Mindfulness: Spiritual Transcendence or Neoliberal Scam?

If you have heard of mindful gardening, colouring books, cooking, eating, drinking, loving, sex, parenting, coaching, journalism, leadership, smartphone apps, courses, bells, cushions, beauty products, and other paraphernalia, you are not alone.

Mindfulness, in the past few decades, has gone mainstream with endorsements from celebrities, elite athletes, movie actors, and CEOs. It is a $7 BN industry that has penetrated its way into schools, corporate organisations, mental health treatment plans, sporting clubs, and government agencies, including the military.

In 2014, Time Magazine featured "The Mindful Revolution" with a seemingly blissful and rejuvenated blonde on its cover. The feature included a classic mindfulness exercise: eating a raisin, very slowly! "The raisin exercise reminds us how hard it has become to think about just one thing at a time. If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then mindfulness, in the eyes of its enthusiasts, is the most logical response." - the author adds. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist by training who pioneered the mindfulness movement in the West, proclaims it as "...the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years".

These are extraordinary claims. And most people in the West still understand very little about what mindfulness actually is – or where it truly comes from.

And yet, mindfulness has now become the gold standard for western psychotherapy and is prescribed everywhere – from universities, medical clinics, and popular culture to the World Economic Forum. Mindfulness books, courses, and products regularly feature on bestseller lists on Amazon and Ebay. Even Silicon Valley corporations have introduced modules on mindfulness.

Now before you hurriedly buy candles or bells or book a retreat to Benaras or Dharamshala in India, you should perhaps know a bit more about what mindfulness is and whether it is really this magical panacea that everyone hails it to be.

As someone who has grown up in a culture where meditative practices were imbued very early on at home, infused at school, and nurtured in the ethos of the society, along with graduate training and field experience in psychology and mental health, I feel I an unique vantage point on this conversation.

However, I must unambiguously state that my insights may neither provide you with a magic pill to allay all your worries nor may it help you attain Moksha (मोक्ष or Liberation). And I mean this in a psychological and eschatological sense.

Where Mindfulness Actually Comes From

Most people associate mindfulness with Buddhism. Meditation apps reinforce this. Retreat centres claim this. So does most of the clinical literature in the West.

But the origin is older.

Mindfulness – as a disciplined contemplative practice – emerged from the Vedic tradition of Hinduism in ancient India. Archaeological and textual records suggest these practices predate Buddhism by at least a thousand years. Documented evidence of meditative practice appears in the Rigveda (ऋग्वेद), one of the four sacred canonical texts of Hinduism, dated to approximately 1500 - 3000 BCE.

These practices were not designed for stress management. They were not a productivity tool. Their purpose was ontological – to understand the nature of reality, consciousness, and existence. They were taught orally, passed across generations in an unbroken line of transmission, and required sustained, disciplined guidance.

Prince Siddhartha – later the Buddha – was himself shaped by Vedic traditions. He incorporated elements of meditative practice into his own teaching. The earliest recorded instructions on mindful practice in Buddhism appear in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, around 20 BCE. That is centuries after the Vedic texts. The origin of mindfulness is not Buddhism. This misattribution matters, for reasons I will come to shortly.

I have written at length about the history and philosophy of these traditions in my guide to Indian psychology. A brief academic version of this argument appears in my peer-reviewed paper published in the Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

How Mindfulness Was Repackaged for the West

The journey of mindfulness from ancient India to corporate wellness programmes is a remarkable story. It is also a troubling one.

Jeff Wilson traced how mindfulness gained mass appeal in North America through six mechanisms. I have encountered each of them in my own research and consulting work.

Mediating – Western thinkers positioned themselves as bridges between Eastern philosophy and a modern lifestyle, framing and translating the practice for new audiences.

Mystification – The nature of mindfulness is downplayed, minimized, or reinterpreted in a non-threatening or metaphoric manner. Its philosophical and spiritual complexity was softened into something generic and broadly accessible.

Medicalization – Mindfulness was reframed as a clinical technique. Research on anxiety, depression, and attention gave it scientific credibility. The spiritual roots became unnecessary – even awkward – to mention.

Mainstreaming – Mindfulness is applied to everyday experiences in order to enhance them or gain control over them. It moved from meditation cushions to weight-loss programmes, parenting guides, mindful cooking, mindful sex, and smartphone applications.

