Regional
How mindfulness went mainstream
Americans embraced meditation. So did corporations.
Capitalism has a way of hijacking our cultureâs best ideas. Regardless of the domain, industry turns almost every promising movement into a product.
Mindfulness meditation is an interesting example of this phenomenon. The number of Americans whoâve tried meditation has tripled since 2012, which, on the surface at least, seems like a great thing. And in many ways, it is a great thing: Mindfulness meditation encourages people to cultivate a deeper connection with themselves and the world.
But has the mainstreaming of mindfulness come at a cost to the practice itself?
Back in 1994, Jon Kabat-Zinn published his mega-bestseller Wherever You Go, There You Are, which helped pioneer the mindfulness movement in the United States. It was enormously influential and has now been republished in a 30th-anniversary edition.
Kabat-Zinn is a scientist and writer, and heâs done as much as anyone to adapt meditation techniques for Western medicine and society. So, ahead of the anniversary of his book, I invited him onto The Gray Area for a wide-ranging discussion about mindfulness â what it means to him, why itâs so hard to practice in everyday life, and what it has come to mean in our broader culture.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, thereâs much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
Sean Illing
Itâs hard to believe that itâs been 30 years since you published Wherever You Go, There You Are. Back then, mindfulness wasnât a part of the lexicon at all. Now itâs everywhere. What do you make of that evolution and where the movement has gone?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
To tell you the truth, Iâm very happy about it, even though there is a shadow side to it in terms of the hype that inevitably arises around anything that becomes in the public interest and is driven by certain kinds of motivations that may not have any real understanding of what the thing is.
In the case of mindfulness, itâs something that has very ancient roots in humanity and is, I would say, universal in its availability to us as human beings. So although it is, formally speaking, the heart of Buddhist meditation practice, it really is universal, as most of Buddhaâs core teachings have to do with the nature of mind and the nature of reality, and not being part of a particular kind of clique or subset or religious group.
Sean Illing
What, for you, is the opposite of mindfulness?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness, and what that means to me is unawareness. One is actually out of touch with aspects of reality that are salient and potentially vital to living life fully. So mindfulness in my vocabulary is synonymous with awareness, with human awareness. Itâs not something you have to acquire. Youâre born with this capacity for awareness.
But what prevents us from living more in the actuality of our lives and getting pulled into our heads is a certain kind of tendency to cultivate intimacy with the present moment. Whatâs challenging in meditation practice, formal or informal, is remembering how important it is to fall awake, because most of the time weâre falling into that automaticity and autopilot. The opposite of mindfulness really is inattention.
Sean Illing
This might be the wrong question to ask, but if it is, knowing that will clarify a lot. Whatâs the goal of mindfulness meditation?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Actually, itâs the one human activity that you engage in for no purpose. Not for some kind of contrived goal that you want to attain and then youâll be happy or whatever. This is a practice for falling awake, so that you actually are living the life thatâs yours to live in the only moment that you ever have to live it, which we donât usually realize is this one now.
Weâre always on the way to some better place, some better moment, or running away from the awful moments. We havenât developed that skill that you could learn in elementary school to actually be with things as they are, whether theyâre pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Youâre just neutral. And see how that actually feels. And the seeing is awarenessing. The feeling that you would feel in your body is awarenessing.
So as they say in the classical traditions, thereâs no place to go, thereâs nothing to do, and thereâs no special state or feeling that youâre supposed to attain. Itâs more about, âCan you be with things in your body, in this moment as they actually are? And what does that feel like?â And thatâs a real discovery, realizing that I can actually inhabit this moment and not be tyrannized completely by my thoughts or my emotions. Itâs a very useful skill if you want to be able to not miss your life.
Sean Illing
Now that you mention it, itâs pretty horrifying to realize that at the end of our lives, one of our biggest regrets will almost certainly be that we wasted so much of our attention, that we cared about the wrong things. And yet very few of us live as though weâve internalized that insight. I mean, I certainly donât. Most of us live as though we think weâre going to live forever because that would be the only justification for wasting so much fucking time, wouldnât it?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Beautifully put. Thereâs a certain way in which I think you can live forever, and thatâs by living in this moment, because this present moment has no dimension to it. Itâs like a dwelling place. You can reside in the present moment outside of time. So that is as close as I think weâre ever going to get to immortality.
