MYTH 5

Mindfulness is just the next trendy industry

The media and marketing machine can’t help but make the worst of a good thing. Think of natural, organic, green, holistic. Now mindful is having its moment: mindful burgers, mindful petcare, mindful this, that, and everything. (And yes, Mindful magazine.) Once a word gets trendy and overused, it can grate on the ear, but because organic has been overused doesn’t mean that genuine organic food has somehow become a shallow thing of no value. Just so, with mindfulness. Everyone feels they know a little bit about it, so that naturally leads to a lot of misconceptions, and indeed it can lead people and companies to try to make a fast buck off it.

But there will always be sham versions, knockoffs, and snake oil. Already writers for The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The Economist, and The Guardian, among others, have claimed that mindfulness is big money. I know a large number of mindfulness teachers. Their median income is modest, to say the least, and almost all of them have “day jobs.”

If authentic mindfulness teachers are to beat out the scam artists, they’ll need to be able to earn a living. It takes time to learn how to teach mindfulness, and it’s hard. It’s as much a calling as a profession, and just as in other callings, like college professor or clergy, it’s not ignoble to draw a paycheck.

The danger of the over-commercialization of meditation is real. The problem is not money per se. Some selling has to take place. Anyone who started meditating was sold on it by someone, but it’s over selling that’s the real danger. When meditation is presented as a panacea, with Pollyannaish language that makes it sound as if five minutes of easy, breezy meditation will transform you, it’s literally too good to be true.

Mind training is serious business. Our minds are powerful and wonderful, and basically sound and good, as noted above, but there also be dragons there. We are capable of developing or inheriting mental illnesses; we have deep, dark fears; and our lives and our world, however glorious and joyous they can be at times, are filled with pain. Real mindfulness must take place within full view of the whole truth of life, with all its challenges and difficulties.

To go there, we need good guides, who themselves are continuing to explore and learn—and learn together with those they teach. As interest in mindfulness continues to grow because of the genuine benefit it brings, weaker, phony versions of mindfulness will also keep popping up. But because they offer empty calories and ultimately don’t satisfy, many people will continue looking and find their way to authentic mindfulness. And we’ll all be better for it. ●