ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a broad-brush view of the vast territory of societal themes and the interface of these with Mindfulness-Based Programme (MBP) teaching, and is therefore necessarily limited in scope. MBPs have at their root the desire to reduce suffering. The chapter highlights that suffering is not solely an individual phenomenon: it is both deeply individual and personal, and socially and contextually situated; and that mindfulness has a role in supporting people to become socially mindful as well as individually mindful. This is catalysing an examination of the potential limits of current MBP curriculum models in terms of their dominant emphasis on the inner personal causes of suffering, and lesser emphasis on contextual and social causes. The chapter aims to examine both how this can begin to be rebalanced within the existing forms of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and to highlight other MBP developments that emphasise social context from the outset.
