Three years ago, when I was studying for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, mindfulness was almost in the air. It was not merely a course, a therapy, or a mental-health programme, but something more like a way of life spreading across campus. The Department of Psychiatry was working with the university counselling service on a study of mindfulness and its effects on student stress and psychological resilience. Nearly everyone I knew seemed to have been drawn into it somehow. Some attended regular mindfulness sessions, filled out surveys on schedule, and carefully recorded their states of mind. Others, like me, were assigned to a control group and did not attend the classes, yet still found ourselves touched by the surrounding enthusiasm. We gathered in strangers’ houses at odd hours to sit in meditation; afterwards, we discussed the subtle movements of breath, body and thought with the seriousness of people comparing dreams. Looking back, the whole period seems both earnest and faintly absurd.
My relationship with meditation began much earlier. I grew up in New Zealand and Sri Lanka within a Buddhist cultural background, so temples, chanting, offerings and meditation were not unfamiliar to me. But just as many “cultural Catholics” are not especially devout, my relationship to Buddhism was often superficial. As a child, when my parents took me to the temple, I was mostly bored. The rituals were solemn, slow and long, and I wanted only to leave. At university, however, things changed. The pressure of academic life led me to psychotherapy, and I was naturally drawn to therapeutic approaches marked by Buddhist philosophy and meditation. Mindfulness was one of them.
Before and during the Cambridge study, therapists taught me a range of mindfulness techniques. I learned to observe my breath, to scan my body and notice sensations of pain, tightness, warmth or numbness; to watch thoughts arise and disappear; to observe emotions without immediately following them. Many exercises used visual imagery: thoughts were clouds passing through the sky, feelings were leaves floating down a river. One classic exercise in mindfulness courses even involves eating a raisin mindfully. You look at it, smell it, touch it, chew it slowly, and attend to every change from its wrinkled skin to the taste it releases in your mouth. I never really did this exercise myself, but it has almost become a symbol of mindfulness culture: everything can be slowed down and noticed again.
By the end of the Cambridge study, I did feel calmer. When strong emotions arose, I seemed better able to step back from them rather than be immediately carried away. I found it easier to relax, and easier to treat stress as something changeable rather than as a catastrophe that would swallow me whole. This broadly matched the research findings: regular mindfulness practice could reduce stress and increase resilience.
But at the same time, another, harder-to-name unease began to appear. I found myself less able to tell what my thoughts and emotions meant. If I thought the essay I had just written was poor, was it because the argument really was weak, or because the deadline was making me anxious? If I felt that I was not clever enough, was that imposter syndrome, or was I genuinely unsuited to this kind of research life? If I felt low, was it the inertia of depression, melodrama under pressure, or an accurate response to my circumstances? The more I practised observing thoughts and feelings, the less they seemed like “my” thoughts and feelings. They began to resemble a kind of internal weather passing through me. I could see them, but I no longer knew how to understand them.
That feeling later became increasingly important. For years I kept returning to the problem, almost obsessively. I left a doctoral programme in an entirely different area of philosophy and applied to graduate school again, just to understand what I had encountered in mindfulness practice. I began reading from ancient Buddhist texts to modern books on meditation, tracing how certain ideas had moved from religious traditions into contemporary psychotherapy and popular culture. Gradually, I came to see that mindfulness is not simply a gentle, neutral, universally suitable technique for stress management. It carries a set of assumptions about how we should relate to thought, emotion and the self — assumptions that are not always made explicit.
In the past, people often turned to religion, philosophy, literature or moral reflection in order to understand themselves. Today, more and more people turn to psychotherapy and its many offshoots. The mindfulness movement is a typical example of this change. It does not ask you, in the manner of philosophy, “Why do I live as I do?” “What do I really believe?” “What kind of person should I become?” Instead, it teaches a particular way of attending to the present. Its central posture is usually described as “nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment”. You need not evaluate experience, analyse it, or ask whether it is reasonable, true or revealing. You need only notice it, and let it pass.
