anticipation and hear words and then laughter emanating from the sidewalk. Singular words and whole sentences disintegrate into mere sounds as they drift to you and then into you and then inhale them. Laughter has neither a subject nor a predicate. Laughter does not bother with subject-verb agreement. Laughter is only the by-product of joy, delight. Laughter is universal.
You light a cigarette, find the track on your phone, and touch the gas as the light turns green. The music is fucking lush, fertile. In it grows your dreams and desires. The song’s synths and repetitious patterns present a canvass upon which you paint images of pure beauty. Nothing dilutes the magic. Nothing poisons the purity. You are creativity personified. Within you, the soul twitches and yearns to reveal itself to the world. You are an artist. And you are part of the world.
In this maelstrom of human activity, you are both past and present. You exhale smoke into the night and watch it briefly sail through the dancing lights before disappearing in the dark. In this whirlpool of movement, you are only a leaf in the wind, and, my god, how fucking fantastic it is to drift through the energy of a Saturday night and prostrate yourself to its power. If you could, if you fucking could, you would liquefy it and inject it into your vein. You are so vulnerable to the magic and hope it stabs you to death. The song’s gentle beats sway you and leaves you in a quiet and contemplative state. You are a pen. You are a camera. You are a paintbrush. You are a uterus. You are receptive to everything. You love everyone. You are open, open, open. Your mind burns with ideas. The finished cigarette you flick into the gutter is a fucking masterpiece. And watching the dirty pool of water extinguish the smoke’s last dying ember represents to you a million truths and lies all at one. The cigarette butt in the gutter—what a paradox.
You drive through the city until the people become fewer and the lights become dimmer. There are no more skyscrapers. There are no more sushi joints and pubs. Before long, the laughter stops. Before long, the music stops. Before long, all you can see is what the car lights reveal—an endless, dirt road. And in that silence, you confront yourself and you do not like what you find.
Luang Prabang is the cultural and religious centre of Laos. Surrounded by mountains and sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, the town possesses an old-world tranquility, a charm that transports visitors backwards to a time undefined by more modern preoccupations, more new-age anxieties. The pace is languid; bodies are directed to slow down. Worldly concerns have no use here. The mind must rest.
Dozens of Buddhist temples and monasteries call Luang Prabang home, and because of such a dedication to erudition and spiritual enlightenment, families from all over Laos send their sons there for their schooling and maybe as the first step towards full-fledged monkhood. Visitors can see the students everywhere in town as they go about their daily routines of meditating, studying, and cleaning. It is a Spartan existence, for sure, but one that, nonetheless, promises its followers a life of purpose and calm. As with any religion, Buddhism provides tools to confront and hopefully overcome the ravages of daily living, the suffering of a world based on excess and the worship of pretty, fake things. Whether or not these boys actually do become monks, whether or not they decide to dedicate their entire lives to the pursuit of enlightenment, their years at the monastery will have given them the means to master their own mind. If the mind is a puppy disturbed and excited by the slightest noise, then the skilled monk is its master. He knows how to settle the pop and reign in its natural exuberance. He knows how to direct the pup’s attention inwards and to the present. He knows how to teach the pup to focus on the present and become more mindful of it. In a world of noise and constant distraction, these are invaluable skills to have.
Luang Prabang and its traditions have attracted the attention of the West, just as Buddhism itself has become fashionable in Europe and North America as a mechanism, some would say, to provide a splash of spirituality in a life defiled by the dictates of productivity and wealth generation. One of the town’s traditions that has certainly enticed the imagination of the tourist is the daily ritual of alms-giving. Every morning at dawn, the monks depart from their monasteries, wrapped in their saffron-coloured robes as well as carrying a basket, and walk single file along Sisavangvong Road, the town’s main street. Along the route, devotees kneel and prepare to distribute the sticky rice to the monks as they pass one by one, rice that will provide them a degree of sustenance throughout their long day. Taste is of little importance, a rather unbecoming indulgence; what matters are the carbohydrates, the fuel to support monastic living, which is why that line of devotees offering their sticky rice, their alms, to the monks—that simple practice of letting the grains gently drop from their fingers into baskets—is of such symbolic significance. The alms-giving ceremony signifies the respect that the residents of Luang Prabang have for the monks and for what their practice means to not only Laotian culture but also their own understanding of the world. The town nurtures the monks through food, and in return, the monks nurture the town through the safeguarding of Buddhism.