Marketing – What began as a spiritual discipline became a consumer product. A $7 billion one, with average annual revenue growth exceeding 11 per cent.

Moralizing – Mindfulness is presented as remedy to the threat of mindlessness (a condition of extreme and dangerous distraction); providing alternative values, worldviews, and imperatives such as compassion, wisdom, or sustainability. Being present was good. Being distracted was a personal failure. Stress became a character flaw, not a social condition.

Mindfulness in the West has been stripped of its spiritual and metaphysical foundation; devoid of its Hindu philosophy, ethics, and orientation; compartmentalised into a secular self-help tool; and marketed as frees-all-stress-technique that anyone could use if they just applied themselves in life with a bit more fervour.

If you think this reeks of colonialism and imperialism, you are right. The wars of capitalism and moral superiority are now fought on softer grounds. And this sort of extraction is not new. The Western "discovery" of Vedic practices dates to the 15th and 16th centuries, when missionaries encountering a tradition they could not fully comprehend lumped the entire body of Eastern philosophy together as "Oriental Philosophy" – then extracted and reframed whatever was useful for their own purposes (see Lopez, 2008; Lopez, 2012). The political parallel is drawn sharply by the Indian author and politician Shashi Tharoor in An Era of Darkness. The pattern of taking from India what was valuable and rendering its origins invisible has a very long history.

A personal memory makes this concrete for me. At an international conference in Germany, leading researchers were attempting to ascertain the correct dosage of mindfulness to be neatly packaged and prescribed to elite athletes and military personnel – as if it were a pharmaceutical compound to improve productivity and performance. Mindfulness had been commodified and presented as a new vaccine for the stress disease. When I raised a question about the philosophical basis for this approach, the response was quick and dismissive: "Why else would you research mindfulness?" – as if it were the last frontier for the scholarly community to assist in capitalistic pursuits and monetise human suffering.

I found myself wondering what the Vedic yogis – or even the Buddha – would have made of that.

The Neoliberal Problem with Modern Mindfulness

The most serious concern about modern mindfulness is not that it is ineffective. It is that the way it is framed shifts responsibility in a very particular direction.

Ronald Purser, in his mindfulness article in The Guardian, argues that modern mindfulness has been turned into a tool for managing individuals within difficult environments, rather than questioning whether those environments should exist. Stress is reframed as a personal problem. Mindfulness is offered as the personal solution. The context – the unrealistic expectations, the toxic culture, the systemic pressures – is rarely the focus.

Rather than challenging the conditions in which distress occurs – social inequality, institutional racism and sexism, nefarious corporate greed, political and economic uncertainty, and the relentless hacking of our senses by social media – the ultimate responsibility for health and wellbeing is relegated to the individual. Who is then handed mindfulness as a viable DIY solution.

This perverse fascination with self-initiated self-care in a precarious society reinforces neoliberal values. In its current dominant form, mindfulness reflects a privileged, individualistic, corporate, and capitalist culture. It is a culture that is, at its core, self-serving – and one that sits in direct tension with the relational and communal philosophy from which mindfulness originally emerged.

I have seen this in performance contexts directly. Athletes engaged in mindfulness-based approaches are encouraged to stay calm and present under pressure. This is genuinely useful. But the question of whether the performance environment itself is generating unnecessary distress receives far less attention. Organisations that fund mindfulness programmes rarely fund the structural changes that might make those programmes unnecessary.

There is also a philosophical paradox worth naming openly. The core teachings that underpin mindfulness – non-attachment, letting go, non-striving – are not easily compatible with elite performance culture as it is currently constituted. To prescribe a practice rooted in relinquishing outcomes to athletes and executives who are judged entirely on outcomes requires some intellectual honesty about the tension involved.

Kabat-Zinn's diagnosis is that individuals now suffer from "thinking disease". The treatment he prescribes is a personal one. But thinking disease, if it exists, does not develop in a vacuum. Social inequality, institutional pressure, financial precarity, chronic overload, and the demands of digital life are not problems that an eight-week mindfulness programme can solve. Recognising this is not a criticism of the practice. It is a criticism of the narrowness of the framing.

