Experience Required
Developing liberating attention skills is easier said than done—but worth every bit of effort.
Mindfulness can change your life—but I try not to make a big deal about it.
Focusing on the benefits of mindfulness can actually get in the way. The real value isn’t in talking or thinking about mindfulness—it’s in experiencing it firsthand.
Given a choice, would you rather:
Read a book about music or listen to your favorite songs?
Watch a cooking show or savor a meal?
Study the science of reproduction or have good sex?
Now more than ever, it’s more satisfying to have some skin in whatever game you want to play. An imperfect live concert beats reading about a perfect one. Eating a simple grilled cheese trumps watching a YouTube video of a chef making an artisanal one. Even awkward romance is more meaningful than an online article or a TikTok video about sex, love, or loneliness.
We’re constantly seduced by claims that sound too good to be true—and often willing to accept such claims as substitutes for real experiences.
With mindfulness, it’s tempting to chase the promise of calm on demand—until you meet the hard, messy work of developing liberating attention skills.
That’s the heart of the McMindfulness debate: how do we get more people to try mindfulness without watering down its richness and complexity? Seasoned Buddhist meditators criticize the marketing of an approach tailored to a specific context rather than evaluating the modified instruction itself.1 Journalists with little or no practice experience question the paradoxical claims that the long-term meditators know intimately.2
Right now, the conversation around mindfulness loses more than it gains—like the practice itself, it’s messy and full of paradoxes.
Building attention skills is a lot like getting fit: easy to talk about, hard to make a habit. Both require consistent effort, discomfort, and confusion—yet they’re worth it.
A mindfulness teacher needs to sell you on the potential outcomes of consistent practice, but also has to steer you back again and again to the slippery path that leads to them.
If a personal trainer is as clear as possible about how to do an exercise, it doesn’t make it any easier to perform. Using a sloppy technique might allow you to quickly check it off the list, but you risk forgoing the benefits that motivated you to work out in the first place.
I want to be challenged, but being outside my comfort zone is—well, uncomfortable. I often don’t want to exercise, but I’m always glad that I do afterward. During yoga, I silently beg for the end of downward dog, but later appreciate rising to the challenge. When I’ve waited impatiently for someone to ring the bell ending a long meditation practice, I’m almost immediately grateful for the chance to meet and stretch my limits.
We would all prefer that the task of any contemplative practice be to solve an important yet abstract riddle related to human suffering and contentment. We want a treasure map with a big “X” marking the exact spot where we should dig. Instead, we are handed a shovel and sent out with clues that seem intentionally vague.
I’ve spent a lot of time digging, and while I would love to sell you the exact coordinates to a magical above-ground location, I am honored to provide you with a shovel and share the most effective digging tips I’ve discovered. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where you look, but how.
I don’t want to change your mind. I want to invite you to change your relationship to your thoughts.
I don’t want to confuse you. I want to be as clear as possible so that you will be confused enough to change your relationship to confusion.
I don’t want to fiddle with your heart. I want to nudge you to feel what you feel—even anger, fear, sadness, and embarrassment—with less resistance and internal interference.
I don’t want you to be in pain. I want you to cultivate ways to experience life’s inevitable discomforts without making them worse or letting them define you.
I don’t want to convert you to a different belief system. I want you to feel more at home in your life—and this messy world—just as it is right now.
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Some think the problem amounts to secularizing Buddhist ideas (Ron Purser’s McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality and “Beyond McMindfulness”), but I think the issue is an excessive emphasis on results over process and on pleasant states over unpleasant ones. Another problem I have with the McMindfulness take is the kind of Buddhist exceptionalism explored by Evan Thompson in Why I am not a Buddhist.
There’s no shortage of examples of this, but Virginia Heffernan’s “The Muddled Meaning of Mindfulness” is a good one. To be fair, as Eric Harrison points out in The Foundations of Mindfulness, “thirty-eight years after Jon Kabat-Zinn launched his seminal mindfulness program at the University of Massachusetts, no consensus has yet materialized about what mindfulness actually is. Buddhists, psychologists, and popular writers all have differing views of it. Ignorance of the past and half-truths are endemic. Poor-quality research and extravagant promotional claims muddy the waters.”