Over the years, though, the curiosity of Luang Prabang’s visitors has intruded upon the serenity of the alms-giving ritual. Stories have circulated of tourists disrupting and disrespecting the proceedings whether through making too much noise, dressing inappropriately, or taking photographs when they should not be taking photographs. Imagine flashes exploding in the early-morning darkness or a series of shutters closing in tandem and then imagine yourself as a participant trying to deliver alms to the monks and to partake in a ritual that has long fostered your self-identity when around you, visitors offer you the same respect they would a panda trapped in a zoo. Yet the visitors’ fascination with the alms-giving ceremony should not surprise, for Buddhism’s popularity has skyrocketed in traditionally non-Buddhist areas, particularly in the west. It’s a peculiar tendency among Western citizens, particularly the whiter ones, to scour the earth searching for practices that may deliver them a semblance of peace in their chaotic lives, something more spiritual and transcendent than their present money-making and pleasure-seeking rituals. And, perhaps, the most far-reaching trick the West has borrowed from Buddhist culture is mindfulness.
It’s 2017, and I am sitting around a table with a half-dozen other people in a non-descript room in the adult mental health wing of some hospital. We range in age and comprise an equal number of men and women. We are almost exclusively white but not quite. What unites us, though, is our difficulty in managing anxiety and depression and because of that particular shortcoming, we have been selected to participate in a ten-week program to help us better regulate our emotions. We will learn strategies to cope with those feelings of helplessness and despair when they wash over us like, like, yeah, whatever. Two instructors, sitting at the front of the table, will lead our sessions and our discussions, a social worker and an expert in mindfulness.
The social worker lays out the expectations of the class.
“We ask that you do not come to class intoxicated. If you do, you will be asked to leave,” she says.
I take a sip of my coffee.
“We also ask that you refrain, if possible, from bringing any stimulants to class, including caffeine. Our minds are active enough without any outside help.”
She smiles, and I decide not to touch my coffee for the remainder of the class, which will last for two hours.
“We will start every session with a guided mindfulness session, led by my colleague here. She is an expert in mindfulness and its benefits.”
The second woman speaks.
“Who here has heard of mindfulness?”
We all raise our hands.
“Now, how many of you incorporate mindfulness in your day-to-day life?”
Most of the hands drop, and the instructors smile.
“Yes, the doing is always the hardest part.”
She looks down at her notes.
“So what actually is mindfulness then?”
No one dares a response.
“Mindfulness is to be fully present in the moment without judgment. It’s a mechanism through which we are aware of what is around us but are not overwhelmed by it.”
Five years earlier in the same hospital and on the same floor but in a different room, just down the hall, in fact, I heard a similar pitch for mindfulness’s effectiveness. I am here for help managing depression stemming from a spectacular failure, which occurred just a few months previously, and since that flameout, I have oscillated between despair and mild depression. Never suicidal, mind you, which if I were cynical would say was rather disappointing on my part, another failure perhaps, for if I had sunken to a level where death seemed welcoming, I would have been granted access to therapists, councillors, social workers almost instantaneously, instead of waiting for months for a publicly funded one.
The social worker explains mindfulness to me in a robotic fashion, as if her spirit has left her body and all that remains are these words she must regurgitate to every new client on the verge of self-destruction. I do not blame her. Social workers tend to burn out; the internal flame that once propelled them to help complete strangers in times of crisis slowly extinguishes into a kind of pragmatic realization that you cannot save the world by yourself, but you can save yourself by yourself. Those with the greatest capacity for empathy usually suffer the most. And after years of existing as a lighthouse for those perpetually drowning in the dark, her focus must turn inwards, to self-preservation, and to the radical idea that you yourself matter as well.
So I do not begrudge her for her rather perfunctory sales pitch. And to be honest, it would have taken something extraordinary, an unbelievable magic trick maybe, for her to dislodge me of my stubborn reverence of the past.
“I do not believe in the present,” I say rather professorially, painfully aware of how arrogant I must sound.
