EN
This article analyses mindfulness as an ascetic and aisthetic practice – a form of perception training largely shaped by strictly Western cultural processes dating back to the late 19th century: modern patterns of perception and habitual regimes, including forms of aesthetic contemplation, which permeate our everyday life – as well as the anaesthetic response to the hypertrophy of the aesthetic. Understood as a training of senses, stemming from the need to experience the sense (meaning) at its fundamental psychophysical level, mindfulness is discussed here as a response to the entire constellation of needs and deficits, overlapping with and specific to Western modernity, including the sense of disembodiment (desomatisation), communication overload, and hyperaestheticisation. From this point of view, mindfulness practices might be recognised both as a refinement of aisthetic experience and a form of sensory asceticism. Without disregarding its Buddhist origins, the text draws attention to the elements of mindfulness ideas and practices that seem to be closely related to the Western cultural context, with a particular focus on (broadly understood) aesthetic ideas of the 20th-century modernism.