Capitalism has a way of hijacking our culture’s 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 who’ve 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 he’s 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 — what it means to him, why it’s 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, there’s 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
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years since you published Wherever You Go, There You Are. Back then, mindfulness wasn’t a part of the lexicon at all. Now it’s everywhere. What do you make of that evolution and where the movement has gone?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
To tell you the truth, I’m 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, it’s 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 Buddha’s 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. It’s not something you have to acquire. You’re 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. What’s challenging in meditation practice, formal or informal, is remembering how important it is to fall awake, because most of the time we’re 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. What’s the goal of mindfulness meditation?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Actually, it’s 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 you’ll be happy or whatever. This is a practice for falling awake, so that you actually are living the life that’s yours to live in the only moment that you ever have to live it, which we don’t usually realize is this one now.
We’re always on the way to some........