A reading guide by Frances Garrett for Wakoh Shannon Hickey's book, Mind Cure

A summary preview of “Introduction” (pgs 1-17) and Chapter 5, “Is Mindfulness Religion?” (pgs 137-170) from Wakoh Shannon Hickey's book, Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019). From a series of lectures by Dr Frances Garrett from a University of Toronto course that surveys historical, cultural, and textual contexts for Buddhist meditation, with a focus on the role of race in the history of Buddhist meditation in North America. We examine how Buddhist meditation practices including mindfulness have been shaped by, and even contributed to, forces like colonialism, orientalism, capitalism, and white supremacy in the last hundred years or so in North America.