Sean Illing
If you meditate long enough, do you eventually come to the conclusion that the self is an illusion? That whatever we mean by âthe selfâ is really just a story that gets reinforced by our environment?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Totally. It is a narrative. Itâs the story of me, starring me. When people sit down to meditate, because everybody wants to be good at everything, they think, âWell, if Iâm going to meditate, I better get a good result.â But again, this is the one thing you do for its own sake without getting a result. But that doesnât matter because youâll sit down, and after a few moments, somethingâs going to drive you crazy. Either your bodyâs going to get fidgety and youâre going to say, âWell, whatâs the point of this?â Or youâre going to fall into some kind of narrative, or youâll start thinking about what youâre going to have for dinner or what you forgot at the grocery store. Whatever it is, you begin to realize that, âOh my god, that narrative never stops,â but your awareness of it isnât touched by the narrative itself. So you already in that present moment have a new degree of freedom. You donât have to fall into the thought stream. You can attend to it by just observing.
Sean Illing
Well, that all sounds lovely and so simple, and yet â
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Do you have a meditation practice yourself?
Sean Illing
I do, but itâs inconsistent and frankly embarrassing. I would say that my experience has been one of constant frustration and failure, even though I know you say that thinking of it in terms of success and failure is a mistake. But the reality is that this is hard to do in practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Yes, because we are so reactive. The mind generates this illusory self. And this is a fundamental message of the Buddha or the fundamental insight: You are not who you think you are. Youâre much, much larger than the story of me.
Sean Illing
But the world around us does sort of conspire to keep us in that story, right?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Thatâs exactly right. Mindfulness meditation is a liberative practice. Itâs actually freeing us from the automaticity that youâre talking about. Of course, youâll get caught in a million different things, and youâll sooner or later recognize that. The recognizing is the awareness. If you do this long enough, if you tune this instrument on the meditation cushion long enough, after a while that does become more your default mode. You live in the room rather than living in the agitation of your conceptual reality. But you donât lose the conceptual reality. So itâs not like you get stupid. A lot of people might think, âWell, if I start meditating, then Iâm going to just become a weird zombie, good for nothing, canât get anything done, take too much time to do everything.â No, the most effective people I know are meditators.
Sean Illing
Iâm sure youâve heard the term McMindfulness, which is meant to capture how mindfulness practice has been co-opted by industry. What do you think about this and the kinds of problems itâs created in the broader mindfulness movement, or do you think itâs created any problems at all?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
To tell you the truth, no, I donât think itâs a big problem. I think that people who try to capitalize on something, especially something as intangible as mindfulness, after a while, theyâre going to find something more tangible to invest in because this one is really not going to carry them all that far.
I remember when the term âMcMindfulnessâ was first brought to my attention. I was in the UK doing some stuff with mindfulness in Parliament, and somebody showed me this paper that somebody wrote about McMindfulness, and they were really angry about taking mindfulness out of the Buddhist context and just offering it to the world in medicine and so forth. And you know what? I learned a long time ago, you donât have to wrestle with those kinds of accusations. Just let time take care of it. If itâs true that itâs not true dharma, it will fall away, and MBSR [Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction] will go the way of all sorts of other things.
I canât take responsibility for everybody whoâs hyping mindfulness. But I can tell you, because Iâm so clued into the medical and scientific worlds, that I see authenticity everywhere. I meet thousands of people who come up to me and say, âThis meditation practice has changed my life.â I keep hearing from them decades later. So my own maybe deluded or opaque take on this is that thereâs far more beauty thatâs unfolding through this entry of mindfulness into the mainstream than there is shadow side. And I donât feel like itâs my job to police the waterfront.