When eating a raisin, you are not supposed to think about whether you like raisins, or remember the little boxes of them you had in childhood lunchboxes. You are supposed to attend to the raisin itself. When observing your breath, you are not supposed to follow the train of thought, nor complain about boredom or irritation. You simply return to the breath. When scanning the body, you are not supposed to explain why the pain is there, or ask what anxiety in your life might be connected to that tightness. You only notice it. The goal of mindfulness is not to eliminate thought and feeling altogether, but to loosen their power to pull you away. They come, and they go. You see them, but you do not follow.
This method is appealing partly because it presents itself as value-neutral. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the central founders of the modern mindfulness movement, repeatedly emphasised that mindfulness does not conflict with religious or scientific beliefs, and does not sell an ideology. It appears to be only a tool. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, whatever values you hold, you can practise mindfulness. It can reduce stress, ease pain, help treat mental illness, improve concentration, creativity and productivity, and even bring you closer to your “true self”. Mindfulness has thus become a kind of modern all-purpose instrument: it offends no one, demands no change in values, and yet seems able to patch over every crack in contemporary life.
Commodification has produced diluted versions — delivered through apps and taught in schools and offices
Mindfulness is not without its critics. Its relationship to Buddhism has long been controversial. Many Buddhist scholars argue that the contemporary mindfulness movement simplifies, distorts, and even culturally appropriates Buddhist traditions. It takes certain techniques from Buddhist meditation while stripping away their ethical, doctrinal and soteriological contexts. Kabat-Zinn and others have sometimes further complicated matters by claiming that mindfulness demonstrates the truth of certain core Buddhist teachings. Critics point out, however, that mindfulness’s emphasis on “nonjudgment” does not always sit comfortably with many Buddhist traditions of meditation. In Buddhist practice, the meditator is often not merely observing experience, but discriminating, evaluating and transforming it in light of doctrine.
Others note that psychotherapy and Buddhism do not begin from the same aims. Psychotherapy usually seeks to reduce suffering and help people live better lives; Buddhism understands suffering in a more radical and pessimistic way. It does not merely aim to reduce certain symptoms, but sees life itself as caught in ignorance, craving and rebirth, with liberation from that cycle as the ultimate goal. To turn Buddhist meditation into a workplace stress-management tool is already to change its meaning.
A third criticism is often summed up in the phrase “McMindfulness”. On this view, mindfulness has become a spiritual fast food repackaged by the market. It has moved from the therapy room into schools, offices, universities and mobile applications, becoming products such as Headspace and Calm, employee benefits, and methods for improving efficiency, reducing anxiety and optimising the self. It has been commodified, lightened, modularised, and severed from its more complex ethical and philosophical background.
My own dissatisfaction is related to these criticisms, but its focus is somewhat different. What worries me most is that mindfulness claims to apply to anyone, in any situation, facing any problem, and in doing so it oversimplifies the difficult work of self-understanding. It fits neatly into a culture obsessed with technical fixes and self-optimisation. In this culture, discomfort in life always seems treatable by some technique: regulate the breath, redirect attention, reshape habits, track sleep, optimise emotion. We are encouraged to adjust the contents of our heads, but less often encouraged to ask why our lives make us so uneasy in the first place.
My own experience made me realise that merely observing thoughts and feelings is not enough. To understand why mindfulness is not well suited to serve as the central method of real self-understanding, we have to see the hidden picture of the self that lies behind it. Although mindfulness often presents itself as universal, neutral and non-doctrinal, it is in fact metaphysically loaded. It inherits certain key assumptions from the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, and these are not assumptions every practitioner would consciously accept.
The doctrine of no-self denies the existence of any enduring self-substance. On this view, there is no soul, spirit or stable subject that serves as the owner of all experience. We ordinarily assume that beyond thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations there is an “I” who undergoes them. Pain is “my” pain, anxiety is “my” anxiety, thought is “my” thought. In Western philosophical traditions, despite many disagreements about what the self is, some concept of an experiencing subject is usually preserved. The Buddhist doctrine of no-self is more radical: when we examine experience carefully, it says, we find no fixed “I” at all.