She stays silent, a noticeable trait among mental health professionals, as she wishes me to work out the meaning of my words for myself. And it’s a chore I have always loathed—fitting words to feelings—because I know how I feel and do not require to legitimize them through stuffing, in fact strangling, those sensations into sentences that, quite frankly, cannot express a fraction of the complexity a human being feels in every second of their life. Yet I respect her time, and what she represents, and try all the same.
“I studied history,” I say. “I believe in the past’s power to shape the present, whether it be for an individual or for an entire country. Every second influences and shapes the next. The present, quite literally, does not exist outside the past. We would not be sitting here and talking had it not been for decisions we made in the past that put us on a path to this conversation. Asking me to exist solely in the present makes as much sense to me as asking me not to breathe.”
“Interesting,” she says. “I’ve never heard such a position before.” The statement, whether true or not, tickles my ego, despite my best efforts to curb such self-flattery.
“In any case,” she moves on. “I suggest you at least try mindfulness. You may find it an effective method to lessen those feelings of depression and anxiety.”
Five years later, I am in no better position vis-à-vis my anxiety and depression. I have not conquered them. I have not locked them away in some cave. I have not buried them in my backyard. They continue to rule me and to infect my thinking, particularly anxiety. My sky is not always endless blue; sometimes, in its stead, are rows of eyes—of all different colours and intensities—and they watch and judge my every movement. They do not blink, and they never sleep. These above me eyes are always open, always alert, always following me. Always. They attach grades, extensive evaluations, to my every action. They rain down scorn and derision disguised as life lessons. Oh my god. These brown and green and blue eyes stalk me. Fuck. They are everywhere. I look up and they burn their desires into me; their wants and needs are tattooed across my skin, across my face. I cannot breathe. Fuck. I cannot breathe. Their vision has stuffed me full. I stink of them. I am them. They do not blink. They fucking never blink, never rest, never give me a second. Fuck. And then my exasperation with the constant monitoring, never-ending surveillance, reaches its zenith; my frustration piques and explodes into rage and fury. I grab a knife, or whatever makeshift weapon I can find, and point it to the sky. I threaten the eyes with my blade. I swear. I foam. I spit. But those irises and pupils merely stare me down and try to hammer me into submission. They are relentless, merciless. So I jump and stab. I jump and stab at the sky. And I know how ridiculous I look because I see myself in those eyes jumping and stabbing, jumping and stabbing. I grow increasingly desperate, wilder and more unhinged, in my leaps and thrusts, so mad in my movements that when I squat to the ground and release my quadriceps to the sky, the knife in my right hand catches and cuts my left, and I tumble to the ground in pain and acute embarrassment. And I can see myself lying there on the ground and bleeding, as the sky is a mirror, and I can see everything. For me, anxiety is a sky full of eyes.
So I am not as cynical in my reception of mindfulness this time around. I do not merely toss it aside as another example of the latest mental health fad. I am more open to psychology and pharmacology these days, although on my greyer days, I still believe psychology as a discipline is setup to attract a special breed of narcissist. In fact, I take antidepressants, a pill a day like a good boy, to increase my serotonin levels, one of those special happy hormones—which was something not long ago I swore I would never do. Fuck Big Pharma, I would huff and puff in one my numerous arguments with myself. Fuck those socially acceptable drug pushers, I would hiss, who argue that happiness, or contentment, is only a matter of brain chemistry gone awry and not dependent upon a person’s social situation, his or her actual environment. All I have is me, this body and mind, in all of their pronounced imperfections, I once told another councillor, and if it takes a pill to pull me from the precipice, if it takes an injection of chemicals or hormones or whatever the fuck is in one of those pills, what exactly is the point of getting up each and every morning? If I am so inadequate in my present state, such a loser in the lottery of genetics, then I may as well go down with the ship, at least then, I would argue, my voice rising, I would have the satisfaction of knowing I had the courage to drown with my authentic self intact. I would remain unsullied by corporate fingertips rummaging around in my mind and adding different mixtures of different ingredients in an effort to cook up the very best of me. I would remain unpolluted by their fucking version of what constitutes happiness, purpose, contentment. I would never become a walking advertisement for Big Pharma, until, of course, when I did.
