Can we make meditation a political tool?

We have in our hands a tool so powerful that it’s disorienting.

by Chiara Pedrocchi

“Once, I used to keep the door of the meditation room closed (...). Over time, I felt that the closed door not only preserved, but also separated, excluded, interrupted a flow. So I left it always open, and a current formed between the life of the other rooms and that empty, silent room. Both spaces were enriched, I believe.”
Chandra Livia Candiani

Can doing nothing be the highest form of work? That is the question posed by Slovak artist Sašo Sedlaček in his 2020 project Oblomo, which demonstrates how even inaction can be capitalized. The mechanism is simple: it is based on a blockchain with its own cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence becomes the police that ensures nothing is being done—except, at most, meditating. With the cryptocurrency earned, users can purchase gadgets from the Oblomo project.

Profiting even from one’s need for peace may seem absurd, yet it is what happens every day in a system where there is no time to take time.

There is no space to meditate, no time to practice yoga; one may even rush because they are late for a mindfulness session. Slowness becomes a goal to achieve—and we end up stressed because we cannot maintain it. Sunday remains the only space to catch up on sleep and try to hold everything together: work, relationships, social life, physical and mental health, rest, home, groceries. And it is exhausting.

In this context, it becomes increasingly difficult to find spaces in which to speak about loneliness or discomfort, or spiritual groups where one can work on what is most abstract and intimate.

In an increasingly secularized country—with “regular practitioners” nearly halved between 2002 and 2022 and “never practitioners” doubled, according to Istat data—and within a neoliberal model that turns even faith into an individual, flexible, and privatized choice, so-called New Age spirituality has quickly taken hold.

As sociologists Nicola Pannofino and Stefania Palmisano point out, “older definitions both emphasize and mock this creative attitude: do-it-yourself religion (Baerveldt, 1996), pick-and-mix religion (Hamilton, 2000), spiritual supermarket (Lyon, 2000), or à la carte religion (Possamai, 2003). However (…) the heterogeneous and fragmented character of spirituality is significantly reduced if one recognizes within it a common denominator, what Heelas (1996, 2), in his study of New Age, calls a lingua franca. For this author, it is the language of ‘self-spirituality’ that crosses boundaries and unites the most disparate proposals and practices of the spiritual milieu.”

New Age movements were largely born in the 1960s, a period when it was more the spiritual impulse than the political one that sought to change the world. According to sociologist Roy Wallis, some of these movements reject the organization of the external world, isolating themselves from society; others accept it, seeking tools to feel well within it; and still others attempt a compromise between society and religious institutions, which they consider corrupted.

Today many people are exhausted and tend to perceive their own problems as central, within a phenomenon defined as hypernormalisation:

the normalization of dynamics far larger than ourselves, which appear distant or irrelevant in everyday life, yet in fact radically shape it—and will do so increasingly. We are speaking of ongoing or imminent conflicts, of the climate crisis as the backdrop of every aspect of existence, of economic crisis and the widening gap between those who accumulate ever more wealth and those who sink into poverty, both locally and globally. If we intertwine these data with low political engagement and voter abstention (in 2022 a new record was sadly set, with national election turnout in Italy at only 63.9%), the picture that emerges is one of a resigned and disempowered society, increasingly delegating to institutions, mass media, and market laws the decisions that concern its own life.

Within a context marked by neoliberalism and widespread collective dissociation, the strand identified by Wallis as “rejection of the world” seems to prevail.

Its centrality is clear if we observe how many people have stopped reading the press due to loss of trust in information, how many no longer take to the streets because they believe revolt—and the repression that follows—does not concern them, and how many choose not to vote. Are these not all expressions of a rejection of the world, or at least of what exceeds the boundaries of one’s own microscopic reality?

It is within this context that mindfulness emerges:

a set of secular awareness-training practices inspired by contemplative traditions. Today these practices generate growing interest both in the scientific community and among the broader public, who consider them useful tools for mental well-being.

A simple and accessible example is Zazen, a fundamental practice of Zen Buddhism, which consists of “thinking without thinking,” sitting with half-closed eyes fixed on a point slightly ahead, back straight, and simply breathing. Zazen meditation is essentially based on three principles: doing nothing, expecting nothing, and letting body and mind fall away.

Politicizing meditation can become a valuable tool for navigating the present time,

in which we are constantly bombarded by negative news and injustices accumulate and stratify, profoundly impacting mental health. Not by chance, this impact drives many people—understandably—toward withdrawal, toward rejection of the world, toward exclusive focus on themselves.

One of the most relevant aspects to observe concerns the way suffering and the search for well-being have been progressively capitalized, transformed into new needs and into a market of ready-made solutions.

Hence the exponential increase in downloads of mental health apps such as Calm, Petit BamBou, and Headspace—the latter even collaborating, since 2021, with the streaming platform Netflix.

But have we not excessively normalized the idea of entrusting the spiritual orientation of our lives to these applications, allowing ourselves to be seduced by a promise of well-being in exchange for five minutes a day, our personal data, and often a subscription fee? If well-being is truly what we seek, does it make sense to confine it to a time slot, live it in solitude, and allow someone else to profit from our vulnerability?