Sean Illing
I think the concern that people have is that mindfulness is becoming another tool for productivity and self-gratification, or itâs becoming a kind of hack for self-gratification, which in the end just amplifies the sources of our disconnectedness and unhappiness. I mean, itâs got to make you cringe a little when a company like Facebook, which exists to harvest the attention of billions of people around the planet, probably has meditation rooms in its corporate headquarters.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
You nailed it. Mindfulness is very popular in Silicon Valley, and there are all sorts of paradoxes associated with life. You pointed to some of them earlier on in our conversation. So thereâs no stopping whatâs going on in technology. Itâs mind-blowing. Itâs also terrifying. The people who are doing it are terrified, and also driven by greed, hatred, and delusion just like everybody else. And theyâre talking about not billions of dollars of potential profit, but trillions of dollars of potential profit.
So that is potentially very corrupting. The whole thing about artificial general intelligence, where the machinery trains the next generation of machine learning so that after a while, even the humans who have programmed things donât actually know what, say, ChatGPT is doing. Itâs doing stuff that it wasnât actually programmed to do, or the programs didnât realize that they were programming it to do it.
What happens in the nightmare doomsday scenario when the machines actually start doing other interesting stuff, when they actually become aware of themselves? So youâre pointing to something thatâs really terrifying. And in a certain way, this makes the need to drop into our core multiple intelligences, including awareness, more urgent than ever. And to engage in it in a way that is ethical. And this is a very important part of it, and itâs been an ethical foundation to mindfulness from the time of the Buddha. The Bodhisattva vow is in some sense parallel to the Hippocratic oath in medicine. Whatâs the Hippocratic oath in medicine? âFirst, do no harm.â But how would you even know if youâre doing harm unless youâre aware?
Sean Illing
Iâm more of a political person than you and thatâs where I come from when Iâm thinking about the dangers of mindfulness practice divorced from any kind of ethical foundation. From my point of view, the hazard of too much focus on our inner lives, or too much focus on meditation techniques to help us cope with the brokenness around us, is that it can actually distract us from the struggle to face that brokenness and change the world. I am all for self-compassion and self-love and that kind of thing, but if your journey inward doesnât eventually lead you away from your ego and toward the world around you, toward the people around you, then itâs a dead-end ethically and politically.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Buddha is famous for having said his 45 years of teaching could be encapsulated in one sentence. And I like to say to people, âWell, on the off chance that thatâs true, maybe we should memorize the sentence.â Here it is: âNothing is to be clung to.â The operative verb being clinging, self-identifying, as I, me, and mine.
So again, when you recognize that you are clinging and caught up in that kind of selfing, the recognition factor is awareness, and the awareness is not clinging. So itâs not like you have to un-cling. Itâs more like youâve dropped into another dimension, what I call an orthogonal dimension of reality. Itâs been here all the time. Itâs called awareness. And when you live inside awareness, then you see how greed, hatred, and delusion operate, how easy it is to betray your ethical instincts. And you donât, because youâve exercised the muscle. And thatâs what the meditation practice is.
People love to go to the gym and exercise muscles. And itâs not always pleasant because you have to work with just the right amount of weight so that you get some kind of resistance, but youâre not working against the resistance when youâre working with weight. Itâs like a love affair. Youâre working with the resistance because you want to build a certain kind of muscle strength or whatever. Well, itâs the same with the muscle of mindfulness. You just bring that kind of care and attention to it. The breath goes out, the breath comes in. The breath goes out, breath goes in. And youâre riding on the waves of your own breathing, moment by moment by moment. You can do this 24/7 if you donât sleep, and you just ride on the waves of your breath.
Youâll get caught up in reactions and emotions, whatever they happen to be â fear about the end of the world, anger at whatâs going on, and so on. Of course, we need activism within mindfulness, because if youâre not acting in the face of harm then you become part of the problem. We have to find a way to stand up to harm and do everything that we can, realizing that we donât know what the limits are of what we could do, individually and collectively, to bring medicine to the world, to actually heal the world.
Itâs not just about Israel and Gaza, or Ukraine and Russia, or China and Taiwan. These are really existential questions that all of a sudden arenât for scientists or religious figures to deal with. Itâs for all of us to deal with because weâre all in the same boat. And if you have children or grandchildren or you care about humanity, then activism is synonymous with mindfulness or heartfulness.
To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.