Towards Mindful Geographies

Abstract

The research in this thesis draws on autoethnographic, ethnographic, and participatory experiences from varied therapeutic encounters with mindfulness. The first was an 8-week course based on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) undertaken in an adult learning programme in a local College during April and May 2018, and the second was a participatory 8-week course co-produced by a group of participants and myself that ran from October to December 2018. After this, I took part in several meditation retreats during spring 2019 at three retreat centres in South Devon: Sharpham House, Sharpham Barn, and Gaia House. In summer 2019 I hosted follow-up interviews with the participants from the 8-week mindfulness courses. This thesis makes three main contributions. The first is to the dialogue between geography and mindfulness originally initiated by Whitehead et al.’s (2016) publication. I seek to further this conversation by offering a broader and nuanced understanding of mindfulness as sati, a definition that is routed in Buddhist historical and cultural context. The second contribution is to the intersections between cultural geography and health geography. I will explore the (therapeutic) geographies of mindfulness, and in doing so I aim to expand health geographies and geographical conceptualisations of mindfulness. The third contribution is to the interdisciplinary work on mindfulness. Mindfulness-based interventions (e.g. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, MBCT, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, MBSR) have received major criticism under the label of ‘McMindfulness’ (Purser 2019), which casts mindfulness as commodified, individualised, and rationalised therapeutic technology of late capitalism. In this thesis I challenge the arguments of McMindfulness by offering a collective and engaged understanding of the practice. I demonstrate the ways in which mindfulness-based interventions can have transformative effects both individually and collectively. I also offer pathways for geographical research on transformative, social, and decolonial forms of mindfulness.