Is the practice of mindfulness and meditation compatible with the cut-throat ethos of capitalism? This is the dilemma at the heart of David Gelles’s intriguing, timely, and enjoyable new book, a fascinating account of the increasing adoption of these ancient oriental disciplines by western businesses as means of improving corporate efficiency, reducing employee stress, and, directly or indirectly, boosting the bottom line.
Gelles is a reporter for the New York Times and former Financial Times journalist who is also a long-time practitioner of mindfulness meditation — “the ability to see what is going on in our heads, without getting carried away with it”. It is a useful combination: he has both an initiate’s appreciation of how meditation works, and a journalist’s objectivity and ability to tell a story.
In a potted history of mindfulness in the US, Henry David Thoreau gets Gelles’s vote as the earliest New World proponent and an inspiration for the Beat generation Dharma bums Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. More recently, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist who pioneered mindfulness based stress reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, takes centre stage. His willingness to downplay the spiritual side of meditation, Gelles argues, helped make mindfulness acceptable to mainstream science and medicine.