Politicizing meditation does not mean stopping meditating—quite the opposite:

it is by now widely documented that meditation brings benefits not only to mental health but also to brain structure. Taking a step forward means approaching meditation and then extracting from it what can serve the collective and opposition to systemic dynamics of oppression.

For example, almost all mindfulness practices focus on the present moment and on observing thoughts as they flow by, until space is created in the mind. Already here some fundamental cues emerge for rethinking meditation. The first concerns the nature of those thoughts: what do we truly see flowing, as we imagine ourselves seated on the bank of a river observing them?

If they concern strictly individual matters, it makes sense to address them on a personal level. But if those thoughts point to problems born of social injustices, more or less visible, then perhaps it is not enough to remain closed in one’s room meditating alone, assuming sole responsibility for what crosses the mind.

It becomes necessary instead to imagine shared spaces, in which to recognize what is common, name structural causes, and collectively build possible responses.

As Chandra Livia Candiani, poet and translator of Buddhist texts from English, notes: “To meditate has the same root as medicine; it is care and taking care.” For example, are we tired because we cannot take care of everything, or because we are prevented from caring? “Ethics, like meditation, is a decisive political gesture; it is care toward the human community.”

Another central element is the idea that meditation teaches us to remain seated—even—beside negative thoughts and emotions, to look at them without averting our gaze and to welcome them as part of experience. The rejection of the world often arises from this discomfort in the face of what happens, or from guilt for not addressing what we choose to consider distant. In this sense, meditation can become a tool to recognize absences too—the absence of voices of protest—and to question one’s own positioning, especially when one has the privilege to do so. As Candiani writes,

“Meditation is not seeking exits, but rather entrances.”

If it is true that we cannot free others from their prisons, it is equally true that we can knock, enter, and use our position to widen the narrative.

Another crucial knot remains. Meditation requires time and constancy. Candiani writes: “Once, I met a Japanese Tea Ceremony Master. She had left Japan very young to marry a foreigner. After some years, she returned to Tokyo for a two-year work assignment of her husband. She called a Tea Ceremony Master to become his student. The Master listened and then asked: ‘How long did you say you are staying? Two years? Well, for such a short time, yes, I can teach you how to walk on the tatami toward the teapot and the cups.’”

Candiani also writes: “The gesture of bowing, of placing the forehead on the ground. Of descending. It is beautiful to have a gesture that repeats every day; it is like having a frame that remains still, and within it we can notice how everything changes, inside and outside us. Holding the gesture steady, we notice that one day we do it with emotion, one day with anger, one day in haste, one day we are in love and another we are not, life has touched us deeply, life seems to neglect us—and with all this flow of events and states of mind, together with all this, we bow.”

We are required—and have grown accustomed—to hyperstimulation and constant running, in a society that demands performance, where being rested almost becomes a flaw because it means not being productive enough.

Giving oneself time instead to make space, to consciously choose what to place on the blank slate of one’s life after meditating, to stay with things, to make mistakes without immediately fixing them, but to remain with the error in order to value it (as taught by the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, where a broken object is rebuilt with gold, and as artist and poet Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”) calls us back to the urgency of a radical slowness from which we should begin again.

The coronavirus seemed to have taught us this: as anthropologists Adriano Favole and Marco Aime explain in Il mondo che avrete, the pandemic could have been an opportunity to learn the suspension of time and activity from peoples such as the BaNande of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their culture includes various forms of suspension: pauses in forest clearing, believed to be inhabited by forest spirits; the suspension following the death of a chief (mwami), when his body is placed on the hill of his coronation on a lattice bed surrounded by wild fig trees whose aerial roots must not be touched; and, again upon the death of the mwami, the halt of all economic activity in a suspension called ekyusi. This entails willingness to endure the consequences—even famine—rather than remain trapped in infinite and uncontrolled progress.

And yet, once everything reopened, we resumed running—faster than before—without a clear direction other than hyper-productivity, unaware that this race is so fast it leaves us no time, when the cliff approaches, either to brake or to change course.

Fortunately, to oppose this race one does not need to know how to do much. In fact, strictly speaking, one needs to know how to do nothing

—at least in the case of Zazen meditation. One needs to expose oneself, to stand visibly and claim one’s revolution; to present an alternative so simple it is disruptive. So banal it is frightening. So disobedient and, at the same time, so innocent that it leaves no room for objection.

And so, if something as massive as a global pandemic was not enough—perhaps too complex for minds accustomed to polarization, hypernormalization, and oversimplification—Candiani may be right when she writes that “it is enough to stay in the small and with the small, because the large reveals itself when we are attentive.” It is not about holding long sessions or becoming monks, but about understanding that potentially, as Candiani writes, “everything is meditation.” Let us then focus on our small nothingness and our breath, make room for new priorities, and grant ourselves a cultural and political revolution—collective, shared, radically slow, yet determined and decisive.