Nautilus

The Problem with Mindfulness

The mindfulness movement’s heavy focus on positive, health-related perks, like stress or anxiety reduction, turns meditation into a mere tool for mental hygiene.Photograph by DrewHeath / Wikicommons

Should we be mindful of how popular “mindfulness” now is? Carl Erik Fisher says we should. Fisher is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a practicing psychotherapist who integrates meditation in his practice, and meditates himself. But he worries some popular meditation practices, which stress salvation through a clear mind, undermine the genuine benefits of meditation. Recent studies in psychology show mindful meditation has been detrimental to practitioners.

“The overselling of mindfulness can lead to this idea that we should always be rigidly focused on what’s in front of us and our minds should be totally clear of any sort of input or. “That’s a total misrepresentation. Mindfulness doesn’t mean the eradication of thoughts, in any tradition. In any sort of basic, secular, clinical application, it just means paying attention to the present moment…Maybe we need to clarify what we mean by mindfulness before we slap it on a bunch of posters in every school and every workplace.”

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus3 min read
Archaeology At The Bottom Of The Sea
1 Archaeology has more application to recent history than I thought In the preface of my book, A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, I emphasize that it is a history of the world, not the history; the choice of sites for each chapter reflects
Nautilus13 min read
The Shark Whisperer
In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places
Nautilus5 min read
The Bad Trip Detective
Jules Evans was 17 years old when he had his first unpleasant run-in with psychedelic drugs. Caught up in the heady rave culture that gripped ’90s London, he took some acid at a club one night and followed a herd of unknown faces to an afterparty. Th

Related