Part 1 and Part 2 of this little series lead in to this foundational question: Is mindfulness/meditation an Eastern religion practice or not? With its use in schools, businesses, and psychologists’ offices, it tends to be billed as neutral. Sometimes, though, the Eastern-ness is cheered, and (it had to happen!) you also sometimes hear of “Christian mindfulness.” This Huffington Post…
Part 1 of this series told of the ACLJ’s action against Buddhist meditation being forced on school kids. The ACLJ’s researchers dug into general (not just school-related) reports on mindfulness/meditation. Turns out that with this current craze, mindfulness being trendy and cool, studies don’t report the negative side effects (or they downplay those). That matches info I’d found recently. One…
ACLJ attorney Jay Sekulow’s bulletin of December 11, 2018 focused on complaints about Buddhist/Eastern meditation being forced on school kids. More from that in a minute. Various “relaxation” programs have been appearing in the public schools for years. Most parents and teachers didn’t pick up on the religious implications because (1) parents often didn’t even know this was going on;…
Visiting in Japan in October 2016, on my one night in a hotel room, I suddenly realized I’d not watched any Japanese TV. It was fun to land on a kabuki theater performance and also a documentary about antique Noritake dishes. Then an announcer introduced the next hour’s topic: “mind-oh-foo-roo-nessu.” That’s mindfulness. I knew this is all the rage in…