Deal with Yourself: Or Why MNDFLness is Bad for You

Recently, mindfulness has become the latest self-help craze in the United States, especially as it connects with Buddhist meditation practices. Writers at the New York Times have done a very good job of documenting the phenomenon of mindfulness throughout the past two years. As Virginia Heffernan has noted in her 2015 article on the matter, the word “mindfulness” itself was derived out of a sort of mistranslation of the Pali word sati, a word that more closely translates to “memory of the present” than simply the one word we now refer to as its replacement. As Buddhist practice became more popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s, so did its connections to “being more present,” and the general conceit and concept and well-being, both of which I would say Buddhism provides.

As the Buddhist Dharma came to the West, it essentially ran into capitalism. And certain enterprises and ideas that seek to help us escape the demands of a capitalistic society sure do have a way of becoming ensnared by that same economic structure. As Heffernan notes in the article, which I suggest you peruse quickly, mindfulness and the “well-being” it would lead to became a major industry under the Buddhist teacher John Kabat-Zinn, but I am not writing this to point the finger at any particular individual – the fingers have already been pointed at so many within the Buddhist community and in Buddhist scholarship. However, that’s why I mentioned capitalism – because capitalism makes us all complicit! Hooray!

Further adding to the research and analysis provided by his colleague Heffernan a year before, David Gelles writes in a 2016 New York Times article, mindfulness itself has become its own self-sustaining corporate entity of sorts. We have seen this with the commodification of yoga in the West (please, try and tell me it was not commodified, I will fight you), especially with Lululemon and their yoga-focused products. Because when you’re a yogi, you go to a high-end clothes store to make sure you are prepared to forgo all material comforts in the heart of India to become one with the Brahman. Companies, “meditation teachers,” and DVDs all provide courses to get you on the right track in life. Yet, one development in particular has caught my attention and the attention of many other Buddhists: MDNFL. Other than ridding their name of all vowels to appeal to the Millennial demographic that strives to be semi-illiterate, MNDFL describes itself as a meditation studio that “exists to enable humans to feel good.”

Now, I could continue to tell you more and bring up other issues and questions I have. Like, how does MNDFL have guided mantra practice when the meaning of the words themselves do not carry the historical or symbolic significance they are meant to within a temple or the proper Buddhist sectarian setting? Do any of these “meditation teachers” have the authority to guide Buddhist meditation by being the successor of a Dharma lineage, that is, have they received the utmost authority from Zen masters and Buddhist abbots to teach others the rigorous techniques of meditation. Or, boy, how much money do you want me to throw at you to give me the privilege to sit my ass down on a cushion, something I could do at home for free if I was not always getting so distracted by watching the X-Files on Netflix?

None of those questions matter because the first actual sentence, which I assume is the thesis and motivational statement of the company itself, is inherently wrong. Meditation does not “exist to enable humans to feel good.” Buddha never said to any of his followers that he wanted to make sure they had a place to decompress from their jobs after working at an online retailer start-up all day. Saint Anthony the Great, that most bad-ass of the Desert Fathers, did not go into the Egyptian Desert because he wanted to get a tan. Meditation, contemplation, prayer – these are not practices you start to intensely engage in for the sake of making yourself feel better.

In the words of Brad Warner, Zen priest and punk rocker extraordinaire: “Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.”

Mindfulness, meditation, yoga, centering prayer, etc., etc. – they are good for people. They really can be, if you believe in them and devote your time and energy to one of those practices. The fact is, being more aware of your surroundings and who you are as a person and being present in the moment are aspects of our being we need to recognize every day. They help to not only center and ground us, but to make sure we can participate in our life and in our conscious experience of the subjective or objective to levels we may consider to be almost 100%. It is better to be an engaged and participating member of life than go through our day-to-day grind in a haze, unaware of the ways we may be harming ourselves and others. This is no way to go through life.

However, this does not mean we can take these religious/spiritual practices and fit them into our framework of commodified consumerism we in the West are so used to engaging with. Spirituality, faith, religiosity – believe it or not, the principles of most major wisdom traditions do not jive very easily with late capitalism. We cannot simply consume the teachings of these religions to create a better state of mind for ourselves in the hope we come out a happier person. Because, in reality, meditation and mindfulness are not practices that are intended to make you think happy thoughts and replace all the negative, nasty feelings we have about ourselves with happy ones.

Not only that, but we cannot and should not tear away all that is essential to these mindfulness and meditation practices within the context of the wisdom traditions they belong to. As I write that sentence though, I know I am already too late, but the point still stands in my mind. Yoga itself uses mantras and positions that are divorced from the gods and worship ceremonies they are identified with in the context of Hindu spiritual practice, but that does not deter people from the practice. I have known a lot of people who have found out more about Hinduism and its teachings because of yoga, but there are still a majority of people who may practice without any knowledge of what the practices they are engaging with are really meant to do.

This goes doubly for Buddhism. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism ascribes an exalted position to the lotus position of seated meditation. The lotus position was the same way the Buddha meditated when he sat under the Bodhi tree and found enlightenment. Not only that, but the position is ascribed with helping one achieve the state of nirvana, or “extinction,” meaning they may not come back after death after having found enlightenment. However, if you strip meditation of the context and concepts of rebirth, enlightenment, and nirvana, then in what context are you practicing meditation in? To feel good? What if that is not enough?

Meditation is a whirlwind of a mental and bodily exercise that makes us hallucinate, feel intense emotions, and reckon with the demons in our lives to an extent we are not used to dealing with. Saint Anthony the Great battles hordes of demons in the Egyptian waste before he came back a wiser man. Buddha confronted Mara, lord of temptation and personification of death for three days before he reached enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Jesus pile-drived Satan all Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-style in the desert after a forty day cage match.

If you want to feel good about yourself and be happy, that is your right as a human being. However, co-opting ancient spiritual practices and tearing away the contexts they are meant to inhabit to make them more palatable to a more modern and supposedly rational crowd does not mean you are stripping the practice of that which is inessential. In fact, you may be taking away the much needed environment and tools needed to make sure your journey into mindfulness will actually pay off in the long-run and make you a better person, not simply a person with a nice feeling in their stomach. Going into a “meditation studio,” you can escape the world and sit on a cushion for a fee every month to think happy thoughts. However, that studio and that nice little cushion may not save you from the thing you are actually running away from every time you might be entering MNDFL: Yourself.

To once again quote the Zen Buddhist teacher Brad Warner: “Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real.”

Care less about feeling good, and start caring more about being good.