Buddhist traditions contain many techniques for revealing this. A practitioner might examine thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations, and observe that they are all impermanent. A thought appears and disappears; one emotion rises and is replaced by another; bodily sensation shifts with environment and attention. None of these things is stable enough to constitute the self that persists through a lifetime. Nor can their totality constitute the self, because the totality is equally unstable. But beyond these phenomena, there is nothing else to be found that could be called the self. The conclusion is that no fixed self exists. And if there is no “I” to own these experiences, then thoughts and emotions are not truly “mine”.
Contemporary mindfulness often does not state this metaphysical argument directly, but many of its practices move in a similar direction. It repeatedly emphasises the transience and impersonality of experience. Thoughts simply arise and pass away; feelings move through; pain is not you; anxiety is not you. You are asked to see thoughts as clouds in the sky, emotions as leaves on a river, suffering as an object rather than as the core of the self. Common mindfulness mantras make this explicit: “You are not your thoughts.” “You are not your pain.”
Such sayings can indeed be useful at certain moments. They can prevent a person from being dominated by a single thought, or from mistaking one episode of anxiety for an eternal truth. But once this posture is treated as the primary way of understanding oneself, it can make it harder to see thoughts and emotions as part of one’s own life story.
After a certain point, mindfulness does not let you take responsibility for and analyse your feelings
I later came to understand my sense of self-estrangement as a result of mindfulness’s relationship to the doctrine of no-self. When we relinquish the self, we relinquish not only an abstract notion of the soul, but also a more ordinary and practical understanding: that my thoughts and emotions, in some sense, belong to me. They reflect my history, character, desires, fears and circumstances. If everything is merely a temporary mental event arising and passing away, it becomes difficult to tell a coherent story about oneself.
Yet self-understanding usually requires such a story. We want to know why we are so prone to anxiety, why we retreat in certain relationships, why criticism overwhelms us, why success still leaves us feeling undeserving. We do not usually treat these feelings as random psychological weather. We suspect they have something to do with our character, our childhood, some past experience, or some long-formed mode of self-protection. A person who worries that she is neurotic does not make that judgment because of one passing anxious feeling. She sees a recurring pattern: insecurity, over-explanation, repeated checking, hypersensitivity to others’ judgments. These feelings matter precisely because they seem to belong to her, to say something about her.
Of course, it is useful to step back from emotion. When one is overwhelmed by rumination, shame or anger, imagining thoughts as drifting leaves can create a little space. That space can prevent a person from being swallowed by the feeling of the moment, and it can help reveal triggers and patterns of reaction. But distance cannot replace understanding. After a certain point, we cannot simply keep saying: “This is not me; this is only a feeling.” We also need to ask: why does this feeling keep appearing in me? Where does it come from? What is it protecting? What is it distorting? Is it drawing my attention to something real?
Mindfulness is weak here. It can repeat that “I am not my feelings”, but it is less able to help me say more difficult things: “I am feeling jealous.” “This is my insecurity.” “I may have a tendency to avoid intimacy.” “My fear of criticism may come from a long-standing doubt about my own worth.” These statements are uncomfortable, but they are crucial to self-understanding. Without some sense of ownership over thoughts and emotions, it is difficult to take responsibility for them. If my anger is always only “anger arising”, rather than “I am angry”, then it becomes harder to ask why I am angry, whether that anger is justified, and what I ought to do with it.
The relation between a person and her mental life is a heavy one. It involves responsibility, history, character and moral judgment. We should not push these questions aside too quickly, leaving only the lightness of observation.
