If you’re a person living in 2026, you probably have a long list of things you’d like to fix. Your list might look something like this: affordable housing, the global economy, the cost of groceries, your headache, your back pain, your aging body, the cost of gasoline, the price of groceries, global warming, and maybe something to deal with your insecurities or chronic busyness.
And that’s just the top of the list.
In our collective overwhelm and desire to find peace or respite from the current landscape we find ourselves in, anywhere but “here” feels good, if only for a moment.
Some of us have turned to spirituality for answers. Some of us tried to distract ourselves with activities and to-do lists. And for others, we dive even deeper into health practices, supplements, and exercise programs that promise ways to help us be healthy.
In our collective overwhelm and desire to find peace or respite from the current landscape we find ourselves in, anywhere but “here” feels good, if only for a moment.
Enter mindfulness.
When practice becomes a commodity
For decades, teachers like Jack Kornfield Sharon Salzbergand Joseph Goldstein helped introduce insight meditation (vipassana) to Western audiences. They made a contemplative practice that had existed for centuries more accessible to people who were looking for a different relationship to stresssuffering and the mind itself.
Over time, mindfulness moved beyond meditation centers and into schools, workplaces, therapists’ offices and hospitals, and later into the larger wellness industry as a whole.
In essence, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.”
However, somewhere along the way, mindfulness became more than a practice. It became a prefix. Today, when we come across words like mindful eating, mindful communication, attentive parentingcareful performance—the adjective itself lends an air of credibility to what follows.
In essence, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.” The label itself is imbued with authority over what follows it, encouraging us to believe that simply adding the word “mindful” to an activity somehow makes it wiser, more educated, or healthier, when the reality is much more nuanced.
Have we lost the plot?
In search of answers, I picked up a copy John Cabot-Zinn‘s A complete disaster. Kabat-Zinn is credited with translating mindfulness into a clinical context, known today as MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Reducing stress), where health and hospital practitioners included these practices.
The name comes from the line in Zorba the Greekwhere “total disaster” refers to the messiness of life (stress, work, uncertainty, insecurity, love, joy, illness, loss) and all that comes with it. The main premise of the book is that we cannot control what happens to us in this life, but we can change our relationship to what happens.
Mindfulness, applicable to many life situations, has a useful result: it helps regulate our emotions, develop self-awareness and support our mental well-being.
The question has never been whether mindfulness helps?, but rather what we now expect it to help with.
And yet, as mindfulness has become more popular, so have our expectations of it. In some cases, the word “mindful” itself has become a linguistic indicator of well-being.
never had a problem Does mindfulness help?— but rather what we now expect it to help with.
Labels come at a price
Part of the appeal of mindfulness is that it offers what many of us desperately need: a way to face our lives with more balance, more awareness, and less reaction.
But as more people recognized this desperate need, and perhaps tried more than a few things that didn’t work to satisfy it, mindfulness began to take on responsibilities far beyond its original scope.
We want the feeling of relief more than the skill of experiencing discomfort for which there can be no easy answers.
In some cases, the expectations associated with mindfulness can turn into what some contemplative teachers might describe as a form of spirituality. bypasswhere more often than not people see the practice itself as a solution rather than participating in the larger process that involves our participation. In other words, we want to feeling relief is greater than the ability to feel discomfort for which there can be no easy answers.
Marketing has played a big role in helping many of us learn about mindfulness, but to what end? We can attend more mindfulness workshops or participate in corporate mindfulness retreats, but I think we should consider whether we are asking mindfulness to carry the burden of responsibilities outside of the practice.
Mindfulness was never intended to fix the “total disaster” of life, but rather to give us the tools to meet ourselves where we are.
By confusing the path with the destination
The healing trap begins when we mistake some practice or form of healing for the solution itself. Mindfulness was never intended to fix the “total disaster” of life, but rather to give us the tools to meet ourselves where we are.
Yes, practicing mindfulness can help improve things like focus, concentration, communication, which can make workplaces better and more efficient. But when did mindfulness become responsible for healthy workplaces? Or more productive? When did he become responsible for helping us have better leaders or helping us fight burnout? Of course, none of these are bad uses of mindfulness; but if we attribute the success or failure of such efforts to a practice such as mindfulness, we are not seeing the process clearly.
Mindfulness is a tool for cultivation, not the solution itself. In other words: Mindfulness is one way of relating to experience of any kind. This, however, is very different from being a solution to eliminating experiences we don’t want.
Returning to the foundation
So what does mindfulness actually offer? And why do we keep expecting mindfulness to “fix” whatever feels out of place in our lives?
John Kabat-Zinn has repeatedly emphasized that mindfulness is not just a technique, but “a way of being in a wise relationship to feel how you find it.” This distinction matters.
John Kabat-Zinn has repeatedly emphasized that mindfulness is not just a technique, but “a way of being in a wise relationship to feel how you find it.” This distinction matters.
Most of us avoid unpleasant emotionsconversations and uncertainty whenever we can. This is a deeply human tendency. We fall into a wellness trap when we start looking for something or someone to relieve us of this unpleasant feeling. We outsource our agency when we entrust these unwanted experiences to our meditation app, retreat, self-help book, or app.
We live in a time where so many offers of help are available to us. Our trap is not what to use; it expects that whatever we engage in (whatever that may be) does the work that belongs to each of us.
When we mistakenly think of a practice as a “panacea,” we are effectively surrendering our will to participate in the resolution of what concerns us.
Buddhist teachings state that while we cannot prevent pain and suffering, we do have some influence over our circumstances. As Kabat-Zinn suggests, for most of us this means that life is a disaster: joy, fear, illness, love, uncertainty, all of it.
Mindfulness invites us to learn to live with this experience. The goal is to help us be present with our discomfort, not avoid it altogether.
Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for health care, community, recreation, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change.
The wellness trap occurs when mindfulness is expected to carry more than it was ever designed to. Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for health care, community, recreation, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change. It sheds light on things we should see more clearly, helps us understand where the boundaries exist and why they look the way they do.
And hopefully it helps each of us realize that our problems (as we discover them in each of our lives) are not only about our ability to endure, but more about the causes and conditions of our circumstances than anything else. Perhaps most importantly, mindfulness can help us discern the difference between what requires our compassionate acceptance and what requires our compassionate acceptance coupled with thoughtful action.
