If 2014 was the year of mindfulness, 2015 was the year of fruitlessly trying to debunk it

Brigid Delaney, The Guardian Monday 19 October 2015

Each week my group meditation class grows. New faces arrive, mostly young women in their 20s whose refrain is the same: they can’t sleep properly at night, frequently worry, find themselves constantly overthinking.

It’s standard low-level anxiety stuff for which a doctor might prescribe a mild sedative, or put you on a mental health plan. That’s if you see a doctor. Most people just muddle through, thinking that the feeling of always being slightly on edge is just part of the modern condition.

That is why many of us gather together in the house, meditating together. We hope that mastering this ancient thing and doing it twice a day will deliver that elusive feeling of peace. No need to take any drugs; just sit quietly, detach and let your thoughts drift across your mind like clouds.

Last year meditation hit its peak. It was Arianna Huffington and her book Thrive. It was Ted talks on mindfulness, clogging up Facebook feeds. It was meditation making the cover of Time magazine. It was the New Republic calling 2014 the Year of Mindfulness. It was meditation mantras on corporate retreats and Zen buddhists on the speakers’ circuit.

Ten years ago, in Australia, meditation was not mainstream. If you’d heard of it, it was from your parents’ weird friend who had a breakdown and then went on the Pritikin diet. It was for Buddhist monks or the desperate. You’d hear dramatic stories about Vipassana – people travelling to the Blue Mountains and going for days of hardcore, silent meditation. On day five they’d flee the centre with its hard beds and soft, brown food and run out into the bush.

We’ve barely settled on our cushions but debunking has already begun. If 2014 was the year of mindfulness then 2015 is the year of debunking mindfulness.

In the New York Times earlier this month, Adam Grant pleaded for an end to the “meditation madness”. “Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities,” he wrote. In Comment is Free, Christina Patterson struck a similar note:

I don’t doubt that “mindfulness” can cut stress, and make your brain work better. Lots of things can cut stress and make your brain work better. Knitting, for example, and walking, and kissing, and baking, and writing poems, and picking flowers and chasing butterflies, and playing football, and stroking pets. Oh, and sex. Lots of lovely sex. But you can see why the Wellcome Trust wouldn’t want to fund 7,000 teenagers to have daily sex.

“It hasn’t yet changed the world, but I suppose one day it might. What it has done, in the last few years at least, is ride the crest of a wave we call fashion,” she concluded.

Meditation, the debunkers say, is, at best, just one method of relaxation among others. This kind of scepticism misses the point.

On meditation retreats over the years I’ve met people who’ve been gatekeepers of the craft. They’re usually men with yoga-ripped bodies and dirty hair. They use up their annual leave on retreats and meditate for heroic amounts of time. They tell the group they see things like “the sound purple.”

The rest of us sit there ashamed, with nothing to offer. The gatekeepers seem to have vivid, transcendental experiences while the rest of us get the shopping list stuck on rotation.

But it’s not the debunkers who unsettle them, but the mercenaries – the ones who are totally indifferent to meditation’s bigger spiritual claims. These are the utilitarian meditators, the business leaders and stockbrokers who want to be efficiency machines that function on four hours’ sleep. The whole compassion-and-sacredness thing doesn’t really come into it.

And if it’s done by the ones at the top of the business world, it eventually trickles down: now something that was once (mainly) free is tied up in millions of dollars worth of expensive luxury retreats, apps for your smartphone and celebrity endorsements. The Telegraph, which kicked off the debunking in January, calling mindfulness the “saddest trend” of 2015, noted its move into the workplace, where it is becoming ubiquitous: a technique that can make the employee happier and more productive.

“Meditating at work might ... make you happier,” concurred two writers in the Fairfax press earlier in October. “But you know what else might make us happier at work? Packing up and going home on time.”

We shouldn’t be surprised by this shift. The market feeds off, overcomes and co-opts the things that were either free or were opposed to it. They did it in the 1990s by commodifying the anti-globalisation, anti-corporate mood, with soft drink companies sponsoring outdoor concerts featuring the counter-culture’s favourite bands; feminism is similarly being used to shift Taylor Swift’s albums and movies like Frozen.

Meditation and mindfulness have gone the same way; from contemplation of this world’s impermanence, to yet another productivity tool in a world where impermanence is more often used to describe your job security.

To resist this trend, we’re better off investigating and overcoming the reasons why we are flocking to meditation, rather than debunking meditation itself. What is the communal Om except a cry for help in a competitive, atomised and hyper-connected world where anxiety is a given?

What we need is more silence and space. We need to switch off the machine that is in our heads (and the one in our hands). We don’t necessarily want to be tranquillised out of it – there has to be a better way for the young women in my mediation class – the ones who worry all the time about everything and nothing.

If meditation is what it takes to get you through, who cares if people in the New York Times say meditation is boring? But just make it your own. Explore it, don’t necessarily accept the packaged, commodified, watered down version of what you think meditation is. You don’t have to go into the wilderness, you don’t have to apprentice yourself to a tanned yoga gatekeeper, and you certainly don’t have to take your mindfulness in 10 minute doses from your boss.