Doing minds with words: mindfulness meditation as a case study for the historical relevance of lexical conceptuality

Today's success of Mindfulness meditation is mostly identified in the alleged cognitive advantage it proposes for the achievement of an autonomous and aware ‘mind’. This success can be assessed looking at the spread of the concept of Mindfulness in sectors such public health or universities, up to common language, showing its capability to inform the contents of the meta-representations of the ‘mind’. In its resembling a social epidemic phenomenon, it becomes necessary a historicization of the concept of Mindfulness and its lexical landscape, starting with an analysis of the Western scholars who first inserted the term in the context of theravāda Buddhism and subsequently standardized it in the drafting of dictionaries, attributing to it those characteristics of autonomy and awareness that today we find exacerbated in a formalized meditative lexicon. Moreover, this conceptual diffusion has occurred despite problems, highlighted by several historical works (see Gethin, 2011; Sharf, 2014), on the correct exegesis of the traditional texts from which Mindfulness supporters say it derives, and regardless neuroscientific studies that questioned the conclusiveness of the cognitive results of its meditative exercises (see Ospina, 2008). The aim of my project is to use the historical analysis of the concept of Mindfulness as a laboratory where to test a theory of concept repetition able to take advantage of different philosophical (see Davidson, 2001; Mitchell, 2012) and neuroscientific (see Corballis, 2015) approaches, in order to study the strategies repetition uses –both in its extensive (greater access to a lexicon through its standardization) and intensive form (repetitive formal practice of a certain concept)– to lead to the incorporation of meta-representative postures, capable to define how we experience our ‘mind’.