Abstract
This chapter explores mindfulness as a path for leisure practices and introduces insight leisure as an approach that brings the possibility for deepened connection with eudaimonia and a freedom cultivated through 13 inter-related attitudes of mindfulness. Buddhism reveals to us a different set of qualities about leisure, which emphasize the mind’s capacity for wisdom, love, and compassion as the conditions for leisure practices, and caring as the spiritual equivalent of developmental tasks such as attachment, separation, and individuation. This chapter responds to seven central questions including how in leisure studies we might engage insight leisure in practice, teaching, and research; avoid reducing mindfulness practice to activity; avoid reducing mindfulness to goal orientation and fixing problems; shift awareness from doing to explorations of being; shift from hedonism to explore meaning making, savoring, and eudaimonia; create conditions that support letting go; and embrace paradox in leisure studies.
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Notes
- 1.
For more information on the Satipatthana Sutta, see The Way of Mindfulness: The Satipatthana Sutta 1949 from the Majjhima Nikaya translated by Bhikku Soma and Cassius A. Pereira, Lake House, Colombo, Kessinger Publishing.
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Arai, S.M. (2017). Leisure Experience and Engaged Buddhism: Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom and Justice in Leisure Studies. In: Spracklen, K., Lashua, B., Sharpe, E., Swain, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56479-5_9
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