32 Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 2.2 Mindfulness: The Secular Way and the Danger of Separating the Practices from the Whole We must also consider the non-religious perspective, which is usually defined under the broad umbrella of mindfulness and which, as we will see, also shares the difficulty of definition and the implicit contradictions of the religious approach. We cannot fail to highlight this practice – mindfulness – because we can speak of a real boom thereof in society. Shinzen Young, in his clarifying chapter What is Mindfulness? A Contemplative Perspective also talks about the difficulty of defining mindfulness and the importance of differentiating isolated practices from the understanding of this term as a contemplative totality (Young 2016, 38). Listing the more-or-less contrasting studies on the practice and benefits of mindfulness would be an endless task. Mindfulness can nowadays be found in education, psychology, medicine, and, of course, in personal productivity and business organization. For this reason, it is no less true that it has become a neoliberal substitute for the great spiritual traditions that, on the other hand, do provide a radically holistic vision (Purser 2021, 253). Thus, we are urged to practice mindfulness to concentrate more on our tasks, to control our affections or to relate to other people in a better way; in short, to be more productive, to oil the economic machinery and make it work better. This is what has wisely been called “McMindfulness”, i.e., a time of meditation, silence, or practice, superficially similar to what could be called contemplation, but rather as a kind of hamburger squeezed into our day between other activities, without any influence on our life as Weltanschauung. In the foundations and origins of mindfulness, it is possible to observe the East–West pairing, where, roughly speaking, the East would represent wisdom, and the West would represent rationality. It is true that the mindfulness practices to which we have just alluded come originally form the East and particularly from Buddhism; but it is fair to say that as isolated practices, they have been stripped of their sapiential roots. But the most important thing is to point out that contemplation is a task and for a lifetime, which requires totality and unity. To achieve it, we work with various tools, paths, and contemplative exercises: in our specific case, we will study singing as a road to reach this contemplation. But these activities cannot be dissociated form the vital purpose, the essential one of having a contemplative life. We can find this dissociation from some disciplines, which have introduced “contemplative practices” in their development, but that may have lost sight of the unitary and holistic end to which they were originally intended, thus remaining as broken branches of a tree. For instance, this happens, paradoxically, from the psychological view, where contemplation would be “a set of practices that may foster particular forms of awareness in students, forms conducive to the conscious motivation and regulation of learning, and also to freedom and transcendence in life more generally” (Roeser and Peck 2009, 119). What may be perplexing, perhaps, is precisely to refer to contemplation as a set of practices, when the goal pursued is precisely a holistic conception of the human being, stripped off from the distraction and pressure of productivity in order to be able to focus instead on its own being and on the unity of the self. This contradiction could be illustrated by the behavior of people rushing, already stressed, to their mindfulness class. In the pedagogical arena, it is common to refer to a series of teaching and learning strategies (Braud 1998, 37) that “seeks to learn how people can become more whole through integrating the somatic, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, creative-expressive, and relationship and community aspects of their lives.” However, there is an integrating intuition that is both present and innovative (though by no means new): it is precisely the distraction of post-modernity that has led us to perceive this almost radical need for a return to the unity of the original to the original in its unity. This occurs in the aforementioned disciplines, but something similar can be found in religions. Religions are cultural concretizations of spirituality [3], escaping neither, nor the fact that some practices may be detached from the contemplative goal. For instance, if we were to draw a parallel between the modes of prayer found in religions and what we understand here as contemplation [4], we would say that in the first phase, perhaps the most common one, we find vocal prayer, i.e., repetition of phrases belonging to each tradition and of diverse origins. This is followed by mental prayer: reflective introspection, whether or not based on the aforementioned prayers and texts. Very often, this mental prayer is followed by affective prayer: the movement of feelings and emotions towards the spiritual object. We draw attention to this type of prayer because in many traditions, particularly in the Western world, music has been at the service either of vocal prayer – using it for better memorization, learning and appreciation of
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