I have found mindfulness to be a helpful tool on occasion, I have blogged about how it has helped me. I am not 100% mindful and present every waking moment, delighting in chopping every carrot or cleaning the toilet! But sometimes when I feel a rising panic, the stress response when I have too much going on, and have said yes to too many projects; then that is when I can guide myself to the task at hand and remain 100% focussed on that and only that. It works for me and calms me down and I know it works for many others.
Recently though there seems to be a bit of a backlash against this practice - some referring to it as a 'snake oil' which claims to sure all ills. I suppose it was inevitable, as everything that becomes 'popular' or 'mainstream' at some point is questioned at best or torn down at worst.
See this New York Times Article for an example of this. It does, however, raise some interesting concerns about how meditation and mindfulness can be used in questionable ways.
It has made me question whether we are just expecting to much of this practice and this has coincided with me reading the auto-biography of Alan Watts - a spiritual philosopher, writer and teacher. He died in 1973 (the year I was born) so was a completely different generation to me, but it seems back then they were asking many of the same questions as we are now (and probably the same questions as spiritual seekers many hundreds of years ago)
There is a passage in the book where he is talking to his wife Eleanor and they are discussing the method of concentration on the eternal present, she says:
"Why try to concentrate on it? What else is there to be aware of? Your memories are all in the present, just as much as trees over there. Your thoughts about the future are also in the present, and anyhow I just love to think about the future. The present is a constant flow like the Tao, and there is simply no way of getting out of it"
Alan then writes "with that remark my whole sense of weight vanished. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I realised that when Hindus said Tat tvam asi 'You are that', they meant just what they said. For a whole week thereafter I simply floated, remembering Spiegelberg's telling me of the Six Precepts of Tilopa:
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention,
Let it settle itself."
So where does it leave us with regard to mindfulness? There is no magic answer. We have to ensure that when we are using certain practices, we are discerning. We are evaluating whether it is beneficial at that time, and not expecting too much from the practice. Are we using the practices in an appropriate way? I daresay there are some people who it just doesn't seem to work for and maybe even some people who are just very naturally focused on the present without having to do it as a practice. Or maybe like Eleanor says even your memories are part of the present moment.....perhaps sometimes we need to just 'go with the flow' this is something my own Mum and Yoga teacher has said to me on many occasions and sometimes it is the appropriate response....let me know your thoughts on how mindfulness has worked (or not worked for you)
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