“Mindfulness meditation” is a rather vague category anyway, with different teachers teaching different things as if it were all the same thing. This might sometimes be true, but I think of mindfulness meditation as an artificial category recently made up that doesn’t neatly, as used by the people who teach it, divide the space of meditation techniques, even if a particular teacher does use it in a precise way that does divide the space in a natural way.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t avoid it if you think it doesn’t work for you. Meditation is definitely potentially dangerous, and particular techniques can be more dangerous than others to particular individuals depending on what else is going on in their lives, so I think this is a useful intuition to have that some meditation technique is not a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, especially those who have not already done a lot of work and experienced a significant amount of what we might call, for lack of a better term, awakening.
I agree that the term mindfulness can be vauge and that it is a recent construction of Western culture. However, that doesn’t mean it lacks any content or that we can’t make accurate generalizations about it.
To be precise, when I say “mindfulness meditation” I have in mind a family of meditation techniques adapted from Theravada and Zen Buddism for secular Western audiences originally by Jon Kabat-Zinn. These techniques attempt to train the mind in adopt a focused, non-judgemental, observational stance. Such a stance is very useful for many purposes, but taken to an extreme it can result in de-personalization / de-realization and other mental health problems.
For research to support this claim I recomment checking out Willoughby Britton’s research. Here are two PDF journal articles on this topic: one, and another one.
“Mindfulness meditation” is a rather vague category anyway, with different teachers teaching different things as if it were all the same thing. This might sometimes be true, but I think of mindfulness meditation as an artificial category recently made up that doesn’t neatly, as used by the people who teach it, divide the space of meditation techniques, even if a particular teacher does use it in a precise way that does divide the space in a natural way.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t avoid it if you think it doesn’t work for you. Meditation is definitely potentially dangerous, and particular techniques can be more dangerous than others to particular individuals depending on what else is going on in their lives, so I think this is a useful intuition to have that some meditation technique is not a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, especially those who have not already done a lot of work and experienced a significant amount of what we might call, for lack of a better term, awakening.
I agree that the term mindfulness can be vauge and that it is a recent construction of Western culture. However, that doesn’t mean it lacks any content or that we can’t make accurate generalizations about it.
To be precise, when I say “mindfulness meditation” I have in mind a family of meditation techniques adapted from Theravada and Zen Buddism for secular Western audiences originally by Jon Kabat-Zinn. These techniques attempt to train the mind in adopt a focused, non-judgemental, observational stance. Such a stance is very useful for many purposes, but taken to an extreme it can result in de-personalization / de-realization and other mental health problems.
For research to support this claim I recomment checking out Willoughby Britton’s research. Here are two PDF journal articles on this topic: one, and another one.