In this article, we analyze the popularity of mindfulness and its problems.
The mindfulness industry
Mindfulness is quite popular nowadays and has become part of mainstream culture. It manifests in multiple products such as mindful yoga, mindful finance, mindful leadership, mindfulness apps, mindfulness coloring books, mindful dog owners and so on. There are multiple courses, journals and conferences in mindfulness, and it has been adopted by a number of organizations and institutions such as hospitals and schools. The global market in mindfulness apps alone is projected to touch $2.1 billion soon.
Looking at it one way, this is a positive sign: it shows that mindfulness has been accepted as beneficial by society and is even considered trendy and fashionable. This can lead to more people, across all boundaries, embracing the concept and benefitting from it. However, it is all positive or does this also have a flip side?
Below are some of the points I would consider as the flip side of the mindfulness industry.
Lack of enough scientific studies
As argued by Rahmani and Stetka among others, there is still not enough scientific studies to prove how well mindfulness works in healing people. As the Scientific American article by Stetka says, a study showed issues such as lack of proper methodologies in mindfulness research, including lack of double blind randomized controlled trials. Even widely used programs such as Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) are not immune from this.
Part of the problem is that mindfulness, like other kinds of meditation, is largely a first person experience and so is difficult to measure. Also, there is lack of standardization in how one is to conduct and measure a mindfulness intervention.
This makes many claims made by mindfulness practitioners potentially misleading. Similarly, the dangers, if any, of mindfulness practice have not been systematically studied.
Lack of proper qualified teachers
Similar to yoga, there is no standard qualifications needed or available before someone proclaims themselves a mindfulness teacher or practitioner. Programs like MBSR do have a course which one has to go through to be certified. Similarly, Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) does offer training courses and teacher certifications. However, these are just some examples and not needed for someone to start teaching mindfulness. Buddhist monks can also offer meditation courses or retreats that involve mindfulness, the format and schedule of some of which are highly traditional and time-tested, but others are not.
This lack of standardized training can lead to variable experiences of mindfulness meditation among students, depending on the teacher and his/her qualifications.
Divorced from Buddhist roots
Mindfulness meditation has its origins in Buddhist teachings, where it is one of the integral parts of the Buddha’s noble eight fold path. Mindfulness in Buddhist teaching comes in the context of an ethical framework and is supposed to lead to the total transformation in a person, away from suffering caused by egoistic and habitual tendencies.
Modern mindfulness, however, mostly ignores the ethical framework and its proper context. For example, one may practice mindfulness from an app without worrying about having a right livelihood, keeping ethical precepts such as no lying and no killing, and so on. In this sense, one might say that the this is missing the point. The benefits of mindfulness meditation that are sold today, such as health benefits, are merely side effects of what was truly intended, which is a total transformation and freedom from suffering.
Over commercialization
One could say, given the number of mindfulness products available today, is that it has been over commercialized. Even the mindfulness meditation has been packaged into a nice beautiful product that one can adapt to their own lifestyle without making any real changes. Again, there is nothing wrong with it per se, but this makes mindfulness into a commodity that one can buy, with its related ills: lack of access to poorer or less technologically advanced people and its perception as a fashionable commodity to keep. From the Buddhist perspective, this can be seen as strengthening the ego, rather than loosening of the ego.
A related criticism is: mindfulness, rather than seen as a vehicle for personal and social transformation, becomes incorporated or appropriated by the current over consumption, capitalist and neo liberal machine, with all its accompanying ills.
Conclusion
So where to go from here? How is mindfulness to be redeemed? Some obvious ways are to standardize the teaching and training of teachers, to conduct proper scientific trials, to acknowledge the roots and ethical framework of which mindfulness is a part of. As individuals and consumers, perhaps we can make our own thoughtful (or mindful) choices of which aspects of mindfulness to adapt in our lives and in which way.
