Modern mindfulness

Deliberately stripped of Buddhism in 1979 so hospitals would accept it — and the ethics that were removed were not decoration, they were load-bearing.

What it is

The secular practice of non-judgemental present-moment attention, taught in eight-week programmes, apps, schools, prisons, militaries and workplaces, and studied in thousands of clinical trials.

Its canonical definition, from Jon Kabat-Zinn: awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.

Two programmes anchor it:

MBSR — Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Eight weeks, weekly group sessions, a day of silence, daily home practice of body scan, sitting meditation and gentle movement.

MBCT — Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. MBSR's structure combined with cognitive therapy, designed specifically to prevent relapse in recurrent depression.

Where it came from

MBSR has a founding date and an explicit rationale. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist with a long personal practice in Zen and vipassanā, started the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, working with chronic pain patients whom conventional medicine had run out of options for.

He has been consistently open about the secularisation being deliberate and strategic. The vocabulary of Buddhism, he judged, would have prevented the practice from being accepted in an American teaching hospital, and would have deterred exactly the patients he wanted to reach. So the Buddhist terminology went, the ethical framework went, the cosmology went, and what remained was presented as a health intervention.

That was a considered choice with real benefits — it put contemplative practice into medicine, at scale, for people who would never have entered a Buddhist centre.

MBCT was developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale, and published in 2002. It targeted a specific mechanism: the ruminative thinking that precedes depressive relapse. It is the most rigorously evidenced application in the field.

From there the spread was rapid — into schools, corporate wellness, the US military's Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, and an app industry worth billions.

How it is practised

Body scan, seated attention to breath and sensation, mindful movement, and informal practice — attending deliberately to routine activity. Sessions of ten to forty-five minutes, taught as skills rather than as parts of a path.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the evidence is real and modest, and it is set out in the evidence on meditation. MBCT for depressive relapse prevention is the standout result and a genuinely valuable clinical tool.

We can say the critique of "McMindfulness" is serious and deserves stating properly. Its sharpest form comes from Ronald Purser, and it is not simply that Buddhism has been disrespected.

In the Buddhist framework, sati — the word translated as mindfulness — is one factor of the eightfold path, and it is never freestanding. The path includes right speech, right action and right livelihood. Attention is cultivated within an ethical commitment and for the purpose of seeing craving clearly enough to end it. Detached from that, non-judgemental awareness has no direction: it is a technique for tolerating your present experience, whatever that experience is and however it was caused.

The consequences are practical. A corporation that responds to overwork by offering mindfulness training has located the problem inside the employee's reaction rather than in the working conditions. A programme that teaches soldiers to be more present has made them better at a job whose ethics it declines to examine. A school that teaches non-judgemental awareness to children in under-resourced classrooms has addressed their distress without addressing its source.

This is close kin to spiritual bypassing: the use of a contemplative technique to accommodate something that ought to be changed. And it follows fairly directly from removing the ethical component, which was not decoration.

We can say the adverse-effects problem was partly created by the same removal. The traditions had maps of the difficult stages; the secularised versions did not carry them, so teachers had no framework when practitioners became distressed and frequently advised them to continue.

We can also say the criticism can be overdone. A person with chronic pain who gets six months of relief from a body scan has been helped, and the fact that the technique came out of a tradition they do not share does not make the relief fictitious. Kabat-Zinn's original patients were people medicine had failed.

We cannot say whether the trade was worth it, and reasonable people inside Buddhism disagree sharply. What can be said is that the trade was made knowingly, is documented, and is not what most people using a meditation app have been told.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading