Mindfulness: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
Reading time: 2 minutes.
Everyone seems to be into “mindfulness” these days. It’s like the hip, cool way we all get to be-here-now without going to Buddhist temple or waking up.
Even corporations have gotten into it, once they saw a correlation between stress reduction and an increased bottom line. Personally, I see nothing but upsides to more people learning how to sit quietly and observe their breath. (How many of these suits at corporate retreats, do you think, are dying for the meditation exercises to be over?)
Still, the more attempts to connect with silence, the better, in these days of noise overload, right?
Yet, as someone who spent a lifetime on the spiritual/self-improvement hamster wheel, I also know the pitfalls of mistaking practices and techniques for awakening. I’ve experienced firsthand how well-intended practices can get co-opted by the wolf (ego) in sheep’s clothing. “Mindfulness” may encourage more of us to pay attention to right here, right now, but this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with awakening. A person could practice mindfulness their entire lives and never actually wake up. As Robert Salzman put it: "The PRACTICE of mindfulness has nothing to do with being awake, and the two should not be confused." More often than not, when we do confuse them, spiritual practices just become another way for the ego to hide in what looks and seems like holy clothing. Trust me, that sucker can hide anywhere, even in yoga/meditation, maybe especially there.
Do you use the feel-good temporary RELIEF of your practices to avoid the CURE?
Spiritual practices—and other escape hatches—are healthy, good, normal. The problem comes in when they are used to avoid deeper self-inquiry, to avoid asking the real questions, to avoid facing unprocessed trauma, to avoid feeling unwanted emotions (which point to the deeper self-inquiry/questions), and to avoid the LOOKING that needs to happen in order to wake up and end the search.
As Carl Jung said we will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing our own souls. We will stay cuddled up 🧸 with our current lives, partners, careers, beliefs, answers, knowledge, and opinions—our current conditioned, ego selves—to stripping down naked and doing the work to go deeper, even if we know it will be better for us. We want the rebirth without the death, the light without the dark, the happy without the sad, the success without the failure. We will go for that magic cleanse or diet pill over doing a few burpees and changing our daily habits, even though we know it won’t work! We know it. But we still go for the quick-fix anyway. It’s only natural. We’re human. We move towards pleasure and away from pain.
This is often why, without crisis, nothing changes. Without crisis, we keep doing the same sh** over and over, expecting different results, like Sisyphus and that damn boulder, for generations even, until some unexpected disaster (or 20) finally forces us to wake up and switch gears.
Mindfulness practices may offer needed relief to our cluttered minds and productivity-obsessed culture but, alone, they can’t solve the deeper issue. As long as there remains a belief in a separate self who is being mindful, a separate self who is doing the meditation, a separate self who is trying to be here, now—I think I can, I think I can—the illusion of a “me” on a search for contentment continues. As long as the search for contentment continues, the suffering continues, because contentment is placed out there somewhere in the future vs. right here, right now.
There is no one to be mindful… there is no meditator. There is only THIS, here, now. One eternal mysterious movement and WE ARE IT.
“True meditation is the realization of being. It’s not a doing… you cannot do a meditation.” — Eckhart Tolle
Show those burpees some love, ya'll! 🤸
KB