The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was a misadventure I took to Trinidad and Tobago in January 2017 to run a marathon in and around Port of Spain. The night before I could not sleep, and since I had to get up at 5:00 am for the race, this issue began to bother me. I looked at my wristwatch, watched the seconds and then the minutes tick up, relentlessly, and realized that each disappearing segment of time would have a negative outcome of my performance, and as I would be running in heat, thirty or so degrees, I was not accustomed to, my body needed every second of rest it could find. And even though my body did lie still, my mind wandered from visualizing myself at the finish line, soaking in the enjoyment of another marathon completed and enjoying the fruits of all my labour, to visualizing myself not at the race at all. Indeed, a wildly absurd idea planted itself in my mind and spread—what if I did not run? What if I just stayed in bed? What am I putting myself through such torment, I asked. If you do not feel up to running, then simply don’t, I reasoned. The idea took hold and did calm my anxiety but only temporarily, for in its place came guilt and shame on an intense level. These feelings were robust, acute. They said that I was a coward, a child. They said that I was spoiled, a brat. They said that I was spineless, a scaredy-cat. They hounded and haunted me and made me understand, like a fucking hammer to the skull, how my acquiescence to fear here in Port of Spain was yet another failure I could add to the list. These feelings convinced me I collected failures as if it were a hobby, as they were stamps or baseball cards. You, Jesse, collect failures, they said, and I believed them. I believed them so much that I began to hate myself with a great intensity, as if a zealot prostrating himself beneath a temple of self-hatred.
So I started to take escitalopram. It belongs to that class of drugs known as selective serotine reuptake inhibitors, those diligent workers striving to restore the natural balance of serotonin in the brain. It does help lift the fog and provide an extra boost of energy. My mind feels sharper, less cluttered. I am more productive and efficient. I juggle a dozen different duties. I cut time up into manageable little chunks. My days unfold like a clock.
Yet, at times, I also feel a little too focused and regimented, a little too cerebral and emotionless, a little too like a well-oiled machine. Alcohol repulses me as do cigarettes, two activities, drinking and smoking, that I once took great interest in. Sex and desire strike me as a fabulous waste of time. Social situations still terrify me, and I avoid them when I can. Instead, I work. And then I work some more.
Eyes, however, still bother me.
A social worker once diagnosed me as having a highly sensitive personality type and was prone to deep bouts of feeling, drinking, as it were, from a bottomless well of emotion. As much as I found her methods simplistic—she did, after all, make her decision based on my answers to a multiple-choice questionnaire, not the most nuanced, detailed, or comprehensive of the social science research repertoire—I did find some of characteristics of this highly sensitive time applicable. The effect of music, for one. Hearing a beautiful piece of music for the first time devastated me. Tears would well in my eyes while I sat completely entranced by these sounds of strings, percussion, and voices in play, so completely overwhelmed by feeling that I became powerless to interpret the effect. It was as glorious as it was frightening.
After escitalopram, the tears do not arrive. I feel them sprout within when I hear a moving piece of music. I feel them worm their way to the back of my eyes, knock, but they never materialize. Something blocks them. Something says you shall not enter. After escitalopram, I am routine and habit personified. And this metamorphosis does worry me slightly, this erasure of emotion, yet I do experience slightly more clam in situations that would once destroy me. I do feel more in control of my anxiety. What I prioritize about all is purpose, and anything that pushes me towards my purpose and helps me realize my potential is a source of strength and is a hand in the dark I will reach for. Escitalopram, or any medication for the matter, does not cure anxiety. Nothing cures anxiety. And there are moments, still, when anxiety attacks and I cannot shield myself from its claws and instead I fall, spiral, down into an endless abyss and while I tumble and tumble further into the blackness, those eyes burying themselves into me, I attack and defend myself from those enemies of the night and just as my foes are merciless in their affront to my dignity, I am unrelenting in my desire to defend myself and to protect what is sacred within myself. The results are often ugly and disgraceful.
So while I sit at the table and listen to the expert in mindfulness extol the benefits of her practice, I swallow that mounting cynicism as well as that desire to critique and instead pay attention to what she has to say.
“It’s important to be non-judgemental. If your mind wanders during your practice, and it will, do not respond with judgement; instead, slowly bring your attention back to the present, to your breathing.”
