Mindfulness, saúde mental e espiritualidade budista: equívocos produtivos

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how the secular meanings of mindfulness are produced in Brazil. Mindfulness is a practice of education of attention to the present created by the molecular biologist and ordained Buddhist Jon Kabat-Zinn, associated at the same time with self-care and well-being in the West and to the Buddhist meditation originating in the East. In therapeutic contexts, mindfulness occurs in an eight-week protocol focused on specific themes – such as stress and anxiety – or on broader issues, such as health promotion. Based on the empirical fieldwork conducted by the researchers in Mindfulness training centers, websites, meditation practices, and interviews, it was possible to perform a first mapping of this field, which is on the rise in Brazil. In doing so, we also tried to understand the ways of transposition, translation, and re-signification of practices related to meditation which, “purified” from the asceticism of their original spiritual traditions, resurface in scientific protocols of psychology and psychiatry. In this transposition, we try to show discontinuities and continuities, either assumed and/or denied – as in the case we call productive equivocations. We could notice that, although with partially overlapping meanings, the notion of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition remains a reference horizon, and at the same time, it differs from its uses in the West, in which religion always appears disassociated or denied. We argue that this ambivalence is constitutive of mindfulness practices in their relation to scientific, neurophysiological evidence and a mystical-religious aura, retranslated as secular spirituality.