So, Is Mindfulness Bad?

Absolutely not.

The clinical benefits are well established and should not be dismissed. Mindfulness-based approaches have documented efficacy for anxiety, attention difficulties, emotional regulation, and general mental health and wellbeing. Reducing suffering and promoting health are noble aims that deserve to be appreciated. If mindfulness helps you reduce distress and function more effectively, that is genuinely valuable. You do not need to become a scholar of Vedic philosophy to benefit.

But the problem lies in the packaging.

The new-age mindfulness merchants will have you believe that stress occurs only in the heads of atomised individuals. According to them, what makes us unhappy and stressed is our sole inability to pay attention in the present moment. The cheerleaders of this movement, enamoured by their revolutionary ambition to save the world, have privatised and pathologised distress – ascribing it to individuals with ostensibly fragile psychological constitutions. Other sources of psychological, social, or cultural malaise are rarely mentioned.

What I am arguing is more subtle than "mindfulness is bad". It is this: knowing the roots of mindfulness does not complicate the practice. It deepens it.

When you understand that what we call "mindfulness" emerged from a tradition concerned with the deepest questions of human existence – Who am I? What is real? What causes suffering? What does it mean to live well? – the practice gains weight. It becomes less of a technique and more of an enquiry. Less of a productivity hack and more of a genuine encounter with yourself.

In my consulting work and retreat with athletes, executives, and professionals in high-pressure roles, I encourage a different relationship with mindfulness than the one most performance programmes offer. Not "how do I use this to perform better?" but "what am I actually trying to understand here?" The shift is small on the surface. The difference in depth is significant.

So what is next, you ask?

I genuinely do not know. Perhaps a mindfulness fragrance, spray, inhaler, patch, wearable band, pill, or drink – or whatever you fancy. I would not be shocked if such products flood the market in the next few years. Imagine yourself holding a mindfulness moisturiser that the manufacturer insists should be applied generously. Perhaps you will see instant results. Perhaps it will take 5, 10, or 20 years. But your success, naturally, depends entirely on your ability to use the moisturiser almost religiously – and not at all on the contents of the jar or the manufacturer's express guarantee.

The grandiose ambition of reducing human suffering by tweaking internal states through simplistic mindfulness mechanisms – without any regard to the socio-political context in which life unfolds and adversities persist – is not only naive and misguided, it can be outright harmful. Mindfulness, as it is preached by some, may produce unintended consequences, particularly for individuals with certain treatment needs. And yet the fans of the modern mindfulness movement will vouch for its magical powers, regardless of diagnosis or context.

A Word Before You Move On

There is an image in Indian philosophy that stays with me. A teacher points a finger at the moon. The student's mistake is to look at the finger instead of the moon.

Modern mindfulness has, in many ways, become the finger. The app, the corporate wellness programme, the prescribed dosage, the 8-week intervention – these are fingers. They can direct your attention. But they are not the moon.

The moon is what the Vedic yogis were pointing at thousands of years ago. It is the genuine enquiry into the nature of your own mind, your existence, and your relationship to others and to the world. That enquiry is available to anyone. It does not require an intervention, a wellness package, or a certification. It requires only honesty and sustained effort.

I sincerely believe that the practice of mindfulness – along with other cognate practices enshrined in Indian philosophy – has the potential to bring transformational change to humanity. But in its current form, it risks becoming another fad that will only last until the monies have been fully extracted, and something new and shiny comes along to tickle our imagination.

Modern mindfulness now finds itself positioned as a self-help, therapeutic tool, often depicted as purely rational and secular, which stems from a reductive, compartmentalized, and over-simplified understanding of the human mind. By seemingly espousing to an ostensible narrative of wellbeing and health, albeit still operating from archaic pseudo-secular, neoliberal, colonial, and capitalistic value systems in actuality, modern mindfulness has been deviously turned into an omnipotent detritus of the very roots of human suffering it was intended to solve at the first place.

Understanding mindfulness requires a nuanced comprehension of its Indian philosophical roots, historical background, and spiritual and psychological positionality. And comprehending what you are actually practising will serve you better than any app or prescribed dosage ever could.

Attempting to understand concepts such as mindfulness is like looking at someone pointing their finger at the moon. It is important not to confuse the finger for the moon!