Mindful Practices and Embodied Critical Thinking: Tensions and Transitions
This Special Issue explores embodied approaches to critical, analytic, and systematic thinking in dialogue with mindfulness practices. Articles focus on (i.) basic styles of meditative attention that support staying with an experience, and (ii.) practices of embodied critical thinking that engage with complex issues to move towards change. In so doing, authors ask, “What characterizes a mindful kind of thinking that engages bodily experiences to support careful and sensitive consideration of complex issues?” Authors draw from Euro-American contemplative traditions and contemporary philosophies including pragmatism, phenomenology, and Eugene Gendlin’s process philosophy to explore novel conceptual and practical approaches.
by Amir Freimann, Ofra Mayseless, Tobin Hart, Aostre Johnson
What happens to researchers interested in spirituality, as they engage with a large number of spiritual exemplars? This question is explored, based on the experience of 14 research collaborators in a qualitative phenomenological study of spiritual exemplars of different traditions, paths, and cultures. Over 5.5 months, two groups of research collaborators watched video recordings of interviews with 20 spiritual exemplars, analyzed their transcripts, wrote down their impressions of each exemplar, and discussed them in biweekly meetings. At the end of that period, the effects of the process on the collaborators were explored through individual interviews and group discussions. The conditions that contributed to the effects of the process and the potential of its application to facilitate interreligious dialogue and personal growth are discussed.
While many martial arts include meditation as a part of their practice, some are regarded as being essentially spiritual exercises. Moreover, in a variety of religious traditions, certain forms of prayer and meditation are conceived as preparation for engagement in “spiritual combat.” Most immediately, these practices are designed to enhance one’s capacity to control attention, to defend it from forces that attempt to capture it. I argue in this essay that such a capacity is morally significant. Our behavior is most readily subject to ethical evaluation when it is deliberate behavior, that is, in instances when we are paying careful attention to what we are doing. Moreover, paying attention is itself a kind of doing, something that we can do poorly or well, or fail to do altogether. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch made this last claim the centerpiece of their philosophy, the foundational insight that grounds an “ethics of attention.” My goal in this essay is to explore the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention. Toward that end, philosophical pragmatists like William James and Charles Peirce will also prove to be important sources of insight.
According to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi’s view, canonical Phenomenology is specifically concerned with analyzing the mind-world dyad and its theoretical implications for philosophy and science. Despite widespread adoption in therapy and research, they claim that mindfulness is ambiguously described as the practice of bare attention and nonjudgment, either on perceptual objects or subjective acts. Thus, comparisons that liken Phenomenology to mindfulness are inaccurate because mindfulness is primarily concerned with how we experience the world. Furthermore, such comparisons have misconstrued Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological attitude and method of epoché and reduction, resulting in a lax usage of the term “Phenomenology.” However, I argue that within their originating soteriological milieu, meditative practices like mindfulness are no less concerned with knowledge of reality than Phenomenology.
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