She speaks slowly. Each word falling from her mouth is completely separated from the next. None are strung together. Not one bleeds into the next. It’s as if each word were a small wooden block—those used to help toddlers learn how to read—and after spitting each out, she would find its correct spot on the table until those blocks formed a total thought, a complete sentence. I realize she speaks in such a fashion to instill in us the benefits of a slow talking—a practice often used to lessen feelings of anxiety—I find her speech annoying and artificial. I do not like uncovering the routines of those charged to help me through my mental health struggles. I do not like feeling I am only a box to be checked. I do not like knowing where my mental health professional is going through her questioning. I do not like sensing I am a piece of rubber, undifferentiated from the rest, passing through an assembly line and after a few adjustments and moderations, after having a few new pieces attached to me, after having countless hands mould and shape me, I can be transformed into a strong and sturdy tire. I do not like uncovering how the magician did her trick.
But I stop myself from pursing this argument any further, and I close my eyes when she tells me to, and I breathe in the manner she requests. When she stops speaking and the class has gone silent, the mindfulness session truly begins. I am amazed at how heavy and tense my body feels, particularly my shoulders and legs. I am a rock and feel as flexible as a two-by-four. Yet my breathing is calm, as is my mind, and I sense a small wave of relief wash over me, but that serenity disappears when I hear laughter emanating from the hallway, from a classroom next door, and the familiar sounds pull my mind from its cave and pushes it back into the world. What she laughs about is unclear, a mystery, yet it is a good sign, indeed a good advertisement, that laughs can he heard in a mental health ward and that despite our problems and challenges we may still find humour and joy in life and suddenly I remember the unplanned fits of laugher I had whenever I finished a hard run and I laughed not because it was necessarily an enjoyable experience, not all runs are, but because I had finished and had endured the struggle and I call these kinds of runs character runs because they do not show you at the peak of your abilities rather showcase your capability to struggle through the discomfort, building mental fortitude and resilience, and I remember one such run I had in June 2012, after finishing an eight-hour shift working in a factory on an assembly line adding pieces of metal to other pieces of metal hundreds of hundreds of times until the movements became instinctual, my body just another tool to be used and exploited for the benefits of those graduates of schools of management in which they teach you how best to arrange your human employees to best maximize their efficiency to best maximize your profits and I lasted only a week there, right, could only stomach a week, but during that run, a rainy Thursday I believe, I was hurting on this hill, my legs feelings lie big boulders but then Sigur Ros roars through my headphones and Jonsi’s angelic voice and the band’s stunning instrumentals propel me up and up and up and on the cusp of the hill, tears of pure joy stream down my face because of the music, the scene, the run and Sigur Ros, man, fucking Sigur Ros, the Icelandic band that created its own language, has always accompanied through my life and I remember how that music, its crushing crescendos and polyphonic parts, sketched for me a Iceland unapologetically defined by nature, by its elemental ferocity and pulled me towards its black, obsidian-coloured beaches and its bleak, treeless terrain, and just the other year, February 2016, I went to Iceland and visited Reynisfjara, the famous black beach, and the winter made the waters rather angry and there I see the waves pounding the shore, the Atlantic lacerating and cutting every things apart, even the sea stacks, which stand like arthritic fingers, the water a row of teeth, growling, the tourists snapping photos at its tip, laughing, unaware of how close they are, screaming, to be taken out to sea, lost forever, and it happens, says Arnar, our guide, people drown here, amid the waves and wind, and the snow falls heavier and leaves white ribbon streaks across the black sands and I fall deeper and deeper in love with the place, the beach evoking a sense of vulnerability, the danger lurking everywhere reminds me I am part of this world, and how insignificant do my problems feel when faced with Reynisfjara, how wonderful it is to be reminded how small we are, how much we resemble beautiful pieces of dust, and what a gift it really is to be part of this world and to reflect upon and ultimately fight its greyer parts, to taste them, to feel them, to eat them, and realize unequivocally that you are and that I am part of this world.
“How did everyone find the exercise?” the expert asks after five minutes of mindfulness.
A few participants talk about the difficulty they had remained focused while so much commotion could be heard outside.
I do not divulge my own mental journey through time and space. My mind is a river, as is creativity.
