This is one concept that has always eluded me. I have seen the term “mindful consumption” thrown around recklessly on fashion blogs for the following cases :

When purchasing your 12th sweater.

When buying anything expensive.

When buying anything from a certain set of stores.

When professing love for a garment you want and will most likely buy.

In blog posts that end with suggestions on what to consume mindfully.

When its the sale season and you really want to shop.

When you want convince your readers that you buy sustainably.

When you want to convince yourself that you consume sustainably.

…..

The pop culture made it a miracle word that absolves the gap between need and want. You can buy anything in-spite of how much else you own and tell the world that you consumed mindfully. I have been tempted to use the term but never understood what it meant. So I looked it up :

The term ‘mindfulness’ is a Buddhist concept. It is a practice of training the mind. To understand mindful consumption, I needed to understand the context in which it evolved. A few notes from Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire and the Urge to Consume :

Affluenza

A painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.

Ecological Identity

Our sense of place, ecological concerns and environmental values ( such as respect, compassion and reverence for life )

Consumer Identity

Brand-name preferences, material posessions, class status, social group and market desieres. When more time is taken up in consumer activities, less time is avaialable for cultivating our ecological identity.

Consumerism

The dominant culture of a modernizing invasive industrialism which stimulates – yet can never satisfy – the urge for a strong sense of self to overlay the angst and sense of lack in the human condition. As a result, goods, services and experiences are consumed beyond any reasonable need. This undermines the ecosystem, the quality of life, and particularly traditional cultures and communities and possibility of spiritual liberation.

Author Bill McKibben once did the experiment of watching every minute of television that was aired on a single day by the largest cable site at the time. He concluded that the central theme, repeated on ad after ad, was this : “You are the most important thing on earth” Can this really be the primary orientation of our times ? McKibben calls this “I-dolatry”, the extreme self-referencing fostered by the profiteers of consumerism.

The Buddhist view shifts emphasis from objects or being to the relationships that form them. A relational world view is not unique to Buddhism, but when coupled with empathy, it becomes a powerful tool for dismantling the structures of consumerism. This relational understanding can support ethical restraint and fruitful inquiry.

All the things we gather in our lives will inevitably be dispersed. Either we lose interest in them or they break or they remain in the corner of some closet until we move or die. Yet the tendency toward accumulation is very strong.

Covetousness, the wanting mind, the feeling that we never have enough, is seen in Buddhism as unskillful action of the mind. This state is most extreme in the hungry ghost realm. Hungry ghosts are often depicted as having huge stomachs and pinhole mouths, showing how they are incapable of ever feeling satisfied. In our own culture, we might call it ‘catalog consciousness”, obsessively rifling through the pages to see what else we might want. This is “wanting to want”, a disease our culture keeps nourishing.

Mindfulness training :

One of the things I discovered in my own practice, which speaks to my relation to consumerism, was how desire works on very subtle levels. For example, when I’m on retreat and I find myself desiring a cup of tea, I might be inclined to get up and gratify that desire. This is because I am focusing strongly on the object of my wanting, the cup of tea. But if I shift my focus from the object to the anticipated feeling of satisfaction, I can be aware that it is the pleasant feelings associated with the tea that are really what I am after. If is then much easier to remember that these feelings are fleeting. Remembering this impermanence, I am less hooked by the objects of desire. If we focus on the object, which appears to be more real, it is harder to resist the desire: we are more fooled by the apparent substantiality of the object and less able to see its impermanence. When we focus on the feelings, we have a greater change of remembering the impermanent nature of feeling, thus breaking the link that generates the wanting. Still, the habit pattern of wanting is very strong.

Mindfulness is the foundation of understanding. It contributes to wise attention and helps us distinguish what is skillful action from what is unskillful.

Although renunciation is a central aspect of the Buddha’s teachings, many of us in the West have a difficult time with this idea. Renunciation is not a particularly appreciated cultural value. And even if we are somewhat aware of its value, it may not be all that inspiring. In Saint Augustine’s famous prayer, he says “Dear Lord, make me chaste, but not yet”. But another way of talking about renunciation is through understanding its “non addiction”. Whereas “renunciation” feels like a burden or sense of deprivation, “non addiction” implies freedom, which is something all of us want.

The Buddhist teachings explain on a microscopic, almost neurological level how attachment works and the self gets created. We encounter, for example, a desirable object. At the moment of visual, aural, or touch contact with that object, a pleasant feeling arises in our minds or bodies. This pleasant feeling comes from a variety of places – past habit, training, media, standards of cool, socioeconomic, karma, and so on. With this contact, we associate the pleasant feeling with the object. The feeling itself is wonderful. In order to sustain the feeling, we think we need to get the object. We cling to the feeling and then to the object itself that we think has produced the feeling. We get attached and voila, the “self” is born.

Another way of saying this is, we feel something nice ( pleasant feeling ), we reach out for it ( craving ), grasp our hand tightly around it and don’t let go ( clinging ), and then there is a birth of the self ( becoming ). It works in reverse too: an unpleasant feeling results in not wanting and ultimately pushing away ( aversion ). In Buddhist philosophy, this chain of events is called dependent origination – nothing is independently produced. This chain is happening continuously at such a rapid rathe that we are seldom aware of this process. They say it is the driving force by which we live our lives. We are unconsciously responding to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli but all we know is that we have to have the new DVD player.

Dependent origination teaches how we automatically grab for an object to stop the aching and sustain the pleasantness. in effect, we are trying to put an end to our suffering, which is certainly understandable. The chain can seem hopeless – we are controlled by an unconscious process, running toward pleasant experience and away from what is unpleasant. But this is where mindful awareness comes in, which is really the key. Mindfulness is the part of our mind that knows exactly what is really the key. Mindfulness is the part of our mind that knows exactly what is happening when it is happening. It is present, aware, and connected to the moment. Is has liberating power in that it can help us to see clearly. Through the power of mindfulness, it is possible to short-circuit the cycle and prevent the automatic response. If at any moment we apply mindful awareness to the cycle of contact, pleasant feeling, wanting and clinging, we need not move on to the next link of the chain.

We can notice Wow, I want a pair of boots. We can feel the feeling of desire in our bodies ( aching in the chest or gut area, pounding heart ) and notice the accompanying thoughts ( they are perfect, I cant live without them ). Then we can apply mindfulness to these sensation or thoughts. When we see them clearly for what they are – mere thoughts and sensation, not truths about ourselves – the mind may let go. We may relax some, soften the belly, notice : “Hey, its just a thought.“. By seeing it clearly, the mind can let go and stop the forward thrust into attachment, purchase and the boot addiction self.

The revolutionary insight brought to us by the Buddha is that actually it is painful to want. Letting go of wanting stops the pain. Getting what we want only temporarily soothes the wound. Buddhist wisdom teaches us that a desire doesn’t have to be fulfilled to make it go away. We can recognize and let go of the desire. We can break the chain. All we have to do is catch a single point on the cycle.