When did mindfulness become a wank word?
New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan reckons it happened when it became the technique du jour of Fortune 500 executives and wealthy entrepreneurs who are into cold-pressed juices and wax lyrical about the benefits of yoga and meditation to soothe their frazzled minds.
"Maybe the word 'mindfulness' is like the Prius emblem; a badge of enlightened and self-satisfied consumerism, and of success and achievement," Heffernan writes.
"If so, not deploying mindfulness – taking pills or naps for anxiety, say, or going out to church or cocktails – makes you look sort of backward or classless. Like driving a Hummer."
Oh the horror of the Hummer.
Mindfulness was never meant to be a pursuit purely of the affluent.
The word was originally coined in the 1880s by British scholar Thomas William Rhys Davids. It is a loose translation of the Pali word sati.
In English, sati comes from the root "to remember". Not to remember the past, but to "remember" and be attentive to the present.
Thankfully, this is an absolutely free and indiscriminate practice.
Even 100 years later, when American professor of medicine emeritus Jon Kabat-Zinn popularised the term – adopting it in an attempt to distance meditation from its Buddhist, religious roots – it was still largely a practice of poor hippies and explorative fringe dwellers.
But then, mindfulness went mainstream.
Time's "Mindful Revolution" cover in February last year made a splash around the world.
"We're in the midst of a popular obsession with mindfulness as the secret to health and happiness, and a growing body of evidence suggests it has clear benefits," the feature's author writes.
It is indeed the growing body of evidence that has attracted the affluent set as people try to find an edge and endurance in an increasingly stressed, competitive culture.
Mindfulness, research has shown, isn't just an incredibly effective form of stress release.
A new study, published in the Lancet, has found mindfulness to be as effective at treating depression as pills.
It boosts our immune systems, enhances our relationships, changes our brains, fights obesity and improves memory and attention span as well as making us more compassionate.
It has also become, like the rest of wellness, expensive and sometimes smug and even self-absorbed.
In January, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kabat-Zinn led executives and 1 per centers in a mindfulness meditation, Heffernan wrote.
Many mindfulness and meditation courses in Sydney cost more than $1000 for a weekend of training.
The trendy word has also come to encompass parenting and eating. There is now even "mindful" flying.
"Mindful fracking: Could that be next?" wonders Heffernan, with the heavy hand of cynicism.
"Putting a neuroscience halo around a byword for both uppers ('productivity') and downers ('relaxation') – to ensure a more compliant workforce and a more prosperous C-suite – also seems twisted.
"No one word, however shiny, however intriguingly Eastern, however bolstered by science, can ever fix the human condition."
This may well be true.
Heffernan's concern is that the commercialisation of mindfulness has "muddied" its meaning and become about escape rather than "remembering".
The irony is that the commercialisation of mindfulness has made it elitist and diluted its meaning, but also has made it more accessible to the masses, Sydney meditation guru Tim Brown says.
"Yes, we are seeing the commercialisation of it," Brown admits.
"When something moves from isolated to a collective, it allows more people to appreciate it and address it."
Commercialised and a buzzword it may be, but Brown disagrees that it has become about escapism or elitism. On the contrary.
"It is born out of a desire to be engaged," he says, noting that engagement does not mean "frenetic vigilance".
"Trying to become more present by thinking about trying to be more present does not make you present," he points out.
Learning to be attentive and "remember" the moment we are in is not about fixing, so much as enhancing the human condition.
"The greatest joys in life are often not from experiencing different places, people and things, but familiar places, people and things through new eyes," Brown says, "and this is where mindfulness comes in."
This practice does not come pre-packaged and sold at a premium. It's free for anyone who cares to pay attention.
You can do that in your Prius or your Hummer.
"The most prevalent experience is becoming aware of how mindless you are and how many impulses you have to distract or entertain yourself, to fix or change what is happening so that you don't have to tolerate this moment the way it actually is," Kabat-Zinn said recently.
"The idea that it's 'just focusing on me', that it is narcissistic, that's a complete misunderstanding. Just stopping [to think] is a radical act of sanity and love, and not just love for yourself.
"To drop into being means to recognise your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness."
