Ouch: They're monetizing Mindfulness

Oh dear. We Americans do love bingeing. We so love to be obsessed by the next big thing, perpetually moving as we do en masse from the happiness we just charged on our credit cards to the newer must-do we just gotta get right away: Crocs, Glocks, Krispy Kremes, quinoa, yoga, instant video...  charging ever onward. We've really mastered impermanence so exquisitely, the Buddha would probably congratulate us.

However,I don't think he would have LIKED the last big obsession, our body, that great high temple of self worship. So many got on board this supposed bullet train to happiness that reality, which the Buddha told us to friend, turned around and went the other way like a scared dog. This opened up a lot of space in which rigor became the de rigeur of having a personal trainer, Photoshop, diet du jour and piles of spandex clothing. Loose clothing that kindled imagination was an absolute no-no in this age of literal showmanship. Actually, the exercise clothes company Lululemon refused to make large sizes. Doctors swore you shouldn't consume carbs and new mothers felt shamed by their postpartum bodies. Having the flat abs, hard gluts and bulging pecs of a picture perfect bikini bod was mass aspiration because it promised all the celebrity lucre media attention can magnetize, and no other industry pays these days. Hell, if bulimia was your thing, you could even binge on the Kardashians and be applauded for throwing up. 

Well let go of your yoga mat. The love fest is over. We've divorced our body and moved on. Really. I just learned from a seemingly smart, slick in-the-know reporter's request for experts, the trend for designer bodies has given way to a mad rush for what she called designer minds. You know, your thoughts all manicured and muscled and perfectly toned. Doubts by Dior. Memories by Armani.

Boy am I glad I caught that query. Now I won't die wondering why the word "mindfulness" has suddenly been showing up everywhere, just everywhere like those Kardashians. It's in essays about how to deal with the dentist, and in credit card ads. That's right, mindful shopping. You don't have to stop shopping. You can still have it all. You just get the Buddha to be your personal shopper, your very own consultant, so you shop better than ever with more likes. We're talking focus.

Well. America has a new one.  Mental fitness is being promoted so prodigiously, if I had a nickel for every time I've seen or heard "mindfulness" mentioned in the last few months, I'd be personally training with the one percent. Here's a toe dip into the endless stream of headlines from The Huffington Post in the past few weeks: Mindfulness at Work: 5 Tips for a Healthier Stress Free Work Day; How Mindfulness Can Save Your Relationship; The Tipping Point for Mindfulness; Mindfulness: So What's in It For Me?  Here are a few more from the "spirituality" website Beliefnet.com: the Mindfulness Game; 5 ways to Combine Cardio and Mindfulness; Free Your Mind: See Free Your Mind (the movie). Even the venerable New York Times is running a story right now about how mindfulness can improve your writing.  Really.

I'm sure it was not the Buddha who said: "Apres moi, le deluge," but there's nowhere I can escape this tsunami. Last week I drove 2 1/2 hours into the mountains to give a talk and demo on what I think of as intelligent eating--the feng shui of food: eating with the season, locality, time of day to avoid dis-ease-- but the organizer billed me as an expert in Mindful Health and Meditative Cooking. Ha ha. An autodidact book reviewer panned my Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking because it never talked about how to be mindful in the kitchen. It turned out, as her review rambled on, what she wanted when she saw the word Dharma was not awakened awareness of our connection to each other and the food in front of us--how the food got into the kitchen and what it means there, but a step by step guide on how she could focus without distraction while chopping and stirring.

Anybody notice the self emphasis there? Well, keep that in mind because this latest craze is just another fling at self-improvement. You know: something's wrong with you so you have to go pay an expert to fix it. They're out there, in droves these days. Just like the hills are alive with the sound of music, the shills are alive with the sound of ka-shing. They are pouring out of coaching schools faster than the Japanese beetles swarming out of the soil onto my bushes. They come to preach the new original sin: not focusing.

With fanfare, Bi-Rite, the farm-to-table supermarket in San Francisco, recently touted a class series called Mindful Eating taught by a young woman who personifies the phenomenon. She used to be a personal trainer, then a yoga teacher but is now a mindfulness consultant and coach, a personal mind trainer certified by an organization called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and another called Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness. You can trust her: she has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed. She's in Google circles.

That's San Francisco. Across the country and the spectrum, the fellow who invited me to his "wellness" seminar last week insisted on opening for me with a "mindfulness relaxation" exercise. He'd started attending an upcountry weekend New Age spiritual group and just had to share the love, plus a few handouts. One explained the word meditation comes from our word medicine. Well how about that. The word meditation actually comes from the Latin for contemplate, and the Tibetans translated it to mean "familiarize." But I digress. 

The opening exercise went like this: he asked the 16 participants to lie flat on their backs on the floor. He told them to close their eyes. He clicked some repetitive New Age electronic flute music onto his iPad and fiddled with the volume. He asked me to turn off the table fan, the only source of air in a room where windows didn't open and the air conditioner was kaput. He didn't want anyone to be distracted by its whisper. Once no air was moving, he started spewing a nonstop stream of coaching instructions: breathe deeply....don't think... visualize a beautiful oasis...just meditate on how peaceful you feel there. Whoa. This was definitely what not to think, at least if you are a genuine Buddhist practitioner. So I got into the basic Buddhist meditation posture, sitting with crossed legs, leveling my gaze, and tuning into my mind, ignoring the distraction of his constant voice. (I would've preferred the fan because it was as hot as hell in there.) Having distraction is, of course, the best way to hone your mindfulness, but who wants to quibble with people relaxing on the floor with their eyes closed?

The good news is that back in San Francisco, a dharma brother of mine responded to the high stress of high tech workers by volunteering to teach meditation, the authentic version straight from instructions of our Rinpoche. It was evidently so helpful that he went on to craft a scientific experiment for his megacompany: Project Breathe. Everyday for four weeks, 116 employees volunteered to do 15 minutes a day of authentic Buddhist meditation, focusing on heir breathe, and the results were startling. Medical conditions evaporated, stress disappeared because people now felt better equipped to face their own fears.

I just published a piece about this on the Opinion Page of The Daily Dot, an Internet newspaper, not under my preferred title: To Breathe or Not to Breathe, because the editor wrote: You don't need another app, you just need to breathe. I wrote the essay because I wanted everyone to know genuine meditation instructions in unadulterated descent from the Buddha were out there as quite the app. I wanted multitaskers to know that breathing is a task too, one that we need to focus on because it has powerful side effects. One is mindfulness.

Which brings me, if I may, to paraphrase the late great storyteller Raymond Carver: what do we talk about when we talk about mindfulness? So many have talked so much about what Buddhism would become when it came to America, what's happening to it may be a sneak peek. After all, we are fanatic monotheists who like extracting one element from a whole, obsessing over one contributor to a complex network. One God, one magic bullet, one winner take all, beta-carotene!  Vitamin D! Mindfulness!

Perhaps this is what the ancient prophet Padmasambhava, aka Guru Rinpoche, meant 1500 years ago when he warned of a degenerate age that would dilute and probably destroy the Dharma.  When mindfulness gets extracted from the hard work of meditation, and dedication to doing it so you eventually get the wisdom that can help others, when it gets sold like stuff at Walmart, it's doomed like the word "organic" whose verifiable meaning commercial interests so exuberantly looted. 

I do not think Shakyamuni Buddha would friend or LIKE this turn of events because real mindfulness is the study of, the focus on, reality: that real unabashed hardcore reality we drive further away with each new fad. It really is all about your focus.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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