Mindfulness trend + Futuristic flying cars

The market for mindfulness exercises: enlightenment to go

“Why is the West taking our traditional Chinese culture and is selling it back to us?” ranted Zeng Xianglong, a psychology professor at Beijing Normal University, in an interview mid-year. His angry comment was directed at mindfulness, a meditation practice focused on the present moment. This practice is also experiencing a boom in China. In wealthy metropolises such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, mindfulness studios have sprouted up in the past three years. Hundreds of mindfulness apps entice people with guided meditations, videos, or music tracks that are supposed to relax, alleviate anxiety or help you fall asleep. Even large Chinese corporations like Huawei and Didi Chuxing now offer their employees breathing exercises to reduce stress. The underlying idea behind this trend, which has been adopted from Silicon Valley, is that people who feel inner peace work more efficiently.

But Professor Zeng is right: The current trend is indeed coming from the West. But China is the birthplace of mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation has been practiced for centuries in Chinese Chan Buddhism. The communists initially saw individualistic introspection primarily as a superstition. During the Cultural Revolution, practitioners were openly attacked and Buddhist temples were destroyed.

Western-modern mindfulness meditation, largely stripped of its religious context, now traces its origins in part to the American scientist Jon Kabat Zinn. When the professor for molecular biology first traveled to China in 2011, he praised the positive reactions of the largely secular Chinese, saying: “It felt like the closing of a certain kind of karmic circle.”