Right about now people are starting to break their resolutions to get in shape. There’s a playoff game on, it’s cold outside, very cold, and the living room seems so inviting. There’s always tomorrow to really begin, or maybe next Monday. Yes, always better to start on a Monday. As long as wellness is something we do, an action, an activity, there will always be a better time to do it.
And so it is with mindfulness, that part of wellness that captured us for the last decade and now sits like an unused exercise bike, draped with laundry, always in the way, as we look for some goal-setting relative to pawn it off on.
Mindfulness showed promise for a while. It seemed so simple. Just pay attention, be aware of your surroundings, your thoughts, your breathing. Question everything, and trust your experience. Doubt your judgments. Be present. All good advice. All things we can very easily do with little practice.
But the practice is what tripped us up. That’s where the money was. You can’t sell people mindfulness. It’s something natural within us. But if you strip mindfulness away from the simple act of being and repackage it as a form of self-help with classes and books and retreats and endowed institutes to teach people how to do it suddenly there’s billions in it.
Before we knew it mindfulness was no longer a natural state. It became something you do. A practice. And to do it required teachers and a special cushion and an app on your phone. Suddenly mindfulness, this place of awareness known well to fly-fishermen, model ship builders and people drawn to watch the sunset, was an ever more disappointing thing you did, a thing that didn’t often deliver the earth-shattering results the gurus said it would, until you got up from your chair and went off and did something else.
Evidence? This morning I Googled mindfulness. I got this:
Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment. Practicing mindfulness involves breathing methods, guided imagery, and other practices to relax the body and mind and help reduce stress.
That’s it. How to do it. Nothing at all about what it actually is, as if anybody even knew in the first place. But a lot of people tried it. And a lot of people gave up doing it. Like so many other good ideas reduced to mere product by very skilled marketers, mindfulness became a fad.
And now it’s not.
Now it’s apricot crush, low-rise jeans, Ozempic, neo-brutalism and back-yard beauty. Companies will find some way other than mindfulness benefits in the employee assistance program to distract workers from how shitty their job is. Because yes, this tremendous capacity to fully experience existence and fully pay attention, mindfulness, was pulled apart, packaged, and sold to the point that it became a mere distraction.
I wrote a book about meditation in which I avoided the term mindfulness because I saw this coming. Well it’s here. And just like that, it’s gone. Meditation has always been with us. Looks like this oh so modern form of mindfulness won’t be. The mindfulness hucksters promised a lot, and while a lot of people signed on it didn’t deliver the results promised for most. It actually pulled many away from the good life.
Just like every good fad.
It takes a lot of strength not to get sucked in by the latest fad, especially when there's so much social pressure to do so. But if we can hold our ground and remember what really matters to us, it's so worth it. Thanks for reminding me.