Mind Cure
Book Description
Discover the hidden origins of today's mindfulness revolution in this eye-opening exploration of America's forgotten spiritual healing movement. Wakoh Shannon Hickey reveals how the meditation practices now marketed as secular wellness techniques actually emerged from a powerful nineteenth-century phenomenon known as "Mind Cure."
Long before mindfulness became a billion-dollar industry, pioneering women led a transformative movement that combined Eastern spiritual wisdom with Western healing practices. These early practitioners, many learning directly from Buddhist and Hindu teachers, understood meditation as far more than stress relief. For them, consciousness transformation was a pathway to concrete liberation from the oppressive social, economic, and legal constraints of their era.
Hickey traces how this grassroots spiritual movement, which offered particular hope to women and African-American men seeking genuine freedom, gradually became co-opted by elite white male professionals. As doctors and clergy repackaged Mind Cure methods into "scientific" psychology and medicine, the movement's radical social justice vision and religious foundations were systematically erased.
This compelling historical investigation challenges readers to reconsider what mindfulness truly means and whom it serves. By examining how spiritual practices become commodified and stripped of their transformative potential, Hickey illuminates the gap between meditation's promise of universal healing and its current reality as a privilege primarily accessible to affluent communities.
The book offers both historical insight and contemporary critique, questioning whether individualized approaches to stress can address the systemic inequalities that fuel suffering in the first place.
Who Is This For?
📖 Reading Level: Medium (200-400 pages) (~9 hours)
📄 Length: 336 pages
What You'll Discover
- ✓ Learn practical meditation techniques
- ✓ Explore Psychologie
- ✓ Explore History, 19th Century
- ✓ Understand psychological principles
- ✓ Explore Verhaltensmedizin
- ✓ Explore History, 20th Century
- ✓ Explore Medizin
- ✓ Develop present-moment awareness
