I have always been allergic to what I call whooey-wooey, the ungrounded spiritual talk that comes with a lot of vocabulary and no weight. My mother spoke the language of theosophy all my life, and I experienced the opposite of everything she professed. Words that weren't embodied always lit up my bullshit detector. So when I finally walked into a meditation hall, after my first divorce, I was braced for it.
What I found was a room of strangers, a bell, and thirty minutes of silence. The teachers took themselves lightly and kept repeating the same instruction: if it doesn't ring true, take what does and leave the rest. That gave me agency, and agency was the one thing I needed. I sat. And I found out, with some embarrassment, how loud my own head was. I had no idea I was that noisy.
I'm grateful for those evenings. This piece is about what I've since learned I was given and what was left out, because the practice I walked into was a piece of something older, and the piece comes with a history worth knowing.
§ 1 · What the word meant
Be still, and know that I am God.
The Pali word is sati, and it means more than paying attention. It comes from a verb meaning to remember: not to forget the object of practice, the instructions, or one's ethical commitments, moment to moment. The scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi describes it as presence of mind, an attentiveness to what is happening now. But the texts are emphatic that it doesn't work alone. Right mindfulness pairs sati with sampajañña, clear comprehension: the capacity to discern which mental states are wholesome and which are not. One watches and the other understands. Stripped of discernment, attention is half a faculty.
And mindfulness was never freestanding. Sammā-sati, right mindfulness, is the seventh factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, resting on ethical conduct, right speech, right action and right livelihood, and leading toward wisdom. Its four foundations train attention on the body, feelings, mind and the contents of mind, not to relax but to see directly the impermanent and selfless nature of experience. The aim stated in the texts is the end of suffering, awakening, and not stress relief. I'm summarizing a large and contested tradition, and Buddhist traditions differ on this. I'm describing the Theravada account as Bodhi gives it, which is one reader's authoritative source, not the only one.
§ 2 · What the market kept
When mindfulness crossed into Western clinics and app stores, it was distilled to one ingredient, present-moment, non-judgmental attention, and the surrounding architecture mostly fell away. Jon Kabat-Zinn's formulation, paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, made the practice secular, measurable and teachable at scale. That was a genuine gift to medicine. It has helped a great many people, and I'd count myself among the people who benefited from the secular version.
But something was lost in the translation. Critics argue that dropping sampajañña and the ethical frame left a technique without a map. "Non-judgmental" was easily misread as non-discerning, when classical sati is precisely the faculty that evaluates what is skillful. The monk Nyanaponika coined the phrase bare attention for the first stage of practice, and he never meant it as the whole of it. In fairness to Kabat-Zinn, he has answered his critics, arguing that ethics are implicit in how the practice is taught, and not everyone agrees the loss was as complete as the critique claims. I think both things are true. Neither a teacher nor an app guarantees the ethical frame; it has to be deliberately taught.
What remains in common speech is a folk definition: mindfulness as relaxation, focus or stress relief. Teachers warn this sets people up to fail, because meditation isn't always calming. A practice sold as a quick path to ease can feel like a betrayal when the mind, given room, surfaces something hard.
§ 3 · The scale of it
Stripped to a portable technique, it spread. The US National Health Interview Survey found that the share of American adults who meditate rose from about 7.5 percent in 2002 to 17.3 percent in 2022, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. A contemplative discipline became a monthly subscription, and mindfulness moved into corporations, the military and schools.
Ronald Purser, in McMindfulness, calls the result a form of capitalist spirituality, a tool of self-discipline disguised as self-help that helps people adjust to the very conditions that made them unwell. I think that is too harsh as a description of what most teachers and many users are doing, and about right as a description of what happens when a workplace offers a meditation app instead of fixing the workload. The critique is worth keeping in view, not worth swallowing whole.
§ 4 · Two harms
The commercialization wounds the practice in two ways, one philosophical and one concrete. The first is dilution. Sold as calm and productivity, mindfulness loses the ethical and liberative frame that made it transformative. The second is a safety gap. Because the practice was marketed as universally relaxing and benign, its risks went largely unstudied. Fewer than a quarter of meditation trials even assessed adverse effects.
When researchers look carefully, the signal is real. Willoughby Britton and colleagues, in a 2021 study, followed ninety-six participants who completed variants of an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program. People who already meditated regularly were excluded. When the researchers asked actively, 83 percent reported at least one meditation-related side effect, 58 percent something unpleasant, and 37 percent an effect that affected daily functioning. In that same study, between about 6 and 14 percent reported lasting negative effects, depending on how lasting was defined. These were participants in a particular program, asked directly, and not a measure of the general public downloading an app. How often problems appear depends heavily on whether anyone is looking.
My own experience has been mild and good, and I would be a poor witness against the practice. But I notice that the "download it and relax" model offers no teacher, no screening and no container for the minority for whom sustained, unguided attention turns difficult. If you have a history of trauma or serious depression, it is sensible to practice with a trained person nearby.
§ 5 · Putting back what was removed
I don't think the answer is to abandon it. The repair isn't less mindfulness. It is the rest of mindfulness. Attention joined to discernment, so that watching becomes understanding. Understanding set inside an ethic, so that it becomes conduct. And a purpose larger than a calmer afternoon. It also means honesty about risk: preparation, qualified guidance, and the plain admission that discomfort sometimes comes with practice, while effects that worsen or impair someone deserve attention and not a pep talk about growth. Difficulty is not proof of benefit.
Commercialization isn't the enemy. Decontextualization is. A practice can be popular, paid for and app-delivered and still be whole, so long as the missing pieces are built back in deliberately and not quietly priced out.
That lesson is one I try to apply to my own work. A faculty measured in isolation is a fragment. Attention tracked on its own becomes another number. If I build tools to measure attention, they will be useful only if they stay joined to the questions of what the attention is for, and who it serves. I don't claim to have solved that. It is a standard I want to be held to.
§ 6 · What I'd say now
Mindfulness was never just attention. It was attention joined to discernment, set inside an ethic, and aimed at something larger than the self. The market kept the first and sold the fragment as a cure for the stress it often leaves untouched, sometimes at a real cost to the people least prepared for it.
Company alone doesn't restore discernment or ethics. A room of people sitting in silence can be kind and still go nowhere. What I took from the room was permission to leave what didn't ring true, and a teacher who didn't take himself too seriously. What I took from attention itself was smaller and more practical. When my son was a teenager and wouldn't talk on the drive to school, I told him, half teasing and half sincere, that we could just drive in silence, and I learned to wait. Some mornings he talked. Paying attention to who he was, and not to what I wanted him to say, changed what I did. That is the test I would put to any practice: not whether it calms me, but whether I behave differently toward the next person in the car.
Sources and further reading
Bhikkhu Bodhi (2011). What does mindfulness really mean? A canonical perspective. Contemporary Buddhism, 12.
Satipatthana Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 10); Anālayo (2003). Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization. Windhorse.
Nyanaponika Thera (1962). The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. Rider. Bare attention as a first stage.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10; Kabat-Zinn, J. (2017). Too early to tell: the potential impact and challenges of mindfulness in society. Mindfulness, 8.
Purser, R. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Meditation and mindfulness: effectiveness and safety. nccih.nih.gov. Summarizes National Health Interview Survey data for 2002 and 2022.
Britton, W. B., Lindahl, J. R., Cooper, D. J., Canby, N. K. & Palitsky, R. (2021). Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects in Mindfulness-Based Programs. Clinical Psychological Science, 9.