Mindfulness also weakens self-understanding in another way: it tends to detach the self from its environment. Emotions do not arise in a vacuum. Sadness, anxiety, anger and helplessness always occur within some life context. Perhaps you have recently lost someone you love. Perhaps your job is unstable. Perhaps you are living under financial pressure. Perhaps you are in a relationship that constantly makes you doubt yourself. Merely observing the feeling of sadness cannot tell you whether that sadness is a fitting response to reality. Merely noting anxious thoughts cannot tell you whether the anxiety is a neurotic pattern or whether the situation is genuinely dangerous.
To understand why we think and feel as we do, we need to see ourselves as concrete individuals in concrete environments. We are neither purely the products of inner character nor purely the products of external circumstances. We live between the two. I know, for instance, that I tend toward excessive worry and overthinking. This self-knowledge helps me ask: is this anxiety an old pattern starting up again, or is the external event really worth worrying about? Often, the answer is a mixture. That is exactly why we need careful analysis, not merely the observation of thoughts as they arise and pass away.
Without some concept of the self, it becomes difficult to distinguish between “this is my response to the environment” and “this is the expression of one of my own patterns”. That distinction is one of the central tasks of self-understanding.
The problem is that mindfulness is often presented as a cure-all for every modern ailment
Mindfulness’s tendency to bracket context does not only limit personal self-understanding. It also risks making psychological suffering overly individualised, even dangerously apolitical. Many forms of distress are not merely problems inside the individual mind. They are connected to loneliness, poverty, overwork, competition, housing pressure, social isolation, care burdens, gender structures and class position. Yet when policymakers and institutions look for low-cost solutions, they often prefer a psychological technique that can be quickly rolled out to many people, rather than addressing the deeper social conditions.
Depression among older people is often connected to loneliness, financial insecurity and the loss of social roles. Yet the response is more often medication or brief therapy than the rebuilding of community or social support. Student anxiety may be connected to a highly competitive educational system, but schools can more easily offer mindfulness courses than change the systems of evaluation that continually push students toward collapse. Workplace stress may arise from overwork, unstable contracts and managerial culture, but companies would rather offer meditation-app subscriptions than reduce exploitative working conditions.
Mindfulness fits this tendency easily because it directs attention toward the contents of the individual mind. Your suffering becomes a matter of your relationship to thoughts and feelings, rather than your relationship to the social world. Mindfulness does not necessarily deny external circumstances, but its mode of practice often places them in brackets. You are asked to return to the breath, return to the body, return to the present. But sometimes what a person needs is not to endure reality more calmly, but to understand why reality is painful and decide whether it should be changed.
I do not mean that mindfulness is harmful for everyone, or that every practitioner will feel estranged from herself as I did. Mindfulness can be a useful tool. It can help create distance in an emotional storm, help an insomniac settle, help an overloaded person loosen the inner fist of stress. Its problem is not that it exists as a tool, but that it has been packaged as a universal answer.
I still use mindfulness occasionally. After a particularly difficult day at work, or on a night when I cannot sleep, I might do a simple breathing exercise. But I no longer treat it as a main road to self-understanding, nor do I believe that its impersonal mode of awareness is always more advanced, healthier or truer. It can be helpful in moments of emergency, but it cannot replace deliberative reflection.
The central mistake of the mindfulness movement is to universalise one particular mode of consciousness. It takes a way of seeing rooted in the doctrine of no-self and repackages it as a model of self-relation suitable for everyone. But sometimes what a person needs is not only to observe her thoughts, but to interpret them; not only to let emotions pass, but to understand why they arrived; not only to say “I am not my pain”, but to ask: why is this pain happening in me, and what does it have to do with my life, my character and my environment?
The truly difficult question is never simply how to let thoughts drift away. It is how to decide which thoughts deserve belief, which emotions require responsibility, which forms of suffering come from ourselves, which come from the world we inhabit, and what we should do once we understand the difference.
Mindfulness can offer distance. But distance is not understanding. Understanding requires a return to the self, to history, to context, and to all those questions that mindfulness too easily lets pass by.