“In a world of distraction,” she says, “we must train ourselves to tune out its noise. We must learn to embrace the present moment without judgement, as what is life except a series of present moments?”
The world will not quiet down, so we must quiet ourselves down.
The second councillor walks around the table and drops a single raison into each of our hands.
“We are going to practice mindful eating,” she says.
She instructs each of us to place the raisin in our mouths but not to eat it. No, we are not supposed to immediately eat the raisin. Instead, she says, we should appreciate the raisin, its texture, its feel along the tongue, on the teeth, in the saliva. We must activate every one of our senses to truly appreciate the full-bodied experience of eating a raisin in the present moment without neither judgment nor distraction. Listen to the cues your body sends you, she says. Are you feeling hungry? Do you actually want to eat the raisin? Move the raisin around your mouth and notice how your body reacts. She says mindful eating can help us better understand our hunger and know when we are truly full. She says mindful eating can help us lose weight, if that is a goal of ours. She says that mindful eating, most importantly, can help us enjoy the experience of eating. Eating can become a pleasurable experience, as it should be.
My relationship to food has never been mindful; it’s always been a little more complex than that. I was what could be called a “husky” child—a charming adjective used my one of my public school teachers to describe my physique. He took aside the bigger boys, the huskier ones, and informed us that he understood that gymnastics—the sport we were practicing in gym class—might prove a little more challenging for boys with bodies that did not bend or twist or summersault with such ease as skinnier or more agile ones. Fat does not twirl. Fat is not graceful. I had thought the fat would melt from me naturally, only a product of childhood indulgences, and that as I grew into a man, my body would magically transform into one of those ripped ones the men from the television had. But after I realized, much to my chagrin and embarrassment, bodies do not work like that, I became far more cognizant about how my weight represented a report card detailing my failures as a person. My body represented me. My body said more about me than I ever could. My body advertised myself to the world and it did not have flattering things to say. As a boy and teenager, I would fast. I would exercise for hours. I would work until I had a body society deemed acceptable. Food became a source of anxiety. Its carbohydrate and calorie content had to be measured. They had to be known. I added and subtracted numbers. I noted the ideal weight for boys of particular height. I compared my body with bodies of the boys around me, with the men in the health magazines. My body became a laboratory in which I would experiment with different concoctions. The gym became my temple. I would lift weights and run on the treadmill until my body conformed and fell into line, until it checked all the required boxes, until it became an advertisement for healthy living. I watched in jealousy the ripped men doing bicep curls in front of the mirror, their arms exploding in definition and strength, their bodies a shrine I would mentally pray before, silently hoping to one day look like them. I measured my success not only by the number of pounds I shredded but also by the congratulations I received on my new body. As the critiques and insults lessened, I knew I was heading in the right direction. After a summer of relentless exercise and calorie counting, I returned to high school thirty pounds lighter and a cute girl said “look at you.”
Fat people are the last group one can mock with impunity. Such disparagements are even encouraged from time to time, for those sharp rebukes instill in the fat person the desire to transform, to better himself, to become desirable in the eyes of others. And what it is incredible about such insults, those not-so-gentle words of motivation, is that the fat person swallows them like a piece of cake, sorry, like an apple or a protein shake, and digests them so well and comprehensively that those words became part of himself, flowing within his blood, etched on his bones, swimming in his bile. He internalizes those words so diligently that their expectations become as natural as the sky and the sun and the birds flying between the two. My god, how good a student the boy has become. No external voice need chastise him when he reaches for a chocolate cookie or a muffin, as he has grown into his must vicious critic. Society no longer exists for the boy. He has disciplined himself so thoroughly that only he and his choices are of any relevance, of any great import. Fat bodies are unnatural bodies has become a universal truth for him. Fat is an indulgence of an unfit body, a polluted mind. Fat is evidence of a body out of control. Fat is proof of an undisciplined individual. And those eyes that monitor a body’s slippage into fatness no longer stare and judge from the outside; no, those eyes now shine from the inside, from deep within the boy.
