"Mindfulness and Educating Citizens for Everyday Life invites readers to explore the role mindfulness can play in mediating how we enact social life in today’s increasingly challenging and challenged world. The educators and researchers who have contributed to this book use mindfulness as a lens to address and untangle what is becoming a profoundly complicated way of being within the reality of global capitalism. Education is framed broadly—the research transcends the walls of classrooms and includes museums, nursing homes, hospitals, AA meetings, and homes. Hence, the chapters feature participants occupying varied social positions and spaces that may be situated in different parts of the globe.
The authors address two overarching and dialectically related themes of mindfulness and wellness and collectively the chapters expand possibilities for readers to act mindfully in a world in which wellness and wellbeing are pervasive concerns as a fragile Earth adapts to a dynamic flux of human-led changes that threaten the future of lifeworlds that support humanity and myriad species that face extinction. The authors do not offer oversimplified solutions to dramatically switch direction and preserve life, as we have known it. Instead, the ideas that emerge from the research presented in this volume expand possibilities for informed conduct, self-help, and educating citizens with a goal of individuals and collectives transforming lifeworlds by embracing mindfulness-saturated ontologies.