It’s profoundly tempting to dismiss as cant any word current with Davos, the N.B.A. and the motherhood guilt complex. Mindful fracking: Could that be next? Putting a neuroscience halo around a byword for both uppers (“productivity”) and downers (“relaxation”) — to ensure a more compliant work force and a more prosperous C-suite — also seems twisted. No one word, however shiny, however intriguingly Eastern, however bolstered by science, can ever fix the human condition. And that’s what commercial mindfulness may have lost from the most rigorous Buddhist tenets it replaced: the implication that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced. Of that shift in meaning — in the Westernization of sati — we should be especially mindful.
That quote was from an article in a recent New York Times - talking rather disdainfully about the meaning of mindfulness in the West. And though it has a ring of truth to it, it is somewhat dismissive of how some might actually find solace in mindfulness - in a practice of mindfulness that includes facing the most mind numbing suffering. Suffering that is implicit in the human condition - yes - but a suffering that, when personal, is often dealt with alone in the middle of the night or with a cup of coffee and a blank stare at a kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon. One that you are thinking about so hard and get so lost in that suddenly you look up and the coffee is cold and the sun is almost set.