This is why a raisin is never just a raisin, and food is never just food. A person brings her history to food with every bite. And to suddenly ask her to approach vegetables, fruit, and meats without judgment is a curious request because judgment has always been integral part of food, just as an individual never exists outside her culture, her society. The greatest trick mindfulness ever pulled was convincing the individual that society does not exist—a trick perfected by neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is an economic theory that demands the state’s self-immolation. It looks at the state’s fat fingers interfering in the natural running of an economy—the beautiful purring of supply and demand—and orders them to be cut from the knuckle. Neoliberalism chastises the state’s bloated belly and laughs at how it waddles down the street and how it struggles to complete the most basic of tasks its fat figure, and thinks how it would be a mercy if neoliberalism were to hold down that obese thing and cut away its flab with a butcher knife crafted from the finest steel. And although neoliberalism began as economic assault on a state’s social safety nets, it has since evolved into an ideology infecting every facet of modern life.
To governments drowning in its debt (because of their acquiescence to corporations’ demands to lower taxes), neoliberalism pitches the following: The twin virtues of privatization and deregulation, combined with unrestrained competition, destroy all bureaucratic burdens, improves efficiency and productivity, and reduces costs, both directly to the customer through lower commodity prices and indirectly through the lowering of taxes. Through the gutting of the state, neoliberalism argues that everyone can enjoy and benefit from the more numerous, and shorter, avenues towards prosperity, for what was once burdensome and bulky has transformed into something smooth and lithe.
Yet neoliberalism, as with most plans hatched in board rooms, is a rich man’s game. The ravenous nature of neoliberalism, as well as the equally voracious processes of globalization it has unleashed, means that corporations and companies must also be searching for new markets to penetrate or new resources to swallow. Capital has no nationality, and it now spreads across the globe as fast and as stealthily as a virus. Richer, Western countries, as well as the international financial institutions who push these reforms, want poorer, non-Western countries to eliminate their trade barriers, their price controls, and to encourage their companies to play on the global markets without the help of Daddy. Yet even as Western countries instruct their peers to stop cuddling their farmers or subsidizing other nascent industries that do not have the experience of their Western counterparts, these same governments then turn around and support their own industries—in a not so subtle example of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
Neoliberalism believes in neither history nor context. It does not much care for the future either. What it craves is now. What it wants is everything all of the time. And despite its pitch that the economic reforms it prescribes can drag a country from poverty and deliver untold riches to the citizens, the outcomes have not matched the rhetoric. Of course, neoliberalism and globalization have produced great wealth—worldwide economic growth creeps forwards inch by inch, year by year, like a steadfast worm—yet these processes have failed to redistribute prosperity in any equitable way; instead, it has increased the misery of billions. Take, for example, Russia.
For seventy years, a little less than a lifespan, the Soviet Union was America’s foil. For seventy years, the Soviet Union represented—albeit more so on paper, or an idea, than in reality—an alternative to a capitalistic mode of production that inevitably leads to great inequalities. For seventy years, the Soviet Union, despite the hell it unleashed on its people in the name of solidarity and Mother Russia, blocked the expansion of capitalism reaching every corner of the globe. As long as the Soviet Union existed, so, too, did the idea of an alternative. But then it collapsed. And its wake, only one hegemon was left standing.
In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich chronicles the transition from communism to capitalism in Russia. She interviewed hundreds of Russians who lived through their country’s transformation into a market-oriented economy, resulting in a book filled with a chorus of voices attempting to make sense of their new reality. They watched as their government replaced the hammer and sickle with the almighty dollar, moving from a controlled price system to a market price one and privatizing all property that had belonged to the state. They watched as economists viewed the situation not as unfolding tragedy but as experiment in economic transition. Never before had such an opportunity presented itself: they could actually oversee the Soviet Union’s, the fucking USSR, transition into a capitalist state. Two schools of thought emerged on how to best effect these changes. The gradualists worried that if the reforms were implemented too hastily or carelessly—picture children unwrapping presents on Christmas Day—the outcome would be disastrous: the evisceration of the social programs supporting millions, the impoverishment of millions more, and the arrival of political and corporate corruption on a scale never before seen. The shock therapists, in contrast, argued that if privatization were applied too slowly and inefficiently and not a wide scale, if government officials did not instill in Russians a newfound love for private property, for pretty things and trinkets, then society risked a communist backlash, a slip and slide backwards into a state affairs in which objects did not hold such fascination and produce such reverence. And Alexievich’s informants watched as the shock therapists won the debate and then shocked the country and its systems into submission.
