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Mindfulness and yoga are widely said to improve mental and physical health, and booming industries have emerged to teach them as secular techniques. This movement is typically traced to the 1970s, but in reality it began a century earlier. Mind Cure traces the process by which practices like meditation, mindfulness, and yoga moved from the religious fringes of American culture to the medical and psychological mainstream, revealing previously overlookedconfluences of Buddhist, Hindu, medical, African American, and women's history in America.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1: Mysticism, Mesmerism, Mind Cure
- 23: Individualist and Community-Oriented Mind CureMind Cure and Meditation at Greenacre and Beyond
- 4: Mind Cure Medicalized: The Emmanuel Movement and Its Heirs
- 5: Is Mindfulness Religion?
- 6: Is Mindfulness Effective?
- 7: From Mind Cure to Mindfulness: What Got Lost
- Appendix: Notes on Methods and Theory
- NotesBibliography
- Index
About the author
Rev. Wakoh Shannon Hickey, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Notre Dame of Maryland University. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously worked as a journalist, editor, and corporate trainer. She is also a professional chaplain, a priest of Soto Zen Buddhism, and a certified leader of InterPlay®. She enjoys research, teaching, contemplative practice, interfaith engagement, and flying stunt kites.
Summary
Mindfulness and yoga are widely said to improve mental and physical health, and booming industries have emerged to teach them as secular techniques. This movement is typically traced to the 1970s, but it actually began a century earlier. Wakoh Shannon Hickey shows that most of those who first advocated meditation for healing were women: leaders of the "Mind Cure" movement, which emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instructed by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, many of these women believed that by transforming consciousness, they could also transform oppressive conditions in which they lived. For women - and many African-American men - "Mind Cure" meant not just happiness, but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms.
In response to the perceived threat posed by this movement, white male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials began to channel key Mind Cure methods into "scientific" psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized and commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social-justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell by the wayside. Although characterized as "universal," mindfulness has very specific historical and cultural roots, and is now largely marketed by and accessible to affluent white people. Hickey examines religious dimensions of the Mindfulness movement and clinical research about its effectiveness. By treating stress-related illness individualistically, she argues, the contemporary movement obscures the roles religious communities can play in fostering civil society and personal wellbeing, and diverts attention from systemic factors fueling stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.
Additional text
Wakoh Shannon Hickey provides the most in-depth historical treatment ... Her personal, professional, and academic experience at the intersection of Buddhism and health care informs her work ... It is a unique and important contribution of her work that Hickey is able to show that the American reception of meditation involved such a diverse range of practitioners ... provide[s] a comprehensive overview of the history and contemporary practice of meditation in America, emphasizing the important roles that mental health and well-being have played in that story.