The results were brutal. Prices were instantly liberalized and land as well as assets were immediately privatized. Ordinary Russians could not participate in the wild-west capitalism seizing and shaking the Motherland, as their savings disintegrated due to runaway inflation; jobs evaporated, and state assets were given away to friends. Hands gripped and grabbed and grasped Mother’s flesh and pulled and tore and peeled away layer after layer until Mother was no longer Mother but a giant skeleton, resembling a kind of fossil archeologists use to understand an extinct way of life. Indeed, the shock therapy, and its prescription of stabilization, liberalization, and privatization, did not work. The gross domestic product, that measurement adored by economists the world over, fell year after year during the 1990s while industrial production fell 42 per cent. Crude oil prices fell in 1998, bad news for an economy dependent on resource extraction, and the International Monetary Fund, a cheerleader for all things neoliberal, approved an eleven billion to the country, yet the organization seemed to care little for the corrupt infrastructure that would distribute the funds, and, unsurprisingly, the money went to places, and pockets, in least need of it. And as the transition from communism to capitalism unfolded, the voices in Secondhand Time grew more desperate and shocked to see their country invaded by a new reverence for sparkly and shiny possession, of which few of them could actually afford, and their stories became increasingly coated with a sense of nostalgia, not for the brutal realities of life under Soviet rule but those ideas that 1917 represented but which were never fulfilled: the right to a dignified life. For them, the freedom promised under neoliberalism and capitalism was only the freedom to starve to death. Even today, on the streets of Yerevan, Armenia, and Tbilisi, Georgia, countries created after the fall, I hear stories of elderly folks who struggle to survive, whose grandchildren cannot afford school or medical operations, and who speak fondly about the Soviet Union because it represented what today has almost disappeared: the idea of an alternative. And it is precisely at the juncture between a sense of injustice and future possibilities where neoliberalism and mindfulness meet and make interesting bedfellows.
Lenin did not practice mindfulness. He did not look at the brutal realities of Tsarist Russia and then retreat to some room in order to close his eyes and focus on the present and his breathing until those inequalities no longer bothered him so much, until he could walk through a Russian winter full of suffering with less stress and greater calm. He realized that a world existed outside himself and to change it required action. Anything less strengthened and solidified the status quo.
In the temple of neoliberalism, people go to worship the god of the individual. Among the pews, people sit and pray to themselves. In such a temple, there is no talk of a god or gods interfering in the affairs of the living; there is no talk of a god punishing or rewarding a disciple for their behaviour. There is no such thing as an obstacle. There is neither a system nor a society. There are only individuals and what they choose to make of their life.
Neoliberalism never stayed in the economic realm. As the ideology gained momentum and further legitimacy with the collapse of the Soviet Union into the 1990s and beyond, the social safety systems undergirding the lives of the world’s most vulnerable were deemed too luxurious for the champions of efficacy and efficiency, those accountants of misery who concluded dignity too expensive to fund, and were gutted. In the resulting vacuum, as states retreated into the shadows and left the wellbeing of society to the corporations and companies who could supply the most minimum-wage-paying jobs, came the seductive talk of meritocracy and the fervent belief that talent and hard work were the great equalizers and that if individuals were to simply slog through the daily travails, to get up early and report to their job with gratefulness and enthusiasm, they would rise from the position of their birth and take their rightful place at the table of plenty. And if there were hindrances to the inevitable climb from the muck, if the workload proved too great, the poverty too ubiquitous, the oppression too all-encompassing, mindfulness could serve as a helpful antidote. The practice reminds the frustrated and the overwhelmed that outside forces are not to blame, and even if they were, an individual possesses no actual power to change them, but what the individual does have control over is their reaction to them. The individual can choose to face these stressors and triggers with equanimity, through mindful practices and exercises of gratitude, or they can choose to drown in them and succumb to stress and anxiety. Mindfulness, then, privatizes social inequities and passes them off as individual shortcomings. Mindfulness, then, produces docile workers who seek not to ameliorate the realities around them but to improve their emotional reaction to them. Mindfulness, then, is an ideology of compliance.